These two remarkable Polish features by Krzysztof Kieslowski, made respectively in 1987 and 1988 (and being shown for separate admissions), are both expanded versions of segments in his Decalogue, one of the key works in contemporary cinema, with each segment illustrating one of the Ten Commandments–though regrettably unseen and unavailable in this country apart from a few festival showings. A Short Film About Killing is a feature that might be called terminally Polish in its bleak handling of a brutal killing and the public execution of the murderer....

What an inspired pairing of talents for a gay and lesbian rights fund-raiser. Barbara Cook, an unchallenged master of luxuriously lyrical singing in the classic Broadway style, is teaming with folk-pop singer-songwriter Janis Ian in “A Statement for Freedom/A State Meant for Freedom,” a benefit for the Illinois Federation for Human Rights’ efforts to pass statewide antidiscrimination legislation. Cook, star of the original Candide and The Music Man, has built a devoted cult following since her comeback as a cabaret and concert artist in the 1970s; no one matches her ability to combine a big soprano sound with conversational intimacy....

In 1531, the Nahua Indians of Huejotzingo, a town southeast of Mexico City, sued the Spanish colonial government for excessive taxation. Since the conquest ten years earlier, they’d been forced to furnish Spanish officials with such items as corn, chili peppers, beans, bricks, lumber, and limestone. Although they had paid similar taxes to previous rulers, they believed the colonial government’s demands were too much of a burden. As proof they presented the Huejotzingo Codex, an eight-sheet document that relied on drawings and a numbering system to depict the precise amount of goods that they’d turned over–symbolically denoted by bushel, load, or individual....

Under the clearheaded leadership of composer-saxophonist George Cartwright, Curlew is a tight, exciting jazz-rock ensemble with ideas bursting out of every corner. The typical number consists of a fairly catchy melody that periodically explodes into a burst of improvisation and demonstrates that putting serious ideas on top of a beat doesn’t mean having to sacrifice subtlety. Davey Williams’s electric guitar playing, by turns spiny, loopy, and manic, reaches hungrily in several directions at once....

From SRO to AAA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hotel business–with its high overhead, stiff competition, and boom-and-bust cycles–is notoriously difficult, even for industry veterans. And Kornota and Klok are far from seasoned pros. While pursuing full-time careers as engineers, they started moonlighting in real estate. At first they bought and renovated small apartment buildings on the city’s northwest side. But while traveling in Europe, they took note of the many small hotels, or pensions, and wondered why there was nothing like them back home....

Holly Cole has plenty going for her: a voice as clear and crisp as the mountain air of her native Canada; a hip backing duo (piano and bass); production help from David (not Don) Was; and a firm (if not yet fully formed) sense of adapting the role of cabaret diva to an audience coming of age in the 90s. She can sell standards and novelty tunes, and her repertoire contains some clever and usually effective reworkings of popular music from the last 60 years; she ties it all together with rhythms and phraseology borrowed from jazz, without really becoming a jazz singer in the process....

Of the ten filmmakers on this program, eight have studied with Peter Kubelka, who teaches in Frankfurt and whose own short films create an architecturally perfect cinema out of precise “articulations” (his word) between images and sounds. One wonders what Kubelka thought of Anja Czioska’s Bolero, a film of a man in drag doing an erotic and eventually nude dance in a gravel pit. Mostly edited in camera, the fey dance is in surprisingly good sync with the music, making it an amusing send-up of Ravel’s macho rhythms....

Here on the tundra, it gets so cold that you stop believing in warm weather anywhere: not even the impending Mardi Gras in a city some 60 degrees warmer can distract most of us from the local misery. Nonetheless, altoist Jeff Newell has looked beyond the high-pressure fronts for this project, an eight-piece band that borrows heavily from the New Orleans brass-band tradition. Like the Crescent City’s famous Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Newell applies the modified march beats of New Orleans street music to a lot of songs that came a good deal later, from Ellington’s “Caravan” to Charlie Parker’s “Bongo Beep....

ROSEANNA VITRO WITH GARY BARTZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t imagine much better circumstances in which to hear Roseanna Vitro than those that bring her to Chicago. The vocalist rides in on the crest of her new (and best) album–Passion Dance, on Telarc–in which stylistic maturity and vocal vivacity arrive at an impressive intersection. She brings with her a guest star from that album, alto saxist Gary Bartz, himself in the midst of one of jazz’s most gratifying recent resurgences and sounding like a million bucks every time he records....

With its 20th anniversary season set to begin next September and subscriptions down, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is changing its artistic leadership. On August 31, Randall Arney will step down after eight years as the company’s artistic director. He has held the post twice as long as any predecessor. In announcing his resignation, Arney, who’ll remain a Steppenwolf ensemble member, expressed a desire to pursue more acting and directing jobs than he had been able to accept while at Steppenwolf’s helm....

For call waiting there’s a ripping and chewing sound. Hammacher Schlemmer now offers an $80 Tyrannosaurus rex telephone (keypad under a rock, receiver in the dinosaur’s back). According to the summer catalog, “‘Rex’ even announces incoming calls with a roar instead of a ring.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If a bit shoddy, [popular religious] belief at least has the strength of vulgarity–like a plaster statue of the Little Flower or a phosphorescent crucifix,” writes Paul Q....

The Urge to Merge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Touchstone’s landlord has already taken the company to court for nonpayment of rent. The matter was resolved after an out-of-court agreement was reached for the theater to stay in the building through June 30, when their lease expires. The situation forced Marlowe to begin looking for another home. Her search included both the Athenaeum and the Organic, where negotiations soon progressed to talks of a full merger between the two companies....

Tony ‘n’ Joyce’s Venture Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Estimated to cost well in excess of $1 million, the center is being constructed in a relatively out-of-the-way location that has not yet proved to be particularly hospitable to theater. Russ Tutterow, artistic director of Chicago Dramatists Workshop, which has operated for seven years in a small space a couple of blocks west of the proposed center, described the area as isolated from the heart of the theater community; he is currently investigating other spaces on the near north side....

Dear Reader Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The castration of Windy City Times publisher Jeff McCourt by Michael Miner (issue 5/26/95) is one of the most unbelievable pieces of journalism I have recently read (only to be followed by the continually factless and bitchy pages of Babble). Mr. McCourt has many friends, of which I am one. Mr. McCourt is a business owner who has the right to terminate any employee’s tenure....

When it comes to 20th-century string music the Arditti String Quartet is the very best. In fact, history will probably prove the British foursome to be one of the finest ensembles in any category, playing music of any period. What makes the Arditti so nearly peerless is the fact that they apply to the contemporary repertoire the same exacting standards expected from chamber ensembles playing music from the standard classical canon....

CHICAGO BAROQUE ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few could have predicted that the keyboard music of Antonio Soler as performed by harpsichordist David Schrader would become a series of best-selling CDs for the local label Cedille. After all, the oeuvre of the prolific Catalan monk is as obscure as Spanish baroque music is in general. Now, thanks to Schrader, critical opinion on this 18th-century composer is being upgraded....

Ears are one of those body parts that strike us as funny–silly, floppy pieces of boneless flesh of infinite varied designs, colors, and contours. All the actual hearing hardware is deep in the ear canal, so you get the idea we could do without these things. Yet we know to cup our hand into an extension of the ear when we need to hear better. We find that the ear is a wonderful place to hang ornaments....

Cardigans Two years ago the local record label Minty Fresh wowed the music biz and boosted the profile of Chicago’s rock scene by scooping up the virtually unknown Veruca Salt and quickly passing them on to Geffen for a big-money deal and overnight success. Since then, Minty Fresh has signed a few more promising bands, two of which breezed through town for a show last Friday. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s a blustery day, and a group of people have taken shelter in Nancy Bromberg’s Gallery a Go Go art bus. With its festive animal-print seat covers, fur pelts, stuffed rodents, and mounted animal heads, the interior brings to mind an over-the-top version of Elvis’s Graceland Jungle Room. Outside, the vehicle is a glorious collage of plastic animals, buttons, pictures, mirrors, and other objects. A team of swans perch on the roof, just above the bus’s destination sign, which reads: “Home....

Gun Smoke However, we feel that Henderson’s discussion missed a point that is just as crucial: handguns raise the risk of death by increasing the lethality of whatever else is going on. This is why, as he says, gun injuries are not exactly like motor vehicle injuries. Thus, if someone is interested in committing suicide, the availability of a handgun makes death a more likely outcome; in a community wracked by violence, the ubiquity of handguns causes rampant homicide....