Friday 2/7 – Thursday 2/13 Since 1981 the New Arts Six, a classically trained performing-arts ensemble, has been working to preserve African-American folk heritage by blending poetry, storytelling, classical opera, theater, and music. The group performs tonight at 8 at the Dorothy Menker Theater in the Fine and Performing Arts Center at Moraine Valley Community College, 10900 S. 88th in Palos Hills. Tickets are $16.25. Call 708-974-5500. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Friday 1/23 – Thursday 1/29 In 1991 filmmaker Julie Murray read a newspaper article about a woman who fell to her death from an elevated highway. She says the experience of reading that article, laid out in narrow columns, was like “following this woman’s descent meter by pentameter.” In her short film, Mantilla, Murray retold this story using “broken and caged text” to duplicate her original experience. Murray’s work combines photographs, found footage, and a delicate use of sound to create what she calls “emotional landscapes....

By Ben Joravsky But environmentalists say it’s a wacky Rube Goldberg scheme that may pollute pristine waterways that feed Lake Michigan. They’ve gone to court to halt the project until more environmental impact studies can be completed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the 1980s many of those factories had closed (the old Pullman factory was converted into the Lighthouse Place Outlet Mall). Though the town never bottomed out, leaders were always looking for ways to bring in money and jobs....

GRANT LEE BUFFALO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For many years this LA folk-rock trio was impenetrable as an iron triangle: guitarist Grant Lee Phillips spun cryptic tales out of America’s past and the murky corridors of the heart, then bounced them off eclectic percussionist Joey Peters and producer-bassist Paul Kimble. This setup helped the band preserve an endearingly peculiar vision in a genre that too readily devolves into Byrds-ian retro or the crowd-pleasing globalspeak of R....

Hi and Mighty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days many of Hi’s key figures are still active, but most have never been able to achieve on their own the brilliance they wrought together. With his new album, This Time Around (Bullseye Blues), Otis Clay has tried to recapture the Hi vibe, reuniting not only with most of the great rhythm players that graced those old recordings–including bassist Leroy Hodges, organist Charles Hodges, and drummer Howard Grimes–but also with Mitchell....

What’s unexpected as well as moving about this film by Olivier Assayas, at least in relation to his other recent features (Cold Water, Irma Vep), is how sweet tempered most of it is. Split into six chapters, with several weeks or months separating one section and the next, it follows a group of close friends–mainly a novelist who’s just turned 40 (Francois Cluzet) and is becoming ill, a writer-editor in his 30s (Mathieu Amalric), and their current and former lovers (Virginie Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar, Arsinee Khanjian, and Mia Hansen-Love)....

By Michael Miner I’d called for his reaction to an anguished memo someone had posted in the Sun-Times newsroom. Something about the ceaseless coming and going of jet planes must encourage melancholic introspection, for what I got was half an hour on the state of contemporary journalism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Of course we realize we’re paid to work, not to joke, gossip or be particularly friendly,” she continued....

It might be too cold to picnic at Ravinia Festival’s “Winter Wonderland” event, but you won’t have to pay for parking or a lawn ticket either. This is an off-season chance for families to cavort at the sublime summer hangout. No leaves, no party tents, no mobile shushing signs–just plenty of music. Choirs from five local schools will sing on the steps of the Martin Theatre while the Avalon Brass Quartet of Chicago, Midwest Young Artists’ Chamber Music Ensemble, and Eileen Boever’s Traveling Troupe perform in Bennett-Gordon Hall....

By Michael Miner Kirchner loses the early rounds, but eventually the Illinois Supreme Court grants him custody of his son. In April 1995 the four-year-old boy is separated from the Warburtons and their biological son, who’s seven years old. The Kirchners take him home, and he becomes Danny Kirchner. In January 1997 Otakar Kirchner moves out, leaving Danny with Daniela Kirchner. In June Daniela, with the support of her estranged husband, petitions the court to void the consent she’d signed in 1991 surrendering her son....

The Chicago Latino Film Festival A middle-aged, out-of-work electrician heads for Madrid, winds up on the street, and becomes friends with a Caribbean hustler in this 1997 black comedy from Spain, directed by Enrique Gabriel. (Water Tower, 5:30) Video Program 3 A 1997 Brazilian comedy directed by Hugo Carvana. A folklorist from Rio de Janeiro, en route to Sao Paolo, falls in with a group of musicians and the niece of their bandolinista, then wakes up in her bed the following morning....

The Professor of Comedy, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio, and Scary Baby: The Pat & Tamara Show, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. There’s a lot of stupid comedy–every gagster-rapper who gets five minutes on Letterman seems to inspire a dozen more to think, I can do better than that! But David Spark and Dion Stanley have put dumb humor at the service of smart comedy in The Professor of Comedy, a mock lecture-demonstration on how to be funny....

Here is a question to test Cecil’s mettle. This ain’t “what caused the big bang?” but close enough. How come the Chandler wobble hasn’t dampened out? –R.M. Mentock, via the Internet The Chandler wobble is but one of several wobbles of the earth’s axis. The most important is precession, which has a cycle of 25,800 years due to variations in the pull of the moon and sun. Because of precession, the star Vega will replace Polaris as the North Star many millennia from now, a fact to keep in mind if you’re planning to navigate by the stars in 14,000 AD....

Though Mahalia Jackson sang almost exclusively in sacred settings, making exceptions for Carnegie Hall and Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington, she was instrumental in transforming gospel music into the popular fare it is today. Starting her career as a demonstration singer for the legendary Reverend Thomas Dorsey, this New Orleans native went on to bring her music to Depression-era audiences via radio (notably Studs Terkel’s show) and later television....

Headline Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Alspector, movies that break taboos may be inherently valuable. Does this mean that the upcoming remake of Lolita, if indeed it shows sex with a minor, is guaranteed to be a great film because it borders on kiddie porn? If the only criteria that makes a film good is that it breaks taboos (and Alspector goes as far as to admit that this taboo-breaking is the only thing worthwhile about Love!...

When Alex Wald appeared on the Japanese game show Naruhodo, Za Warudo in 1993 he answered only one question: Ultraman’s father once appeared disguised as which character from European folklore? Wald slapped his buzzer and, for the first and only time during the taping, it worked. The answer: Santa Claus. The show, which was taped on the roof of a Holiday Inn in San Francisco’s Chinatown, pits the cultural literacy of its Japanese contestants against Americans who are Japanese culture aficionados....

Friday 10/15 – Thursday 10/21 Peter Dunne, director of New Jersey’s Cape May Bird Observatory, is often called “the bard of birding” for his amusing avian tales. The Chicago Audubon Society has imported him to give a talk tonight to benefit the society; it’s at 6 at Kenyon Oppenheimer Gallery, 410 N. Michigan. Admission is $45, which includes wine and snacks. Call 773-539-6793 for tickets. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Chick Willis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Georgia-born Chick Willis is known best for bawdy up-tempo numbers like “Stoop Down Baby,” “Mother Fuyer,” and “I Want a Big Fat Woman,” but lurking behind that R-rated mouth is a first-rate bluesman. Willis’s guitar style is sparse and somewhat elemental, but the intensity of his keening tone and the precision of his attack pack every punch with fire....

Bob Barrett recently hit a low point in his career as a dance impresario. After hiring students to put up posters for the concert he’s producing this weekend and carefully explaining the procedure (go into businesses, ask permission to put the posters up, etc), he discovered that many had been improperly posted. And the city charges for each illegally placed flyer. “So there I was at 11:30 on a cold, rainy Sunday night, ripping down posters on Clybourn,” he says....

EDDIE GOMEZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1966, when 21-year-old Eddie Gomez first hit the spotlight as the bassist in Bill Evans’s famous trio, he transformed the future of his instrument. Gomez conceived of the bass not as a giant violin (which it is) but as a guitar: his pizzicato had the speed, dexterity, and feathery lightness of the best fingerpicking, so that his bass lines felt more like rushing wind than steady footfalls....

Lake Michigan is demarked as Lac des Ilinois, the Grande Nation des Illinois occupies the far western suburbs, and Checagou and the Rive de Checagou are somewhere in what’s now northern Indiana in Carte de la Nouvelle France, a hand-colored copperplate engraving by Nicolas de Fer from 1718. Geographer to the king, the Parisian de Fer is credited with some 600 exquisitely rendered maps that today evoke the obsessive handicraft cherished in outsider art....