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Boston-area avant-gardist Luther Price is one of those filmmakers who project their spliced originals (in his case, labs have refused to print many of them because of their sexual content), so his three-night stand in Chicago this week may be your only chance to see these fascinating Super-8 works. Price’s father, mother, and sister all died of cancer, and if the reconfigured home movies and videos on this program are his way of preserving the past, that passion is counterbalanced by his usual cool distance....

Frequently favoring jazz dance and other pop-culture forms like tap, ballroom, and hip-hop, the Dance Chicago festival has been anchored ever since it started in 1995 by River North Chicago Dance Company. That was smart: in 1993 River North had had a weekend of sold-out shows at the Harold Washington Library Center, largely on the basis of Sherry Zunker’s Reality of a Dreamer, a piece with music-video appeal featuring a live cellist playing along with the Eurythmics song “Sweet Dreams....

Southern Africa, 1936-1949: Photographs by Constance Stuart Larrabee The daughter of a Scottish mining engineer and his British wife, Larrabee grew up in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. In 1933 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Photography in London and later worked as an apprentice to portrait photographer Madame Yevonde. She moved to Munich two years after that to pursue her studies at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, where she encountered the Bauhaus tradition....

Charlton Heston may have performed plenty of schlocky larger-than-life roles in Hollywood–Ben-Hur, Moses, John the Baptist–and may be best known these days as a rifle-raising NRA spokesman. But none of this has impaired his ability as an actor. From the moment he walks onstage in this touring production of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, remarkably fit and energetic for 76, he takes command of the room. And he finds hidden depths, moments of pathos, flashes of insight in Gurney’s flyweight play about two friends who spend their lives writing to each other....

Merle Haggard has slipped into his 60s with such rare grace that he can be forgiven for letting a little nostalgia seep into his work over the last five years or so. The ballad-heavy If I Could Only Fly (Anti, 2000)–sort of his September of My Years–revisits the elegantly unadorned, largely acoustic approach that made him a Bakersfield legend four decades ago, and opens with “Wishing All These Old Things Were New,” where Haggard rejects any notion of remaking himself for the times....

Jean Eustache’s color follow-up to his black-and-white masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), detailing his adolescence in the south of France, has never been distributed in the U.S., but some devotees of the director’s work actually prefer this 123-minute feature to its lengthy predecessor, and there’s no question that it seems to get better and better over time. Writing in these pages, Dave Kehr called its unsubtitled version “an original and disturbing treatment of that most commercial of themes, a young boy’s coming of age....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month the New York restaurant Salon Mexico introduced a $45 burrito filled with truffles and filet mignon. . . . The founder of Paul Mitchell salon products recently launched a line of shampoos for dogs, joining Estee Lauder in the still-wide-open market for upscale pet hair-care products. . . . And at a New York legislative committee hearing in May, a Manhattan building owner revealed that he had paid former U....

You’d never know it, but this place is legendary among musical-theater buffs–drama mammies, people in the arts, darling. With a touch of queer flair that could jump and do bells (that is, click heels–that’s what bells are in tap). This is where the renowned Punchinello’s piano bar once resided. It was the place to be seen and join in, Chicago’s entertainment mecca. Its heyday was the 70s. It was the favorite layover of the Gabor sisters when they were in town....

Philip Samartzis, a sound artist and composer from Melbourne, Australia, practices a combination of environmental recording and musique concrete, merging natural and synthetic sounds in his evocative compositions. Most of his work is built on field recordings he’s made around the world–beside a Norwegian stream, on a Japanese subway, in a Hong Kong bird market–but he also judiciously includes thunderous pipe organ, oblique piano plinks, and electronic clatter like high-frequency tones and static bursts....

Pioneer Press Aims at Foot, Fires On May 8 Diversions carried a Rayes-Ichkhan review of Flatlander’s Restaurant & Brewery in Lincolnshire. Leonard had given it a friendly review a few years earlier. Rayes-Ichkhan could not. “I tried, yes, I tried” to be kind, she says, but her lack of enthusiasm shone through. The steak soba “was a busy mix that lacked eye appeal.” The baby back ribs “tasted more fatty than meaty....

DEAD MOON 9/20, EMPTY BOTTLE Fred Cole’s four-decade CV brings to mind This Is Spinal Tap, specifically the “historical footage” that places the band Gump-like in every rock trend that ever was–embarrassing Merseybeat phase, fey hippy-dippy phase, overreaching progressive phase. But what seems lampoonable on screen can be pretty impressive in real life. Cole, front man for Dead Moon since 1987, was in an R & B group called Deep Soul Cole in the early 60s, a psychedelic band called the Lollipop Shoppe in the late 60s (around the time he married his bassist, Toody), a hard-rock band called Zipper in the early 70s, a punk band called the Rats in ’79…well, you get the idea....

Lots of people do improv. Most don’t do it very well: they’re content to mug and show off the way the players do on Whose Line Is It Anyway? But there’s another, more evolved kind of improv practiced by people with the confidence and patience and guts to let the improvisation lead them–the style of “slow improvisation” sometimes advocated by the late Del Close at ImprovOlympic. Two former students of his, David Pasquesi and T....

The Midnight Circus has always framed its variety acts with a narrative, however rudimentary. But The Flower Thieves, its most recent effort, features an actual book by G. Riley Mills and Ralph Covert and Covert’s original score, which he performs onstage. Far from upstaging the action, these elements enhance the tale of a melancholy monarch whose enemies are foiled and spirits restored by a band of wayfarers, fortuitously comprised of acrobats, aerialists, rope walkers, web dancers, jugglers, and mimes....

Back at Stage Left fresh from its college tour, The Sensitive Swashbuckler and Other Dating Myths is not your typical late-night improv show. Sure, it’s funny and encourages audience participation–but there’s also an educational component. Conceived by Christian Murphy and Gail Stern, this high-energy hour-long revue explores gender stereotypes, sexual innuendo, miscommunication between the sexes, and date rape. Two actors (Murphy and Stern on opening night, but Gwendolyn Druyor will play the woman’s role during most of the run) improvise audience-dictated “choose your own adventure” dating scenarios....

Early this April, Worth Weller, owner of the weekly News-Journal of North Manchester, Indiana, wrote the owner of the local Ace Hardware, Roger Moore. The letter was retrieved from the Ace Hardware box and read by Roger’s wife, Judy. North Manchester, a town of some 6,000 people in Wabash County in northeastern Indiana, is a sensible place–its rural conservatism blended comfortably with the progressivism of Manchester College. Paula Adams, a graduate of the liberal arts college, says proudly that over half the faculty has studied abroad and that on a per capita basis the school produces more Fulbright scholars than Harvard....

The Mercy Killers Reardon was there to do research for a thriller set during the Vietnam war, and she’d already spent three months reading up on the history and talking to veterans, many still living with the pain of their experience. But she felt that to understand where they’d fought she had to go there. She spent five days taking in impressions of the landscape and the people. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Harry W. Schwartz was empty. Oh, the books were there, fresh and smart on the shelves in the large, upscale bookstore in a strip mall in Milwaukee. The salespeople were there, eager, friendly, eyes twinkling with bookish goodwill. And I was there, hungover, wearing a sports coat. This sure wasn’t the first time for me. I had endured similar ordeals with previous books–that reading in Tacoma that Doubleday had scheduled during the Mariners-Indians playoff game at the Kingdome....

Despite his grace and precision as a director, Clint Eastwood, like Martin Scorsese, is at the mercy of his scripts. But in Million Dollar Baby he’s got a terrific one, adapted by Paul Haggis from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t think of many things I’m less drawn to than boxing. Million Dollar Baby tends to view it as neither an especially interesting sport nor a metaphor for something else (as Raging Bull does), but rather as a particularly acute form of savagery in a savage world....

Friday 6/21 – Thursday 6/27 22 SATURDAY There are 70,000 books, 400 periodical titles, and more than 5,000 reels of microfilm in the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, which Harsh–the city’s first black librarian–started assembling when she was named head of the George Cleveland Hall branch back in 1932. These days the collection is housed at the Woodson Regional Library on South Halsted, and today the Vivian G....

Friday 1/17 – Thursday 1/23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago chapter of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) sent ten busloads of protesters to October’s antiwar march on Washington, and they hope to dispatch even more to tomorrow’s follow-up rally and march on the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard to protest a war with Iraq. “This is going to be big, but we’re not sure how big,” says one of the organizers....