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THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE Virtue may be its own reward, but that’s little protection in a world that despises it. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle Brecht told a bitter truth–that the rich expect the poor to be submissive and to act morally, so they can fleece them more effectively–that charges the play with the kind of knowing anger vital to Brecht’s polemics. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In The Caucasian Chalk Circle (which Brecht based on both a legend of King Solomon and a 13th-century Chinese play) doing good seems more an instinct than a choice: only rich people are always able to choose....

“Let’s face it,” says Glenn O’Brien in Interview, quoted in Utne Reader (July/August 1989). “Reprieved chickens and ducks wouldn’t be wild animals; they’d just be unemployed animals, homeless animals, animals whose enforced mutations mean that there is no going back. There’s no wild to go back to. If everyone were vegetarian, chicken would be an endangered species…. Chickens are successful as a species solely because of their ability to appeal to our appetites....

Until last year the system for electing judges in Cook County was so bewildering that only legal scholars understood it. So it was changed. Now even the experts are confused. Part of the confusion of the judicial election process–new or old–stems from the system’s size. It’s enormous; more than 300 courtrooms are overseen by about 365 judges all over the county. Of those judges, 175 are full circuit-court judges, elected by the voters, with a salary of $81,000 and first crack at choice courtroom assignments....

Most baseball fans consider themselves seers in one way or another because they are more astute judges of talent than the managers and general managers of the major leagues, or because they have a deep faith in one team or another, they believe they know the eventual outcome of the season ahead. Pick-the-divisions baseball pools have always been popular, and the ever-increasing number of Rotisserie leagues testifies to the number of stats-conscious baseball eggheads–the Bill Jamesians–who, if they aren’t exactly sure of the future, at least believe they know the reasons for past mistakes and therefore will not repeat them (picking the Cleveland Indians in the American League East, for instance)....

It seems to me that “shameful” and “shameless” basically mean the same thing, yet one is “full” and the other is “less.” How is this possible? –Katherine C., Van Nuys, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You are usually so hip I checked your naive repetition of the excuses for bomb testing five times before I was sure it was not satire [July 3]....

SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE As its lowercase title suggests, sex, lies, and videotape is an example of lowercase filmmaking: lean, economical, relatively unpretentious (or at least pretentiously unpretentious), and purposefully small-scale. Its having walked off with the Cannes film festival’s Palme d’Or–making first-time writer-director Steven Soderbergh at 26 the youngest filmmaker ever to win that prize–saddles it with more of a reputation than it can comfortably live up to. In a time of relative drought, it’s certainly a small oasis, but the attention it’s been getting befits something closer to a breakthrough geyser....

On the run from the Texas Rangers in 1963, an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) develops a close friendship with the seven-year-old boy (T.J. Lowther) he takes hostage. A good two-part character study with a terrific performance by Lowther and fine work by Costner, which should help resuscitate his image after too many Boy Scout projects, this film bogs down when it aims for too much psychology and pathos, and it arrives at a few false moments and more than a few overextended ones; John Lee Hancock’s script has too many good guy/bad guy setups, and the suave period handling doesn’t always extend to the characters’ behavior....

The ninth edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues from Friday, August 10, through Sunday, August 12, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $5, $3 for Blacklight, Film Center, and Jazz Institute members. For more information call 509-2981 or 443-3737. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » STEEL BANDS FROM TRINIDAD and SHADOW: THE BASSMAN A Caribbean double bill: Daniel Verba and Jean-Jacques Mrejen’s French documentary about carnival time in Trinidad and Tobago (1988), and Albert Bailey’s English documentary about the social roots and recent developments of calypso (1989)....

At a rock ‘n’ roll cattle call last year in Austin, Texas, one band really caught the ear of Robin Hurley, managing director of Rough Trade, England’s independent record label. Over three days, he heard many of the 100 or so bands that had shown up to perform for company bigwigs, but Souled American, a Chicago group, “really stood out as several leagues above what I’d been seeing there,” he said....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When a new owner evicts long-time residents of the community, some of whom have contributed more to the quality of life in their neighborhood than the average ECC board member has in hers, the ECC sees no reason to object; the property owner has the absolute right to do whatever he wants with his property. When a subsidized developer destroyed neighborhood businesses to make way for one more strip mall, the ECC said “Yes” to what they called “progress....

Who the hell is Johnny Cash? He’s Nashville and Greenwich Village, Memphis and the holy land, a fundamentalist who in his earlier incarnation as country’s angry young man got himself banned from the Grand Ole Opry after busting out the footlights during an amphetamine-induced pique. Cash summed it up best himself in “Highwayman” when he sang the ultimate space cowboy line, “I fly a starship / Across the universe divide.” Cash’s reach, marked by some flaky moments, has indeed been vast and brilliant....

“We were filling the gap in the 60s. We started changing people’s tastes in filmgoing to make them want to see more of this kind of product. And now the theaters that used to show it all have stopped showing it because the distributors do not buy foreign product anymore and foreign product is not being shown in the local theaters anymore. So, ironically, we’ve become the only source now, the festival, for this new kind of film....

PICTURES IN THE HALL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether or not that’s what she actually thought isn’t the point. The point is that Pictures in the Hall invites us to imagine thoughts like that. Gently loving, gently anguished, gently funny, or gently hokey, Carnelia’s songs are almost always about love and allegiance–about passing time in the presence of other people. Or at least–as in the case of a tune involving a woman and her avocado tree–other living things....

ROOTS ‘N’ BLUES Columbia’s much-heralded “Roots ‘n’ Blues” series illustrates the problem perfectly. It’s an admirable, long-overdue effort on the part of a major label to document some of our most important blues history in a serious, even scholarly way. But aside from the ubiquitous Willie Dixon (shown here in a setting most would consider nearly irrelevant to his best Chicago work), scarcely a living soul is represented. To be taken seriously, it seems, the blues must be a museum piece....

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs has metamorphosed several times. It was premiered by Twyla Tharp Dance in 1982, then recast for ABT in 1984 as Sinatra Suite, a work for a single couple rather than seven. This year the seven-couple original was given its ABT premiere. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nine Sinatra Songs is a very different dance from Sinatra Suite, which I saw ABT perform several years ago....

THE HOMECOMING Teddy, a British philosophy professor at an American university, returns one night, after a six-year absence, to the dreary North London house he was born and raised in. He brings his wife Ruth to meet the family: his widowed 70-year-old dad Max, his prissy bachelor uncle Sam, and his younger brothers Lenny and Joey. It is a coarse, brutish family of men, seething with mutual contempt, fierce discontent, pathetic pretensions, and the potential for quick and frightening violence....

Are Social Security numbers “recycled”? If not, then why is my number lower than my (older) boyfriend’s? If you add the current population (now about 250,000,000) to the number of Americans who have died since 1935 (when Social Security began), wouldn’t the resulting number exceed nine digits in an S.S. number, proving my little theory about recycling? OK, Cecil, tell me I’m full of blarney, but what do the numbers represent?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was really sad to read Mr. Wyman’s article on XRT [“So Many Records, So Little Time,” November 16], which basically amounted to a free 12-page advertisement for the station. There are several reasons for my feelings toward this article, most of them having to do with Bill Wyman’s embracing the station as a station that has “taken chances” and succeeded, christening them with the status of underdogdom....

GREMLINS 2 THE NEW BATCH A cautionary tale set in a Frank Capra universe, Joe Dante’s original Gremlins (1984) gives us a kindhearted, unsuccessful inventor named Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) who buys a furry little creature called Mogwai as a Christmas present for his teenage son Billy (Zach Galligan). He finds Mogwai in Chinatown, in a curio shop run by the sage Mr. Wing (Keye Luke), who doesn’t want to sell it, but Wing’s practical-minded grandson, who says they need the money, arranges the deal anyway....

Friday 13 Destruction of the world’s tropical rain forests has been the subject of much serious, adult-oriented media hoopla lately. But today and tomorrow, you can help your kids learn a greenhouse-effect fact or two at Family Rain Forest Awareness Weekend, sponsored by the Chicago Rainforest Action Group. The program includes lectures, a raffle, visits with rain forest animals (borrowed from Lincoln Park Zoo), a rain forest walk forested by Tropical Plant Rentals, and a puppet show at the Express-Ways Children’s Museum....