Friday 12/11 – Thursday 12/17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 11 FRIDAY The shiny black helmetlike masks worn by African Mende women during female initiation rituals are loaded with meaning: the downcast eyes symbolize spirituality, the high forehead represents good fortune or intelligence, the small mouth indicates an aversion to gossip, the smooth skin denotes youth, and the elaborately braided hair stands for close ties between women....

The Hart of London Jack Chambers’s 80-minute film The Hart of London (1970), being presented this Saturday by Kino-Eye Cinema at the Chicago Cultural Center, is hardly ever screened; in fact, when I polled eleven local critics, curators, filmmakers, and academics interested in experimental film, only three of them had even seen it. Some viewers consider it a masterpiece, some give it mixed reviews, and some are merely baffled. I fell into the third category when I first saw the film, finding it disorganized and confusing, but on each successive viewing I’ve loved it....

Message in a Bottle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It may not be The Bridges of Madison County, but the latest Kevin Costner romance is nearly as good as they get. A lonely researcher for the Chicago Tribune finds a bottle washed up on the beach that contains a letter so passionate she develops a crush on the anonymous writer. After the message is published in the Tempo section, she tracks him down but neglects to confess her role in the invasion of his privacy until after they’ve fallen in love....

Phantom Opera Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cohen met Williams four years ago, when the company was performing Walton’s The Bear and Menotti’s The Medium at Rosary College. Williams had been involved in opera for over 30 years, doing artistic and managerial work for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, Opera Theatre of San Antonio, and the Die Bühnen der Stadt Köln in Cologne, Germany....

Leigh Li-Yun Wen at Artemisia, through May 31 This work looks unusual even at the very inclusive Artemisia, and the same can be said of the other 20 paintings and etchings in Wen’s show. Born in Taiwan in 1959 to a family of modest means–her father was a farmer–Wen studied Chinese art at the National College of Art in Taipei, which also has a Western curriculum. She was a frequent visitor to Taipei’s Palace Museum throughout her childhood, and she cites Sung dynasty landscape painting as a primary influence....

STILLUPPSTEYPA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On last year’s Reduce by Reducing (Fire Inc./Some), the Amsterdam-based trio Stilluppsteypa minimalized their approach to electronic music: their microscopic glitches, set against gut-rumbling tones, ominous hums, and irregular beats, were a far cry from their earlier rock-tinged noise experiments. Later in 1999, with the ponderously titled Interferences Are Often Requested: Reverse Tendency as Parts Become Nearly Nothing (Ritornell), the group relaxed a little, taking a broader approach but sounding more cohesive than ever....

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about subliminal advertising, sexual words and phalluses in Disney movies, etc. Another rumor I keep hearing is that a part of the male anatomy was pictured unintentionally in a Sears catalog underwear ad in 1975. Let me put it this way: a penis is peeking out under somebody’s boxers. Naysayers claim that advertising photographers scrutinize their work and would never let something like that get by, that it could be just a drawstring....

Chelm!, Opera Factory, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. Performing a one-person musical requires a wide array of exceptional skills. Ian Geller has one: a rich, booming, mellifluous baritone with the power to make a believer out of even the least devout person in shul. But Geller’s musical–his version of a witty Jewish folktale (popularized by Isaac Bashevis Singer in “When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw”) about a foolish man who takes a trip to Warsaw yet finds himself back in his hometown–requires not only a standout vocalist but an actor, literary adapter, storyteller, and comedian....

DAVID SANCHEZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve heard saxophonist David Sanchez in many contexts over the past decade–his callow but impressive U.S. debut on trumpeter Charlie Sepulveda’s 1991 disc, The New Arrival; various collaborations with pianist Danilo Perez; his own subsequent recordings; and several Chicago appearances–and I have to wonder whether he ever has a bad night, or even a bad idea. Last year’s Obsesion (Columbia), a bundle of Latin American standards in big string-and-horn arrangements, could have capsized under a load of sugary excess and false sentiment, but Sanchez’s clarion timbre and intense focus made even the bulkiest orchestrations sound nimble and direct....

By Ben Joravsky Kennan was 28 when he lost his eyesight in 1976, blinded by an adverse reaction to a swine flu vaccination offered by the government. “It killed my optic nerves. Within ten days of that shot I began losing sense of color and larger objects. I got to the point where I could not read. I was left with 2 percent vision in one eye. I was a young married man, a Vietnam vet....

Nasty Business Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I loved Chicago,” he says. “It was very exciting to be a young playwright here. People didn’t just embrace or encourage new work but passionately engulfed new plays.” Raised in Spokane, Washington, LaBute attended Brigham Young University, worked for a computer company in New York, and pursued a graduate degree at the University of Kansas before he moved to Rogers Park in the late 80s....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Times of London reported in January that 10,000 current or former Irish soldiers have filed claims seeking compensation for hearing loss they suffered while in the military, either because of noise from firing ranges or because they played in army bands. Judges have been awarding them about $33,000 per claim, on average. The Times also reported that an Irish soldier on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon has filed a claim against the army because he developed skin cancer....

Dear editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I too run a mental comparison between the New Orleans and Chicago music festivals, and the New Orleans fest usually comes out on top. But I don’t think the Chicago fest has a long way to go, and I don’t think that charging for tickets in order to pay higher performance fees is the right path. When I read the suggestion of charging for “just those prime seats down front at Petrillo,” I got a vision of a more classist Blues Festival, with the best stuff available for those who pay, and only the by-products available for those who don’t....

Hey, Faggot: Before I give you a reasonable answer, Lieutenant John Cerrone, commanding officer of Philadelphia’s citywide vice enforcement unit, is gonna give you a scolding. Is paying a masseuse to give a hand/blow job illegal in Philly? “Yes, it most certainly is,” said Lieutenant Cerrone. How often do massage parlors get busted? “Well, I can’t give that information. But prostitution is an illegal act. It comes under our authority, and this man should know that we enforce the laws against illegal prostitution regardless of where it occurs....

By Ted Kleine Every Saturday afternoon the tabletop generals who buy little lead armies here gather in the store’s back room, like poker players drawn to a secret game, to replay the Napoleonic wars, Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, or any other conflict where men with weapons got together to kill one another. While I’m failing to reverse the course of the Civil War, a group at the table across the room is fighting a battle in an imaginary medieval world called Arden....

What Ever (An American Odyssey in 8 Acts) Woodbury calls the work a “performance novel,” a cross between Charles Dickens’s serial novels and performance art. This four-evening event, each show including two acts, is more like a soap opera on acid, however. The ten main characters ramble through their cross-country love affairs and vision quests while a cast of 90 whirls around them, complicating their voyage with drunken binges, mistaken identities, ghostly hauntings, drug rehabs, and midlife crises....

TURANDOT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like many cultivated European men of his time, Puccini fell in love with a romanticized version of the Far East. Yet his quaint notions of its women–as tenderhearted, betrayable naifs or as capricious ice princesses–gave birth to three of opera’s most memorable characters. Two of them are in Turandot (1926), his last and most majestic opera: the eponymous princess, and Liu, a young slave to the deposed emperor of Tatary....

By Mike Ervin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jesse Jackson Jr. signed on. So did Democratic senate leader Emil Jones, state representative Judy Erwin, and Alderman Burton Natarus. Natarus even went so far as to submit an ordinance July 8 that, if passed by the City Council, would have made “Handicap Place” that stretch of Quincy’s honorary name. But there’s one problem. To many of the disabled folk whom the street is supposed to honor, Handicap Place is as insultingly anachronistic as Negro Way or Colored People Circle....

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....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While still in his 20s, avant-garde Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki shook up the concert world with eerily beautiful and aggressively dissonant compositions that, in retrospect, seem to connect the anxiety of the era between the world wars to the defiant rage of the 60s. His Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), written for an ensemble of 52 strings, shatters brief interludes of resignation or uneasy prayer with cathartic eruptions of wailing, squealing, and screaming....