ANN DYER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » San Francisco vocalist Ann Dyer is nothing if not audacious. For the first album by her band, No Good Time Fairies (named for an obscure tune by M-Base saxophonist Steve Coleman), she concocted stark revisions of standards (“I’ll Remember April”) and wrote lyrics to compositions by McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter. And for her newly released follow-up, she’s taken on a musical and cultural Goliath: on Revolver (Premonition), subtitled A New Spin, she covers 9 of the 14 tunes from the Beatles’ 1966 album, including “Taxman,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “She Said She Said....

ATERCIOPELADOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before Bloque was even a blip on the North American radar, their fellow Colombians Aterciopelados–led by singer-guitarist Andrea Echeverri and guitarist Hector Buitrago–had released four albums that wedded rock ‘n’ roll to traditional folk forms with a punkish urgency. On the most recent of these, last year’s terrific Caribe Atomico (BMG U.S. Latin), the band added yet more fuel to the fire, framing its irresistible hooks with beautifully crafted electronica: “El estuche” layers acoustic son guitar figures and down-tempo breakbeats; “Cosmos” combines piquant mariachi horn charts, rapid-fire ranchera accordion lines, shuffling ska, and murky dub bass; “Mañana,” which features bossa nova star Vinicius Cantuaria on guitar, pairs a sashaying samba groove with jacked-up drum programming; and seamlessly integrated throughout are samples of everything from Dixieland trumpet peals to what sounds like muffled gargling....

SEPTEMBER Last May, over 100 area youths participated in a roundtable discussion about race and created a list of things they wanted adults to consider when they discuss the subject at today’s intergenerational Racism Explained conference. A video of that roundtable will be shown at the conference, which includes a panel discussion, small group sessions, a poetry reading, and a resource fair. The panelists include author and law professor Patricia Williams, In These Times senior editor Salim Muwakkil, author David Mura, poet Martin Espada, and school reform activist and UIC professor of education Bill Ayers....

ELLIOTT SMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since performing his song “Miss Misery” from the movie Good Will Hunting on the Oscars earlier this year, Elliott Smith has become the glossy mags’ favorite mopey white boy, kind of the way Kurt Cobain was in the early 90s. But whereas Cobain’s anguish and confusion were manifest in Nirvana’s confrontational music, Smith’s lovelorn sulkiness is couched in gentle, glorious melodies, a synthesis of the Beatles, Todd Rundgren, Nick Drake, Big Star, and the Beach Boys with all the sharp edges sanded away....

My dog does this thing where she leaps up, all four paws off the ground, and wiggles from her nose to her toes to her tail, apparently unable to contain the excitement of simply being alive. Not to detract from the artistry of choreographer Billy Siegenfeld and his dancers, but they remind me of my dog. They’re frequently airborne, but without the taut disguised effort of ballet, skipping or skidding across the floor with a loose, almost accidental impetus....

By Cheryl Trykv Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back at the register I light a cigarette. I sort through stacks of books and books on books. There are books in the sink and boxes of books and books in the corner mating. The unshelved books are of such great number I am able to construct an igloo of sorts in which, if need be, I may nap....

Park Row Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This neglected feature is one of Samuel Fuller’s most energetic–his own personal favorite, in part because he financed it out of his own pocket and lost every penny (1952). It’s a giddy look at New York journalism in the 1880s that crams together a good many of Fuller’s favorite newspaper stories, legends, and conceits and puts them in socko headline type....

Projections of Growth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We always knew we wanted to be entrepreneurs,” says Alisa. She and Donzell grew up on the south side; Alisa graduated from Northwestern University with a journalism degree, and Donzell earned his MBA in finance from Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1993 Donzell gave up a lucrative career in investment banking to pursue their movie theater idea while Alisa worked as an advertising executive at Burrell Communications Group, and after approaching Cineplex Odeon with their plan for a trio of new multiplexes, the Starkses won backing from South Shore Bank, First National Bank of Chicago, and GE Capital Corporation in Connecticut....

SMOKER-SHORT ANNUAL QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps Chicago drummer, bandleader, and composer Damon Short should title his next album “Short Shrift”: too often that’s exactly the treatment his work has received. The smartly textured, even delicate hybrid of improvisation and composition Short has cultivated for the last 20 years has flowered in the 90s in the humid atmosphere of clubs like the Empty Bottle, HotHouse, and the Velvet Lounge....

By Susan and Michael Stahl Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raymond “Bud” Overholzer, whose last name means “dweller beyond the woods,” was born in 1890 and grew up in Paulding County, Ohio. He ended up marrying his elementary-school teacher, Hortense Brown, who was 23 years his senior, and sometime in the 1920s he brought her and his mother to Lake County, where he made his living mainly by catering to wealthy sportsmen who came for the copious game and fish the region has always offered....

A Huey P. Newton Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems Roger Guenveur Smith based his startling one-man show A Huey P. Newton Story on one simple fact: there’s nothing entertaining about Newton or the political life that both inspired and destroyed him. Rather than provide a neat biography of the political activist, philosopher, poet, and crack addict, Smith forces his audience to stomach a mock press interview, as a wired and at times nearly incoherent Newton squirms and flails like an insect pinned to a corkboard....

ADRIAN SHERWOOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than a decade before some category-happy writer coined the term electronica, Britain’s Adrian Sherwood was using technology to lay musical categories to waste. As a producer and later as proprietor of the On-U Sound label, Sherwood has been responsible for some of the wiggiest dub-influenced music ever released, organizing potent projects like the New Age Steppers, a fluctuating lineup with members of the Pop Group, the Raincoats, and the Slits; Tackhead, with drummer Keith LeBlanc, guitarist Skip McDonald, and bassist Doug Wimbish of the legendary Sugar Hill house band; and the very loose Dub Syndicate, with members of straighter reggae outfits like Aswad, Roots Radic, and Creation Rebel....

Being Herself Celeda–a Diva With a Difference Listen to Celeda sing on “Music Is the Answer”–her hit single, recorded last year, has sold 300,000 copies–and you might not guess that she is a he. She now uses the name Victoria Sharpe and says “no problem” if folks don’t realize that she’s a gay man. “Honey, you can call me Celeda or Victoria–and if you don’t get that far, you can even call me Vic,” she says....

BOBBY SHORT & HIS ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his three decades as the house attraction at New York’s posh Cafe Carlyle, Bobby Short has come to define cabaret. His reputation rests upon his skills as an “entertainer,” a word both he and his admirers use to say, “He sells a song like nobody’s business, so it doesn’t matter that he’s not the world’s best pianist and doesn’t have the greatest voice....

Chicago’s Own: Recent Films and Videos Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the best works on this mixed program take the form of rude, in-your-face cultural commentary, reminding us that nose-thumbing humor still runs strong in Chicago art. In the fabulously demented Slow Gin Soul Stallion the duo who call themselves Animal Charm reedit found footage so that objects seem to transform: a downy milkweed seed becomes a star in the heavens, part of a long series of apparent mutations intercut at first with the face of a child who appears to be watching them, but later with a horse....

“To your knowledge has fraud ever been committed by management in an organization you have worked for?” Forty-seven percent of the 223 responding members of the Illinois CPA Society checked “yes” in response to this question on the group’s recent annual opinion poll. And who would be in a better position to know? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We will have new generations of youth rebellion as certainly as we will have new generations of mufflers or toothpaste or footwear,” concludes Tom Frank in his new book, The Conquest of Cool....

The Who The Who’s next advertising deal really ought to be with Hamburger Helper–they’ve stretched a career that produced ten studio albums into at least a dozen other compilations, live sets, and retrospectives. At this point, if they’re going to release yet another disc of recycled material, there’d better be a good reason for it. As it happens, their new BBC Sessions–culled from the band’s ten or so performances on “the Beeb” between 1965 and 1973–is fascinating, not for its documentation of a superior band in peak form (for most of it, they’re neither) but for its insight into the peculiar and irreparable flaws that made the Who a great rock band....

Drumm Don’t Strum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drumm, a 28-year-old native of South Holland, didn’t know he was building on tradition when he started sticking things in the strings of his guitar back in 1991. Like prepared piano–a technique popularized by John Cage in which objects are placed within the instrument to damp the strings or rattle against them–the tabletop method transforms the guitar from a chordal instrument into a noisemaker....

Ever Changing Waters Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The line that begins Marcos Loayza’s enchantingly lyrical and romantic film–“Nothing extraordinary happened, but I’d never have thought water would leave such traces in my being”–accurately describes the profound sensation that lingers after the closing credits. The story may seem far from complex: Manuel, an unassuming but fiercely intelligent Buenos Aires teenager, travels with his father to the countryside to visit his grandfather and falls in love with a local girl....

Last week I made a couple of passing references to the Chicago International Film Festival’s lack of clout in acquiring what many of my colleagues and I believe are the most important foreign movies to have appeared this year, including Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained, and Claire Denis’ Le beau travail. Of course some colleagues–in particular ones who favor strong, easy to follow story lines over form, style, even vision–don’t consider these pictures important, but my excitement about them is shared by many people in the mainstream: Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum singled out the Kiarostami and Denis movies as major Toronto events, in print and on Roger Ebert’s TV show; Rosetta won the top prize at Cannes; and the New Yorker devoted a small spread to the star-studded Time Regained three months back....