The ninth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, continues from Friday, October 1, through Thursday, October 7. Film and video screenings will be held at Pipers Alley, 1608 N. Wells; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at the University of Chicago’s Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St.; at the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis; at the Chicago Historical Society, Clark at North; at Loyola University, 820 N....

EASTERN STANDARD This may make Eastern Standard sound like an annoyingly didactic piece of theater. But playwright Richard Greenberg avoids that by creating genuine, likable characters, whose conversation is peppered with hilarious and insightful one-liners that come at just the right time to stop the play from becoming preachy or sentimental. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stephen Walker, a successful but frustrated young architect, has developed an enormous crush on a woman who eats lunch every day at the same restaurant he does....

IMPERCEPTIBLE MUTABILITIES IN THE THIRD KINGDOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Parks does not develop characters, she creates voices–cryptic figures who both suggest and challenge archetypal images. She does not write dialogue, she strings together words in complicated cycles to drive home her philosophical points. Hers is a fragmented style with neither beginning nor end–it’s all amorphous middle. The title and subtitle, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: African-American history in the shadow of the photographic image, signals both what is right and what is wrong with this interlinked series of four short plays....

Master Musicians of Jajouka Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although the tribe’s history stretches back 4,000 years, it wasn’t until the 1950s that prominent American expatriates like William Burroughs, artist Brion Gysin, and writer/composer Paul Bowles began spreading word of its existence west. Gysin hired the Master Musicians as the house band of his Tangier nightclub between 1954 and ’57. But it wasn’t until a decade later, when Gysin took Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to visit them, that their music was heard by a significant number of outsiders....

In his finest work, including this masterful 1938 noir, the remarkable French filmmaker Jean Gremillon (1901-1959), trained as a composer and musician, used mise en scene, script construction, editing, and dialogue delivery to explore the complex relationship between film and music. Raimu, one of the greatest French actors, plays the “strange” title hero, a respectable Toulon merchant who secretly operates as a fence for local thieves; after he murders a potential blackmailer, an innocent local shoemaker (Pierre Blanchar) is sent to prison for his crime....

The correspondents in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters are well bred, well-to-do, and well meaning. Those in George Brant’s Lovely Letters: A Correspondence of Love are shallow, selfish, hypocritical, and materialistic and draw little smiley faces in the margins of their letters. But though Brant’s parody satirizes, among other things, the military, the Peace Corps, the snack-food industry, fraternities, capitalism, and Gurney’s play (with its numerous guest stars), at no time does he stoop to mean-spirited ridicule....

Midsize Theater Project Shifts Its Sites Navy Pier and the midsize theater development project have parted ways–at least for now. Late last month, the Chicago Music and Dance Theater Transition Advisory Board set up by the Chicago Community Trust abruptly announced that its new preferred site was the $92-million symphony center the CSO recently voted to build next to Orchestra Hall. Not long after that, James Reilly, CEO of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, informed the advisory board that the authority would begin pursuing other options for Navy Pier....

Ten years ago, musician Winston Damon would have said he was influenced by jazz, rock, and funk. Today he names Brazilian, African, Balinese, East Indian, and Afro-Cuban music as his favorites. He says he felt straitjacketed playing Western pop. It started to seem too stiff and confining. “The cerebralness, the disconnection, the ego put me off,” says the 29-year-old Damon. “People seemed to relate to music like football rather than making love....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The annual Wisconsin hunting-season accident report issued in August included accounts of a boy who shot himself in the hand when he used his rifle as a crutch to get up off the ground; a man who shot himself in the foot trying to hit a squirrel who was running nearby; and a man who was shot when the gun he dropped from a tree discharged upon hitting the ground....

By Adam Langer The only aspects separating this press conference from the run-of-the-mill Democratic or Republican affair are the stunningly low turnout (about 15), the chintzy spread (shortbread cookies, Celestial Seasonings tea, and two pitchers of water), and the three barefoot, giggling young men in T-shirts and loose-fitting trousers, sitting cross-legged with eyes closed on eight mattresses with white sheets placed side by side. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

AMANDA MILLER AND THE PRETTY UGLY DANCE COMPANY Literary quotations included in the program for three of the four works have to do with a sense of home. “One of the central acts is . . . connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us, and to which we belong,” goes the quotation (from novelist Junichiro Tanizaki) for St. Nick, a duet Miller dances with Michael Schumacher....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ben Joravsky’s piece titled “Road to Ruin” [October 20] correctly identifies the publicly financed superhighways as a major contributor to the decline of Chicago and other large metropolitan areas. Unfortunately while citing the historical outflow of jobs and people to the suburbs, Joravsky failed to mention the history of urban Democrats demanding that the interstates be built through the major cities, rather than around as first proposed during the Eisenhower administration....

Rock and rollers have distinguished themselves from the pack since the music was born by adopting trademark stage moves: Elvis Presley’s swivel, Chuck Berry’s duck walk, James Brown’s impossible splits, and more recently, Michael Jackson’s crotch grabs. Veteran Dutch punkers the Ex, though less well known, have some pretty distinctive moves of their own. During a recent show at Lounge Ax, a Chicago debut for the 15-year-old band, they ran, leapt, staggered, and swung around each other with a reckless abandon that was as thrilling as the music they played....

One day last year Pat Hill missed a day of work because she had a headache. A throbbing migraine, to be exact. That might not upset most employers, but Hill is a Chicago police officer, and the department has some rather rigid rules regarding medical leave. Anyway, one thing led to another, and Hill was eventually suspended for six months for disobeying an order to undergo a psychological examination. Hill defies all Chicago-cop stereotypes....

The Oriental Express Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But despite the glowing stories in the newspapers and on television, there’s still one big unanswered question: Is Drabinsky’s Livent organization financially secure enough to handle the Oriental acquisition as well as the other projects it’s expected to undertake over the next few years? In addition to the $15 million Livent is putting into the Oriental, the publicly traded company is investing another $22....

Offered as an adjunct to the annual summer Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, this monthlong showcase of fringe performance features work by the likes of locals Jenny Magnus, Beau O’Reilly, Frank Melcori, David Isaacson, Scott Turner, and James Schneider. The fest runs February 1 through March 2 at the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, 2827 N. Lincoln, 327-6666. Shows take place almost every night and there are matinees most weekends, as indicated in the listings below (which are subject to change; audiences are advised to call the festival for updates)....

As attempted fusions of jazz and hip hop become ever more pervasive, so do the failures. All too often uninspired horn and keyboard riffs get sampled and that’s it, throwing only the most minuscule wrinkle into hip hop’s often predictable fabric. Augmented by well-integrated electric piano and a variety of horns, the recently released second album by Philadelphia’s the Roots, Do You Want More?!!!??! (DGC), features contributions from top-notch jazzers like Steve Coleman, Graham Haynes, Joshua Roseman, and Cassandra Wilson....

Part patriotic tribute, part 60 Minutes-style investigative journalism, Claude Lanzmann’s five-hour documentary Tsahal probes Israel’s embattled state of mind through a history of its army. Between 1991 and 1992, Lanzmann, who’d made the harrowing Holocaust epic Shoah (1985), was given unprecedented access to members of the Israeli Defense Forces, or Tsahal (an acronym formed from the agency’s name in Hebrew). Eschewing battle footage and voice-over narration, Lanzmann instead uses interviews with officers and soldiers–most of whom fought in the country’s six major conflicts with its Arab neighbors–to make up the core of this hard-nosed examination of a complex, disconcerting topic....

Every day the world is bombarded with natural disasters, civil war, terrorism, Newt Gingrich. Out of this vast mess of news, how do we distinguish highlights from the past year? History books are obligated to weigh each event’s effect on the world, but we are bound by no such restrictions. So our 1995 Timeline has one requirement: great quotes. There’s a reason that journalists secretly rejoice when a source lets loose with a juicy quote: it makes any story a whole lot better....

BLINKY PALERMO, BRUCE NAUMAN, AND RUDOLF SCHWARZKOGLER Schwarzkogler is represented by seven highly enigmatic drawings, some of them apparently sketches of planned performances, and three groups of photographs documenting performances. He was one of the four main practitioners of Viennese Actionism, a late-60s movement whose “actions” included animal slaughter, defecation, and self-mutilation, much of it presumably in the 60s spirit of breaking rules and attacking bourgeois conventions. Best of Chicago voting is live now....