Excerpted from Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I’d gotten a tattoo as a husky ten year old, it would have been of a hushpuppy and a can of Coke. If I’d waited until fifteen, it would have been a picture of either Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman or Kurt Vonnegut. At eighteen I would have had to choose between Peter Falk as Columbo and Joey Ramone....

This 1996 Swiss documentary about writer Breyten Breytenbach returning to his native South Africa is one of Richard Dindo’s richest and most moving films. From the late 1970s to the early ’80s Breytenbach was imprisoned for resisting the apartheid government; in the ’90s he interrupted a self-imposed exile in Paris to visit the lush landscapes of his childhood, the courtroom where he was tried, and the prisons where he was held....

Tom Greensfelder says identifying himself as a calligrapher provokes a predictable reaction. “It’s sort of like telling people you’re a communist,” Greensfelder says. “They think of it as sort of quaint.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greensfelder began studying calligraphy–everything from uncial, the script of ancient Romans and Irish monks, to the flowing copperplate commonly used today–in the mid-1970s in San Francisco. He studied under Thomas Ingmire, a calligrapher who started taking liberties in his work, experimenting with abstract-expressionist form....

Boxmedia’s Balancing Act Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s got inertia on his side: since graduating from Kalamazoo’s Western Michigan University in 1994 with a bachelor’s in sculpture, Gutzeit’s been moving at the speed of sound. In August of that year he headed for Nagoya, Japan, to study with renowned ceramicist Ryoji Koie on a two-week scholarship. But he had ulterior motives: while in school he’d discovered Japanese noise bands like the Boredoms, Ruins, and Ground Zero, and he wanted to infiltrate their world....

CROWN ROYALS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Old-school funk, soul, and R & B have returned from the 99-cent bin with a vengeance in the last couple years–try to find a soul-music fan who hasn’t heard of the Dusty Groove imprint or jazz funksters the Pharaohs, back from the tomb after more than 20 years. So it’s easy to forget that when the Crown Royals first got together, five years ago, almost everyone who brought the funk used a sampler....

By Leah Bobal Stromberg was the right guy to make something out of nothing. He knew how to go his own way. “I didn’t much care for school,” he remembers. “I was always getting into fights in grammar school. I was one of those obnoxious kids making fart noises in the back of the classroom. Mrs. Levy, my fourth-grade teacher, always called me a non compos mentis congenital idiot. I believed her....

From Limb to Limb This is not exactly the kind of question Bates had in mind. Provoked by accounts of recontextualizing installations by artists like Fred Wilson and James Rosenquist, he was also aware of the fact that many contemporary artists have been inspired by nature. At the same time he knew that many museumgoers “walk into a contemporary exhibit and say, ‘Where is this from? It’s ridiculous.’” He hoped to increase viewers’ appreciation of contemporary art by placing it in a new context....

Factory Girls, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, at the Chopin Theatre. Like Frank McGuinness’s best-known work–the earnest if somewhat trying hostage drama Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me–his play about Irish textile workers who take over their employers’ Donegal office is an appealing actors’ vehicle. But here McGuinness’s characters aren’t chained to a wall, which allows for more physical and emotional interaction. Still, both works have a certain discursive, open-ended quality that somewhat dulls their impact....

Fruits of the Vine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sachs wants to avoid overwhelming his patrons with possibilities. They’ll choose from a carefully edited list of 50 wines–20 reds, 20 whites, 5 sparkling wines, and 5 dessert wines–and have a chance to sample them by the glass. The retail shop will feature graphic displays showing, for instance, a wineglass filled with the different components that suggest the flavor of a chardonnay....

If film is an art, then some of the greatest artworks likely to be screened this year are these short films by Stan Brakhage, now in his fifth decade of filmmaking. One might superficially call them purist films–each is silent and abstract, made by applying paint directly to the film; this is cinema stripped down to its visual essence. But the films’ effect is expansive rather than reductive, messy rather than precise....

You will be my devoted disciple. –from “Through Haunted Caverns,” by the band Ezurate Named after a Dungeons & Dragons demon, Ezurate, a black-metal group from the northern suburbs, has been around for seven years. Its current lineup ranges in age from 17 to 32. They fancy diabolic black-and-white face paint, sport metal-spiked wristbands, and brandish terrifyingly surreal swords and knives. They’ve perfected their showmanship–the only thing they’re missing is a place to put on a show....

JOHN MCLEAN QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you only know John McLean’s guitar work from Patricia Barber’s last three discs, you haven’t heard the half of it. His liquidy, hypnotic countermelodies do in fact play a vital role in Barber’s postjazz aesthetic, but when he roars into overdrive–something he rarely does when he accompanies her–he can electrify a tune or an audience quicker than any jazz musician in Chicago....

By Michael Miner The Sun-Times was ready to report that Snitzer was represented by John George, a former law partner of Mayor Daley and present partner of the mayor’s brother Michael, and by Dennis Aukstik, who’s related by marriage to the Daley family; and that the city’s side of the table was headed by asset-management boss Cosmo Briatta, who’s related by marriage to John Daley, who’s a brother of the mayor, a Cook County commissioner, and the Democratic committeeman of the 11th Ward, where the property’s located....

MAGMA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not to belittle punk’s largely successful efforts to dismantle prog rock’s pretensions, but there are a few things about the prog era that seem rather lovable now–most of all its tolerance, if not outright encouragement, of serious eccentricity. And no prog band was more seriously eccentric than the French band Magma. An underground legend in the States for decades, multi-instrumentalist Christian Vander’s unwieldy ensemble (composed during its heyday of a rotating cast of European rock and jazz players, with Vander and his wife, Stella, the only constants) is probably best known for its early-70s cycle of mind-bogglingly overwrought concept albums, which revolved around space travel between a degenerate, miserable near-future Earth and a paradisial planet called Kobaia and the earthlings’ inability to accept the Kobaians’ message of peace and spiritual enlightenment....

MARC RIBOT Y LOS CUBANOS POSTIZOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago audiences have had the opportunity to hear a lot of genuine Cuban music in the last few years–from original son revivalists Sierra Maestra to modern masters like Los Van Van and Vocal Sampling–so why bother with a small New York combo that proudly calls itself “the fake Cubans”? Because authenticity be damned, Marc Ribot y los Cubanos Postizos (Atlantic) was one of last year’s most consistently entertaining records....

The film segment of the second annual Russian Arts Festival runs Friday through Sunday, November 28 through 30, at First Chicago Center Theater, First National Bank of Chicago, 2 N. Dearborn. Tickets for all programs are $6, students and seniors $2. For more information call 773-734-2619. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Another Russian gangster film,” you may groan at first, as I did at the onset of this feature by writer-director Alexei Balabanov (who made the remarkable 1995 short Trofilm)....

The White Sox took the black clouds and bad weather that seem to have plagued them ever since the 1994 baseball strike and used them as a weapon against the Cubs in Wrigley Field. They practically ran the Cubs off their own ball field in the early going of each game two weeks ago, and whenever the Cubs threatened a comeback the dark forces the Sox know so intimately thwarted it....

SUSAN JAMES 9/25, SCHUBAS I’m not proud of it, but it’s true–women buy self-help books by the truckload, and even those of us who would never fork out cash for the crap have been known to flip through them in the bookstore. The one I’m really waiting for is Smart Women, Foolish Choices, Volume 2: The Music Business, for all those guitar-toting hopefuls who pouted and wailed for a spot on Lilith Fair only to find out that they were going to be accused of having something in common with Jewel....

Released in 1998 after a seven-year ban by the Iranian government, this feature by Dariush Mehrjui explores the psyche of a distressed upper-class woman but also serves as a political parable about Iran’s uneasy class relations. Banoo, abandoned by her philandering husband, invites a homeless gardener and his wife to live in her Tehran mansion, but eventually they begin to take advantage of her kindness, asking their relatives to join them....

Re: “Rush Job,” February 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was astonished, to say the least, that such an article was printed in your “progressive” paper. For a city in such terrible conditions I thought that your writers would be objective in their writings concerning our mayoral candidates. As a concerned native of this city, I felt obligated to inform you that Mr....