This second program in the MCA’s “Made in Chicago: Independent Films” series (the last four programs of which will also be screened this weekend) consists of 11 short “lyrical” films. The lyrical tradition in independent filmmaking can be dated to the 1950s, to the work of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, and others who pioneered the use of the first-person camera to express the filmmaker’s subjective visions. But most of the films on this program have a more ambivalent take on the idea of the personal....

Maureen Fleming and Loretta Livingston Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If contortionists make your stomach churn, you won’t like Maureen Fleming. Ditto if you’re offended by nudity onstage. But if you’re a fan of the human body’s abstract beauty–of its rolling, shifting planes, ridges, and bumps–Fleming’s solo After Eros should be a treat. A New Yorker who was born in Japan, Fleming’s twisting, iceberg-slow style of movement has been influenced by butoh–and in press materials she talks about an injury from a car accident in Japan when she was two (which her mother told her about) caused by a bicyclist who rode away laughing....

Angels in America “Very Steven Spielberg,” gasps the prophetic gay AIDS patient in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as the rumbling approach of a winged messenger causes the walls of his New York apartment to shake. In the 1993 Broadway premiere of Kushner’s “gay fantasia on national themes,” the moment was Spielbergian indeed, transforming the stage of the Walter Kerr Theatre into a three-dimensional movie screen. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Notes From Underground Wells once designed conventional factories, offices, churches, libraries, and laboratories. “In the 1950s I was a typical successful suburban architect,” says the 74-year-old, who earlier this month left his Cape Cod home and office to speak at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, on West Burton Place. “I called myself a conservationist architect, but it was pure baloney. I made a lot of money and never thought a thought....

As an art student at Columbia University seven years ago, Wendy Clinard visited a dance studio to sketch a friend who was practicing. She picked up her charcoal and positioned her sketch pad in her lap as the strains of flamenco guitar filled the studio. The dancer’s feet began to move: bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those two worlds, ancient Greek mythology and flamenco, have never been seen together onstage in Chicago....

The Rhino in Winter The Queen of Bakersfield & Other Tales of Dust & Moonlight Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dolphinback Theatre Company’s artistic director KellyAnn Corcoran performs writer Greg Owens’s “loose collection of stories and songs [exploring] the well-mined world of trailer parks, beehive hairdos, and Elvis worship. To Owens’s credit, he also captures a far less discussed side of blue-collar life–its unwed mothers, suicidal depression, and diminishing job opportunities....

Dirty Three The first part is undeniably true. In fact, for Low’s overweeningly delicate performance–which made Big Star’s Sister Lovers sound like the Stooges’ Fun House–the management would have done better to provide hot chocolate and warm beds. The second part is an amazing leap of logic. The Dirty Three, an instrumental trio from Melbourne, Australia, are nothing if not a shit-kicking rock ‘n’ roll band, with the hard-living looks and reflexive twitches of compulsive musicians–drummer Jim White probably struck as many beats while warming up as Low’s Mimi Parker did during an entire set....

My next-door neighbors just had a baby, announcing the birth with a pink lawn sign that says, “It’s a girl!” However, the space where you’re supposed to fill in the name of the baby was left blank. When my sister and her friend Jenn asked why it was blank, I suggested that maybe our neighbors hadn’t picked out a name yet. Jenn responded to this with “Babies can’t leave the hospital until they have names....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. ROB ANDERLIK hosts an open mike. Saturday, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 909 N....

VIENTO DE AGUA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Building its music from the native forms of Puerto Rico but transcending provincialism, New York’s Viento de Agua is the ideal modern salsa group. On its debut, De Puerto Rico al Mundo (Agogo/Qbadisc), the group makes effortless connections, mixing various Latin styles and playing the blend with a sharp contemporary edge. All of the songs on the young group’s debut are either bomba, the Puerto Rican equivalent of the voice-and-percussion dominated African rumba, or plena, a more lyrical, Spanish-flavored style that was originally employed to tell stories and spread news....

Working Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since its 1977 world premiere at the Goodman Theatre, this quirky, engaging concept musical has had a somewhat checkered career. Despite the involvement of some high-powered talent–including Stephen Schwartz, composer of Godspell–the show never really caught on with New York tastemakers when it transferred to the Big Apple. It wasn’t glitzy enough to compete with the likes of A Chorus Line and Schwartz’s own Pippin, nor did it have a compelling central story; it was hard to pinpoint its identity because of its musical eclecticism....

A Survivor! Christmas, Zeppo Theater Company, at the Beat Kitchen. The third in Zeppo’s series of end-of-the-year musicals is yet another sparkling foray into giddily obvious humor. Writer-director George Brant ties his send-up of the real-TV hit into the holidays with a premise that’s both hilariously stupid and ingenious: the contestants compete on Christmas day against the ultimate ringer–Jesus. With music by Paige Coffman, this is more a pageant than a show–but a highly entertaining one....

ANDY BEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When velvet-voiced baritone Andy Bey released last year’s ravishing Shades of Bey (Evidence), he overcame the second-biggest obstacle on his road back to grace after two decades of obscurity: he proved that Ballads, Blues & Bey, the 1996 album announcing his return, hadn’t been a fluke. Even those of us who fondly remember his work from the 70s never saw this one coming....

By Tori Marlan Donna wanted to believe that the bee venom would make her well. Two years before, when she was 28, she’d learned that she had multiple sclerosis. Myelin, the fatty tissue that surrounds and protects nerve fibers, had broken down in her central nervous system, hindering the flow of nerve impulses to and from her brain. Symptoms of multiple sclerosis can range from numbness to paralysis. The course of the disease varies; it’s often characterized by random waves of attacks and remissions....

The 10th or 11th time DanCBS/PeterABC/TomNBC told me the massacre in Littleton, Colorado, was especially horrific because it happened in a high school, “somewhere children feel safe,” I started screaming at the television. What high school were they talking about? I went to three, and in none of them did I for a moment feel safe. High school was terrifying, and it was the casual cruelty of the popular kids–the jocks and the princesses–that made it hell....

wilson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know obnoxious rhetorical questions from the “Dept. of Clear Thinking” aren’t supposed to be answered, but here’s a try. First of all, one might normally think that handguns everywhere are somehow associated with handgun violence, but that’s probably my muddy liberal brain at work again. Perhaps more important is the fact that under a 1995 law Philadelphia is required to grant a concealed handgun permit to any law-abiding citizen, and since that time the number of concealed permits has increased tenfold....

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur Certainly the elements are here for a great Williams play: dreams, dashed hopes, neurosis, and vulgar reality with all its disappointing compromises. Williams’s setting, in the working-class squalor of south Saint Louis, is reminiscent of the downwardly mobile neighborhoods of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. And the characters in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur remind us of Williams’s earlier, better conceived heroines....

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Errol Morris’s best film to date–a clear advance on Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, The Thin Blue Line, and A Brief History of Time–alternates interviews with four unconnected individuals: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a mole-rat specialist, and a robot scientist. The result is more a poem than a documentary, made coherent by Morris’s formal precision: he links found footage with the interviews, black and white with color, in a dreamlike continuity that invites the viewer to trace his or her own connections....

GRIFTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twenty-five years ago the Rolling Stones were making the best music of their career, having transcended their blues influences to create a dangerous-sounding new strain of rock. Now they’re desperately trying to shake off the moss, hiring hot producers like the Dust Brothers and Danny Saber to inject their feeble new Bridges to Babylon with a shot of the latest youth tonic....

NICHOLAS PAYTON QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The modern jazz roster brims with accomplished trumpeters, largely because Wynton Marsalis–the influential progenitor of the 90s’ blast to the past–happens to play that instrument. But the youngest player on the A-list, Nicholas Payton, could well eclipse them all. His first appearances begged comparisons to Louis Armstrong: he, too, hails from New Orleans, and he can effortlessly summon Armstrong’s vulcanized tone and brash strut....