Violent mood swings are the dominant feature of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16, which Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is giving its U.S. premiere in the company’s fall engagement downtown. The music ranges from a Dean Martin song to cha-cha and mambo tunes to a heavy-metal version of “Havah Nagilah.” The always inventive choreography is similarly schizoid–sometimes humorous, sometimes introspective, sometimes angry and militant. But I don’t mean to suggest that Naharin’s channel-flipping approach is casual or unmotivated: it seems he might be speculating on groupthink versus individual experience....

JOHN SCOFIELD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s still no creative daredevil, but you gotta hand it to John Scofield. It would have been easy for him to maintain his stature as the guitar geek’s jazz guitarist, churning out one funk-fusion album after another as he did throughout the 80s. Instead, this decade he’s made an effort to shake things up. He worked with the great saxophonist Joe Lovano to develop one of the finer postbop groups of the 90s (Scofield, it should be remembered, played with Mingus as well as Miles), but before that outfit got too predictable he moved on to a slightly unorthodox organ combo with Hammond B-3 whiz Larry Goldings....

Lead Stories Latest adventures of defendants who elected to be their own lawyers: Joe Pietrangelo, 54, on trial in September for assaulting the mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario, refused to register a plea because the “corrupt” judge would not allow him to complain about issues concerning his father’s will. (He was convicted.) Lawrence Brown, 30, on trial at press time for murder in Toronto, decided he didn’t need a lawyer even though he had told a guard, “You guys are always picking on me because I killed some white bitch....

In 1966, as the Vietnam war was escalating, Bob Adams and a buddy decided they should enlist in the navy together, thinking the two would learn a trade. “I was a year out of high school, and I really wasn’t going anywhere and had no plans to get an education,” says Adams, who grew up in Scottsdale, on the far southwest side. “I had no money and not a lot of skills....

This in-depth 1997 look at everyday life in Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing project, running 195 minutes, is one of Frederick Wiseman’s greatest documentaries to date. Few of the points in its epic analysis are obvious ones; though it gives the overall impression that public housing is like living in a concentration camp, the film favors exploration and understanding over finger-pointing and polemicizing. Wiseman presents a wide array of materials, and because you have to reflect on the film to realize how the various pieces of its design hang together, you’re liable to be thinking about it for months afterward....

lee.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Being black myself, having also foolishly used this silly word, I’m now questioning this whole mess. If this word is so horribly offensive to black people coming from nonblack people, particularly whites, why in the name of heaven is this same word acceptable among blacks? As I said, I’ve used this pitiful word too often and now I feel bad about this....

Revolving Troubadors The Rhino in Winter subdivision of the Rhinoceros Theater and Performance Festival started last week with a program of solo spoken-word performances by six of the usual suspects on the fringe scene: Abby Schachner, Greg Allen, Gabrielle S. Kaplan, Antonio Sacre, Judith Greer, and Bryn Magnus. An instructive, sometimes brilliant collection of stories and storytellers, this is an evening demonstrating the how-tos–and how-not-tos–of a certain kind of performance art, the monologue....

Barbara Crane: Artifacts and Entities Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 60s and 70s, Barbara Crane created wonderfully complex photographs using the “whole roll,” printing sequences of similar images on long scrolls of paper or in grids. Although the individual panels are of interest, the dark spaces between them are what came to life, the passages of time not photographed. Time is the medium that animates still photography, yet like a ghost it merely haunts the film; one must hunt between the shutter’s openings to watch it passing....

By Jeff Huebner Many people in Wicker Park would say the same thing is true of their neighborhood. Michael Warr–a poet, the executive director of the Guild Complex, and a 20-year resident of West Town–laments the loss of many places in Wicker Park that he believes nurtured local artists. “What’s being stripped away is a way of life. I’ve met with groups of people in Urbus Orbis, where we made plans, shared visions and ideas, and implemented those ideas....

TIM MULVENNA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The unaccompanied drum recital was a staple of 70s free music. Andrew Cyrille was first to go on record by himself, with What About? (BYG) in 1969, and he and fellow explorers like Milford Graves and Han Bennink turned the seemingly limited setting into a boundless format, expanding the kit with ancillary percussion and transforming the role of the jazz drummer from servant to master....

Never one to stand still, choreographer Ginger Farley has moved from the sophisticated nightclub setting of her HotHouse performances last May to the drafty, barnlike Chopin Theatre. In keeping with the new setting, she’s devised an hour-long show of 17 short sections–she calls them poems or sketches–inspired by the act of drawing (musical director Cameron Pfiffner is also a visual artist). But this show is less about the product than the process: the fear, humor, and melancholy that drive us to make our mark on the world....

Singing His Own Praise Barr does a lot of his campaigning in churches, hitting four each Sunday. “They always lean on me to sing,” he says. “When I get through there’s so much shouting that I never get a chance to give my campaign speech.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LaBelle’s office says they have a warm relationship with Barr–up to a point. “He calls all the time asking for tickets and stuff,” says Michele Roy, a spokesman for the singer....

It’s easy to see why this movie is a little too long. It must have been frustrating for filmmakers Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn to make only one movie out of all the exciting footage they got on their trek across America. Many of the women’s experiences were recorded by cinematographer Bill Brown, though the movie–an array of people and places that encourages American audiences to see the nation with tourists’ eyes–obscures this fact, almost suggesting that the camera we see the women take in and out of the trunk of their car is somehow capable of taking pictures of itself....

Hum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When RCA signed Hum in 1994, a Champaign quartet playing mammoth guitar rock was a pretty safe bet: Soundgarden and Dinosaur Jr were riding high, and some people still talked about “the Chicago scene” without chuckling. And as it turned out, Hum’s first record for RCA, You’d Prefer an Astronaut (1995), sold a respectable 250,000 copies in the U....

From an early age aesthetic choices were important to jazz critic Howard Mandel. “I broke up with one of my first girlfriends because she was all gaga over the Beatles, and I just thought it was puerile,” he says. “Her dad had a good album by [trumpeter] Donald Byrd that I liked, but I didn’t want to listen to her Beatles record, so she dumped me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

SCOTT HALL/BOB LARK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trumpeters Scott Hall and Bob Lark both made their names in bigger groups than the ones they’ll lead for this Monday-night one-shot: Lark leads the jazz ensembles, including an impressive big band, at DePaul University, and Hall takes close to half the solos accorded the trumpet section of Bill Russo’s Chicago Jazz Ensemble. But both men have also just released debut albums (on Hall’s new Corridor label) under their own names, small-group affairs that attempt to convey their individual strengths....

SOLEX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s all pretend for a minute that we’ve never heard of sampling and listen to Pick Up (Matador), the forthcoming second album by Dutch record-store owner Elizabeth Esselink, aka Solex. What are we hearing? Gosh, sounds like a skillfully arranged art-pop record. Esselink’s building blocks are samples, but really, how different is what she does with them from what singer-songwriters (think Paul Simon or Randy Newman) did in the 70s, holing up in the studio and meticulously refining their arrangements?...

I have been searching for the answer to this question for some time now. I hope you can solve my dilemma. What was the Leaning Tower of Pisa originally designed to house? Such as apartments, shops, observatory, monument, etc. Thank you in advance for any help. A: A bell tower. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A: Why not? Guys, being guys, always want to build towers....

8 BOLD SOULS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saxist and composer Edward Wilkerson’s longstanding octet 8 Bold Souls remains not just viable but exciting. Wilkerson’s open-ended compositions and detailed arrangements have always compressed jazz history, leapfrogging from its African roots to Duke Ellington’s small bands of the 30s all the way to postfreedom improvisation, but over the years he’s explored that approach with greater and greater complexity....

Friday 11/19 – Thursday 11/25 20 SATURDAY The Chicago Historical Society’s new exhibit Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions–curated by historian Bernice Johnson Reagon, who’s also the founder of the gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock–examines the cultural forces behind spiritual music, from hymns to Pentecostal “shout singing.” The exhibit, which ties into the society’s ongoing program “Good News! Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music,” opens today with performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the South Shore Community Chorus at 2 and Lyric baritone Robert Sims at 3:30 in the Rubloff Auditorium....