Chase: The metal frame into which the type form was locked. Flatbed press: A cylinder press in which the form was locked flat onto a “bed” that passes beneath the ink rollers and pressure cylinder. Imagine what that would do to a full-grown cat. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Halftone: A photographic image engraved into a zinc plate. Mounted upon wooden blocks, these became part of the type forms and a large headache for anyone who tried to run them on the smaller presses, which did not provide the steady even flow of ink necessary to print large surfaces properly....

I WAS A CHILD OF DEPRESSION PARENTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been bedeviled by such questions ever since I saw David Parris’s lackluster one-man show, I Was a Child of Depression Parents. Wittily subtitled a “Twelve-Step Performance Piece,” it nonetheless lacks both the therapy-born insight and the unifying theme the subtitle implies. Instead Parris–the show’s author and performer–serves up an evening of six half-digested, unevenly performed autobiographical fragments....

A two-part film. The first part is an exemplary, scrupulously researched documentary about the making and unmaking of Orson Welles’s 1942 Latin American documentary feature It’s All True–a project doomed by a change of studio heads at RKO, but also by its radical politics: Welles’s problack stance and his focus on the poorest sectors of Brazilian life upset RKO and the Brazilian dictatorship alike. (His career never fully recovered from the ensuing studio propaganda, and this film represents the first major effort after half a century of obfuscation to set the record straight....

Magic Hour is a collision of apparent opposites. Drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang once powered Galaxie 500’s lighter-than-air post-Velvet Underground pop; guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar, on the other hand, have probed the outer limits of crazed psychedelic guitar abuse in their bands Crystalized Movements, Vermonster, and BORB, as well as on lead vocalist Rogers’s solo albums. On paper the quartet looks like a mismatch, but in practice they work together splendidly....

Marianne Kim’s images are often impregnable–evocative and rich but without a shred of explanation or context. A young woman reaches for a red umbrella suspended in midair, for example, or a woman wearing only a togalike skirt takes ten minutes to turn in a circle. Many of Kim’s recent pieces draw on the super-slow Japanese dance form butoh. But her interest in inexplicable images was apparent even in the first dance of hers I saw: a student piece based on Conrad Aiken’s short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” about a boy becoming lost in the snows of catatonic schizophrenia....

Every Little Bit Helps Come fall the community is expected to unveil a mosaic pathway made by 11 local teenagers on a pedestrian mall near the college. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m old enough to remember the fight over Truman College,” says Pat Murphy, director of the Beacon Street Gallery, which helped supervise the project. “At the time I was against Truman. I didn’t think they should displace all those people....

Ursula Davids, matriarch of the family that runs Pastiche restaurant, likes to call its food “cuisine without borders.” You might have inferred something like that from the name, just as the name of Stewart Parsons’s restaurant, Gypsy, suggests the chef’s culinary meanderings across national and cultural frontiers. Cross-culturalism isn’t limited to the fancy places, either. Lots of otherwise basic American restaurants offer pizzas in classic or designer versions, Italian-style fried calamari, Greek salads....

MULE, SILKWORM, CRAIN 4/15, LOUNGE AX Mule is a heavy Ann Arbor trio with burly mountain-man vocal stylings and a faux-backwoods roots blast. Its new four-song EP Wrung (Quarterstick), however, dispenses with the pronounced chaw spitting of the band’s debut album in favor of a more stripped-down, boogie-laden kick in the ass–sort of ZZ Top with the dry heaves. Transplanted to Seattle from Missoula, Montana, Silkworm sculpt a fine tension from their shy melodicizing, pummeling rhythms that avoid the expected 4/4 grooves, and obfuscatory twin guitars that bump into each other like flirting grade-schoolers; their music works as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does....

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus What accounts for the difference in how these two circuses are received? The answers would please P.T. Barnum, America’s first master of spin, the man who made millions giving suckers uneven breaks: marketing, packaging, and product. Ringling Bros. has positioned itself as a purveyor of regular American entertainment, something you can safely take your kids to and not worry that you’re undermining their faith in American-style democracy or capitalism or whatever God or gods you worship on Sunday or Saturday....

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls When Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was released last year, the clip circulated to the review shows featured Jim Carrey bent over at the waist proffering his clothed behind. Using his hands he opened and closed his butt cheeks, turning them into a mouth, and thus the talking ass moved from the playgrounds to the cinema screens. Knowing critics would hate the flick, Carrey made a preemptive strike: Siskel and Ebert complaining on At the Movies about the clip couldn’t help but come across as stuffy and uptight....

Jeff Bridges stars as Wild Bill Hickok in an ambitious and flavorsome picture by writer-director Walter Hill–based on Thomas Babe’s play Fathers and Sons and Peter Dexter’s novel Deadwood–that’s not only a western but also a western saga and an art picture of sorts. Very striking to look at it in terms of Joseph Nemec III’s production design and Lloyd Ahern’s cinematography (with varying uses of black and white as well as color), the film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography over everything else....

Neil Young’s influence on a disillusioned generation rears its head again in this young LA trio. On their debut album, last year’s Cindy (Vernon Yard), Acetone bashed away at loose grooves, Mark Lightcap’s guitar staggering drunkenly through the wreckage left by Steve Hadley’s frantically splashing drums and Richie Lee’s rumbling bass. “Pinch,” with its refrain “Sandpaper on my insides” delivered in a disaffected nasal whine, is a dead ringer for Young at his most recklessly aggressive....

The second installment of Satyajit Ray’s great Apu trilogy, fully comprehensible on its own terms, suffers at times from its episodically constructed plot, which follows Apu from the age of ten in the holy city of Banaras (in 1920) to his early adulthood in Calcutta. It also bears the traces of technical problems, which led to a virtually one-to-one shooting ratio for many scenes. But this also happens to be my own favorite film in the trilogy, as well as the reported favorite of Ray’s fellow Bengali directors Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen....

We want to hear about your favorite fantasies involving celebrities–actors, actresses, musicians, athletes, our Pets. Tell us who they are and what they do in that wide realm of your unrestrained imagination. Send your wildest fantasies to “Celebrity Fantasy,” Penthouse, 1965 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10023-5965. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was walking down Michigan Avenue last week when I came to Atlas Galleries....

A neighborhood dispute in east Wicker Park has ended up being the catalyst for a new record store. Over its five-year existence, Tim Adams has always run Ajax Records–a one-man label and national distributor of much hard-to-find stuff–out of his apartment. Recently, some city inspectors showed up at Adams’s door; he was informed that there’d been reports that he’s been running a business out of his home, and by the way, did he have a city business license?...

LIBRA Shattered Globe Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Writing some 30 years after Condon, Don DeLillo explored the question in his brilliant novel Libra, a study of how a maladjusted nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald could be groomed into one of history’s most significant figures. In DeLillo’s view, Oswald was a patsy recruited by disgruntled intelligence operatives who wanted to kill Kennedy in revenge for his failure to overthrow Castro....

CLOUD NINE at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s a big agenda for this gender-bending play, which is too clever in its clutter and too fragmented in its focus. Churchill’s script sometimes betrays its origins in an actors’ workshop; a lot here seems written in italics. Nonetheless the play makes its characters, stylized in the first act and solid in the second, say more about the forces behind feminism and its challenge than a score of tracts....

Dear sirs: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I must also take umbrage with his statement that “comps are just free tickets” as being the “myth of the ages.” Mr. Penn is misleading here because he implies that by not charging for tickets, a theater is taking the money out of the mouths of actors, technicians, directors, etc, acting like some sort of orphanage overseers in a Charles Dickens novel....

** BACKBEAT With Stephen Dorff, Sheryl Lee, Ian Hart, Gary Bakewell, Chris O’Neill, and Scot Williams. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iain Softley’s necrophilic semibiopic tinkers with the truth right away, setting up its hero as the archetypal doomed genius by opening with a Liverpool brawl in which Stu receives the head injury that eventually proves fatal. Official accounts say he sustained it much later, tumbling down a flight of stairs in Hamburg; much-reviled biographer Albert Goldman has theorized that he got it in a fight with Lennon himself....

Bruce Goff: Compositions Born in 1904 in Alton, Kansas, to an economically marginal family who had to move frequently, Goff lived in seven different midwestern towns before settling in Tulsa when he was 12 (he died in Texas in 1982). Seeing his interest in drawing, his father apprenticed him to an architectural firm at that young age, and Goff was soon designing his own buildings. By then he’d also written admiring letters to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan....