GREG FISHMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For two years now, Chicago tenor saxist Greg Fishman has taken advantage of a historical coincidence to honor a pair of jazz greats, Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt. Both sax men were born on February 2, Getz in 1927 and Stitt in 1924, but they only occasionally crossed paths in performance–most impressively on the 1956 Dizzy Gillespie date For Musicians Only (Verve)....

Bryn Magnus remembers the time he tried to sneak from movie to movie at a multiplex. The ushers caught him red-handed, but he bravely refused to concede anything. Even though he could hardly believe it himself, he insisted that he’d thought admittance to one show entitled him to see them all. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Magnus has created the perfect world he couldn’t find at the multiplex....

While Ruth St. Denis was exploring orientalism, Martha Graham human psychology, and Agnes de Mille American lore, Katherine Dunham was preserving the dance traditions of Africa and the Caribbean in her own uniquely theatrical way. A black woman, a dancer, and a student of anthropology, she sought to gain respect for black dance traditions–indeed, to institutionalize them. And it’s no hyperbole to say that every black dance company in the United States is indebted to her pioneering work....

KENDRA SHANK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York-based singer Kendra Shank has built a career in jazz the old-fashioned way. Like musicians from Coleman Hawkins to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, she established herself in Europe–she lived and worked in Paris for most of the 90s, then headed back to the States in 1997 to enjoy her reputation. She released her debut, Afterglow (Mapleshade), while still abroad, and it caused such a stir in New York that the buzz surrounding her follow-up, last year’s Wish (Jazz Focus), almost drowned out the music....

By Ben Joravsky “We lived in a three-flat at 21st and California, purchased by my grandfather with the pennies he saved,” he says. “When I think about who I am I see parts of my father, my grandfather, and my mother. There’s a real stubborn streak in us all, and we’re all wise guys. We had these exchanges where the style was to get in your put-down before they got in theirs....

ROBERT BELFOUR, T-MODEL FORD, PAUL JONES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks in part to a distribution deal with punk behemoth Epitaph, the tiny Mississippi blues imprint Fat Possum no longer has to work so hard to make people pay attention to its releases. Label head Matthew Johnson stirred up a buzz in the mid-90s by presenting the Fat Possum roster as a motley crew of mean, dirty, loud old motherfuckers who’d brook neither slick urban production nor placid back-porch revivalism–but in knocking down one stereotype, he’d set up another....

Hey, Faggot: It’s understandable girlfriends find your desire for anal penetration odd. Straight boys who wanna take it up the butt are odd, in the sense that they’re unusual, so you are odd. Finding herself in bed with a man who wants to be fucked is a unique experience for most straight women–and not all women are thrilled by it. If you’re unwilling to go the personals route, I suggest you brace yourself for a lifetime of shocked reactions, tight-lipped refusals, and the occasional makes-it-all-worthwhile enthusiastic assent....

Skirt Power Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From Malian director Adama Drabo comes this exuberant magical-realist comedy (1997) in which an 18th-century village’s war between the sexes casts a distinctly modern light on the role of women in Mali’s 1991 revolution. An abused young wife of the Dogon people steals a tribal mask ordinarily worn by men, demanding that they exchange roles with the women and take over the household chores; the men prove so inept that they’re exhausted by the end of the day, and some of them pretend to be asleep when their wives make sexual demands....

The confetti was a new touch, no doubt left over (if replenished) from last year’s Democratic National Convention and fired off anew. Otherwise, the occasion of the Bulls’ fifth NBA championship in seven years–and the third won here at home–was a familiar experience: the jubilation at the final buzzer, the playing of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” and the tape loop of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2,” the players dancing on the scorers’ table and holding their children on lofty shoulders, the booing of NBA commissioner David Stern, Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and general manager Jerry Krause, followed by cheers for coach Phil Jackson, for each player, and especially for Michael Jordan, who was presented his fifth NBA finals MVP award....

As a conceptual piece, Joel Ross’s Room 28 [June 18], an installation in which Ross has checked into a hotel room, dismantled everything in it, and put the entire contents into 50 suitcases, is beautiful. No better image of America exists than the anonymity of a hotel room. Think where film noir would be without hotel rooms. We travel across this immense landscape passing the time in hotel rooms. Hotel rooms hold secrets: murders are committed there, clandestine relationships flower there, money changes hands there....

Working Retail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gates moved to Chicago from Portland in March 1997 after the rest of the Spinanes–drummer Scott Plouf–quit, then joined Built to Spill. Arches and Aisles, her first album without Plouf, was originally due this April, and Gates, a savvy 34-year-old who has witnessed many an indie-rock sea change since Manos made her a minor star in 1993, was already antsy about how it would be received....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Joan Chen, I also grew up during the Cultural Revolution, although I was 11 years old while she was 5 in 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began. I was one of the millions of sent-down youth and spent five years in a village growing vegetables with peasants while Joan Chen was an actress chosen to perform for the Shanghai film studio....

“You are probably not a liberal anymore,” writes Sam Smith in the “Progressive Review” (October), if you “consider a 5% wage increase in an industry to be inflationary but a 5% return on your stocks in that industry to be inadequate,” or if you “know what NARAL stands for but not SEIU,” or if you “have a piercing alarm system on your Lexus but think gun owners are paranoid.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Nothing in the dance world even remotely approaches the saturation of feeling achieved by Eiko & Koma, a husband-and-wife team whose intimacy in performance magnifies the moment, not the personality, conveying a Zen-like timelessness. (They’re the only duo ever to win a MacArthur Foundation genius award, formerly reserved for individuals.) Memory–the performance that concludes the Dance Center’s Shinpi No Bi fest and opens the Spring Festival of Dance–is a four-part exploration they’ve described as “poems for grieving souls....

By Michael Miner Who can say how close Ebert came to that? The Sun-Times hired him after he graduated from the University of Illinois, but he was a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago in 1967 when the movie reviewer retired and Ebert was told to take over. That’s when he dropped out of school. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be a film critic,” Ebert told me....

In 1948 Dan Robbins was a young artist back from the war, and Max Klein was an entrepreneur looking to make his fortune in do-it-yourself tchotchkes. Klein’s business, the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit, made washable paint sets for kids (varnished designs that could be painted, wiped off, and repainted), and he hired Robbins to draw pictures for the line. But Klein aspired to reach a much broader market. Soon he was prodding Robbins for an idea that would appeal to older people....

Whenever Western Civilization has stumbled across some unfamiliar living thing, it’s sorted it into one of four categories. Whether it’s a plant or animal, bigger or smaller than we are, it’s always something to be (1) feared, (2) consumed, (3) domesticated, or (4) worshiped. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This history is detailed in the exhibit “From Forest to Park: America’s Heritage of Trees,” a joint effort of the Newberry Library and the Morton Arboretum marking the 75th anniversary of the Lisle tree museum....

Balm in Gilead Balm in Gilead is over 30 years old, but Lanford Wilson’s experiment in applying cinematic jump cuts and cross talk to theater still delivers the goods. Like Elmer Rice’s Street Scene of 40 years earlier and Jonathan Larson’s Rent a quarter century later, Wilson’s play cross-sections New York’s lower depths. And though there’s energy in his anonymous junkies, drag queens, bums, dealers, and hookers, there’s no joy: this is not the stuff of Whitman....

IRA SULLIVAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most music teachers will tell you that it’s impossible for one player to master both woodwinds and brass, but Ira Sullivan, like swing-era genius Benny Carter, has spent his career taking exception to that rule. In the 1970s, more than a decade after leaving Chicago for southern Florida, Sullivan started gigging here again, bringing almost all of the many instruments he can play: alto, tenor, and sometimes soprano saxophones, usually a flute, and always a trumpet....

NIHILIST SPASM BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In terms of sheer determination and dedication, the Nihilist Spasm Band has few peers. Formed in 1965 by the late Greg Curnoe, the NSB is ostensibly the world’s first “noise band”; moved by both free jazz and the pure sound experiments of academic composers like Stockhausen and Xenakis–and lacking the training of either–the NSB decided to make a racket....