Ryan? How Could They? Wycliff also said, “There’s been disagreement among us on the board for some time, and the earlier editorial reflected a consensus view of things. The last one reflected my view of things….The Tribune supports the use of the death penalty in extraordinary cases, but by God we also depend on elected officials to exercise the utmost judgment to see that things like this do not happen.”...

Enchanting and impressively crafted, this animation feature by Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke) fulfills the twin criteria of a classic fantasy: it transports us to an alternate world with a beguiling logic all its own, and in doing so it teaches us to understand ourselves better. Chihiro, a bratty ten-year-old, is moving to a new home with her yuppie parents, and when they stop at a country inn for food, the girl is whisked away to a bathhouse (modeled after Japanese and Mediterranean castles) where spirits of all shapes, sizes, and temperaments come for rest and recreation....

The Trap Door Theatre has always had a minor obsession with Polish avant-garde playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz. When the company opened its doors in 1994, its first production was Witkiewicz’s best-known work, The Madman and the Nun. It was an evening held together more with spit and determination than artistry, but by the time Trap Door attempted Witkiewicz’s grotesque, incestuous drawing-room comedy The Mother in 1998, they’d begun to find the stylistic consistency within the playwright’s ferociously disjointed fantasy....

XBXRX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you grow up in Podunk, you’ve got to make your own fun, be it downing your friends’ antidepressants with a bottle of Robitussin or forming a band. XBXRX, four lads and a lass from Mobile, Alabama, went the latter route–though their epileptic guitar jams and Gymkata dance moves might suggest they also went the former. Their CD Gop Ist Minee (on Kill Rock Stars’s noisy little sister label, 5 Rue Christine) has elicited comparisons to Brainiac, which isn’t entirely unreasonable: keyboards blast death rays over frantic guitars while the unintelligible singing escalates from prepubescent sniveling to angst-ridden screamo....

Curb YOur Enthusiasm To his credit, Duncan’s established himself as a charismatic cheerleader for the system. In fact, it was a speech by Duncan that convinced Handley, who grew up near East Saint Louis, that she wanted to teach in Chicago. In the spring of 2001 she was a 22-year-old history major just out of Tulane University who’d enrolled in Teach for America, a federally funded program in which recent grads commit to teaching for two years in an underserved system in exchange for a break on student loans....

MAY 1 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In New Maps of Hell, a survey of science fiction, Kingsley Amis examined the way the genre liberates the imagination and tackles “those large, general, speculative questions that ordinary fiction so often avoids.” He held that no sci-fi film is better than a novel, but there’s a whole lot he missed after he wrote that in 1960....

The fifth annual European Union Film Festival runs Friday, February 8, through Thursday, February 28, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. All films will be shown in 35-millimeter prints, and those marked with an * are highly recommended. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Summer Phoenix gives a passionate performance as an aloof, stubborn, quietly ambitious Jew in late-Victorian London who transforms herself from a poor immigrant into a glowing stage actress (2000)....

As an undergraduate at Michigan State in the early 70s, David Hinkamp often traveled to Chicago to hang out at the Jazz Record Mart, where proprietor Bob Koester would update him on the best spots in town to hear blues and jazz. “I came on my 21st birthday,” Hinkamp says, “with the sole purpose of getting Koester and going to some great place. He sent us to this place, Club Motown–63rd and the Dan Ryan....

For over three months activists who participated in the huge antiwar march of March 20 have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with city and county officials. “In some ways it’s not even about what happened on March 20,” says Andy Thayer, who was among the several hundred protesters arrested that night. “It’s about marches to come.” According to the police, 730 people were carted off to jail, where they were held for up to 20 hours, then released....

MOCK THE VOTE–DEMOCKRACY IN ACTION | The improvisers in this hour-long political comedy started out saddled with dull ideas by asking the late-night audience for suggestions. On the evening I attended this Slobodie Productions/Onion show, a Smurf party member still haunted by a childhood swim-trunk incident was challenging a skeet-shooting incumbent. When not relying on easy cynicism about dim-witted or womanizing politicians, the cast produced some fresh comedy from seemingly bland ideas....

In 1933, Louis Armstrong met Herb Jeffries in a Detroit club and told him to hit the road. “Hey boy,” Satchmo said to the 22-year-old singer, “you’re wasting your time here,” and handed him a note to give to his friend Erskine Tate in Chicago. Jeffries took him up on the suggestion and hopped on a bus; when he found Tate, the bandleader promptly gave him a job. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Raven Theatre is advertising these three fairy tales as appropriate for children age two to ten. But what a two-year-old finds amusing rarely entertains a ten-year-old. My three-year-old loved Puss in Boots–in large part, she said, because she really, really liked Elizabeth Bagby’s imitation of a cat. But she disliked the second story in this hour-long show so much she asked to go home. The kids in the theater who looked to be between eight and ten, however, seemed to enjoy the second two stories, one about neighbors who learn to get along, the other about a young man who finds a wife through magic....

Apparently African-American choreographer Ronald K. Brown–who established his Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » company, Evidence, in New York in 1985–specializes in identity politics. The new piece his ten-member troupe will perform here, High Life, is said to describe “the American Negro’s journey from the rural south to the north.” On one program they’ll also perform excerpts from Better Days, a piece exploring “how gay men of African descent have tackled issues surrounding masculinity, faith and sustenance”: the first section, set to a devotional song, shows a bare-chested man clasping his head as the female singer intones “I know He watches me” (apparently a mixed blessing); the second, set to a bluesy soul song, features club-style dancing; and in the third, two male couples move to a jazzy percussion-guitar score....

I am an 18-year-old lesbian. My girlfriend of two years is 17. We have not had sex, however, which by my definition is making each other come by whatever means. She is willing to touch me, but she prefers that I not touch her. She was assaulted when she was 15, and the guy turned sexual touching into a nightmare for her. I’ve been really patient and I try not to pressure her but my hormones are raging and I really want to have sex....

The Box Theatre Group’s first three offerings of four “tales of horror and intrigue” are essentially recitations of spooky stories. Victoria Kallay humanizes Dr. Frankenstein in Meg Graves’s concise adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, but Jen Huffman’s creation of three breathless narrators for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” doesn’t work at all. The strongest piece is Jenna Dalgety’s adaptation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”: though the show’s poor lighting is particularly problematic here, Amanda M....

It’s hard to imagine a musical more relevant right now than this 1949 Pulitzer winner, a healing tribute to decency during adversity and tolerance in the thick of war. Consummate showmen, Rodgers and Hammerstein know why Americans need to believe in themselves and what threatens that faith. When Nellie Forbush, a “cock-eyed optimist” from Little Rock stationed with the Seabees in the Pacific, overcomes her prejudices to love French planter Emile de Becque, a widower once married to a Polynesian woman, her small victory is the kind of good we want to believe can come from war....

Sucked In Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tatro says Charybdis is an independent entrepreneurial center for all kinds of art events. Like the one that was under way May 19 when police and Department of Revenue agents busted in, spotted a woman on rollerblades painting a large canvas with her bare breast, and shut the place down. Tatro says the cops, unable to find drugs, confiscated $225 in door receipts and his bowl of Blow Pops, and put him in jail for the night....

Part of the solstice blowout at the Museum of Contemporary Art this year is a segment called “Everybody Dance.” Organized by Dennis Wise and Nana Shineflug, this final event in the Chicago Dance Legacy Project will bring together over 200 Chicago dancers with as many as 200 bystanders in one huge ensemble piece. The advance recruits include modern, hip-hop, ballet, and square dancers as well as Scottish, African, Balkan, and Indian troupes, all encouraged to wear their most colorful costumes....

Behind almost every man-made thing in modern life–shoelace grommets, artificial grape flavoring, traffic patterns–there’s a whole industry most people never think about, with its own companies and professional organizations, its own acronyms and jargon, its own internecine warfare. Most people, for instance, probably don’t think much about typefaces. But the Chicago-based Society of Typographic Arts, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this month, has had a broader influence and more raucous history than you might expect....

Guitarist Vance Kelly was a teenage prodigy on the south-side blues circuit in the early 70s; in 1987 he hooked up with saxophonist and bandleader A.C. Reed, earning his first recognition outside the midwest, and in ’92 landed a spot on the roster of Austria’s Wolf label, where he remains today. Now 48, he’s developed the artistic and emotional maturity to bring depth to the fiery brashness of his youth; despite the precision with which he tosses off intricate filigrees and long exploratory lines, his playing never sounds sterile or perfunctory....