Harvestide Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These comic book-ish characters come with Serpas’s pomo turf, however: the high-art recasting of distinctly subliterary genres–science fiction, B movies, detective novels, mystery thrillers. And despite Angeline’s sexist ways, she was also a fascinating creature, full of enough tricks and surprises to keep her interesting even when Serpas’s story telling flagged: ironically enough, what was lacking in Dogtown and Green Air was the very thing most pulp has in spades–a story strong enough to grab an audience and keep it....

MYSTERIES OF THE BRIDAL NIGHT, Coyote’s Playground, at Cafe Voltaire. In Martin Epstein’s maddeningly quirky one-act, two newlyweds lost on a back road en route to their honeymoon have a weird encounter with a coffin whose unseen inhabitant tinkles a bell at odd intervals. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This unusual reminder of mortality triggers the couple’s insecurities, testing their willingness to commit to a common future....

Lead Story Alvin Lastimado Jr., 18, was arrested in August at the Wahiawa, Hawaii, Public Library and charged with assault. He had been holding a woman against her will in his home, when he began to utter a satanic chant. In the middle of the chant he forgot the words and told the woman he was going to the library to look them up. The woman escaped and called the police, who intercepted Lastimado in the occult section....

Platinum Pumpkins Virgin Records reports that the Smashing Pumpkins have shipped a million copies of their second album, Siamese Dream, qualifying it for platinum status. (SoundScan, which monitors the number of records actually sold, has the Pumpkins down at 640,000.) Official platinum certification comes from the Record Industry Association of America after a waiting period for returned albums; that should come after the first of the year, says Pumpkins manager Andy Gershon....

Real estate and restaurant folk have always stressed the three keys to success: location, location, location. But a number of successful restaurants run counter to conventional wisdom. Gordon Sinclair opened his restaurant Gordon 18 years ago on what was then a grungy strip of Clark Street, just north of the river; Gordon proved so popular it helped upgrade the entire area. A few years back Jimmy Rohr opened Jimmy’s Place, a citadel of haute cuisine, on a desolate stretch of Elston Avenue near Belmont; Jimmy’s Place is still the only fine restaurant in the vicinity, but gourmet diners continually beat a path to its door....

GLASS SLIPPER TOTEM Of course “those people” weren’t trying to hurt me; they just wanted to express their pain. My paranoia subsided but didn’t entirely leave me: I still didn’t trust these people. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nor did this evening-length dance give me many good reasons to trust them. Although Glass Slipper Totem intriguingly combines dancers and musicians who dance, the piece focuses intently on suicidal thoughts, tangled and fruitless relationships, and the dangers of getting lost in complete self-absorption....

Chicago, Chicago, that pesticide town… A recent state study of composted grass clippings, leaves, and brush from around Illinois found that “the levels of pesticides were, overall, consistently higher in the Chicago metropolitan area samples. It appears that homeowners and other landscape generators in heavily urbanized areas apply more pesticides than their downstate counterparts” (UIC Solid Waste Management Newsletter, December). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Get these people off the coasts!...

Even if you have a taste for movies about dysfunctional families, as I do, you may be a little put off by the Grapes in this adaptation by Peter Hedges of his own novel: missing father, 500-pound mother, mentally disabled son (especially good work by Leonardo DiCaprio), and two daughters, as well as Johnny Depp to more or less hold things together. This is directed by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Once Around), and his feeling for the look and mood of a godforsaken midwestern town is often as acute as Sven Nykvist’s cinematography; Juliette Lewis plays the out-of-town girl Depp takes a shine to once he starts getting tired of the married woman (Mary Steenburgen) he’s involved with, and while the picture is too absentminded to explain what it is that makes Lewis move in and out of town, she and Depp make a swell couple....

Children and African dance are a magical combination. African dance is like problem solving for the body: the task is to complete certain motions to prescribed beats in a given amount of time. The interest lies in the way each body, with its own rhythms and weight and range of motion, comes up with a different solution. Older, seasoned dancers often solve these polyrhythmic puzzles as elegantly as mathematicians do equations: we marvel at their economy and integrity....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The disparities in judicial sentencing practices are compounded by the uncertainties and inequities caused by the capriciousness of arbitrary parole release decisions. By and large parole board decisions are drawn from fragmentary information relating to an inmate’s pre-incarceration history, institutional behavior, and participation in and responsiveness to treatment, education and vocational programs, together with a brief interview averaging six minutes in Illinois....

Cannanes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Australia there’s something called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome”–anyone who seems to be doing well gets accused of being bigheaded and is put down by jealous antielitist peers. The Cannanes named their 1994 album Short Poppy Syndrome, a title that reveals the quartet’s self-deprecating humor–appropriate seeing as they’ll never have to worry about being cut down in their hometown, where they’re completely ignored (their five albums were all on Chicago-based independent labels), but that’s Sydney’s loss....

Pierre Boulez turned 70 earlier this year, and it’s only apt that one of his disciples is paying homage with a Boulez-esque miniature bearing an enigmatic title. The composer, Philippe Manoury, has long been affiliated with the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Boulez’s temple of avant-gardism in Paris built and partially subsidized by the French government. His 12-minute tribute, Prelude and Wait, is excerpted from a larger suite for voice and orchestra that’s based on Manoury’s sketches for an (abandoned) operatic biography of Orson Welles....

In Debra Chasnoff’s feature-length documentary It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School, one teacher starts a discussion about homosexuality by introducing the students to some famous gays and lesbians. After going through historical figures like Michelangelo, he plays a song and asks the children if they recognize it. “That’s from The Lion King!” several excited young voices call out. “And do you know who’s singing?” the teacher asks. “Elton John!...

Iphigenia in Tauris Not to mention a certain distance between the modern reader and Greek antiquity. But in Chicago at least, that two-millennium gulf seems to make audiences’ hearts grow fonder, judging from the recent success of European Repertory Company’s Electra and Agamemnon, not to mention Roadworks’ Orestes. The matri-patri-fratricidal House of Atreus threatens to become as popular in the 1990s as the ill-fated House of Carrington in the 1980s....

There are a few lines from an Alice Walker poem that I want to copy and tape to the refrigerator door of some of my friends: “Never offer someone your heart who is a heart eater / Who finds heart meat delicious but not rare.” Eater of Hearts, Paula Frasz’s solo based on that poem–to be premiered as part of this year’s Next Dance Festival, a showcase of emerging and independent choreographers–gives dancer Frank Fiscella his first villain role; Frasz plans to capitalize on Fiscella’s predatory grin....

Unzipped First-time director Douglas Keeve, apparently doing what he thinks a documentary director ought to do, uses cinema verite cliches as he teases us with behind-the-scenes intimacy. But he has no intention of mocking the industry where he’s long made his living as a still photographer, even though he does pull a few pranks that hint at the spuriousness of the fashion scene’s mystique and the dubious taste of those lusting for a peek inside....

In one of the more exquisite tortures scientists have perfected inside those fiendish primate labs, they take a newborn monkey from its mother and put it in a cage with a doll supposed to look like a real simian. The poor orphan clings instinctively to this bag of dust as if it were actual flesh and blood–“bonds with” it, as the phrase goes–and can’t be pried off even when reunited later with its birth monkey....

Most people who see themselves as unassailable–detached, complete, a whole world in their heads–just look lonely to others. It’s a familiar pose of city life, where the looming human spectacle allows isolation to pass for aloofness; alienation, a tonier, more artistic version of the same thing, is an old favorite with writers who presume to be observers of that spectacle by trade. But they’re mostly shams too. You no more expect to meet a truly unassailable mind on the printed page than you do at a dinner party, so when it actually happens the shock of the experience is likewise immediate and bracing, if not altogether pleasant....

Ripped Off by Ross Perot? Who is Bruce DuMont to speak this way about Ross Perot? DuMont is a local radio personality. Perot is worth billions and ran for president, offering our wretched land leadership just a little ahead of its time. Need we say which gentleman is clearly more equal than the other? DuMont met Perot at a broadcasters convention last September in Dallas. Perot was the keynote speaker....

What’s the straight dope on Jimmy Carter’s once being attacked by a killer rabbit? I hear there are actually photos of Carter swinging for his life at this rabbit, but his people refused to release them because “some facts about the president must remain forever wrapped in obscurity.” What the hell is going on? –Donald Lilly, North Hollywood, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rabbit incident happened on April 20, while Carter was taking a few days off in Plains, Georgia....