As the 29th Chicago International Film Festival winds into its second week, a good many of its best offerings, including most of my own favorites either are still to come or will receive second screenings. My prime recommendations among those I’ve seen are Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle vague, Chantal Akerman’s From the East, Godard’s Helas pour moi, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine, Jerry Schatzberg’s Reunion, Ray Muller’s The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Schatzberg’s Scarecrow, Dusan Makavejev’s Gorilla Bathes at Noon, and Chen Kuo-fu’s Treasure Island....

Yeah, but rolling that crucifix-shaped die is tough. The Thomas More Association on West Monroe is selling a new $30 board game called Divinity, with 672 question cards based on the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good thing rent and food have gotten so much cheaper. Single women receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children are better educated and have fewer children in 1992 than in 1976, reports the U....

Least appealing headline, from a recent appliance-company news release: “Honestly Now, When’s the Last Time You Cleaned Your Can Opener?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What happened to [Chicagoan and soon-to-be-former Democratic National Committee chairman David] Wilhelm is an allegorical tale of Washington, in which the allegiance he offered to the president who appointed him was returned neither by Clinton nor others around him,” writes Dan Balz in the Washington Post weekly edition (August 15-21)....

Do you need a key to start an F-16? –Dave Johnson, Chicago Well, you’re one jump ahead of the late, great Dan Quayle, who, if memory serves, thought Latin Americans spoke Latin. Actually it’s called Latin America because the countries of the New World from Mexico on south speak languages descended from Latin, namely Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A while back someone wrote asking if there wasn’t some effective device to render car stereos and boom boxes inoperative when they were turned up to a certain volume [February 26]....

After obligatory stays at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Eastman School in his native Rochester, modern classicist David Diamond spent his formative years in Paris where he, like Aaron Copland a decade before, prepped with legendary coach Nadia Boulanger and befriended influential artists and intellectuals. His exposure to Ravel, Roussel, and Stravinsky shaped his aesthetic, and the intense lyricism and piquant chromaticism that color the bulk of his work owe much to French impressionism....

Throughout the 70s and 80s the Berlin Philharmoic Orchestra competed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the title of “world’s greatest orchestra.” The Berliners, guided by Herbert von Karajan, excelled in a wide, eclectic repertoire; their strings played with a graceful lilt that suited the Classical style. The Chicagoans, under the baton of the single-minded George Solti, built a reputation on the slick, precise brass and percussion sound that brightened many a Romantic symphony....

Betty Carter hit retirement age this year; should we think that she’s mellowed? (Sure, in the same way you should feel free to pet a tigress you think has gone soft.) She still sings the slowest ballads of the century, with elastic phrasing that lags several measures (not mere beats) behind the rhythm, and then scats at tempi that scare some horn players; either way, her exaggerated, expressionistic, and often breathtaking style remains daring almost 30 years after she perfected it....

Dying is easy, comedy is hard, and improv is just about impossible, especially with a loutish audience. Which may be why I admire Blue Velveeta so much. On Saint Patrick’s Day 1993 I saw them perform before a crowd so sloppy drunk that dick jokes went over their heads. Yet Brian Blondell, Jay Leggett, and Brian McCann never panicked, never pandered. They remained cool, professional, and funny throughout their fully improvised show–creating multilayered comic characters, pulling witty bits from thin air, ad-libbing poignant, barbed blues songs....

Just a few weeks after being named library commissioner, Mary Dempsey did something her immediate predecessors in their years of power had never done–she met with the people who use the libraries the most. Dempsey inherits an enormous system–$67 million budget, 1,500 employees, and 82 branches–riddled with problems. The collection is woefully shallow, as much of the bookbuying budget in recent years was used to stock the Harold Washington central facility....

VERUCA SALT LOUNGE AX, SEPTEMBER 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One expects label reps to have dollar signs for eyes, but the music press has always worked under the notion that it was looking for bands that would become successful artistically, not those who’d become financially successful. Now music writers are becoming like art investors: more concerned with the bottom line than with lines and shapes....

In the 60s and through most of the 70s Eddie C. Campbell was one of the west side’s most popular and flamboyant blues entertainers. With a style anchored in a driving in-the-pocket shuffle groove, in live performance Campbell fused hard-core west-side traditionalism with a delightfully anarchic sense of fun–his good-humored reworkings of novelties like Willie Mabon’s “Poison Ivy” set the stage for his proto-P-Funk posturing on original compositions like his trademark “King of the Jungle....

When Betsy Otto went to work for Openlands Project in 1990, one of the first things she was asked to do was testify at a Chicago City Council meeting about a dispute over the building of high rises along the lakefront. Protecting the Lake Michigan shoreline is routine stuff for urban conservation organizations like Openlands, but for Otto the arguments and the forum were new. Her coworkers helped her prepare testimony about the number of people who benefit from an open lakefront and its historical importance to the economic development of Chicago....

Let’s talk first about “Delia’s Gone,” the song that’s been the focus of attention on Johnny Cash’s “alternative album,” American Recordings. The song is a sanguinary ballad limning the sadistic killing of a cheatin’ wife; the point of it, apparently, is to make the case that murderous misogyny is not merely the province of today’s gangsta rappers: it has a long and proud history in all sorts of music. Point taken, I guess, but the dubiousness of the intention points up some of the problems of the record as a whole....

Dear Reader readers: In response to Ben Joravsky’s July 15 article regarding recent concerns of some residents that isolated cases of tree leaf browning are occurring as a result of the City’s street resurfacing program, the Chicago Department of Transportation sought the expertise of one of the top tree specialists in the country to make a conclusive evaluation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After carefully inspecting trees on the blocks specified in the article (on N....

It would seem that the problems confronting Chicago’s public school system couldn’t get any worse. Well, now comes a complaint that the system is endangering the health of thousands of children by serving them milk from cows injected with a potentially dangerous synthetic hormone. The larger nationwide debate on this issue really started raging last November, when the federal Food and Drug Administration approved the use of rBGH. This was an enormous victory for Monsanto, whose scientists insist rBGH is nothing more than a laboratory-engineered variant of a natural lactating hormone that all cows have....

By Bonnie McGrath That morning Duff began his day as usual. He got into the bathtub and read the front page of the Tribune while he soaked. Under a picture of Jeff Maier–the boy from New Jersey who reeled in the Yankee home run–there was the headline “Judge steps down after decade of controversy” and the subhead “Duff was known for erratic actions.” The story briefly summarized his political history, highlighting his tenure as a state legislator and his unsuccessful run for secretary of state....

This multidisciplinary performing arts festival, closing this weekend after a three-month run, is hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, 1822 S. Halsted, 733-4668. $10 a night; some student and senior discounts available. Following is the schedule for December 15 through 17. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » and Lovers Fragments Ewart performs original compositions and improvisations on traditional and invented instruments. The AlienNation Company’s Lovers Fragments, staged by German choreographer/filmmaker Johannes Birringer, is offered in its Chicago premiere (not counting its presentation as a work in progress at Northwestern University some time back)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mildred Wortham and Brenda Stephenson, social-service counselors whose office is on the first floor, tell me they know all the boys hanging around the front of the building, as well as many of the 11,000 other Rockwell residents. “They usually say, ‘It’s gonna pop, it’s gonna pop,’” says Stephenson. Apparently the teenagers who are about to start a gunfight sometimes warn people who happen to be in the vicinity....

Campaign finance reform died yet another death in Congress this year. One reason is that reformers don’t think clearly about their cause. They’re so sure that money is corrupting American political life that they forget to explain how. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider, for instance, the “list of horribles” put out by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) in October. They didn’t call it that, of course....

River North Gallery Goes South Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saunders says that despite some indications that collectors were beginning to buy again and that prices for art were on the upswing, overall “business was not picking up.” He says many of his sales in recent months were made to people decorating their homes rather than serious collectors. “The business was rebounding at the bottom end,” explains Saunders, adding that selling a lot of inexpensive, small works of art meant slimmer profit margins....