Astrong documentary by Dean Bushala and Deirdre Heaslip about gay bashing in Chicago, alternately terrifying and empowering in its matter-of-fact instructiveness about the extent of the problem and the response of local activists–including the Pink Angels street patrol, the Coalition Against Bashing, and Horizon’s antiviolence counseling and court advocacy program. Following many individual cases of violence against gay men and lesbians, the film makes effective use of several local talents: two videos by Charles Christensen, a song by the duo Ellen Rosner & Camille, and black-and-white photographs by Allen Nepomuceno, Paul Vosdic, and Paul Roesch....

Before there was country and western, before there was western swing or even bluegrass, there was music like the Hackberry Ramblers play: rooted in the primitive model harmonies the French Canadians brought to Louisiana over a century ago, eerily joyful and laced with backwoods imagery, as danceable as any music ever to emanate from North America. The Hackberrys’ first incarnation was in 1933; original members Luderin Darbone and Edwin Duhon still anchor the group’s sound, but this is no oldies act or museum piece....

Jan Bartoszek’s choreography unfolds so gently and graciously that it sometimes seems her movement makes its own music. Neither highly theatrical nor completely abstract, Bartoszek’s dances are poignantly human. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They feel familiar yet otherworldly, landscapes of the soul filled with bittersweet emotions. Her new piece, Clearing, Made of Dream, takes its inspiration from the transformation of winter into spring....

JAMES DENMARK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Objects of Affection represents one extreme of Denmark’s art, including as many different forms as possible, jamming them against each other. In this piece he pushes that idea so far that the work hovers on the brink of chaos. But in most of the other collages, audacious contrasts are balanced by an almost classical sense of order....

Commissioned in 1785 by the bishop of Cadiz, Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross, scored for large orchestra, was presented for the first time in that city’s cathedral. Consisting of seven movements framed by a solemn introduction and a thunderous finale depicting the earthquake that followed Jesus’s death, this near masterpiece, which used instrumental music in the nascent sonata form as a means of religious expression, was rather novel for its time....

Separating Church and Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hanson admits the play quotes two sentences from Dianetics, which advocates a form of psychotherapy that aims to help people dispel the unpleasant past. But he believes the attributed quotes are protected speech. “The piece is a satire that really picks more on Catholicism than Scientology,” says Hanson, who was raised a Lutheran and educated by Jesuits....

ALL I NEED TO GET BY Marvin Gaye’s life alone would make a poignant drama: the intensely spiritual son of a loving, supportive mother and a violent, alcoholic, ex-minister father, he used his considerable musical gifts to gain the world but in the process lost his soul–to drugs, paranoia, and obsessive sexual healing–before being shot dead by his father in a petty family dispute. Couple his story with the intense life of his gutsy musical partner Tammi Terrell, and you’ve got a formula for a glorious Hollywood-style show-biz bio: earnest, talented young musicians find themselves through their art, achieve some worldly success, then are tragically cut down by the great divider of friends, Death....

OO OO WA BEAT KITCHEN, JUNE 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The six members of the band, who hail from Dayton and wear suits instead of the requisite Flipper T-shirts or flannel, would be the first to admit that they sometimes fail at bringing to life their idea of well-crafted, melodic guitar music. Their first album, 1993’s Screen Kiss, contained a little too much self-consciously cheesy synth froth for its own good....

THE CHERRY ORCHARD In the play, the genteel Madam Ranevskaya is in danger of losing her beloved family estate and its ancient cherry orchard. She and her family are unable to confront the situation, ignoring the sensible advice of Lopakhin, a family friend. A onetime peasant who became a successful businessman while Ranevskaya was abroad, Lopakhin ends up buying the estate–the place where his father was once a slave. For him this is both a joyous liberation and a stunning betrayal of Ranevskaya, the woman he worships....

Recently I heard about the U.S. Air Force’s new “doomsday machine” called HAARP, for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. From what I understand, the Air Force plans to experiment with blowing a hole in our ionosphere by directing intense high-frequency radio waves at it from somewhere in Alaska. The Air Force “experts” assured the interviewer that such a thing would have no negative impact on our global environment or weather systems....

Confidently, I eyed my opponent across the chessboard. Justin Sandler’s head of unruly blond hair barely rose above the table where we sat. I had to chuckle to myself at his poise and seriousness as he set up the pieces. After all, I was playing chess before his father was born. I’d competed against another human being no more than three times in the past 30 years, but chess, I thought, was a lot like roller-skating: once you catch on you never forget....

Late in Ajax Dans le Boulevard du Crime, Dial Performance Group’s debut production, a woman as alluring and aloof as Isabella Rossellini appears on a tiny makeshift stage bathed in blue light and hums into a microphone that she’s “looking for a strange and beautiful world.” You may find such a world in this poetic, puzzling hour-long work, as mysterious, disturbing, and visually arresting as the grotesque reveries of the great Polish directors Tadeusz Kantor and Leszka Madzika....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reading Mr. Kramer’s review I was convinced that Philadelphia is a horrible movie–hypocritical in tone and in fact, only a cheap shot at PWA’s and those with life threatening complications caused by the HIV virus, and all in all a miserable attempt by Hollywood finally to produce a “mainstream” gay movie. And yes, I wanted to read Mr....

PLACIDO DOMINGO, KALLEN ESPERIAN, AND THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his arena concerts Domingo has an established formula: he teams up with a young, appealing soprano, a minor-league conductor, and an orchestra that accompanies the singers and plays a couple of operatic overtures as filler. Taking turns with the soprano, he performs a few popular arias, and they join in some duets....

Art Groups: To Market, to Market Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now under the guidance of director Julie Franz, the Arts Marketing Center will finally release its first report on the “state of the arts” next month. The report will focus on developing larger audiences for classical music, theater, the visual arts, and dance. It was written by Kellogg professor Bob Calder, who came on board when the center was still slated to open at Northwestern....

When an 18-year-old Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Audubon disembarked in New York in 1803, the landscape that stretched away to the west must have struck him as huge in every way. From the Appalachians to the Mississippi Valley stretched a forest of immense trees. In the bottomlands, the sycamores and tulip trees grew large enough that pioneer families could live in their hollowed boles. Beyond the forest lay the seemingly endless prairie with its brown tides of bison....

Danger: Revisionists at work. Raymond Bonner doesn’t want to talk about the lumps he picked up in the early 80s in El Salvador. But the two papers that made his life difficult back then have taken to massaging the past, each faulting the other but not itself. From the point of view of the White House, the timing of this article was intolerable. Bonner wrote that the carnage appeared to be the responsibility of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, the first trained by American advisers....

On Mother’s Day we met Afsaneh Rahimian at Gethsemane Garden Center on North Clark, adopting basil to nurture alongside her live ratatouille of eggplant and tomatoes. Her pea-in-the-pod look announced ready-to-sprout. But experts from our fashion nursery took a couple of cuttings to determine its family, genus, and species. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sign of a healthy pregnancy, the simple maternity dress is delivered complete with capacious gathers, easy-entry side buttons, and let-it-all-stick-out construction....

I exit the el at Clark and Lake, buy 19 dollars and 20 cents worth of stamps at the postal branch inside the James R. Thompson Center, and step outside onto the pink granite sidewalk lining La Salle Street. I’ve come here on a nature pilgrimage. Precisely 161 years and one month ago, on October 6, 1834, the last bear in Chicago was killed in this vicinity, and I’ve come to trace the path of its last few moments of life....

Gentle readers: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All this vitriol [Letters, February 18] directed at Steve Albini is uncalled for. While I concede his conceit, it must be admitted that compromising one’s principles for the sake of popularity is, at the very least, tacky. In his defense, I would like to share an incident that speaks to Mr. Albini’s credentials as a true artist who refuses to sell out....