CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Augusta Read Thomas, composer in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, must know how lucky she is to have Pierre Boulez in her corner. Two winters ago he led the CSO in the debut of a Thomas commission, …Words of the Sea…, and this week he’ll conduct the premiere of another, Orbital Beacons. Boulez’s zeal for new music generates excitement and curiosity even among his players, and his cult following guarantees Thomas receptive audiences....

More black people are buying homes, but they’re all buying in the same places, reports the Woodstock Institute in a recent press release. If anything, home-owner segregation is getting worse. “By 1995-1996, 45 percent of African-American home buyers were moving into neighborhoods in which at least 75 percent of buyers were African-American, compared with only 27 percent in 1990-1991.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Universities are becoming more like athletic shoe companies and less like institutions with transcendent and idealistic values,” according to Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and coauthor of the new book Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education....

By Mike Ervin The post also entails maintaining the official shrine of the Chester A. Arthur Clubs of America in the den of Wolfe’s Downers Grove home. That’s not much work, either. The shrine is, fittingly, as sparse as the legacy of Arthur himself. It consists of a framed portrait of Arthur on the wall, one Chester Arthur ashtray, and one Chester Arthur refrigerator magnet. In the portrait, Arthur resembles a stern headmaster with his 19th-century facial hair and his stodgy three-piece suit....

HAMID DRAKE & MICHAEL ZERANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their mutual fascination with the drum first brought Chicagoans Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang together; their mutual fascination with its long cultural history likely helped inspire the series of two-man percussion concerts with which they’ve marked the last eight winter solstices. At these events, which now routinely sell out long in advance, Drake and Zerang combine art and ritual into performances of solemnity and celebration–and if you don’t think the second two can go together, it’s because you’ve never bid good-bye to the last night of autumn by candlelight and frame drum....

HENRY COWELL’S WHOLE WORLD OF MUSIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Composer and pianist Henry Cowell, born in California 100 years ago, didn’t just break the rules–he wrote new ones. He forever broadened the role of the piano, treating it as an instrument whose strings could be strummed and plucked as well as struck. He encouraged performers to improvise on his scores, some of which were notated in a system he devised himself....

Herd Around Town Call it bovine intervention. This year, from June 15 through October 31, Chicago will host “Cows on Parade,” a public art project that will line our streets with no fewer than 300 near life-size fiberglass cows, decorated by a variety of local artists, architects, and graphic designers. The 90-pound replicas of Swiss dairy cows will be installed on specially crafted concrete pads down Michigan Avenue, throughout the Loop, along Oak Street Beach, and around the new museum campus at the south end of Grant Park; strays may show up as far afield as O’Hare and the Museum of Science and Industry....

NHK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Japan’s love affair with Western classical music began more than a century ago, its orchestras still suffer from the snobbery of critics. Eurocentrism afflicts even Japan’s classical establishment, and many Japanese symphonies have consigned themselves to the shadow of Furtwängler’s Berlin Philharmonic with their devotion to the Germanic styles epitomized by that legendary group. To make matters worse, they tour too infrequently to earn the trust of classical audiences in the West....

Polish Film Festival in America The career of Marcel Lozinski, one of Poland’s most respected documentarians, spans more than 25 years. Lozinski tends to focus on ordinary people and places and finds extraordinary meaning and poetry in the mundane. The first documentary on this program, So That It Doesn’t Hurt, is a follow-up to The Visit, which was shot 24 years ago. The subject of both is Urszula, an intellectual who chose to toil on the family farm in self-imposed isolation....

By Harold Henderson Part-timers rarely have organized, partly because they don’t think of themselves as part-timers and partly because they don’t work together and may not even see each other from one year to the next. But the biggest reason may be that they know how many others are waiting to take their place. Prestigious academic departments across the country continue to pump out new PhDs as if there were a 1980s baby boom for them to teach–when in fact academia has been a buyer’s market for more than a quarter of a century....

The Dodo Bird Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems that whenever homegrown talent like Gary Sinise or John Mahoney returns, everybody gets all warm and sticky about it. Which is fine, except that we too often take for granted the talents of many performers who are every bit those actors’ equals yet have chosen to remain here. Stephan Turner, laboring in relative obscurity for four years now with his Stage Actors Ensemble, is one of the best....

TOMORROWLAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Tomorrowland’s 1998 debut, Sequence of the Negative Space Changes (Kranky), Ann Arborites Nick Brackney and Steve Baker take a scrappy punk approach to space rock, imaginatively transforming limited resources–single-note electric guitar lines, simple keyboard figures–into meditative sheets of sound. A persistent darkness and drifting clouds of corrosive noise keep the beatless proceedings out of Tangerine Dream airspace: the isolation-tank synth surface of “Dustbot” is punctured by slowly intensifying electronic gurgles, while under the ethereal placidity of “Saturn” gently clashing harmonies create a subtle but inescapable tension....

Floyd Collins No, it’s not Titanic: A New Musical, the heavily hyped, big-ticket Broadway behemoth at the Civic Opera House–it’s Floyd Collins at the Goodman Theatre. And just as the Goodman and the Civic are at opposite ends of the Loop, so Floyd Collins and Titanic are polar opposites in terms of quality, originality, and dramatic impact. Where Titanic’s script, by Broadway veteran Peter Stone, relies on caricature and cliche, the book by relative newcomer Tina Landau for Floyd Collins–which she also directs–consistently steers clear of formulas despite the story’s potential for soap-opera sentimentality....

When confronted with Patrick Miceli’s recent art installations–huge piles of fast-food paper cups–most viewers are stunned. “There’s the initial impression it makes,” Miceli says. “A certain immediate kind of visual gut response you get.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miceli admits that trolling for cups has become a compulsion: “I can’t help but wake up at two in the morning and go out and pick up cups....

Michael Flores was a teenage hippie in Atlanta working for an underground newspaper when Otto Preminger’s pro-LSD film Skidoo came out in 1968. The bizarre musical satire, inspired by Preminger’s experience with the drug, pits the square establishment, represented by former hit man Jackie Gleason and his boss, a character named God (Groucho Marx in his last screen role), against a bevy of peaceful, fun-loving hippies. Other cast members include fading stars like Carol Channing, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, Frankie Avalon, Frank Gorshin, Peter Lawford, “and a lot of people who should have known better,” says Flores....

One of the best essay films ever made on a cinematic subject, Thom Andersen’s remarkable and sadly neglected hour-long documentary (1974) adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge’s photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds. Andersen’s perspectives on Muybridge are multifaceted and often surprising (characteristically, the film’s opening quotation is from Mao), and he presents Muybridge’s photographic sequences in various ways to spell out the many meanings of this fascinating precinematic work....

Ethics Roasting on an Open Fire… The Sun-Times’s ardor toward a faithful advertiser knows no bounds. This month it teamed up with Marshall Field’s in a “Find the Jingle Elf Hat” contest, the idea being for readers to scan the paper each day and spot the page on which the jolly cap appears, with a “dream vacation” going to the winner. One of the first places the Jingle Elf Hat showed up was on the head of Paige Smoron at the top of her Camera Obscura column....

Garth Fagan Dance Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Somehow Garth Fagan’s dancers look glassy and fragile despite their obvious tensile strength. Maybe because he often tortures the body into unnatural lines, I fear that his dancers’ legs might snap in two or their torsos be irreversibly twisted. And though Fagan’s unusual style is often accounted for by his diverse background–from his childhood in Jamaica to his experience with both ballet and modern dance–I suspect the uncommon bent of his imagination is its real source....

By Neal Pollack “Mah-lee Mah-lee Mah-lee Mah-lee!” “I need to talk to you,” Mario said. “But I just worked out this payment plan…” “I don’t think that,” she said, “but I don’t understand why you’d be approaching me with this now.” “Why?” she said. “Do you think I have anything up there of value? I have nothing up there!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RPCAN was caught up in a difficult struggle that summer....

By Ben Joravsky The main problem was how to draw the new district’s boundaries without infringing on an incumbent’s territory–a mapmaking nightmare compounded by the fact that Illinois was already losing two congressional seats because its population had dropped in relation to the rest of the country. To make matters worse, the city’s two major Latino enclaves–Humboldt Park and Pilsen–were separated by the Loop and the west side. To link them, cartographers would need what mapmakers like to call a “connector....

Ntozake Shange and Guillermo Gomez-Pena Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week Steppenwolf’s “Traffic” series offers up two high-profile cultural critics, performance artists from America’s ethnic borderlands: Ntozake Shange and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. In an interview this week, series curator Kahil El’Zabar–a percussionist who will accompany Shange’s piece Ellington Is Not a Street–commented that he chose this pairing because, while both artists skillfully skewer racism, there’s still “a sense of the open-ended child in both their spirits....