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MYSTERY TRAIN Mastery is a rare commodity in American movies these days, in matters both large and small, so when a poetic master working on a small scale comes into view, it’s reason to sit up and take notice. Jim Jarmusch’s second feature, Stranger Than Paradise, won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1984 and catapulted him from the position of an obscure New York independent with a European cult following–on the basis of his first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980)–to international stardom....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am a black long-time Hyde Park resident. Appalled, I ask: Why did the Reader publish an outmoded type of sociological study which degraded Hyde Park, current race relations, human interactions, and the black communities? “Slim and Bart” by Mitchell Duneier [August 7] was excerpted from a dissertation published by the University of Chicago Press. That’s their problem....

The last film of F.W. Murnau, who was probably the greatest of all silent directors (he didn’t live long enough to make sound films, as he died in an auto accident only a few days after work on the musical score of this masterpiece was completed). Filmed entirely in the South Seas with a nonprofessional cast and gorgeous cinematography by Floyd Crosby (fully evident in this fine restoration), this began as a collaboration with the great documentarist Robert Flaherty, who still shares credit for the story, though clearly the German romanticism of Murnau (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise) predominates, above all in the heroic poses of the islanders and the fateful diagonals in the compositions....

Why am I having a hard time finding the word “callipygian” in the dictionary? No one I ask seems to know what it means. –Kurt Jacobsen, U.S.A. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is there a phenomenon known as February the 30th? When I was in fourth grade my somewhat eccentric teacher explained that in some years there could be as many as 367 days per annum!...

The Vermeer Quartet, the only Chicago-area string quartet with an international reputation, has found a new venue at the Chicago Historical Society, and its inaugural recital series there plays up the group’s versatility and experience. Of the trio of works slated for the opening concert two are definitely of high quality, though they’re seldom performed. One is Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat Major, the first in the set of six ingeniously crafted quartets, nicknamed the Prussian quartets–they were commissioned by Frederick William II, the King of Prussia, an amateur cellist....

When the Philippines trip didn’t fit into Bradley’s schedule this year, a Thai-born colleague suggested his native country as an alternative; the colleague’s Thai friends became the Rush team’s hosts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The team members who were surgeons spent a fair chunk of their own money in order to have that experience–they paid their own transportation and incidental costs. The other expenses–for example, supplies and nurses’ costs–were paid by various foundations, including the Foundation for Children’s Reconstructive Surgery and Rush-Presbyterian-St....

The boldest and arguably the best of Peter Greenaway’s fiction features to date, this extremely odd and perverse conceptual piece certainly isn’t for every taste, although Sacha Vierny’s cinematography makes it so luscious that you may find yourself mesmerized in spite of yourself. The title refers to a European zoo; the curious plot involves two brothers who work as the zoo’s curators and who lose their wives in a freak auto accident....

AFTER THE FALL Other successful memory plays, like Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, have a life apart from the playwright’s real-life dirty laundry. But Miller isn’t willing–or perhaps able–to transform the past into art. He wants to analyze, interpret, and most of all shape it so that it will yield the writer a clean emotional payoff. O’Neill never minimized the dangers of his past, and Williams always let his characters feel for themselves, but in effect Miller won’t even let his characters speak for themselves....

AMONG ALL THIS YOU STAND LIKE A FINE BROWNSTONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I always thought this antiperformance prejudice was a shame. Not just because it reinforced the commonly held belief that poetry is boring and hard to understand (an attitude that a university writing department, as the keeper of the “mysteries” of creative writing, would have a vested interest in maintaining). But also because locked within the confines of the deliberately chosen words and phrases of some poems is a power that can only be released when they’re performed....

Friday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jerker–the two-man show subtitled The Helping Hand, a Pornographic Elegy With Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Phone Calls, Many of Them Dirty–is returning for its third season at Bailiwick Repertory. Back onstage is Darren Stephens with newcomer Brad Boehmke as men looking for love and redemption across the phone-sex lines....

NOVEMBER Saturday 30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you already know what Taurus, Bigfoot, Bear Foot, Grave Digger, Let’s Boogie, and Bad Habit are, you probably don’t need to be reminded that the U.S. Hot Rod Association’s Mud and Monster Truck Racing National Finals run tonight and tomorrow at the Rosemont Horizon. The object of these events is to take one of the aforementioned beasts–12-foot-high, 1,000-horsepower trucks–and drive it through an 80-foot-long pit filled with 30 inches of mud....

The sixth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival continues from Friday, October 5, through Sunday, October 7. Film screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; and at the Roberto Clemente High School auditorium, 1147 N. Western. Ticket prices per program are $6 for adults; $4 for students, senior citizens, and handicapped persons; and $3 for Facets and Chicago Latino Cinema members....

To the editors: As if it is his perception alone (Para 11), Valeo states “But the reasons for the food shortage are complex, and reducing them to simple greed is trite.” In fact, my Minister of Welfare (a protagonist), in nearly two pages of script (MS page 9ff), states “The reasons are complex” and then outlines three root causes: a) public taste for beef; 2) greed and profiteering; and 3) government policies that encourage the other two....

The Jazz Members Big Band charts have always been terrific: the band’s coleader, Jeff Lindberg, saw to that. The soloists, including the other coleader, trumpeter Steve Jensen, remain stellar. And I can think of only one other band in the country that can match these guys when it comes to studying and executing the music of Duke Ellington’s greatest bands. Are the Jazz Members still the best jazz orchestra in Chicago?...

I’m sitting with Gene Chandler in Ed Debevic’s, where they’re playing “My Girl” by the Temptations and someone near us has ordered a Blue Moon Burger. “I played with them last week,” Chandler says, “the Marcells. They do ‘Blue Moon.’” Chandler was born Eugene Dixon on the south side of Chicago in 1940. His dad was a steelworker and his mom worked at Dominick’s. He was an only child. He went to Englewood High School, where he and a few friends formed a neighborhood singing group called the Gay Tones and performed at high school talent shows....

Lead Story After a 14-year-old girl argued with her older sister in Vaughan, Ontario, in February over the relative merits of two figure skaters performing on television, she went to the garage, loaded a .22- caliber rifle, and peppered the family home with seven shots. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 64-year-old woman sued her 71-year-old husband in Boulder, Colorado, in June because he had not been able to consummate the marriage in the one month following the wedding after leading her to believe during courtship that he was capable....

Like Bob Dylan, General Manuel Noriega is disappointing us with lackluster work in the twilight of his career. His latest effort–his long-awaited trial–doesn’t just seem like it’s lasting for months, it really is lasting for months. Who cares about the boring details of workaday drug smuggling? You can hear better government corruption stories anytime Walter Jacobson films a city garbage crew. No, the only interesting thing about the Noriega trial is voodoo....

To the editors: For such a good newspaper, I found the Reader’s December 22nd front page story on the events of 1989 sadly cynical in light of the year’s happenings. For those of us who disregard the wealth of sleazy talk show hosts, the television commercials, and the “Batman” merchandising craze, 1989 was a year of exciting, and at times frightening, turmoil and change. Certainly your newspaper has not forgotten the violent revolutions in Eastern Europe, those in China, and elsewhere?...

The best economic factor working in favor of many baby boomers now entering a reluctant middle age may turn out to be their parents’ frugality. The older generation, children of the Depression, received little from their own parents except character and a determination not to be poor. They married early, worked at the same job for years, had children, saved, and are now retiring on what are known as “defined-benefit pensions,” which usually enable the recipients to maintain a comfortable life....

Rosalie Sorrels is the kind of artist who gives folk music a good name: instead of wallowing in nostalgia for simpler times, she turns a joyfully poetic eye on the human condition as experienced by real people, often expressed as a gritty celebration of her own well-lived, sometimes tumultuous life. Whether painting a bittersweet portrait of barroom philosophers at closing time or praising the resilience and strength of Prairie women, Sorrels imbues her music with the rarest kind of affirmation: a love of life that acknowledges hard times and despair as bravely as it embraces the warmth of friends, faith in human nature, and hope for the future, This weekend should be extra special for Sorrels: she’s celebrating her return to performing after recuperating from an illness that might have ended the career of a less valiant spirit....