The distinctive and unusual talents of French filmmaker Leos Carax have relatively little to do with story telling, and it would be a mistake to approach this, his second feature, expecting a “dazzling film noir thriller,” which is how it was described for the Chicago Film Festival in 1987. Dazzling it certainly is in spots, but its film noir and SF trappings–hung around a vaguely paranoid plot about a couple of thieves (Michel Piccoli, Hans Meyer) hiring the son (Denis Lavant) of a recently deceased partner to help steal a cure to an AIDS-like virus–are so feeble that they function at best only as a literal framing device, a means for Carax to tighten his canvas....

Barbara Mahler is a dancer’s dancer. Using her body the way a haiku poet uses words or a Japanese painter uses brush strokes, she creates spare, articulate solos that reveal her body’s range and intelligence. All parts big and small, from her legs to her little finger, seem to move just the way she wants them to, in richly varied rhythmic and spatial patterns. Practice makes perfect, as my mom used to say: Mahler has been teaching at the Susan Klein School of Dance in New York since 1980 and has garnered praise for her insights into the body from the likes of Stephen Petronio, Stephanie Skura, and Diane Madden, Trisha Brown’s rehearsal director....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That dismissal of Dold’s efforts–because he’s my friend, I follow his work–overlooks three points: (1) Bruce Dold has been writing about the disastrous Illinois child welfare system for eight years. (2) In 1986, with Hanke Gratteau and Tim Franklin, Dold co-authored a piercing DCFS series that the Tribune nominated for a Pulitzer. (3) Having read all there is to read about Joseph Wallace as preparation for my magazine’s coverage of the family preservation debate, I’d submit that the editorials reflect a fair amount of original reporting....

When the U.S. government decided to round up Japanese Americans at the start of World War II, Aiko Nakane and her husband, a minister, were living in Palm Springs. “They came for the leaders first,” Seattle-born Nakane says. “My husband was taken right away.” Soon they wanted everyone. The order, on as little as a week’s notice, was to leave everything and go. “Take only what you can carry.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Dark Deeds No one save the participants knows what exactly happened outside the Map Room, the Bucktown bar, early in the morning two Sundays ago. The only clear thing is the result: Malukosamba leader Venicio de Toledo spent most of the next week in a coma. He came to last Wednesday, and remains in the intensive care unit at Cook County Hospital. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » De Toledo is a Brazilian native in his mid-40s who’s lived in Chicago for about 20 years; the band is a club-scene fixture, dispensing a souped-up samba through a large and shifting group of musicians....

Typically by mid-April a lot of native woodland flowers are in bloom in the Cook County forest preserves. The reproductive strategy of these plants, called “spring ephemerals,” consists of coming into blossom, getting laid, and setting seed while the sun still shines. The bare tree branches let a lot of light through to the forest floor where these plants live; if they waited until May to bloom, the tree leaves would make it too dark....

I AM LORRAINE HANSBERRY: MEASURE ME RIGHT, Black Ensemble Theater. Lephate Cunningham Jr. and Jackie Taylor’s biographical play pays homage to the visionary playwright who first made a place for the drama of the African-American family in America’s theater canon. In this nonlinear creation, sketches of Hansberry’s short life–from adolescence on Chicago’s south side to marriage to a Russian Jew in New York’s East Village–are interspersed with scenes and dialogue from A Raisin in the Sun, dance segments, and Taylor’s portrayal of Hansberry, including text from a collection of her work, To Be Young, Gifted and Black....

The ranks of the west-side blues scene have been sadly depleted in recent years by illness, emotional deterioration, and even murder, but this contemporary funk/soul/blues outfit gives renewed reason for hope. Rick “Smooth” Smith’s keyboard work lends a breezy pop sophistication to the more metallic stylings of guitarist Greg Maddox, and both drummer Bill Murray and bassist Mel Thornton are propulsive yet know enough to remain out of the way of the soloists....

Hey, Faggot: Your desire not to be “one of those guys women complain about all the time” is commendable, but would be more so if you’d bothered to educate yourself about women’s bodies and women’s orgasms before you started fucking women. News flash: Most women are unable to “have an orgasm via intercourse alone.” Why is this? Because the business end of her clitoris, which plays as central a role in her sexual pleasure as the head of the cock plays in yours, is located outside and above the vagina, not inside it....

What does “pompatus” mean? There’s a movie out now called The Pompatus of Love, and of course it contains the Steve Miller song as a theme. I can’t find “pompatus” in the dictionary. Any clues? “Space cowboy” and “gangster of love” referred to earlier Miller songs. Maurice was from Miller’s 1972 tune “Enter Maurice,” which appeared on the album Recall the Beginning…A Journey From Eden. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

TED HEARNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One welcome facet of the Festival of Chicago Composers, which runs on successive Sundays this month, is its inclusion of several generations of local composers. The oldest on this week’s program is Northwestern’s William Karlins, who’s in his 60s, and the youngest is Ted Hearne, a 14-year-old who attends Whitney Young High School and sings with the Chicago Children’s Choir....

We ran across the enclosed item in Marilyn Vos Savant’s column in Parade magazine and were astounded by her reply. Our first thought was, we should ask Cecil the same question. However, we’re equally interested in your response to her answer. –Claire and Harold, San Rafael, California Regarding Marilyn’s answer, I’ll just say that when you make sweeping claims like this you might want to back them up with a little detail....

Richard Rodriguez’s slim volume Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father is a veritable fruitcake of metaphors, allusions, and paradoxes. What exactly does this excerpt mean? “Uncle Sam has no children of his own. In a way, Sam represents necessary evil to the American imagination. He steals children to make men of them, mocks all reticence, all modesty, all memory. Uncle Sam is a hectoring Yankee, a skinflint uncle, gaunt, uncouth, unloved…”...

The most noticeable difference between this edition of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago and the four others that preceded it is: there’s no Shakespeare! No sprawling marathons, no this-year’s-Olivier pandering. English theater is still represented–by Alan Ayckbourn’s new play, performed by his own company–but it doesn’t overshadow the rest of the fest. Which might mean that festival organizers trust in their audience’s broadened tastes. Or maybe they’re just burned out on the Bard....

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer’s Bare-Bones Circus is just that: a kind of minimalist carnival devised and performed by two people inside a “ring” that’s really a rope lying in a circle on the floor. Together the pair dance, talk, embrace, play–all the ordinary things people do for fun–and yet they somehow make it into a spectacular event. Part of the appeal is the pleasure of seeing something created out of nothing: they make a clown from a bit of red rubber; an elephant from an odd, ponderous upside-down pose; a tightrope walker from an umbrella and some stylized graceful lurching; a merry-go-round out of a rope suspended from the ceiling....

Performance poet Lisa Buscani’s tumultuous word jams can bring the chaos of urban life into pinpoint focus. But after she watched a videotape of her last full-length solo performance, the linguistically torrential Carnivale Animale, she decided that her virtuoso wordplay was “ineffective.” Her new piece, At That Point: Humans at Their Best and Worst, opens with nothing but short sentence fragments and an endlessly repeated “OK.” In a world where solo performers carve out marketable ruts for themselves–could Spalding Gray, Jackie Mason, or even Laurie Anderson ever surprise us again?...

This annual showcase features work by generally unknown pro, semipro, and student directors, who offer their interpretation of scripts ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material. Each night presents a different program consisting of two or three one-acts, as shown in the listings below. Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 883-1090. Through August 14: Mondays-Wednesdays, 7:30 PM. $8 per program. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Cabrini-Green residents peering from their windows back in 1991 were suspicious. Outside, in a vacant lot surrounded by high-rises, a white man in khakis was scratching around in the dirt. He was slightly overweight, appeared to be in his early 40s, and had two little black kids hanging on his legs. But to their suspicious parents, he seemed like some pied piper, explains Thomas Murdock, a pastor at a storefront church in the housing project....

About a decade ago the Chicago String Ensemble’s chief maestro Alan Heatherington left for Buffalo, and the ensemble ended up cobbling together a couple of uneven seasons with guest conductors. Then Heatherington returned and built the CSE into a well-regarded orchestra distinguished by imaginative programming. In August Heatherington again severed his ties with the group, this time apparently for good. And again the ensemble has to reshuffle its programs and hire guest conductors, with an eye out for a successor....

Effingham is located some 200 miles from Chicago, due south on I-57–just far enough away for the locals to speak with a soft twang. You’ll know you’re nearly there when you see the first phalanx of billboards since Chicago. Two interstates, 57 and 70, crisscross in Effingham, and 25,000 vehicles pass through each day. Petro Stopping Center, I-57 and I-70 at W. Fayette (217-347-0480), is the Ritz of the truck stops–the newest with the most amenities, including a movie theater, UPS and Federal Express boxes, and a quiet room....