It took time to use an 8-millimeter home movie camera effectively. Time and experience. Not just anyone was qualified. I think it was something of a calling. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not every movie was properly labeled or in the right box, but somehow it never mattered. As kids we knew that the film on the cracked blue reel showed summer 1962 at Christmas Lake....

Robynne M. Gravenhorst’s imaginative, sensual, nightmarish dance-opera piece returns for four midnight shows at the Mercury Theater. Through pantomime, song, and carefully layered choreography, the Anatomical Theatre traces the obsessive journey toward unholy knowledge by a fictional 19th-century vivisectionist, Charlotte DeVoux, who’s supplied illegally with corpses by grave robbers (known in France as les corbeaux, “the crows”). When I saw this piece last spring during its brief run, I felt I’d been taught an entirely new kind of fear–a visceral fear of scientific absolutism, which terrorizes both vivisectionist and audience in the forms of a chorus of flayed corpses and a mincing, clownish crow....

A pioneer of the electronic-music movement, Morton Subotnick has been accused of being a technologist without a soul, and entries on him in reference books emphasize his infatuation with gadgetry. In 1967 he made a big splash with Silver Apples of the Moon, the first of several commissions for Nonesuch Records, written with the aid of a modular synthesizer to create colorful tone clusters and unusual pitches. By 1977 he’d developed the “ghost” box, a device that depends on spurts of voltage to generate pitches with trailing tones; many compositions from this phase of his career pit live performers against electronic ghosts....

Music of the Baroque offers its popular brass and organ concerts this week, pleasurable wallows in loud instrumental polyphony featuring compositions by some of Baroque’s most beloved composers. Unfortunately it’s too early to say exactly which composers will be featured (though early betting is on Bach, Telemann, and Gabrieli): it is conductor/organist Thomas Wikman’s custom to select and rehearse a large number of likely candidates, then put the program together at the lost minute from the best numbers....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May state police in Tennessee arrested Jack Allan Iles and charged him with telephone harassment after he called in a bomb threat to the state attorney general’s office in Nashville. According to the employee who received the call, Iles threatened to deliver an Oklahoma City-style bomb and then asked for the address of the office....

*** QUIZ SHOW (A must-see) Directed by Robert Redford Written by Paul Attanasio With Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, David Paymer, Christopher McDonald, Elizabeth Wilson, and Paul Scofield. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a way, the best thing that can be said about Quiz Show is that it’s a good Hollywood-liberal 50s movie, a movie in which a noble man bears the burden of a complex ambivalence about his mission–exposing the quiz show frauds, especially difficult in the case of Van Doren–an ambivalence everyone in the audience can be expected to share....

Pharoah Sanders has been shadowed throughout his career by his affiliation with John Coltrane, but as his latest album, Crescent With Love (Evidence), a double CD of ballads either written by or associated with Trane, proves, he hasn’t exactly fought against it. Sanders joined Coltrane in the mid-60s to produce some of the latter’s most probing, intense music: on searing, spiritually harrowing classics like Ascension, Om, and Kule Se Mama Sanders’s fearsome tenor sax offered a beautiful foil, blowing white-hot streams of sound and continually threatening to break free from the loose constructs of the tune....

When I was in my 20s, selling out was a hot topic of conversation among us young writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and such. Twenty years later I was making car commercials. You’da thought I could’nt sink any lower. So now here I was in charge of a big-budget, multicamera, totally bullshit TV production designed to get morons to spend money they don’t have to hear bogus advice from telephone “psychics” whose job is is to keep them on the phone as long as possible....

The wife’s been up all night, coughing, drinking Robitussin, I got a headache, and that’s the kind of week it’s been, one week too many of winter, one week too long feeling sick, dark, and depressed. As much as anything, that’s why I decide to take a walk up to International Foods. I shop as often as I can, just to get out of the house. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Most of us, I suspect, greet news about the precise machinations of the European Community with all the enthusiasm we usually reserve for news about, say, Canada–we know it’s a big subject that we should probably pay more attention to, but it’s impossible to work up any real interest. Yet there are thousands if not millions of Americans for whom news about the EC has a very special meaning: those who look upon the international conglomeration as a sign of the End Times, an indication that Armageddon is on its way....

Since getting together a couple years ago, the Rembrandt Chamber Players have emerged as one of the top chamber music groups in town. Their CD (on the local Cedille label), titled 20th Century Baroque and featuring Dominick Argento’s Six Elizabethan Songs, was a remarkable recording debut. The only, albeit minor, limitation of the group has been its rather unusual mix of instruments: Sharon Polifrone on violin, Barbara Haffner on cello, Sandra Morgan on flute, Robert Morgan on oboe, and David Schrader handling all the keyboard chores....

Sam Phillips is an angry prophet in a waif’s body, and the dualism comes through in her music. Her latest album, Martini and Bikinis, sugarcoats her Cassandra-like complaints with a panorama and a half of Beatlesesque song settings and courtly pop psychedelia. The album begins with an elegant cameo, “Love and Kisses.” “History is written to say it wasn’t our fault,” she warbles. “God will grant us all our wishes / Martinis and bikinis for our friends....

SHAKING RAY LEVIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chattanooga isn’t the sort of place one imagines as a hotbed for improvised music. But for the last decade Dennis Palmer and Bob Stagner, better known as the Shaking Ray Levis, have been struggling to smash that preconception and many more. In response to the music’s reputation for seriousness, the duo bristles with knotty humor–as evidenced by the brilliant and hilariously titled 1993 album False Prophets or Dang Good Guessers (Incus)....

SHH . . . WHAT WILL THE NEIGHBORS THINK? Resistance Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Shh . . . What Will the Neighbors Think? author Susan Howard has created an offensive, silly parody of American family life, a hopelessly confused script that this decent cast is forced to interpret. The play concerns the Sanders family, a well-to-do clan with unsavory habits. Not only do they eat junk food at every meal (with plenty of pointless stomach-turning antics), they also dabble in child abuse and incest....

LOVVE/RITUALS AND RAGE As a result of its supposed radicalism, performance has had a kind of false cachet. When it has included artists outside of the academy–such as most artists of color–it’s often been patronizing. And the artists themselves often play to performance’s expectations of them, even if they do so bitterly. (Watch Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s work, especially after Year of the White Bear, and you’ll see what I mean.) Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CHUNE 7/26, EMPTY BOTTLE On the band’s second album, Big Hat, No Cattle (Headhunter/Cargo), Chune puts forth a pasteurized version of San Diego grind rock. Behind the Mark Trombino-tweaked twin guitar assault, singer Andy Harris struggles to express melodic ideas picked out of the trash in the alley behind the Smashing Pumpkins’ house. Second-tier spin doctors will call it passionate; everyone else will call it annoying. FROGS 7/26, DOUBLE DOOR Masters of calculated comedic outrage, Milwaukee’s Frogs have released their first album since their notorious 1989 “gay supremacist” opus It’s Only Right and Natural....

About seven years ago the French shadow puppeteer team of Luc Amoros and Michele Augustin approached Werewere Liking, head of the Ivory Coast-based Ki-Yi M’Bock Theatre, about a collaborative puppet show re-creating the ancient African legend of Sunjata, the Lion King. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable spectacle that incorporates elements of southeast Asian shadow theater with West African tribal dance and music. Amoros and Augustin often use dramatic techniques straight out of the movies: silhouettes tremble and expand until they fill the entire screen, a battle scene ends in slow motion as a spear is driven into an enemy’s heart, the mouths of spidery-limbed characters billow up when they talk....

Who’s in charge here? The suburban-based Pediatrics reports that toddlers get hurt in car accidents much more often than infants do: “Only 12 percent of 4-year-olds are in car seats at the time of a crash as compared to 78 percent of infants.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No free lunches, part one. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires all mass-transit agencies to provide accessible regular buses and trains as well as comparable “paratransit” service for those whose disabilities keep them off regular “fixed-route” transit....

“Trees must be tough to live in Chicago,” according to a recent press release from the Morton Arboretum in suburban Lisle. “For a tree to grow well in the city, it must be hardy enough to withstand sub-zero winter temperatures and extreme summer heat. It must have a root system capable of surviving in confined rooting spaces and very poor soils. Trees planted close to roadways must be able to withstand pollutants, including deicing salt used on roadways and sidewalks....

When it comes to fighting AIDS, hope is a rare and precious commodity. A tiny bit appears now and then like a drop of rain in the desert, and those who are dying of thirst can’t help but imagine they’re caught in a flood. Still, you’d have to have a heart of granite not to feel a bit of hope after reading the protease inhibitor news. I know several people who feel healthy for the first time in years thanks to the new drug combinations....