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TO LAVOISIER WHO DIED IN THE REIGN OF TERROR The subject matter of Snow’s shots tends toward the everyday, the mundane. Each shot is held for a long time, and in most the camera begins a very slow zoom-in. In virtually every one, the surface of the film aggressively asserts itself: the image is at times covered or even obscured with scratches, streaks of various colors, and irregular blotches, and at times the emulsion literally breaks up into multicolored dots or abstract patterns of color, all a result of special film processing by Snow’s collaborator Carl Brown....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, you discussed “high-risk behavior” within “high-risk groups.” High-risk behavior is high-risk behavior, no matter who is participating! Many people who are perceived to be in “high-risk groups,” such as gay people who are women, are among the least likely to ever contract the virus that causes AIDS. Conversely, heterosexual people who have anal intercourse are participating in the riskiest of behaviors....

Two of the men onstage are fighting with swords while two others watch. Each clink of the broadswords is clear, distinct; this is a simple two-man, two-sword fight. Suddenly, the observers unsheath their weapons and join in, stepping between the other two. The newcomers stand back-to-back as the other two circle them. In the heat of battle, they occasionally change partners. Every so often, one of them reels backward, injured, and the fight is two against one....

THE BEGGAR’S OPERA But Gay’s sinister entertainment succeeds because it cunningly dramatizes the great double standard: the world rewards the rich for committing the very crimes it penalizes the poor for. Or as Gay’s “most excellent moral” puts it: “The lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich–and are punished for them.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first entry in the third International Theatre Festival of Chicago, this Court Theatre revival is an unsparing Hogarth caricature....

Is there any great cause today that can be said to unite the American people? While we were in Paris a couple of weeks ago, we thought of two: the control of drugs and the defeat of AIDS. But neither cause finds the people altogether trusting of government or confident that our country is doing the best it can. There’s a hope that other countries will help pull our chestnuts out of the fire....

Friday, October 11 Six women get together for a slumber party on the eve of their ten-year high school reunion to reminisce about their friendship and bare their souls. Written by Nancylee Myatt and based on her play, the film has some strong moments, but Myatt and director Mark Sobel seem unable to trust the original material enough to let it stand on its own and wind up interspersing a series of unnecessary black-and-white flashbacks to the women’s high school days, each accompanied by an obligatory musical “hit” from the 70s....

The two and a half acres of land sit within a triangle formed by the intersection of three streets — Jonquil Terrace and Haskins and Hermitage avenues — just south of where Rogers Park meets the Calvary Cemetery in Evanston. The Haskins-Hermitage triangle contained more than its share of troublesome buildings, causing the city to designate it and some surrounding land an urban renewal area in 1976. In time, the buildings were razed, and then came the issue of what to put on the land next....

AMERICAN NOTES Maybe you saw Jenkin’s lurid Gogol at Blind Parrot Productions, back in 1987. Or maybe you made the trek to Theatre X in Milwaukee last month, for the premiere of his gleefully vicious Poor Folk’s Pleasure. If you did, you know Jenkin’s not the winsome type. His narratives are all broken up into jagged little shards; his characters tend toward the sick, the cynical, the twisted, and the ugly....

BERLIN, JERUSALEM AND THE MOON Just look at the list of characters. Two are historical figures out of the tradition of radical Jewish intellectualism: the paradoxically mystical Marxist thinker, Walter Benjamin, and his fellow German, expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schuler. Then there’s Edie—a middle-aged, middle-class, hip Jewish feminist New Yorker not unlike TV’s Maude; and Izzie the K—a cross between Kafka and Lenny Bruce. Even Jacob the patriarch puts in an appearance....

SCHUMACHER Playwrights’ Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the remainder of this 40-minute one-act, Schumacher is undone by his own technique. The seminar, the introduction to Schumacher–the man and his philosophy–remains my favorite part of the play. I particularly like Schumacher’s closing directive to bring something to sell to the next seminar. Not that I didn’t enjoy the rest of the play. It’s also funny, and slightly horrifying, but it becomes progressively obscure in a symbolic way....

DRINK THE CONTENTS OF THIS VIAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, Lynda Patton’s Drink the Contents of This Vial tries to cut it all of these ways. It has an absurdist setting, a wealthy mental hospital for the “violently, criminally insane” in which three unsupervised inmates share a room decorated with cloud murals and a clock with a sweep second hand and no other....

A front-page story in the August 24 Variety begins, “Last week’s Republican National Convention garnered the worst network ratings of any convention in TV history.” An interesting piece of information, but not, as far as I know, one that was noted in daily newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, or on TV. Why does one have to go to Variety to discover this morsel of recent history? Perhaps it has something to do with Variety’s status as a trade journal....

MORDINE & COMPANY The need for expression–or a less personal need, the need for dance education–may have been what made Mordine step up to a microphone before each dance at each performance last weekend at the Dance Center to talk to the audience about her work. Whatever her reasons, it was an act of courage and generosity. Dancers don’t like words. Mordine also sidestepped her own tradition by creating a program made up entirely of her own dances–three recent works, each of which revolved, in a different manner, around mortality....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil Adams recently addressed a reader’s question on the Infinity Reference Standard V speakers, priced at $50,000.00 per pair [Straight Dope, February 17]. I have some additional information you may find interesting: the reader seemed to feel that these were the most expensive speakers he had ever heard of, and I thought you might not be aware of the Wilson Audio WAMM speakers (Xerox enclosed), list price $80,000....

“Of course I know he’s not here,” said Rick Garcia as he stood outside the mayor’s office on the fifth floor of City Hall. He was wearing a dapper Having said that, Garcia took the plaque under his arm and marched into the mayor’s reception area. “I’d like to see the mayor,” he said. The security guard, who had already told Garcia the mayor was across the street at the State of Illinois building announcing the third-airport agreement, barely looked up....

Jean-Luc Godard’s zany, English-speaking quasi adaptation of the Shakespeare play has the most complex and densely layered use of Dolby sound in movies, and this screening offers one the first chance in Chicago to hear it properly. The “itinerary” of the film–one can’t quite consider it a plot–involves a post-Chernobyl view of culture in general and Shakespeare’s play in particular. Among the performers, mainly used by Godard as a painter might use colors, are stage director Peter Sellars, Molly Ringwald (as Cordelia), Burgess Meredith (as Lear), a semiincoherent Godard (as someone called Professor Pluggy), and, in smaller parts, Norman Mailer, his daughter Kate Miller, film director Leos Carax, and Woody Allen....

Chicago-born altoist Lee Konitz is the King Lear of jazz–not because of loveless daughters or lost eyesight, but because of the way he has continued to peel away the onion layers to find the essence of his music. In the 40s, when the 22-year-old Konitz made his first recordings with Lennie Tristano, he displayed a real if diffident virtuosity in his mastery of Tristano’s quicksilver melodies. (Of all Charlie Parker’s contemporaries, only Konitz was able to carve out a nonderivative style, and his virtuosity validated his vision....

As the title indicates, this two-part new-music jamboree intends to be funky and irreverent, yet relevant–a welcome attempt by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, its sponsor, to reach out to a younger, hipper audience. Composer-in-residence Shulamit Ran chose the pieces for the programs, which are supposed to reflect the cultural diversity that has worked its way into contemporary compositions. Javier Alvarez’s Quemar las naves for brass and percussion instruments, for instance, draws on salsa as a source material, and Martin Butler’s Tin-Pan Ballet recasts both new age and Broadway tunes in a minimalist mode....

MARIA MARTINEZ-CANAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So I didn’t immediately recognize Canas as the creator of the black-and-white collage prints now on view at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, though the pieces seemed vaguely familiar. After seven years of hard work, Canas has made great changes in her content and technique. Whereas the old works were restrained, almost minimalist, the new works fairly explode with detail....

The Rookwood Trio–soprano Denise June Abbott, tenor Roald Henderson, and pianist Robert Haigler–return to the Art Institute for a fun-filled evening of new works and popular classics. Following upon the success of last year’s collaboration with composer David Baker (which brought forth the Chicago premiere of his poignant Song Cycle), the trio will present the world premiere of Baker’s Songs for Living and Dying, a six-piece work peppered with jazz and blues that is based on texts by several black American poets....