Out of the Black Box “In any other [black] film, if there was a person like Darius he’d be comic relief, he would be ridiculed for his intellectual ambitions,” Witcher says. “I believe anything you put in a movie is cool by virtue of the fact it’s in a movie and you’re watching it in the dark. From the beginning filmmakers have used movies to put forth their particular agenda. I thought, fuck it....

The first of two weekends in this series, now in its tenth year, is devoted to Latin rhythms and movement. Perhaps the most unusual piece on this program is Ritmos de pies, a suite of ballet dances for nine dancers set to music by Arturo Marquez, Astor Piazzolla, and Jose Pablo Moncayo Garcia. Choreographer Paul Abrahamson of the Moose Project gently inflects classical movement with the drama and sweep of Latin dance, highlighting a flung arm here, an invisible partner there....

I have a question for you. How much does it cost to make an individual penny? Also, how many are made each year? (OK, so it’s more than one question.) Are they ever going to stop manufacturing them? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A lot of people have been wondering about this. The mint makes something like 13 billion pennies a year, accounting for two-thirds of all U....

Trib Cracks Its Last Nut Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But some people think the Tribune’s passive marketing plan doomed the show. “The Nutcracker died of criminal neglect,” says Larry Long, the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance choreographer who staged the show for Tribune Charities. According to Long, the Tribune Company seemed content to run display ads in its newspaper, seldom promoting guest dancers or devising new marketing tactics for the heightened competition....

TRICOLOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tricolor calls its music “pop-flavored avant-garde jazz,” and though that might set off your oxymoron alarm, the trio does in fact play some of the most exhilarating, least categorizable music you’ll hear this year, with catchy melodies and cool, lean solos informed by lessons learned on the freedom frontier. The band–guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Dave Pavkovic, and bassist Tatsu Aoki–coalesced in 1996 for a year of Sundays at the old Bop Shop, achieving the bright, uncluttered trialogue documented on their forthcoming debut CD....

Arrogant Living Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “An explosion of misunderstanding has erupted about certain motherfuckin’ things,” chirps Jeff Dorchen in the bouncy musical number that opens Arrogant Living, his “episodic collage cabaret.” He’s out to “correct sloppy thinking,” and he believes his hour onstage will overhaul the American psyche. It’s a tall order for a man who admits he spent all day in bed trying to find a reason to get up....

BEAU JOCQUE & THE ZYDECO HI-ROLLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the new Check It Out, Lock It In, Crank It Up! (Rounder), the world’s best zydeco band adds “Tequila,” Archie Bell & the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” and even some goofy hip-hop touches to a repertoire that already includes songs by Bob Dylan and War. Jocque and his band have been incorporating seemingly incompatible styles into zydeco’s traditional French and Afro-Caribbean formula for more than a decade now, and no matter how audacious their borrowings, they still seem incapable of doing them anything but justice....

“The day I got hired as a Blue Man,” says Chicago actor Michael Cates, “they told me two things: put on some weight, and get those eyebrows under control.” Hacking his eyebrows back to a manageable hedge was a simple transformation compared to the other one he had to go through to be “birthed” as a Blue Man–the term company founders Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton use to describe the moment when an actor performs Tubes for the first time before an audience....

DAMON SHORT SEPTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago drummer and composer Damon Short doesn’t throw together many pickup groups; over the last decade he has cultivated a small pool of players who can get inside his unpredictable tunes and complement the busy polyrhythms that flavor his drumming. This group includes two exciting musicians who live out of town and rarely appear on the same stage: reedman Paul Scea, from Iowa, and the mind-blowing trumpeter Paul Smoker, from upstate New York....

Friday 7/24 – Thursday 7/30 25 SATURDAY A link between Chicago and Haiti began way back in the late 18th century, when Jean Baptiste Point DuSable founded the settlement that became our city. These days the local Haitian community numbers around 50,000–that’s why it’s surprising that today’s Taste of Haiti is the city’s first. The daylong event will feature typical Haitian food like griots (boiled and fried pork or goat), bananes pesees (fried plantains), and riz et pois colles (red beans and rice), as well as music by the Rafo International Combo, Frank Desire, Raphael Benito, and DJ Patrick Augustin....

Green Mind Most community gardens around the city are planted on spare parcels of land by people who want to raise vegetables for their own tables or by schoolteachers who want to show their students how plants grow. That’s all well and good, but it’s not enough for Dunaetz. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 70th Street Farm–named after one of his previous gardens–got off to a modest start last season....

By Ben Joravsky So much about city government has changed in the last few years that it sometimes seems Washington’s moment in history was only a dream. Those under 30 for whom the past is fuzzy and inconsequential might find it hard to even imagine a mayor like Washington, so vastly different was he in style, substance, and background from the current officeholder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re going to reach out to [other communities], but this is the base,” he proclaimed to voters at a south-side church....

Larry Hankin: Roadrash Jones and Other Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second City alum and cofounder of the 60s political-comedy troupe the Committee, Larry Hankin is one of those rare performers equally adept at comedy and pathos, turning sorrow into laughter or revealing the pain behind a comic situation. But unlike Charlie Chaplin–another master of this trick–Hankin never lapses into sentimentality: his characters remain prickly and difficult....

Autumn Tale By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Along with Claude Chabrol, with whom he once wrote the first book-length critical study of Alfred Hitchcock in any language, Rohmer stands in opposition to the other critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave in his absolute fidelity to the way people speak and to the quality of a particular place and time– specific regions, cities, towns, seasons, and times of day....

Nailing It Down On a Friday morning things are fairly busy. Four manicurists, including owner Khoa Tran’s wife, Julie Vu, are working at white tables, filing and polishing the nails of customers. Two of the employees are wearing white surgical masks, which they say protect them from the fumes of the nail polish and nail-polish remover as well as from dust. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to the trade publication Nails, nail-care businesses took in $6....

Lead Stories Linda Wallace, a former resident of Rocky River, Ohio, who during two years there was the object of a dozen neighborhood noise complaints, filed a second trillion-dollar lawsuit against the city in September, this time because she says officials insulted her son; two weeks earlier she had sued a town police officer for a trillion dollars charging false arrest. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several Los Angeles contractors petitioned a court in July to restrict lawyer Robert W....

I’m leaving for France next month and this is the first time I’m going to be on my own for an entire month with no parents, chaperones, or people who will gossip about me to my “nice” churchgoing family. Oh, Lord. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Look, don’t worry your pretty li’l head about not being turned on at the sight of some guy’s penis....

At a time when Jerry Falwell can “out” Teletubby Tinky Winky with a straight face, and expensive new AIDS drugs are transforming our definitions of survival, Tim Miller’s stories are refreshingly hopeful reminders of the devastating, delirious, complicated course of history in the late 20th century. Shirts & Skin–the latest installment in Miller’s autobiographical solo-performance saga, being presented this weekend only as part of the “Pride ’99” series–demonstrates the continuing vitality of his honesty, sense of irony, and genuine affection for the audience....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Do we tell them that their contributions help CBE promote recycling? Yes, we do. For instance, our canvassers are proud to tell people that their donations enabled CBE to write and then work to pass Illinois’ Solid Waste Planning and Recycling Act, which has helped countless communities throughout the state fund the start-up of their curbside collection programs....

YO-YO MA WITH THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last summer at Ravinia, Yo-Yo Ma was greeting a long line of fans backstage when he spotted a young local composer, Fengshi Yang, who’d asked to write a piece for him. He took a look at her manuscript and hummed a few bars; when he nodded his approval, she beamed with relief....