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The mukhtar (chief) of an occupied Arab Palestinian village (Ali Mohammed Akili) wants to hold a traditional full-scale wedding for his son (Nazih Akly), but the Israeli military governor will allow it only if he and his officers are the guests of honor. As the ceremonies and festivities gradually unfold over a tense day and night, writer-director Michel Kleifi, who grew up in Nazareth and is now based in Belgium, paints an intimate and multilayered view of the village and its various factions, including the three generations of the mukhtar’s family....

Are libertarians rude and repressed on principle or by predisposition? Why aren’t more libertarians women? Why aren’t more women libertarians? At the Libertarian Party’s recent convention, held in Chicago at the Marriott, these questions came up in an unofficial panel discussion called “Women in Libertarianism–Success Stories.” Many of the women who participated wondered if objectivism, the laissez-faire philosophy of libertarian heroine Ayn Rand, was connected with certain personality traits often observed among males of the libertarian persuasion....

2 TALES WITH LEGS Sometimes theater doesn’t make sense, or it makes the kind of sense that dreams make. Or as in the case of 2 Tales With Legs, only a dream can make sense of it. From what little I understand of Freud, dreams touch the untouchable; they put a curious finger on an inchoate anxiety. It could be a warning or simply an unraveling of tension. Theater can perform the same function....

It’s mighty cold down on the Maxwell Street Market these days, and it isn’t just the winter weather bringing the chill. The University of Illinois was recently given the go-ahead to purchase most of the land in the area: vacant lots have been fenced off, most of the few remaining buildings have been demolished, several longtime vendors have left in frustration, and some of the open spaces where the blues bands play in the summertime have been made inaccessible....

Friday 13 While the organizers of Give the Gift of Sight cite no authority, they contend that 70 percent of Americans either throw away or just stash old eyeglasses. This when untold thousands in developing countries have little access to the sort of eye care we take for granted. Today a couple of Cubs have agreed to swap autographs for old glasses. If you want to say hey to Jim LeFebvre or Ryne Sandberg, they’ll be at LensCrafters, 205 N....

Janice Misurell-Mitchell must be the busiest composer in town this season. Already seven of her recent compositions have been performed; now opuses eight and nine take their first bow in this concert by Cube, a new-music ensemble she cofounded four years ago. It’s premature to categorize Misurell-Mitchell’s music–after all, she only began composing full-time in 1987, after obtaining a PhD from Northwestern. But her attempts at stretching music’s boundaries–by incorporating improvisation and performance art and expanding the range of instruments–have produced refreshing results....

We met Christina Eason stationed outside the Cozy Cloud Cottage on the fifth floor of Marshall Field’s downtown store, where the wait to whisper in Santa’s ear had ebbed to 30 minutes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her sparkle-spangled suit caroled seasonal high spirits, though the rolled-up sleeves and cuffs conceded to the temporary, and corporate (one size fits most), nature of the job....

IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story involves four friends, professional singers all, reaching for that elusive star, overcoming obstacles and enduring petty humiliations in the process. Kristin (Teri Wilder) sings in a nightclub run by an insensitive sleaze (Gary Taylor). Val (Cynthia Jackson) finds that her husband and children selfishly demand the greater part of her time, leaving little room for music....

JOE MOMMA! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ron Mark takes a stab at this issue in Joe Momma!, but he gets tangled up in stereotypes, platitudes, wishful thinking, and gooey sentimentality. Set in the teachers’ lounge of a school on Chicago’s south side during the tumultuous 1967-’68 school year, the play attempts to expose the tensions between two Jewish teachers and their black counterparts....

These same-sex siblings, known for their recordings of both classical music and jazz, are France’s answer to the Marsalis brothers. Piano prodigies Katia and Marielle Labeque bring a lifetime of collaboration to their work, which must be responsible for their sensibility to each other’s playing; it allows them to inhabit, and often illuminate, the subterranean structure of the music they perform. Works for two pianos contain unique hidden dangers–most of them related to keeping the separate parts from overwhelming each other and muddying the presentation–but the Labeques bring an almost blithe clarity to the process....

On June 22, 1990, my friend Greg Allen–an actor, director, and playwright who works a day job in my neighborhood–went up the street during his break to get some Fritos and milk at the nearby 7-Eleven. It was not where he usually took lunch. He was just about there when he heard a pop, felt a burning in his knee, and said, almost matter-of-factly, “I’ve been shot.” He spotted a boy pedaling away on a StingRay bicycle, and then another boy taking off after him....

In 1927, when Melville Jean Herskovits became Northwestern University’s first anthropologist, there wasn’t much scholarly interest in the African roots of black American culture. The few people thinking about it assumed those roots had been lost when Africans were ripped from their homelands and sold into slavery. As W.E.B. DuBois noted, the prevailing opinion early in this century held that “the Negro has no history.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Polish Film Festival, which is being presented by the Art Institute’s Film Center and the Polish Museum of America in cooperation with WPNA radio, concludes this weekend, running Friday through Sunday, October 6 through 8. Screenings will be at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and at the Film Center, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets for any single evening (two film programs) at the Copernicus Center are $6. Tickets for screenings at the Film Center are $5, $3 for Film Center members....

“One pair of bronze trousers is not very much more interesting than another pair,” Lorado Taft wrote in 1921. One of Chicago’s most famous sculptors, Taft had surveyed the city’s collection of public statuary in that year and did not like what he saw. Too many generals on pedestals in the parks and too few wood nymphs. Too many figures posed in modern dress (“clothing dummies,” Taft called them) commemorating the fashionable instead of the timeless....

It was a stroke of genius. A book of genius, in fact. In January, the reviewers’ copies arrived: slim volumes wrapped in very plain, Woolworth’s-type brown paper wrappers with a large black “X” stamped on the lower right-hand corner. Stacked high at Dalton’s in such a manner, the effect would be hilarious (the actual book jacket is black, with a blacker “X” stamped on the front). One would not open a cover like this even if one were all alone on the bus without inviting the taint of perversion....

Despite the much-vaunted universality of blues expression, the grafting of disparate blues styles into a coherent whole can be a tricky business. In the prewar Chicago days of Lester Melrose’s Bluebird label, the work of artists like Memphis Minnie and Big Bill Broonzy was sometimes diluted by producers attempting to enhance their sounds with trumpets and clarinets. In Memphis during the late 40s, the uneasy equilibrium between Howlin’ Wolf’s raw power and the developing sophistication of sidemen like Junior Parker and Matt “Guitar” Murphy resulted in a sometimes spellbinding, sometimes nearly chaotic mix....

When you’re talking about one person’s musical sensibility running the show, the distinction between playing solo and playing with a group is generally meaningless, of course. Stiff, the first album from Sugar, Bob Mould’s new power trio, does seem to have focused the talents of the formidable thrash god. His two demanding solo albums were psychic roars of angst ameliorated only by a certain adventurous musical base. (Workbook included the work of a full-time cellist, for example....

And never wash your hands. “If you see something out of the ordinary, follow it,” chemist Bob Filler advises science students in the IIT newsletter Perspectives on the Professions (January 1991). “Those tangents are sometimes where the interesting science is.” Nutra-sweet, for instance, “was discovered in Skokie about fifteen years ago. A researcher went home and noticed that his food was sweet. His wife said, ‘I put nothing in it.’ He said, ‘Oh yes you did....

Percentage of Cook County criminal defendants who are represented by the Public Defender’s Office: 85 (Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, September 5). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So you want the good old 1950s back? Here’s how: “Marriage preparation programs would make natural family planning an integral part of their instruction. Contraception would not be presented as a personal choice.” Human Life International expounds on how it would celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1968 papal encyclical against “artificial” birth control, in Social Justice Review (July/August), published in Saint Louis....

“It is hard to imagine [Harold Washington] not being pleased with the boldness, audacity, and solidity of the [library’s] design–all features having certain affinities with the late mayor himself,” writes Philip Bess in Inland Architect (March/April). “Moreover, there is something fittingly ‘Chicago’ about this adaptive appropriation of the loft building for a major civic structure. It is not simply that the loft building as a type lends itself so well to so many different activities…....