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HIGH HOPES One of the most interesting things about Mike Leigh’s up-to-the-minute bulletin from Thatcher England is its title. Because this wonderful English movie is partly a comedy, and because it’s very much about the way that Londoners live nowadays, one would assume a title like High Hopes is ironic. Among most of my English friends, the expectations currently expressed about their country’s future couldn’t be much lower; and at first glance, there’s nothing in this movie to contradict their pessimism....

A DIFFERENT WAR: VIETNAM IN ART John Olbrantz and Lucy Lippard organized this exhibit, which comprises 100 works by 54 artists, for the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington. It is the first exhibit to look at the effect of the war on American art. The works are divided into three main categories: protest art of the late 60s and early 70s; art by Vietnam vets; and recent art by nonveterans, including two Vietnamese refugees....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Cunningham obviously put a great deal of thought into his correspondence when he stated the following: “Mr. Heirens has never admitted his crime and thus has not taken the very crucial first step of rehabilitation in any program for personal change.” Yes, I too believe that it is important for each of us, Bill Heirens included, to come to terms with those problems which prevent us from becoming the most productive and socially agreeable persons possible....

JOFFREY BALLET One of the premieres, Charles Moulton’s Panoramagram, starts promisingly with 18 dancers arranged in three horizontal rows of 6 on risers: I thought of school photos, cheering sections on bleachers, the sit-down dancers of the old American Bandstand who made do with upper bodies alone. But ultimately the appeal of this “corps” is its abstract visual texture: Moulton expertly manipulates the dense weave of dancers, animating them in varying contingents of six, or one by one, or in duos or trios....

After two decades Music of the Baroque is making its first appearance in Orchestra Hall. The move not only indicates that the choral ensemble believes it can pack a large concert space–it also certifies the coming-of-age for the city’s third major music institution. For this 20th-anniversary finale, MOB chief Thomas Wikman has picked a daunting vehicle: Mendelssohn’s crowning achievement, Elijah. A monumental oratorio–two and a half hours long–that harks back to Handel, Elijah’s story line is straight from the Bible: the zealous prophet Elijah is misunderstood and maligned by his own people for forecasting drought and famine, but vindicated and revered in the end....

For more than 1,000 years only limited numbers of Jews lived in Russia. Than territorial conquests beginning in the late 18th century gave Russia the world’s largest Jewish population. These Jews were an unwelcome burden the imperialist czars accepted as the price of annexing Ukraine, Belorussia, and Poland. According to historian Michael Stanislawski, the czars regarded the Jews as an “anarchic, cowardly, parasitic people, damned perpetually because of their deicide and heresy [who were] best dealt with by repression....

In 1986 filmmaker Nettie Wild happened to be in the Philippines during the “peaceful revolution” that brought Cory Aquino to power. Wild had gone there to make a political documentary; she had a crew, financing, and plenty of film, but she decided not to shoot a foot of it. Instead, in what she describes as “quite a controversial decision,” she left, intending to return after the thousand foreign press people had departed and the Aquino honeymoon had ended....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Yet two of the figures who opened the Chicago Symphony’s 98th season in a special nonsubscription fund-raiser on September 28 are legendary. Pianist Rudolf Serkin, who is now 85 years old, and our own Sir Georg Solti, who is celebrating the beginning of his 20th anniversary season as music director of the CSO and will turn 76 later this month, are both acknowledged legends. The program was the Beethoven Fifth Piano Concerto (Emperor) and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra....

To the editors. It must be admitted that Marxists do respect the power of ideas. This is why they generally use every means at their disposal to make sure that no ideas except their own are allowed currency. In the late Soviet Empire, this was rather simple. Stalin not only shot everyone who had the wrong ideas, but also everyone who might at some future time have the wrong idea. In the Western democracies, however, things are less easy....

WAVELAND RADIO PLAYHOUSE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I still admire Firesign’s gift for calling up complicated, imaginary worlds through words and sound effects alone. No one has ever equalled them. Joe Frank’s self-indulgent, self- consciously experimental radio show “Work in Progress” (broadcast on WBEZ on Sunday nights) comes close. But his work doesn’t so much stretch the medium of radio as simply translate to the box populi elements of performance art: minimalism, postmodern irony, and story telling....

On a Sunday morning, traffic on the southbound Dan Ryan is light. Garfield Boulevard, where I exit and head east, is bustling with cars, but the rest of Englewood is still asleep. Along Garfield, locked grates cover the storefronts, and the sidewalks are mostly empty except for clusters of brightly dressed churchgoers and here and there hawkers trying to sell them Sunday papers. Just past Indiana I pull over and park....

Judith Jackson is not one to apologize for her chosen field. “I know a lot of pianists who think accompanying and operatic work are boring and limiting, in terms of their own creativity. But I find it very challenging–and I really love it! Basically, being a rehearsal pianist, I get to see the work born, built from scratch, and brought through to real maturity–and at that point I leave it. I’ve always been a person who likes building blocks and the creative process....

In 1977, Andrew Lappin, 23 years old and fresh out of college, marched into town from Boston and booked himself a room in a fleabag hotel on South Michigan Avenue. It’s about as far west as you can go and still be in Chicago. Across the street to the south is Cicero, a working-class suburb; to the north and east are Austin and North Lawn, two predominantly black communities starved for investment....

Dennis Britton’s Worst Decision? When Hewitt’s copy came in on November 28, the sports desk had the bright idea of showing Jackson in a Jason mask. Alan Henry, the deputy managing editor for sports, said OK, and the next morning’s Sun-Times carried what the art department worked up, a doctored photo of Jackson on the mound, his face hidden in white. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The next morning the editor of the Sun-Times didn’t come close to laughing....

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS For Hollywood this has been a season of surprises, mostly disappointing ones. This is the time of year when what passes for “serious adult” films –not dramas necessarily, but films that tackle grown-up subjects–are supposed to thrive at the box office, a rule of thumb that has been hammered by the relative and outright failures of Billy Bathgate, Other People’s Money, Frankie & Johnny, The Butcher’s Wife, and Little Man Tate....

FIERCE LOVE: STORIES FROM BLACK GAY LIFE In Fierce Love–“fierce” used both as slang for “fabulous” as well as the more usual definition of “intense”–there are no absolutes, political or personal. “We are an endangered species,” Branner says. He’s talking about being gay and being black but also about the fragile condition of being human. The wonder here is that, even though the Pomos speak to and for black gay men, as an audience–no matter our own demographics–we can take what we need....

“Yes, but which Harry Kipper?” one might well ask. Both of the Kipper Kids, whose bizarre conceptual comedy positioned them as sort of the Laurel and Hardy of the avant-garde in the 1970s and ’80s, used the name Harry. The team consisted of Martin von Haselberg (an Argentinean of German descent who subsequently married Bette Midler) and Brian Routh, an Englishman descended from a family of music-hall entertainers and street buskers....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have been teaching engineering thermodynamics (and a little bit of ethics) for a while, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I am now cooperating with IIT’s Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions in a new program aimed at teaching faculty how to add ethics to their regular courses. Almost from my start there, I have learned to appreciate the efforts of all the people quoted in the article: Vivian Weil and Michael Davis, of IIT, and John Regalbuto, of UIC....

It’s 1:30 in the afternoon and Nick Perrino and his son, Joe, are arguing about mozzarella cheese. Nick–a hardy 77 years old with a chest big as an institutional soup cauldron and an accent as thick as good spaghetti sauce–insists that cheese from a 20-pound block tastes different than cheese from a 5-pound block. Joe–trim and businesslike in a white shirt, red sweater vest, and lawyerly tortoise-shell glasses–thinks they taste the same when they’re melted....

THE ART OF SUCCESS I’ve been reading The Compass, Janet Coleman’s new book about the Compass Players–that bunch of Hyde Park misfits whose experiments with improvisation 35 years ago “revolutionized the art of comedy in America.” It’s a sad book, in a way. David Shepherd conceived the Compass as a people’s theater, a reborn commedia, where actors would ad-lib plays about the events of the moment and the lives of the masses....