Last year’s Chicago International Film Festival was the best in my eight years of living here. But now in its 31st year the festival seems to be sliding back toward some of its past problems. I don’t want to sound too alarmist about an event that’s showing several indispensable works, most of which would be impossible to see without the festival’s initiative. At least half are U.S. premieres, and we all should be properly grateful for this bounty....

Finding Water Like many performance artists, Wilson was first trained not in theater, dance, or time arts but in two-dimensional art. He came to Chicago armed with a merit scholarship in photography. But once he arrived he found himself spending more time on performance than on photography, collaborating with such artists as Mark Alice Durant, in Men of the World, and Robyn Orlin as well as other art students in site-specific performances....

When the great heat wave hit, I sought refuge in an air-conditioned movie theater. I perused the listings to find the film that would best be illuminated by my critical acumen. The choice was obvious: Species. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You could perform the same academic exercise by screening Donaldson’s new film back-to-back with the original Alien. In Species scientists combine extraterrestrial DNA with human DNA and create a friendly humanitarian with magical powers and an insatiable desire to do good....

Essential viewing: an intimate hour-long self-portrait on film, JLG by JLG, plus the third and fourth episodes of Godard’s ongoing video series Histoire(s) du cinema, each half an hour long; all three works were completed this year. Ostensibly a work of winter landscapes and brooding self-scrutiny, somewhat suggestive of German romanticism, the beautifully composed JLG occasionally gives you the uncomfortable feeling that Godard may be starting to fancy himself someone like Goethe, though he does include at least a couple of his characteristic ingenue employees, one of them in hot pants, along with a blown-up photograph of himself as a boy and various empty notebooks labeled with the first names of directors he admires: Roberto (Rossellini), Boris (Barnet), Nicholas (Ray), and Jacques (Rivette?...

By Patrick Lohier He put out the second issue by himself the next spring. “It was basically a flop. I put it together in one or two nights during finals. The two issues had come out fairly quickly, and while they weren’t good, they weren’t bad.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When O’Leary graduated in 1993 he came to Chicago, and for two years he worked for Morningstar entering data....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read with special interest the Hot Type piece on Jack Hafferkamp in the June 24 issue. Jack was my intro professor at Medill during the winter 1993 quarter, and I have only good things to say about him and his teaching methods. Jack’s support and encouragement were part of what got me through that difficult first quarter, and his sense of humor enlivened the course’s often-tedious pace....

There were 18 seconds left to play, the Bulls were up a point in Orlando against the Magic, and the ball was in Michael Jordan’s hands. Moving low to the ground and in that distinctively fluid, floppy fashion of his, he dribbled past Nick Anderson and across center court. At that moment, however, everyone watching in the stands and on television saw what was about to happen–everyone, that is, except Jordan....

Recently I heard about ear candling [March 10] from a friend and, ever on the prowl for novel ways to rid myself of earwax, decided to investigate. My friend’s mother and sister had tried ear candling and were enthusiastic about its virtues. One ecstatic earwax remover reported that a “gumball-sized” glob of earwax was recovered after the procedure. That was incentive enough for me. Sure enough, inserting and burning an ear candle produced yellow, stinky wax in the stub of the candle tube....

On a cross-country drive with nothing to occupy my time but fuzzy AM radio and a pocket cassette recorder, I came up with the following questions: (1) In McDonald’s commercials, I can figure out that Mayor McCheese is a cheeseburger and Hamburglar is a hamburger. But what the hell is Grimace? (2) What organs can you live without, if you really had to? How much could I sell them for? –Nep Smith, Los Angeles...

On a cold, spring day I was accompanied by architects Uriel Schlair and Jerrold McIlvain and two Park District engineers into a great stone grotto few Chicagoans have ever seen. We entered the only way possible: by climbing a ladder, then descending through a manhole into a kind of crawl space, and worming along painfully through several openings before entering a large, circular, concrete cavern. In the middle of this area is a tangle of ancient, rusted pipes forming a central shaft rising up through the ceiling....

IN A CORNER THE SKY SURRENDERS . . . Though Orlin is largely unknown in this country, she was a well known presence in South Africa, where she taught, performed, and choreographed for over 20 years. Because of apartheid, she–and many other visual and performing artists–were unable to bring their work out of the country. (This performance was offered in conjunction with Northwestern’s exhibit of visual art, “Displacements: South African Works on Paper, 1984-1994....

Taking its name from the Tower Building at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee–commonly called the Coyote Building because it once housed the Coyote Gallery–this multimedia arts event includes a sizable theater and performance component (coordinated by Wm. Bullion, director of Sliced Bread Productions, with Stephanie Beu) that lays claim to being Chicago’s only entirely free theatrical festival. Running September 9 through 12, Around the Coyote features plays and performance pieces by 22 different companies, teams, and solo artists (most but not all human) at four different venues: the Eclipse Theatre Company, 2074 N....

Lisa Buscani tells stories the way Dorothy Parker wrote–by opening a vein and letting it flow. And like Parker Buscani tempers her mostly autobiographical tales with a bitter, pointed wit that skewers sentimentality. Her sweet recollection of a childhood trip to a petting zoo ends with her almost being mauled by several cuddly, ravenous lambs. She reduces Hitchcock’s art, as revealed in The Birds, to “tits and fear.” The stories in this show are collected around the general theme of animals and animallike behavior....

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello & the Attractions play sold-out shows this Saturday, a circumstance that provokes consideration of how well the class of 1977 has kept its early promise to reinvent pop music. The Pistols’ Johnny Rotten once represented a genuinely frightening antisocial impulse; he talked about the death of rock music, but he sounded like he was rooting for humanity’s extinction....

Grant Park Music Fest Dumps Gift Horse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grant Park Music Festival executive director James Palermo says that the festival simply needed more money than the society was capable of raising. “We are appreciative of their contributions over the years, but it wasn’t enough for the sustained growth of the festival,” he says, claiming that the society never contributed more than around $150,000 annually for artistic programming....

GRIFTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their new album, Ain’t My Lookout (Sub Pop), Memphis’s Grifters deliver more of the straight-up rock grittiness they served in a smaller dose on last year’s Eureka EP–this time reconciling the divergent strains (hook-laden pop, mangled power chords, sonic collisions) that made their musical tension stand out initially. With three accomplished songwriters the band’s never been at a loss for ideas, but in the past any potential impact has been frequently blown away by sluggish sonic density and senseless chaos....

Charles Masters’s father was never able to show his son what he did in World War II. The movies of the 1950s had plenty of fighter planes and tanks, but there were never any gliders. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Someone once said, ‘If there’s a book you really want to read and it hasn’t been written, then you should write it yourself,’” says Masters, who’s devoted nearly all of his free time during the past four years to researching and writing Glidermen of Neptune: The American D-Day Glider Attack, which has been published by Southern Illinois University Press and goes on sale this week....

For most of his adult life Larry Gorski was the consummate outsider. Outside because there were plenty of public buildings he couldn’t enter and lots of public services (buses, for example) he couldn’t use. Outside because he could do little to alter a system that, in his view, regarded him and those like him as pitiful victims. But Gorski, a shrewd, aggressive man, has never been one to brood over tragedy and injustice....

TOMMY FLANAGAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Flanagan had found a new piano waiting for him at the Showcase, not new off the factory line but new to the club–a seven-foot grand, and not just a grand but a Steinway, a piano that would list out at more than many of us make in a year. In other words, a serious piano. A marvelous piano....

“Community policing,” the new doctrine here in Chicago, is hard to get a grip on. Sentiment conjures up the amiable constable of yesteryear strolling down an urban lane, woolgathering with local merchants while cocking an eye at young miscreants gathered on the corner. Nor is community policing the age-old practice of working a string of informants. Hermann scoffs at a Sun-Times article that gushed, “Thanks to community policing, a tip from a neighbor led to the arrests,” and at a Tribune piece–on a cop who set up anonymous drop boxes–that explained, “It’s one man’s variation on the concept of community policing....