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“It’s so clean. Not like New York.” Unfortunately for the city’s hospitality industry, Chicago promotes tourism like it inspects tunnels. Its efforts are famous for their infighting and factionalism; the Office of Special Events spars with the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which feuds with the Tourism Council. The business tourist is well catered to, but if anyone is going to use the new playground at Navy Pier or Mayor Daley’s proposed midway of sanitized vice, it will be the pleasure traveler....

THE LOWER DEPTHS Written in 1902 and generally considered to be Gorky’s great stage work, The Lower Depths might easily have been the model for Iceman. Or it might just as easily be one half of a marvelous coincidence. Either way, it anticipates the situations and preoccupations of the O’Neill play with uncanny exactness. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iceman situates us in the bar at Harry Hope’s flophouse, where a small tribe of losers drink and dream their way out of an ugly reality....

In Chicago, even-numbered years bring the odd productions from around the world to town. At least they have since 1986, when Jane Nicholl Sahlins, Bernard Sahlins, and Pam Marsden first launched this sometimes controversial, visionary biennial event. When the festival was founded, Chicago was routinely omitted from major national theater tours, whose producers gauged that the attentions of Windy City audiences were preempted by local shows. Although that has changed in the past year, the festival is still Chicago’s only affirmation that there’s more to French, British, and Canadian theater, say, than Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and Aspects of Love....

Bulworth With Beatty, Halle Berry, Oliver Platt, Jack Warden, Paul Sorvino, Don Cheadle, and Amiri Baraka. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More precisely, Bulworth is about a Democratic senator from California (Beatty), up for reelection in 1996, who is having a nervous breakdown, takes out a contract on himself, and then finds himself blurting out the truth instead of the usual packaged lies during his campaign....

After being circulated in various truncated versions in this country, Andrei Tarkovsky’s beautiful, enigmatic, and highly idiosyncratic SF spectacle has finally been restored to its original 167 minutes. Although Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 feature (his third), beautifully composed in ‘Scope, as the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey that concentrates on the limits of man’s imagination in relation to memory and conscience....

Still 35 Cents–and Now Cheaper Than Ever! The Tribune’s Jeff MacNelly drew a wicked cartoon last week. Sinead O’Connor had torn up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live, and MacNelly imagined four priests watching the show. “Shame!” cries one. “Tearing up a photo of the Holy Father!!?” “Poor, pathetic little bald girl,” sighs the second. “Probably abused as a small child by some trusted authority figure,” the third muses....

Guitarist Hubert Sumlin’s music is characterized by an obstinate, almost compulsive individualism. He’s best known for his work as Howlin’ Wolf’s accompanist during Wolf’s Chess Records heyday. His eerie leads, shimmering like steel behind Wolf’s primal roar, alternated between staccato fierceness and an almost hornlike exploratory impetus. Sometimes sounding like he was barely under control, he played a major role in creating the nearly mystical sense of foreboding characteristic of Wolf’s sound during that period....

THE FANCY MAN A lurid enough story–but Stott wasn’t content to leave it at that. In his account Amy is a discontented bride, frustrated at what she perceives as her husband’s posthoneymoon indifference. Waxing rebellious, she leads her husband to think that she has nightly trysts with a “fancy man,” which she describes in detail–titillating her spouse, and causing him anguish. After he declares that he can take no more, she placates him by claiming to have ceased her adventures for his sake....

The Invisible Man In an election year in Chicago there is always some political neophyte like Ray Smith with good credentials, not much money, and no name recognition who runs for a major office and makes no headway whatever. On the other hand, Neal doted on Partee. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Smith campaign’s one big splash was a series of full-page ads last December in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin designed to introduce himself to the region’s lawyers....

The fact that women live longer than men says more about our biology than about the care we receive from the medical establishment. And second-rate health care for women in the United States is the result of systemic discrimination in scientific research: women have been consistently excluded from clinical trials, and gender analysis is usually missing from scientific data. Whether the fault lies with spending priorities at the National Institutes of Health–the major source of funding for biomedical research in the United States–or with a medical establishment that is still overwhelmingly male, the state of women’s health care can be summed up in two words: bad science....

I could see the sparkle even without my binoculars. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was watching the 1988 Virginia Slims of Chicago tennis tournament at the UIC Pavilion, an event that may well have marked Evert’s last appearance in Chicago. It was the first time in seven years that the Wheaties-box star has played here, and by her own admission 1989 could be her last year in the game....

I’M NOT RAPPAPORT Squinting through his thick glasses, toting his near empty briefcase, and flailing about with his cane, Nat is a happy misfit who eats conventions for breakfast. Modeled on the playwright’s labor-leader uncle, Nat is an unrepentant old-left agitator who sees every problem as part of the class struggle–and as a perfect excuse for cascades of firebrand rhetoric. He’s the sort of true believer who will try to persuade a mugger to join in solidarity against the real robbers, the rich....

One of the main reasons for the White Sox’ improvement this year is an improved defense. One of the great mysteries of the White Sox’ improvement is how they improved that defense. Baltimore’s great manager Earl Weaver used to say that the time to work on defense was spring training; if a team didn’t have the fundamentals down by opening day it wasn’t likely to work out the kinks during the hectic season....

TWO MANY BOSSES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The show takes Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century comedy The Servant of Two Masters and transports the action to New York’s Little Italy in the 1950s. The plot involves the classic commedia dell’arte elements of mistaken identity, crossdress masquerade, sexual confusion, and class conflict. Beatrice, the daughter of a powerful Mafia don, comes to the U.S. from Sicily in search of her lover Florindo, who is on the lam after having killed Beatrice’s brother in an argument....

“It’ll cut through sheet steel like a birthday cake,” says John Weeks, picking up his “plasma cutter,” one of his many metal-working tools, with both hands. He puts the end of its pistollike barrel against a piece of metal thick enough to be from a car body, and pulls the trigger. A piece of metal the size of a silver dollar falls out. Weeks and his two fellow artists, Jan Benes and Max Trefonides, are sculptors at heart....

The eleventh edition of the annual festival of black independent film runs from Friday, July 31, through Sunday, August 9 at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $5, with discounts available to Blacklight and Film Center members. For more information call 443-3737 or 281-4114 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » STEPPING RAZOR–RED X A documentary feature from Canada by Nicholas Campbell about the life and violent death (in 1987) of reggae artist and radical Jamaican political activist Peter Tosh....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An appearance by Jonathan Demme is the highlight of the three-day Festival of Illinois Film and Video Artists, kicking off tonight at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport. The festival’s offerings were chosen by a group of local film professionals, with Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum serving as secretary of the jury. Programs include compilations of winning works from the festival, a selection of films from the Prague School of Fine Arts, and selections from the Sony-sponsored Visions of U....

CATHARSIS The problem with psychotherapy-as-theater is that the dramatic ingredients are too easy to assemble; the formula almost writes itself. In this one-sided, inevitably conflict-ridden relationship, one character is assumed to have all the answers (though all he does is ask questions), while the other holds back secrets that, once exposed, will supposedly produce an instant breakthrough-climax. The characters’ conflicts erupt out of the basic inequality of therapy itself; the remedy, of course, is for the supposed expert to confess his or her inadequacy (if only to balance the patient’s confessions), and the patient to see he’s not alone....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Even before he was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s highest artistic post, the Argentinean-born conductor was getting a bad rap in the local press. One commentator attributed his strong candidacy to cronyism (the cronies being Georg Solti and CSO’s top administrator, Henry Fogel); another questioned his track record. Taking over the baton from Solti would not be an easy task for any mortal, but the youthful Barenboim seems particularly vulnerable to criticism....

Victor Parra says “Salsa isn’t a musical form, it’s something that I put on my food to give it more flavor.” Host of WBEZ’s “Mambo Express,” this well-known Chicago native has dedicated his life to keeping alive the mambo sounds that swelled dance halls four and five decades ago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Mambo came out of the danzon, this slow-paced Cuban music in the middle 30s,” Parra explains....