Jazz at Lincoln Center In fact Wynton Marsalis’s major contribution to jazz will most likely be neither his music (which though Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning is not exceptional in any way) nor his trumpet playing (which is sometimes wonderful but rarely heard in a stimulating context) but his insistence–articulated through the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s concerts, its many educational programs, and his own TV and radio shows–that jazz is a historically specific art form that reached its limits with Ornette Coleman in the early 60s....

I’m a gay black male with a foot fetish. I’ve tried to indulge my fetish with hustlers, but either they were not interested or I wasn’t attracted to their feet. However, I have a straight male friend with perfect feet. He knows I’m gay and that I have a foot fetish. Should I ask him to indulge me in a little foot worship and risk losing his friendship, or satisfy my urges elsewhere?...

“Unlike many of you, I don’t consider myself an artist,” said Ira Deutchman, the keynote speaker opening Script Sessions. “I’m going to get a bit controversial. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working with formulas, it’s what you do with them that counts.” Deutchman, the founder and president of an independent film production company called Redeemable Features, was appearing at a three-day screenwriting workshop put on by CineStory–a screenwriters’ conservatory–and Columbia College....

If words like “testosterone,” “sweat,” and “macho” set your heart racing, then these six guys from Australia are probably just your cuppa. But what’s next? “Flamenco Dogs”? “Lieder Dogs”? Dancing on a set of metal scaffolding and girders, its floor underlaid by 35 mikes to enhance every pounding sound, the Tap Dogs are reminiscent of the cast of Stomp. But since they are true tap dancers (unlike the all-around percussive wizards of Stomp, who sometimes sniff and cough to produce their music), the variety in the show comes primarily from the materials on which they dance–metal, wood, water, electronic pads keyed to drumbeats....

The Chambermaid Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Originally titled The Chambermaid on the Titanic, this 1998 French film by Bigas Luna is at once a delightful piece of romantic whimsy and a meditation on the duplicity inherent in storytelling. Horty, a French foundry worker, wins a trip to Southampton to witness the sailing of the Titanic; a ship’s chambermaid knocks on the door of his hotel room, claiming she needs a place to sleep, and though they don’t have sex, he does bring home her photograph....

THE MADONNA IN SPITE OF HERSELF (A COMMON NATIVITY STORY), Corn Productions, at the SweetCorn Playhouse, and RUDOLPH THE RED-HOSED REINDEER, Sweetback Productions, at the SweetCorn Playhouse. Not for the fundamentalist-at-heart, these campy productions–combining adulation and irreverence in equal measure–will certainly insult anyone who believes that children’s stories and religious tracts should be worshiped without a trace of irony. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Corn Productions, best known for The Tiff and Mom Show, has retold one of the greatest of stories....

Vince and I graduated from Austin in June 1940, and then we went to register at Loyola University. I had this idea of this great university I was going to attend, and then we walked into this dumpy building. The downtown campus was on Franklin Street around the corner from Washington. It was a walk-up with real narrow stairways, one of those real old buildings. The floor by the bursar’s office was slanted straight down–it was like being on a slide....

Jill Godmilow describes this recent half-hour short as a precise remake, in color and English, of Harun Farocki’s 1969 black-and-white German film Inextinguishable Fire, and while I have some quarrels with it, this fascinating intervention is bound to generate some interesting debate (at this screening she’ll discuss it with experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, which should throw the issues into even sharper relief). Farocki’s powerful film, never shown in the U.S. until recently, describes Dow Chemical’s development and manufacture of Napalm B and the effects of its use during the Vietnam war....

Mr. Butts and Mr. Bike duke it out in the baggage car. Rick Harnish in a letter to “Chicagoland Bicycle Federation News” (June/July): “Amtrak has made a big step by recognizing that bicycles represent a valuable market. As its smoking policy became more restrictive, however, Amtrak lost a significant portion of its ridership to air and auto travel. In contrast, the Vermonter, a train that has been outfitted with roll-on bike racks for at least a year, has apparently seen little usage by bicyclists....

DAVE MYERS & KIM WILSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist and bassist Dave Myers was a founding member of the Aces, a band that in the 50s freshened Chicago blues with the swing and harmonic sophistication of jazz. Left to himself, though, he specializes in just the kind of down-home Delta shuffle the Aces helped make commercially obsolete. Lately he’s been working closely with a fellow traditionalist, harp blower and former Fabulous Thunderbirds front man Kim Wilson....

Forward Motion The Dance Chicago festival, now in its third year, is a smorgasbord of dance intended to broaden dance audiences by presenting packages of stylistically diverse pieces slickly marketed. Festival promoters Fred Solari and John Schmitz of SCT Productions want to offer something for everyone, and with that goal in mind have assembled a roster of 300 artists on ten programs with such intriguing titles as “Breaking Boundaries” and “Jazz It Up....

Snowy owls have been appearing on the lakefront from from Northerly Island to Illinois Beach State Park, north of Waukegan. Nine species of gulls–including the extremely rare, for these parts, mew gull–were discovered at Michigan City. The ducks we call old squaws are diving for zebra mussels in the lake, and northern shrikes have flown in from the taiga. Winter is definitely here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bird is named after Thomas Mayo Brewer, a doctor who collected bird’s eggs (his collection ended up at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard)....

By Bill Mahin “It was approaching dawn,” he says. “We were standing around up on Chapel Hill trading songs. Michael McNevin sang ‘Jersey Jail,’ and there were sirens in the distance. There are never sirens in the middle of the night at Kerrville. Then Diane Chodkowski did ‘Fleur de Lis’ by Richard Shindell–an astounding piece of religious poetry written around the time he dropped out of the seminary. It stops time, it’s so beautiful....

orona.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is “important for any fan–man or woman, age utterly aside–to recognize greatness in athletes both male and female.” But Ted Cock’s point (I tweak his name for reasons ornithological rather than sexual) bores home well before that platitudinous disclaimer: Watching women’s soccer was “more pleasant than men’s soccer in part because they were women at play” [July 10]....

Presented by IsraFest Foundation, Inc., the Israel Film Festival runs Saturday through Thursday, April 29 through May 4, at Water Tower, 175 E. Chestnut. Tickets for most programs are $8.50, $5.50 for seniors; weekday shows before 6 PM are $6. Festival passes, good for five screenings, not including special events, are $35. For more information call 312-297-4886 or 877-966-5566. Vulcan Junction Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An expatriate Israeli playwright (Sharon Alexander) leaves Paris to return to the port city of Haifa and care for his ailing mother....

carmody.qxd Your writers need to verify their “facts.” The Reader states that the Best Steak House has a “spotless record”–please check again to see if they were closed just this summer for selling to minors. The owner claims that his employee was misled into signing a petition; I don’t know how that happened. Not only did all petitioners involved attempt to secure signatures honestly, but the petition was written in full above each signature page, with the businesses involved listed....

MARTIN TETREAULT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days it’s not so strange to think of the DJ as a musician, and between hip-hop-related artists DJ Shadow and DJ Spooky there’s been enough ink spilled on the subject to fill a few books. But it’s been a long time coming: In the early 80s, long before the term turntablist came into being, a guy named Christian Marclay was conducting wild experiments with vinyl records that had nothing to do with breakbeats....

MERLE HAGGARD & THE STRANGERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not only has country radio nailed the lids on the coffins of its forefathers, it’s buried alive legends who are still making great music, most notably Johnny Cash, George Jones, and Merle Haggard. The remarkably consistent 100 songs on Haggard’s 1996 box set, Down Every Road (Capitol), paint a vibrant portrait of him as a complex artist; the liner notes remind us that he’s a man out of mythology: born in Bakersfield, California, to Okie parents, he’s been a reformed thief who turned music into his salvation, a champion of the working class, a pugilistic patriot who hung out with Richard Nixon....

PICKETTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As heard on their latest album, Euphonium (Rounder), Seattle’s Picketts deliver roots rock with an honest exuberance missing from most of the music that makes up the sprawling revisionist genre known as Americana. Supported by stand-up drummer Leroy “Blackie” Sheep and Young Fresh Fellow Jim Sangster on guitar, vocalist Christy McWilson sings with clear, authoritative panache, and she can navigate a syllable-crammed rocker like “Good Good Wife” with as much aplomb as she can a languid honky-tonk vehicle like “Just Passin’ Thru....

Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire 5/23, Lunar Cabaret It can’t be easy to be a singer-songwriter-fiddler–try belting out your soul while your vocal cords are stretched sideways and your jaw’s clamping a piece of wood to your shoulder–but Andrew Bird (a Chicago-based touring member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers) makes a fine mess of a bad situation. On his CD Music of Hair, Bird borrows freely from Irish, Gypsy, and Appalachian styles, and nods to everything from Ravel to Haitian dance songs, western swing to the Mad Shak Dance Company, in both his recastings of traditional tunes and his own not-too-seriously titled compositions (“Ambivalence Waltz,” “Oblivious Reel”)....