By Jonathan Rosenbaum Calling for movies that don’t insult the audience obviously wasn’t even thought worth mentioning, and for a good reason. The operative, if unspoken, theory behind all three of the stratagems outlined is that audiences can be insulted from now to doomsday as long as the pictures are promoted correctly and widely enough–self-fulfilling prophecy at work. So there was no reason to conclude that The Scarlet Letter failed because audiences knew it was a ridiculous piece of tripe; the problem was simply that the promotional machinery faltered....

The musical interludes between acts in Moliere’s comedie-ballets, in which ballet is incorporated into spoken comedy, are meant to augment and comment on the main plot. An exemplar of this 17th-century genre is his last play, Le malade imaginaire, a farce satirizing bourgeois pretensions and the medical profession. For the music Moliere turned to Parisian composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a student of the liturgical master Giacomo Carissimi and an imaginative formulator of church music....

It seems this company has always been inclusive. When Jose Limon started it some 50 years ago he made his former teacher, Doris Humphrey, artistic director, a post she held until her death in 1958. Limon generously produced the works of company members, and after he died, in 1972, the troupe added to his repertoire works by such modern greats as Meredith Monk, Anna Sokolow, and Garth Fagan. Of course, this is what it takes to outlast a founder–and the Limon company has now survived his death by almost 25 years....

DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (Knitting Factory Works) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York’s DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, who makes his Chicago debut Saturday at the Double Door, has pushed the redefinition of the DJ to the extreme. Much as garbagemen became “sanitation engineers,” in Spooky’s world DJs have become “recombiners” and “custodians of aural history.” In a recent magazine interview he went so far as to proclaim: “We’re really talking about the migration of human values toward the electronic age, and there’s nobody better equipped to do that than the DJ at this point....

Girl Theater (Bad as We Want to Be) The National Pastime Theater stage has been painted to mimic the marble walls and stately ceiling of the former speakeasy it was, so the women’s rapid appearances and disappearances seem to take place in a generic no-place and no-time, freeing the performers from complicated scene shifts. The actors use only their voices, their bodies, and a few simple props and costumes to establish characters, dismantle cultural stereotypes, and evoke an almost confrontational goofiness that catches the audience and keeps it hooked until the last sentimental scene, which celebrates women’s journey into the continuing adventures of middle age....

In room 301 at LeMoyne School about 40 first- and second-graders sit cross-legged on the floor, their faces turned up toward Jose Reyes and Kevin Draftz, who stand over them in suits and ties. Several children raise their hands. No running in the halls. Don’t tear up stuff. Don’t break glass. “That’s right,” he nods. Draftz sits down, reaches into a bag on the floor, and pulls out a floppy blue puppet that has a police cap on its head....

Trumpeter Randy Brecker belongs in the top echelon of modern jazzmen. When you really listen to his best work, it’s difficult to count many trumpeters who do a better job of putting tone and technique to the service of imaginative improvisation. Brecker has a pure, brash tone and an unshackled technique, and he uses them to issue solos that prove both complex and lyrical but also grandly eruptive, in the tradition of Dizzy Gillespie....

By Ben Joravsky But what the stories didn’t report–because most of the people involved didn’t know–is that the Uptown was available for purchase at the county’s last two scavenger sales of tax-delinquent property. In other words, restorationists could have pulled the property from Wolf’s control for a few thousand dollars had they, city officials, or local politicians been just a little savvier about how land deals in Chicago really work....

From years of watching TV weather I know that our weather (in particular the jet stream) moves from west to east. Yet, as the sunrise and sunset show, the earth rotates in that same direction. Does that mean that the atmosphere is rotating around the planet faster than the planet itself is spinning? Shouldn’t it be just the opposite? –Charles Barksdale, Baltimore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It would be if the world were run by newspaper Q&A columnists....

Boystown Eats Brazil Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scheduled to open in late October, Rhumba will be billed as an “authentic” Brazilian restaurant, according to Abrams. It will take a full half of the 10,000-square-foot building Vortex occupies at 3641 N. Halsted. The restaurant plans to serve food until around 10 or 11 each evening, at which time it will become part of the nightclub again....

The NIPC told us how to do it back in ’68: put all of Chicagoland’s new houses, apartment buildings, shopping centers, and factories within walking distance of CTA and commuter-train stations. Don’t scatter them out over the farmland. Leave some open space between the fingerlike suburban corridors. That way people could live near their work, drive less, pay lower taxes. Developers might be able to make money redeveloping the inner city....

FOUND A PEANUT, Alley Pond Ensemble, at Factory Theater. Since the games of pinners and fast pitch I played growing up in Rogers Park could never serve as metaphors for capitalism and human mortality, I’ve always been distrustful of plays that sum up every adult crisis in an hour on the playground. Donald Margulies’s coming-of-age drama Found a Peanut, in which adult actors play prepubescents, effectively demonstrates the parallels between childhood and adulthood....

Dear sir, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An outright ban on tobacco would almost certainly save some lives for the reasons Griffin outlines: it would become more difficult to obtain and consume. Unfortunately it would also mean the creation of a massive new illegal business that would dwarf the present illegal drug trade and make outlaws out of millions of smokers, farmers, and merchants....

Hyenas The plot by now must be well known; a flamboyant, much-married millionairess returns to the Middle-European town where she was born and offers the inhabitants a free gift of a billion marks if they will consent to murder the man who, many years ago, seduced and jilted her….Eventually, and chillingly, her chosen victim is slaughtered, but I quarrel with those who see the play merely as a satire on greed....

NEW ANATOMIES and A DAY OF FEVER Eberhardt actively pursued a life of poverty, vagrancy, and debauchery in the North African desert and ended up suffering from one or more of that region’s many diseases. In the opening scene the sick woman annoys the journalist attempting to interview her, but the journalist perseveres, sensing that the end is near for this extraordinary woman. During Eberhardt’s fever-fueled delirium, we learn her incredible story....

Hey, Faggot: This may or may not have anything to do with your boobs, but according to a long scary piece in a recent New Yorker and a medium scary piece in a recent Esquire, everything we eat, drink, and wear is slathered in estrogen (female hormones) and/or industrial chemicals that mimic estrogen in our bodies. Con-sequently, girls are hitting puberty earlier, and boys aren’t pumping out sperm on anything approaching the scale we once did: all over the industrialized world, sperm counts are dropping like Chechnyans....

FREDDY JONES BAND 11/24, ARAGON The ascension of the Freddy Jones Band from generic yuppie-bar band to generic midsize-arena band might be one of Chicago’s stranger success stories were it not happening all over the country; Hootie & the Blowfish, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and the Dave Matthews Band have proved that whitewashed, harmless mediocrity–despite the occasional nod to racial diversity–makes white people feel real good. The band’s bland third album, North Avenue Wake Up Call (Capricorn), hypnotizes their audience with dim-witted lyrical wanderlust that doesn’t seem to mean a damn thing: “Thread another needle it’s working / Pass the bottle of reason / Another blanket of feeling / I hear the stars are in season....

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Fait Accompli also recalls 1982’s apocalyptic Bad Smells. We see smoke and hear explosions and crashing sounds, sirens and Klaxons, voices over a radio perhaps discussing some disaster. The rock score, by David Van Tieghem, often carries a heavy beat, though every once in a while we hear a sweet, breathy woman’s voice. The dancing begins with quartets and works up to all 16 dancers onstage, 8 men and 8 women....

Chicago fans aren’t comfortable unless they’re worried. Remember the Bulls’ first-game loss to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 NBA finals, or their seven-game slugfest with the New York Knicks in 1992, or losing the first two games to the Knicks last spring, or even the feeling everyone in Chicago shared as the Phoenix Suns rallied in the sixth game of the finals this summer, before John Paxson hit his three-pointer....

If the earth stopped spinning would we fall off of it? Which way would we fall if we did? Or would there just be less gravity? (Don’t know what centrifugal force is? Go ask your parents. No way they’re palming all their kid’s questions off on me.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How much more would you weigh? Well, figuring in your newtons, your velocity, and your gravitational constant ....