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The production was all wrong on this English trio’s first album and the songwriting is off on their second, but tonight that’s almost irrelevant because onstage this group’s songs become secondary to their sound. Over the fast-paced primal throb of some heavy bass and drums, the big, bald, and blue-suited lead singer/guitarist, Bill Carter, throws out mean, cutting guitar licks only to sweep them away a moment later with a thick pile of barehanded, ringing chords, and the combination triggers that old rock ‘n’ roll endocrine rush with near-scientific precision....

Despite the subtitle, Molly McNett and Shirley Anderson’s wise and witty show, first produced last summer at the Prop Theatre, speaks volumes to anyone, female or male, interested in breaking the media-created consensus trance about body image. Combining elements of satire and autobiography, this wickedly funny five-person revue examines the myriad ways adolescent girls are told by family, friends, and the media that they are not good enough or thin enough or worthy of love....

A favorite story of the late John S. Edwards, onetime general manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, concerned the visit of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Chicago in October 1979. The pontiff, a great lover of the fine arts, had expressed his wish to hear the mighty CSO under Sir Georg Solti during his visit, and so a special concert of the Bruckner Fifth Symphony was arranged in Holy Name Cathedral....

“Envisioning an equivalent to Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive, merchants gradually converted Oak Street’s townhouses to expensive shops,” writes Michael J.P. Smith in Inland Architect (November/December). “These undoubtedly are successful magnets for a certain grade of consumer. But Oak Street has lost every shred of its former gentility to a monoculture of visually raucous boutiques that jostle for attention like a convention of Ivana Trumps.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Hey, Mercedes, how you doing? You look upset.” I had stopped by the apartment of a friend of mine who lives in West Garfield Park. “Ha. Yeah, two whole siss’uhs in da dozen. Look like coupla choc’ate doughnuhs gots mix’ in wit’ da powduh suguhs. Don’ see no tacos, no tight eyes neiduh.” “You’re too sensitive, Mercedes”, I chided her. “You see racism everywhere. It probably was just coincidence that 10 of the 12 women they picked were whites....

Watching the Bears this season was like watching some amazing, intricate machine trying to get itself to work right. There were moments when everything fit together, when the Bears rolled rapidly over the opposition. These moments, however, were few and far between after the season’s first game, so that watching the Bears was more often than. not frustrating rather than satisfying. Our popular culture is full of such frustrating mechanisms–great machines that always seem to be malfunctioning or misfiring, like the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars....

Can you solve a mystery for us? Why is it that every so often as you’re driving along there’s just one shoe lying there on the road? There’s never the other shoe in the pair, just that one shoe. Does someone throw their shoe out the window in disgust? Do kids throw their parents’ shoes out the back of the station wagon? Do they sprout from seeds sewn by bird droppings in the pavement?...

RHAPSODY IN AUGUST *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Akira Kurosawa With Sachiko Murase, Hisashi Igawa, Mie Suzuki, Tomoko Ohtakara, Mitsunori Isaki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, and Richard Gere. Given the awesome size of Kurosawa’s achievement over half a century, I fully admit that this bias is more than a little churlish. Indeed, now that I find that his latest feature, Rhapsody in August, is being castigated across the globe for its sentimentality and irrelevance, it seems like a good time to come to Kurosawa’s defense, especially since I find this film at the very least more affecting and accomplished than any of his movies since Kagemusha (1980)....

All day long, a puffy white sky threatened to wash out Alex Sanchez’s handiwork, but the Sullivan High School junior kept at it. Standing on a milk crate, he stretched above the other kids working on the Keith Haring mural in Grant Park, a thin paintbrush in his hand making little green crosses. He stepped back, proudly admiring his work. A group of peers gathered around him, considering the meaning of his effort....

The May covers of Vogue and Mademoiselle tempt our gaze into the shady caverns between voluminous mounds of smooth flesh, into glossy wonderlands of ideal body parts on parade. Artist Sharon Guy wants us to admire breasts too, but her standards for what qualifies as admirable are somewhat less exacting than Vogue’s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the cryptic utterings of Jerzy Kosinski’s gardener in Being There, the significance of Guy’s artistic statement depended on the beholder....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a teacher of 13 years, I can tell you, I’ve never met a student who didn’t want to learn. Sure, they put up blocks, and indeed some of those blocks were insurmountable at the time I had them in my class. But from elite suburban schools, to rural multi-graded schoolhouses, to a Chicago school for students with problems, I’ve encountered inquisitive, energetic minds....

Ever since he first burned into the American consciousness with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in 1971, Gil Scott-Heron has been an indispensable voice of conscience and liberation. His worldview is unabashedly Afro-centric, but he doesn’t waste time with whitey-bashing or negativity: the music, accessibly melodic, has a loose, life-affirming groove and rhythmic influences that span the globe (From South Africa to South Carolina is the title of one of his LPs)....

STEVE PAXTON The dancer Steve Paxton reminds me of Snyder in many ways. Paxton shares Snyder’s drive to eliminate frills and emotional manipulation. Both Paxton and Snyder helped start an artistic movement: Paxton is one of the founding members of the postmodern dance movement, and Snyder was one of the original beat poets. Both live quiet, isolated lives: Snyder with his family in the California mountains, and Paxton on a New England farm....

WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART With Clint Eastwood, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, Alun Armstrong, Marisa Berenson, Timothy Spall, and Mel Martin. The quantum leap represented by White Hunter, Black Heart from the earlier Eastwood films I’ve seen, Bird included, is the result of three separate factors: (1) he’s working, perhaps for the first time, with a truly first-rate script; (2) he’s developed the directorial skills to get the maximum out of such a script; and (3) he’s attained a freedom as an actor that allows him to take the risk of serving both the script and his own direction rather than the predilections of his usual audience....

Music Kills a Memory has opened and closed four times since January–the last time in New York, last month–which must go to show that you can’t keep a good act down. Jeff Citation winner Paula Killen plays Jane, a dweebish woman caught up in a series of abusive relationships. At a sex addicts’ support group, she meets Stella, a sleek lounge chanteuse, and Connie, a hot-mama blues belter–both of whom have managed to sublimate their self-destructive urges into music....

POLITICAL AXE Political Axe, the Cloud 42 theater company’s program of solo one-acts, takes a caustic look at both these political trends. This double-edged Axe pairs Second Lady, M. Kilburg Reedy’s monologue by a Democratic vice-presidential candidate’s wife, with The David Duke Songbook, a purported intimate encounter with the former Ku Klux Klan leader and recent Republican gubernatorial and presidential candidate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting is Duke’s office in Metairie, Louisiana, where he is entertaining supporters with a casual concert of his favorite show tunes....

NAKED NEON William Doerrfeld’s teasingly titled (Naked Men Music (1985) was one of the audience favorites in “Naked Neon,” a multimedia potpourri presented recently by CBE, a performance group consisting mostly of wind instrumentalists. (Naked Men Music also wowed the crowd at the New Music Chicago festival four years ago.) According to a program note, Doerrfeld has studied the lives of the Humbanee people of Africa. An acute observer, he’s cleverly taken elements from what must be a tribal rite and transposed them to the “civilized” confines of a concert space....

BOYZ N THE HOOD (Has redeeming facet) Directed and written by John Singleton With Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, Larry Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Nia Long, and Tyra Ferrell. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some reviewers have been treating this wave of black pictures as some sort of Golden Age. In terms of the actors, life-styles, slang, and neighborhoods hitting the screen, they may have a point....

THE BRAIN-DEAD CONTESSA: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY SHOWCASE The most impressive pieces were by choreographers Bob Eisen and Rosemary Doolas. Eisen’s Ten Minutes and Doolas’s Drought and Persona are clearly drawn, carefully styled, and expertly executed. Ten Minutes, a solo dance by Eisen, is at once obvious and completely mysterious. He simply enters the space, sets an egg timer for ten minutes, and then performs a series of enigmatic yet emphatic dance gestures before his allotted time is up....

The virtues as well as the limitations of this bizarre fantasy from New Zealand, winner of half a dozen Australian Oscars, stem from its literary conception. Though the story is an original (by director Vincent Ward), and Ward’s use of both black and white and color gives it a very distinctive look, it feels like an idea translated into cinematic terms rather than a cinematic conception. In a remote English mining village threatened by the Black Death in 1348, a visionary boy (Hamish McFarlane) has a troubled dream that spells out possible salvation, which involves digging through the center of the earth to a celestial city and placing across on the spire of a cathedral....