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“A lot of good people come from Indiana,” said a new friend as our bus crossed the state line. “The better they are, the quicker they come.” There’s an attractive tendency toward self-deprecation among Hoosiers, and coming into Terre Haute, a quiet town of 60,000 on the banks of the Wabash River, it’s easy to see why. The town’s main north-south thoroughfare, U.S. highway 41, known locally as Third Street, presents the visitor with an almost unrelieved tableau of chain motels, Wal-Marts, and a fabulously varied selection of fast-food emporia....

Derek Jarman’s lyrical and visionary movie–made after he tested HIV positive and before he made his highly political version of Marlowe’s Edward II–alternates views of his own sleeping and dreaming figure as well as his seaside home and garden with apocalyptic or enigmatic images of the life of Jesus, the state-endorsed persecution of homosexuals (among other horrors of post-Thatcher England), and diverse fancies and fantasies that often combine these themes. Deftly mixing video and film shot with different stocks and in various gauges, this kaleidoscopic reverie also makes room for a mordant restaging of the “Think Pink” number from Funny Face, many glimpses of children and nature, offscreen recitations of poetry, and such Jarman regulars as actress Tilda Swinton and composer Simon Fisher Turner....

In its advertisements for last Sunday’s National Basketball Association All-Star Game, NBC revived Michael Jordan’s last-second series-winning shot against the Cleveland Cavaliers from the playoffs of two seasons ago. It only appeared for an instant at the end of the ad: Jordan sinks the shot and then throws a series of fists in the air. We knew what it was right away, however; its use in the ad reminded us what an indelible moment it is....

WE MADE A MESOPOTAMIA, NOW YOU CLEAN IT UP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » True, We Made a Mesopotamia, Now You Clean It Up does suffer from many of the flaws that have done in previous shows. It lacks any sort of unifying worldview, for instance–in fact, some sketches come down on both sides of an issue at once. An extended bit about a “save the whales” protester (Megan Moore Burns) at Shedd Aquarium starts out by mocking the protest, then turns on the politically unconcerned tourists who think Burns is part of the Shedd’s show....

Q: I was sitting at the Montreal Pool Room eating my all-dressed hot dog and suddenly the question hit me: why is there no ketchup in an all-dressed? Is ketchup not as respectable a condiment as relish or mustard? Is there a conspiracy? Does Dirty Harry’s remark about ketchup in a hot dog have anything to do with it? I would be so thankful if you could shine a light on this obscure bit of knowledge for a passionate and perplexed user of ketchup....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In case anybody else is actually that mixed up, there is no such thing as an “aborted child.” A child is someone who is born, not a cell or unit of cells or even a fetus. A fetus is never a child. Abortions are performed usually on EMBRYOS, which do not have little arms nor do they have little legs nor do they emit tiny screams when they are removed from the woman in whose uterus they might happen to be....

Abiogenesis Movement Ensemble defies easy classification. This seven-year-old Chicago-based troupe freely borrows from such disparate sources as theater, modern dance, silent movies, and performance art to fashion pieces that are too roughly hewn and text-bound for dance purists, too abstract and nontraditional for mainstream theatergoers. In the semiautobiographical Liars, for example, choreographer Angela Allyn uses as her jumping-off point NPR journalist Ira Glass’s recent series on pathological liars. In this powerful piece three men and four women, all in cocktail dresses and high heels, illustrate selections from the stories told to Glass by women who had lived with or married pathological liars....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have diligently pursued the spiritual path under many different teachers and disciplines for twenty years now, and decided long ago that channeling (my own or anyone else’s) is not a legitimate avenue for one who seeks to attain spiritual oneness with the Godhead. I categorize channeling in much the same vein as the magicians of Pharaoh’s court in Moses’ time....

Consider the Soviet Union: enormous and empty by European standards, stretching from icy north to arid south, across the continent from one sea to another; encompassing old cities, raw frontier towns, and assertive minority groups. Its people admire Ronald Reagan. Still, it’s hard for her to withhold all judgments. “The ice cream in Moscow was the best I’ve ever had. But the meat there was mostly pork, which I don’t eat, and mostly fat....

DYLAN & THE DEAD On the personal-appearance front, Dylan’s performance has been a bit more mixed. After the cacophonous roar of the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1976—a tour that produced an underrated movie and some great bootlegs—Dylan hit the road in 1978 with a set of rigid new arrangements for his songs. On this outing, known as the Budokan tour after the live album recorded at Tokyo’s Budokan Stadium, Dylan dressed in jumpsuits and sequins and was backed up by something akin to a Las Vegas show band; he opened each show with a jaunty instrumental version of “My Back Pages” (the mournful song from Another Side of Bob Dylan with the chorus that goes, “But I was so much older then ....

“All sorts of remedies were proposed,” recalled John LaPlante. “Ban all cars from the Loop. Ban street parking. Ban left turns. Ban right turns. Ban all turns.” No gang’s turf, no hot development property, is fought over more energetically than the 8- to 10-foot-wide strip of asphalt that lies next to a Loop sidewalk. “The curb lane is where the action takes place,” task-force chairman Richard Hocking explained. That space is public property, and much of it has been set aside for uses palpably in the public interest–loading zones mainly, from bus stops and taxi stands to truck docks and parking spaces for the handicapped....

Civic Center Exec Seeks Greener Pastures A troubling sense of uncertainty hangs over the Civic Center for Performing Arts in the wake of news that Randall Green will leave his post there as executive director to become managing director of the fledgling Ballet Chicago on June 1. Green’s decision was a big surprise to most of the local arts community; few could have expected that anyone would jump at the chance to join an organization with such a troubled past as Ballet Chicago’s....

The ingredients for success in the clothing business are financial backing, hustle, and luck: you’ve got to get your idea to the department stores before the other guy gets there first. He hooked up with a friend named Bob–a Trim sales rep from Atlanta. Bob knew a designer in Georgia who could make the canvas shorts for $10 less than the competition. Thus was born Off the Top Surfware; Bob was president, Rosenstein the national sales manager....

My favorite record at the moment is The Collected Works of Goober & the Peas, a six-track, four-and-a-half-song seven-inch roundup of the latest outrages from this five-man faux country outfit out of Detroit. Joke bands like this generally don’t have much of a future, but Goober is something special: he’s about 12 inches over six feet tall and has a pained grin that’s about half that wide. He sings in a free-ranging voice that speaks volumes about his feelings on the state of country music today....

It would be wonderful to hear CSO assistant principal clarinetist John Bruce Yeh give a recital anytime, but when he performs a work as daring and adventurous as Pierre Boulez’s 1985 Dialogue de l’ombre double for solo clarinet and tape, it becomes a must hear. Those who were lucky enough to attend the packed 1986 Alain Damiens performance of the work at Northwestern University–a prologue to the Boulez-led Repons that evening–will remember the extraordinary aural color and texture that mark this unusual piece....

There were few novels, indeed few books of any kind beyond the Bible and an occasional western or detective potboiler, in young John O’Brien’s middle-class, Irish Catholic home in suburban Elmwood Park. Despite a rich Irish literary tradition that includes James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Sean O’Casey, O’Brien insists that the Chicago Irish have always feared the written word, avoiding even approved theology in favor of direct priestly authority....

LUV Murray Schisgal treats the cartoonish characters in his 1963 comedy, Luv, with a similar high-speed distortion. He fast forwards their emotional crises and changes of heart till they resemble so many careening billiard balls. Poignantly, despite everything, the billiard balls still think they’re in charge. They never see the cue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The daffy plot in this promising first offering by Sterling Theatre is a kind of emotional musical chairs....

“I think I found a bombshell, actually,” exclaimed Chris Larson, clutching his 14-by-22-inch grainy blowup photo of President John Kennedy’s brain spurting out of his skull. “I think this is the smoking gun everyone’s looking for.” Larson had come all the way from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to show his prized reproduction to director Oliver Stone at a panel discussion on the movie JFK. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They got their blowup by rephotographing a picture that was published in a “very rare” 1968 book by “a personal friend of Kennedy’s....

THE CARETAKER The production isn’t bad. The acting choices, for the most part, are appropriate if uninspired, and one cast member, Rich Komenich, looks as if he’s capable of occasional brilliance. Mercedes Rudkin’s direction, while solid and decisive, is the theatrical equivalent of sensible shoes–but that’s certainly preferable to the excesses practiced by other new groups hoping to garner some quick notoriety. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So the Company Players are yet another small group worth keeping an eye on....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I felt the usual sense of High-Art disorientation when I read your recent theater review [May 25] on the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a performance group that apparently consists of some homeless people and a “performance artist- director” named John Malpede who drags them around the country like the freak tent from a particularly sleazy carnival....