MARSHALL CRENSHAW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suppose Marshall Crenshaw’s moment has passed–though to be fair, it was probably already gone by the time the pop rocker started his career, playing John Lennon in the Beatlemania stage show in the late 70s. But for what it’s worth, his eponymously titled 1982 debut album and its follow-up, 1983’s Field Day (both on Warner Brothers), are still two of the best pop records ever made, tartly sentimental and consciously crafty, with jangling guitars, old-fashioned harmonies, and punchy production....

Antony and Cleopatra Chicago Shakespeare Theater There’s nothing remotely punk about the Chicago Shakespeare Theater now—after all, punk doesn’t pay the bills. And there’s nothing sassy or slapdash about the new venue’s inaugural production, Gaines’s staging of Antony and Cleopatra. Unfortunately there’s little that’s provocative either, though the show has stylishness to spare. Sleek, well paced, technically impressive, this Antony and Cleopatra is a thoroughly competent piece of stagecraft that nevertheless lacks excitement, poetic beauty, and tragic depth....

By Ben Joravsky He has always, he says, been a man of modest means. “I was born in Nashville, I went to school at the Art Institute, and for a while I lived in Dallas, when I worked in the art department at Neiman Marcus. I came back to Chicago in the early 50s because I liked it here. I was never rich. It’s always been a struggle.” The more Creasman thought about it, the angrier he got....

In reference to the article “Raising a Stink” [Schools, December 20], the comment about labor-management cooperation was made (since I made it) because some union members feel that deals are being made at the expense of the workers. We need worker unity for our needs (the rank and file union members) and for quality free public education for all children. States and federal government should fund equal education for all school districts, with elected school boards, and no vouchers....

SNOOKY PRYOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harpist Snooky Pryor is a member of that fabled generation of Mississippians who descended upon Chicago in the 40s and helped define the burgeoning urban blues movement; his recordings on such labels as Planet, Old Swingmaster, and J.O.B. stand as some of the finest examples of the style ever waxed. He’s never felt the need to update his sound, and he shouldn’t: His harmonica tone is muscular and supple, and his improvisations, though somewhat elemental, are seasoned with strategically placed trills, warbles, and bends....

Tap gods is more like it. Despite their T-shirts and jeans, their flapping flannel and rips and baseball caps, these six men constitute a tap pantheon. Every element of the show mythologizes them: the music that underscores their moves, the lighting that punctuates shifts and climaxes in the choreography, and most of all the ingenious transformable set, which frames their figures and amplifes their tapping at every turn. But like the stevedores and plantation workers who were the first tap dancers, these guys are also laborers: they build the set themselves, carting around metal slabs, hauling on ropes, carrying buckets of water....

The Silent Movie, One Reel Productions, at Donny’s Skybox Studio. Silent-film fans and anyone looking for a merry exercise in expert improv will be well served by this enormously engaging, very clever hour of vaudeville complete with title cards, live piano accompaniment, and villains with handlebar mustaches. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part love note, part nudge in the ribs, the show (first presented at this year’s Around the Coyote by Chicago Improv Festival producer Jonathan Pitts) takes an easy target for irreverent improv–what with the exaggerated facial expressions, easy emotions, and grand gestures of silent film–and turns it into a delightful romp....

TOMMY MUELLNER QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tommy Muellner’s relative obscurity proves how vast the galaxy of Chicago jazz really is: only a whole lot of stellar talent could keep the public from noticing a pianist and tunesmith of Muellner’s magnitude. But local musicians have sung his praises for years, and ex-Chicagoan Ira Sullivan has been spreading the gospel since discovering him on a return visit a few years back....

By Ben Joravsky About two years ago Mell came up with the idea of building a mix of homes, light industry, and a school on the site. The school would be a new building for Inter-American Magnet, a highly regarded public grade school now located in Lakeview. That part of the plan seemed to have the most support. Inter-American’s parents and staff were eager to move, as they’d long ago outgrown their building at 919 W....

By S.L. Wisenberg It must be a sign of age not to know anyone throwing a Halloween party. In my 20s everybody was always having parties, and in grad school, costume parties for no reason. We’d dress up as the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy or Free-Floating Anxiety. (Free-Floating Anxiety told me later that she would beat her head against walls, literally.) We even had a prom. I made a dance card and collected the signatures of my partners, sure at least a few of them would be famous someday....

AMADOU & MARIAM, FREDERIC GALLIANO & AFRICAN DIVA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most famous singers of Malian blues, Ali Farka Toure and Habib Koite, have been celebrated for the soul-stirring purity of their work, but Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia, a married duo who met as teenagers at a school for the blind, are notable for the opposite. On their 1998 album, Sou ni Tile (Tinder), and their most recent work, Tje ni Mousso (a French import on Polydor), they use a full band to flesh out circular, repetitive guitar riffs with a diverse array of approaches....

By Elana Seifert According to Carroll, when he and Elenz asked to rent a cottage for this summer they were turned down by the board. “Suddenly it was personal,” says Nannette Graham. She sent letters to the board; to Bishop Joseph Sprague, who oversees the Methodist church’s Northern Illinois Conference; and other NIC officials. She and her husband also told the board that they were giving Carroll and Elenz keys to their cottage and would put up a pink neon sign in the window that read “Reconciling Cottage–Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgenders Welcome....

Friday 11/10 – Thursday 11/16 “I’ve made up a myth in my life that anytime you push yourself through something uncomfortable, say a snowstorm and you don’t have boots on, then you will get the job, because you have been so doggedly good or so stupid or you just know when to push on,” says the protagonist of Eileen Myles’s debut novel, Cool for You, shortly after landing a job in a mental ward....

The sixth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, August 13 through 19, at the Village, 1548 N. Clark. Tickets for most programs are $6; a $25 pass will admit you to five regular programs, and a $75 pass will admit you to all festival screenings and events. For more information call 773-866-8660. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended. SATURDAY, AUGUST 14 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song...

Cuban Snowball Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every few years, it seems, this country gets caught up in the “exotic” music of some foreign land–as in the African music explosion ushered in by Paul Simon’s Graceland, the Irish music deluge that resulted from Riverdance, or the current fascination with Brazilian tropicalia stoked by David Byrne. Now, thanks to Cooder, it’s Cuba’s turn. What’s different about Buena Vista Social Club, however, is that for the most part the musicians are unknown in their own land, and the style of music they play was rapidly dissolving into distant memory before the album caught fire....

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 (Rhino) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new Rhino box set Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 packages the first-ever CD issue of the original Nuggets with three more discs that serve as its long-promised sequels. Together they draw a darn-near complete map of the origins of what Kaye, in the original liner notes, called “punk rock....

JACK THE DOG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The practice of making new music based on traditional religious forms has a considerable legacy–take Arvo Part’s Litany, Cantus, and Psalom, or the vocal pieces for Greek Orthodox communion that John Taverner wrote in the 70s. From a less reverent region of the experimental tradition, Chicago’s own Jack the Dog set out in December 1996 to compose a complete Roman Catholic mass....

For Mad Shak Dance Company’s fifth anniversary, artistic director Molly Shanahan looked to the past to prepare for the future. She’s completely reworked the full-evening piece with which the troupe debuted in Chicago in 1994, Glass Slipper Totem, which she describes as a coming-of-age dance about the fragility and ephemerality of our culture’s indicators of maturity and success. But deconstructing the Cinderella story is now only a small part of the work, which Shanahan has also cut in half: this tight, elegant piece evokes the bewilderment, losses, and troublesome conformity of youth through movement that sometimes seems weary and isolated (a dancer wipes her face with one hand) and sometimes violent and ritualistic (kneeling dancers swipe the floor over and over with one finger, loudly chanting unintelligible phrases in unison)....

Artist Don Stahlke began using food as a medium four years ago. At first he used a tattooing machine to inscribe tiny images on fresh produce. As the fruit rotted and dried, the tattooed images–animals, skulls, family portraits–shrunk and acquired the mysterious quality of petroglyphs. In a gallery exhibit two years ago Stahlke showed the fruit alongside miniature etchings on cats’ and dogs’ teeth. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Pedal Power At the front of the small, cluttered store Tim Herlihey lounges on a seat that might have been extracted from an old Volkswagen van. He talks softly on the phone, discussing the possibility of teaching basic bicycle repair to members of a neighborhood organization. He hardly seems revolutionary. But Herlihey, owner of Uptown’s Urban Bikes, is a self-described anarchist-entrepreneur. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three years ago drug dealers used the same storefront to sell crack....