Twice a year for the last several years, sculptor Vernon Willits has made the trip from his home in Davenport, Iowa, to the Judy Saslow Gallery on Superior Street. He drives the 180 miles in a pickup truck loaded with artwork. Saslow is a fan of Angel’s sculptures, and so are her customers. “People are responding very well to a variety of his works, and I’m delighted,” she says. “He’s been one of our more popular artists....

Kate and Anna McGarrigle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kate and Anna McGarrigle came of age in Canada in the 60s, when young folksingers were blending traditional themes with a forward-looking lyrical inventiveness that had previously been shunned by more traditional-minded folkies. Their music can evoke a sense of place with almost mystical reverence–the songs on their current CD, Matapedia, are propelled by gentle but insistent cadences that often sound as if they were absorbed from Quebec’s Matapedia River itself, much as Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” was meant to bring to mind the Montreal harbor where a venerable mariner’s church looks over the Saint Lawrence River....

LULLABY FOR THE WORKING CLASS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the band’s new album, I Never Even Asked for Light (Bar/None), in his best bored Stephen Malkmus drawl, Lullaby for the Working Class guitarist Ted Stevens sings, “Critics will always make categories to keep their words moving in circles.” He might be responding to all the No Depression tags stuck to the band after its striking debut, Blanket Warm, which apart from the bevy of acoustic instruments on it had nil to do with country music....

Mexican Cinema: Literature in Film A young man falsely implicated in a murder flees Mexico City and hides in a small town with his rich uncle, but the uncle’s other family members fear the visitor will deprive them of their inheritance. Roberto Sneider wrote and directed this 1995 comedy, adapting a novel by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. (7:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Luis Carlos Carrera’s 1993 adaptation of a comic novel by Sergio Pitol chronicles four stormy decades of a bourgeois marriage....

Of Civil Wrongs & Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This immensely moving 1999 film documents the legal battle waged by Fred Korematsu, a young blue-collar worker, against the forced relocation of American citizens of Japanese descent to internment camps during World War II. Through skillful selection, director Eric Paul Fournier revitalizes the tired conventions of the historical documentary, constructing a compelling narrative from montages of talking heads along with photographs, archival footage, and brief, understated reenactments....

When Robin Barcus went to be interviewed as a volunteer for an art program at Irene’s, a daytime women’s shelter in Wicker Park where women can create art as a form of therapy, one of the first things she saw was the paintings of Barbara Jean Lindsay. “When I walked into that shelter and I saw her artwork papering the walls,” says Barcus, a 1993 graduate of the School of the Art Institute, “I felt the same way I do when I walk into a gallery and see an artist that really clicks....

Ruth Page Dance Series at the Athenaeum Theatre, February 26-27 and March 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These were the pleasures to be found at the Ruth Page Dance Series. A collaboration between singer Joseph Cerqua and dancer Wilfredo Rivera for the Cerqua Rivera Art Experience, Mood Swing is based on an idea so perfectly executed that the dance starts to morph into something else....

There won’t be any sex at “Sex Party,” says Rebekah Levine. But it will be a party, with beer and dancing and music. Levine and Vincent Darmody, members of a four-person collaborative called Law Office, have asked male artists with some knowledge of pornography to build “fantasy spaces that they find they identify with sexually.” The four resulting porn sets, which can be viewed and entered, will provide the decor for this 21-and-over art event taking place Saturday from 11 PM to 2:45 AM at 1542 N....

SMOKIN’ GROOVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In its first two years the Smokin’ Grooves package tour was top-heavy with hip-hop, but it did make an attempt to reach out, tossing in Ziggy Marley and Spearhead in 1996 and George Clinton and Erykah Badu in ’97. This year organizers haven’t bothered with even the pretense of inclusiveness, but the lineup is so formidable it probably doesn’t matter....

PROMISE RING 1/30, METRO It took me a few listens to recognize this zircon in the rough, but now I’m sold on the ragged power-pop charms of this Milwaukee quartet’s Nothing Feels Good (Jade Tree). Derivative but sincere, grandiose but disarming–if Philip K. Dick was right, Paul Westerberg is making records like this in a parallel universe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CASH MONEY 1/31, EMPTY BOTTLE This free “customer appreciation” show kicks off with a couple of shit kickers, guitarist and singer John Humphrey and drummer Scott Giampino....

Neal Pollack, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It took me a while to warm up to this older fellow who was at every rock show or party that I attended in the early 90s Wicker Park community. He shook my hand sort of funny (by pressing his thumb between my thumb and forefinger) and he was always wearing sweaters that Bill Cosby wouldn’t even puke up, let alone wear, and he had a weird cartoony voice that I’d try to imitate when drunk, stumbling home....

Excerpted from: What those vintage vamps knew all too well was that smacking a man’s face is the best way to put him in his place–and not just on the big screen. Movie queens were legendary face slappers, but it wasn’t only the glam goddesses doing the slapping back when. Whether you were a movie queen or a shop girl, you didn’t take guff from the guys. And if a fellow tried to get fresh, you yanked off your glove, hauled off and stung him across the kisser....

The Next Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billings managed to cut a demo tape, and earlier this week at Gentry on Halsted she celebrated the release of her debut CD, Being Alive, on the local jazz label Southport Records. The collection of ballads and up-tempo tunes includes the Gershwins’ “I Got Rhythm,” Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run,” and the title song by Stephen Sondheim....

Jonathon Romain says he emerged from seven years in prison “untarnished.” But his paintings–many of them powerful depictions of black men, women, and children in a state of meditation or contemplation–are shaped by his experiences serving time. The works are representations of the inner strength the artist needed to turn his life around in prison. “I don’t think it was a good thing. I think it was a bad thing that I took advantage of,” he says....

Friday 9/24 – Thursday 9/30 Before Our Bodies, Ourselves, some women got their information from a series of books aimed at housewives called Woman Alive. The guides explained “things like how to deal with a husband who does a lot of business travel; how to feed the kids, clean the house, and think about a career; and what to do if your husband leaves you,” says writer Allen Conkle, who started collecting the books after tripping across one in a thrift store several years back....

Friday 12/22 – Thursday 1/4 23 SATURDAY The winter solstice was actually Thursday, but the folks at Charybdis Multi-Arts Complex are marking the change of seasons this weekend with a blowout that promises pagan rituals, music, trance dancing, a drum circle, a community altar, plenty of seasonal art, and the chance to play in or on the venue’s attractions, which include a 30-foot slide, basketball court, and game room. Attendees are encouraged to bring “something to pound on” and vials of water, which will be poured together “to signify that there really are no boundaries between us,” says Charybdis founder Gregor Mortis....

THRUSDAY 1:00 PM Big John Dickerson 4:00 PM J.B. Ritchie Guitarist Special arrived as cofounder of Big Twist & the Mellow Fellows and stuck it out with that popular group until shortly after Twist’s untimely demise in 1990. While most of the other Fellows now do business as the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings, who’ve backed several vocalists now, Special sings in front of his own outfit; unfortunately his gravelly voice and derivative guitar style were more tolerable coming from a sideman....

Christopher O’Riley Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Christopher O’Riley, a Chicago native in his mid-40s, was a rocker in junior high and then a jazz keyboardist before settling on the classical repertoire. He began playing when he was four, but all along he resisted the prodigy’s usual pressure-cooker career. He collected a top prize at the 1981 Van Cliburn competition–classical piano’s seal of approval–but didn’t come into his own until the early 90s, when he got a grant to play with various groups at Lincoln Center....

Fearless Leader Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fitzpatrick, dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia, had good reason to feel disoriented, given the haste of his appointment. Just three weeks ago he received a call from an executive headhunter who asked if he would be interested in pursuing the directorship. With no museum experience, Fitzpatrick will take over an institution racked by firings and resignations and suffering from a leadership vacuum created when director Kevin Consey announced that he would leave this fall....

The films of young Bay Area artist Steve Polta have the trappings of generic avant-garde cinema–fuzzy, abstract images often accompanied by an ambient sound track–but they’re genuinely entrancing, actively engaging the viewer in piecing them together. In his sound films, vague blobs of color and the occasional hint of a landscape combine with sounds that could be trains or cars, implying movement through space and enlivening the dark areas of the frame by suggesting unseen action....