Lawrence Ah Mon, a prolific young Hong Kong director whose best efforts have focused on disenfranchised women and youth, pays homage of sorts to Nicholas Ray with this transplanted Rebel Without a Cause, set in the mid-60s, when Hong Kong was in the midst of an identity and political crisis instigated by the Cultural Revolution in mainland China. One of the film’s twin narrative strands follows the aimless pursuits of rival street punks and petty criminals–Buck, a gang leader from the poor section of town, played with James Dean-ish insouciance and feline grace by Leslie Cheung (of Farewell My Concubine), comes under police suspicion for a series of drug deals, rapes, and murders....

BLAKK LOVE (STOREEZ OF A DARKER HUE) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A wave of collaborations between literary and theatrical artists (reinaugurated, after a flurry of activity in the mid-70s, by Zebra Crossing’s 1990 Lexis Praxis) has given rise to a type of production consisting of little more than a jumble of poetry and prose thrown together under a broad title that usually includes the word “celebration....

The Swans Gilles de Rais, marshal of France in the 15th century–history’s notorious Bluebeard–and King Ludwig II, the “dream king” of late-19th- century Bavaria, probably would have benefited from the Angel of Temperance’s visitation. But unlike most of us in contemporary America, who could stand to let our irrational, impulsive, purely playful waters flow a little more often, Rais and Ludwig drank deeply from the silver chalice but left the gold one nearly untouched, if received notions of history are to be believed....

Blues singer Candye Kane has a nonmusical reputation that precedes her. “A lot of people come to my shows to see how big my boobs really are,” observes the forthright Kane, a former punk/stripper/porn-mag model whose sizable cleavage once landed her on the cover of Jugs. Now she’s moved on to a career in music, and her rep as a serious country-blues phraser is beginning to catch fire. From a look at the retro-50s kitsch cover of her recent album, Home Cookin’, released on Austin’s Antone’s Records, it’d be easy to assume that she’s running on borrowed time....

Saxophonist David Murray has a lengthy, ongoing relationship with Chicago percussionist Kahil El’Zabar. Since the duo’s simpatico performance on The Golden Sea (Sound Aspects)–the first pairing of the hornman’s freedom-seeking revisionism and the timekeeper’s meditative appropriation of African roots–their compelling juxtaposition of fiery postbop blowing and serene rhythms has matured into something of a musical institution. While sticking closer to its leader’s hypnotic explorations of ritual, the aptly named Ritual Trio, El’Zabar’s enduring collaboration with bassist Malachi Favors and reedman Ari Brown, has explored similar terrain....

Dear Sir/Madam: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As representatives of the Cook County Hospital Medical Staff, we wish to clarify for your readers a misunderstanding which may have occurred as a result of your front page article of August 4, 1995, entitled “Dr. Simon’s Prescription.” In that article, Dr. Simon is quoted making remarks about the homeless. Those are Dr. Simon’s personal opinions and do not reflect the policy of the Cook County Hospital Medical Staff....

While making In Spring One Plants Alone (1980), a kind of personal documentary about a Maori mother and her adult son in a rural New Zealand community, filmmaker Vincent Ward lived with his subjects for 18 months, and the resulting film effectively captures the lugubrious rhythms of the family’s life. The son is apparently wholly dependent on his mother–we see her bathe him and then bring him for a haircut–and he seems to spend much of his time doing nothing....

This extraordinary 1992 French documentary by Nicolas Philibert, which plunges the viewer into the world of deaf sign language, required Philibert to rethink such basic documentary techniques as framing, editing, and sound recording and mixing. All the sign language is subtitled in English, but the text seems to offer only a fraction of what’s being said: the men, women, and children are so expressive and personal in their beautifully orchestrated gestures and facial expressions that few professional actors could match them....

The thrill of hearing Jimmy Smith stems partly from the chance to hear history. When you listen to the Hammond organ played by the man who turned it from a novelty instrument into a jazz staple, you may well experience a slight frisson–such as you might get, say, if Alexander Bell showed up to install your phone jack. In Smith’s case you also confront the danger of familiarity. Except for a greater emphasis on slow blues tunes than fast ones, he’s not doing anything much different from years past; and since his sound echoes throughout the style of virtually every other jazz organist of the past 30 years, you might feel you’ve turned down a too-familiar street....

Although Twin Cities bluegrass singer Kate MacKenzie has long fronted the group Stoney Lonesome on Garrison Keillor’s radio show–and even played with them at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall–it wasn’t until the release of last year’s terrific solo outing Let Them Talk (Red House) that she stepped out to perform on her own. Saturday’s gig marks her Chicago debut. Her broad-ranging, gospel-inflected bluegrass places her in the company of individualists like Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent....

Keyboard veteran Mose Vinson is a throwback to the days when jukes throughout the Delta and honky-tonks along Beale Street resonated with the sounds of pianos, string bands, jug bands, guitars, and the occasional harmonica. Vinson’s playing incorporates virtually all of those influences, although these days he tends to concentrate on gently flowing melodic improvisations that evoke both melancholy and a sense of hard-won peace. Vinson’s voice has deepened through the years, and he often sings in a soft, gritty croon....

I have two theories about the way TV shows are made. I also have two theories about the way baby food is made. They’re the same two theories. In the first theory, the manufacturers start with wholesome and natural ingredients, which they proceed to blast, bleach, irradiate, colorize, and strain until the result is bland, featureless ooze. In the second theory, they do much the same thing with the same result, but they start with toxic waste....

Eric Hudson only wanted to play basketball on the playground courts across the street from his Bucktown apartment. For that he wound up in jail. He went to Georgetown University, graduated with a major in international economics, and returned to Chicago, where he went to work for a government-sponsored antipoverty agency. “I lived with my family on the south side, but it was dangerous being back in the old neighborhood,” he says....

The conventional wisdom is that nobody ever bought a newspaper for a comic strip, or switched subscriptions to follow a strip from one newspaper to another. While that’s certainly not universally true, it’s no doubt accurate as a general statement. Yet if that’s the case, why is the competition for new strips so fierce, why do papers keep such close tabs on comics-page readership, and why do they trumpet their best strips or that rare coup when they steal a strip from a competitor?...

Digable Planets Unfortunately, with their insect names (Butterfly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug) and low-key approach the Planets got caught in some nasty webs along the way. They were quickly lumped in with “alternative” rap (i.e., music that can be swallowed whole by otherwise rap-phobic whites without fear of any ghetto bile). Attempting to escape the stigma, they opened some shows on their first tour by announcing who they weren’t: a litany including P....

From the mouths of directors: “My work as a director has taught me the ultimate skill of juggling a dozen and a half balls at once while trying to balance two dozen and a half hats on my head” (memo from the Children’s Theatre of Western Springs). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There is a class of problems–and cities are one such problem–that are so complex they can only be solved through stupidity,” muses the politically incorrect Ed Zotti in Chicago Enterprise (September/October)....

My favorite description of Mark E. Smith, the lead voice and sole consistent member of the Fall, was written in some British music paper more than a decade ago. It said that he chased the English language through a thesaurus with an ax, and while today’s Fall doesn’t sound much like the scratchy ultraprimitive rabble that debuted 17 years ago in Manchester, the description still stands. Smith’s use and abuse of language is more than a little eccentric; he sneers, stresses, elongates, clips, and otherwise distorts phrases, words, and syllables with malevolent glee, and his lyrics obliterate the border between lacerating wit and cranky misanthropy....

We all know that America was named for Amerigo Vespucci. What does Amerigo mean in Italian? –Dave Curwin, Newton, Massachusetts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are a couple of theories on the name’s origin. One is that it’s a variant of Enrico, the Italian form of Henry, and derives from the Old German Haimirich (in later German Emmerich, in English Americus), from haimi (home) plus ric (power, ruler)....

By John Sanchez True to its title, In Man’s Country was shot in Man’s Country, the venerable Clark Street bathhouse where generations of men have met without speaking. On the night the scene I’m in was taped, the extras were told we could keep on our street clothes or wear the bathhouse uniform–a towel. I decided that for the measly pay I was getting–a copy of the video–I’d stay in my clothes....

When it comes to Irish grudge matches, it’s conceivable there hasn’t been so much comic bluster and roustabout blarney on-screen since John Ford’s The Quiet Man. The differences between this film and that, however, are as instructive as the similarities. The setting is an Irish lakeside village in the mid-20s; the antagonists this time are women, with Mia Farrow as the old-timer (and only nonwidow in the ruling oligarchy) who develops an immediate hostility to an American newcomer (the John Wayne part) played by Natasha Richardson, with Joan Plowright essaying a rough equivalent of Barry Fitzgerald....