The 22nd annual Chicago Jazz Festival strikes a pretty good balance between what the people want (Dianne Reeves, Charles Lloyd, Big Band Monk) and what they need (Andrew Hill, Roscoe Mitchell, the Italian Instabile Orchestra). But it’s nearly impossible for any jazz artist to please everyone these days, and though the current democratic format of the festival does encourage serendipitous discovery, I’m starting to think last year’s multi-venue World Music Festival or the Montreal Jazz Festival might be a better model....

“Eighth-grade graduation is such a big, huge deal in Chicago,” complains Heidi Luebs, who teaches science at Burley Elementary (Catalyst, September). “I think [the ceremony] should be eliminated, because it just highlights our low expectations for these kids. We have to throw a big party for these kids because they might not make it through high school graduation.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The harshest penalties [for drugs] followed rather than preceded the decline in drug abuse,” says University of Chicago law professor Norval Morris in the “Compiler” (Summer)....

Dean Milano is getting married. With the big 5-0 breathing down his neck, the guy who collects everything is finally collecting a bride. They’ll celebrate with a bash at Brookfield Zoo, where musicians who’ve played with him in more bands than anyone can remember will get the place jumping and every table will sport its own miniature Buick or Corvair or you-name-it from his model-car collection. When it’s all over he’ll move into his bride’s pretty Cape Cod in Elmhurst and live happily ever after....

Frill Seekers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guests will enter Glow through a narrow foyer where they can view themselves on a video monitor. The ground-floor room will be paneled in mahogany and dominated by a large bar with copper trim and glass panels that will glow in different shades of deep blue. The perimeter of the vaulted ceiling will also glow, and monitors set into the walls will air a variety of silent video images....

Jamie O’Reilly and singer-songwriter Michael Smith follow up their moving, much praised evening of songs from the Spanish Civil War, Pasiones, with a show that has a much more diffuse theme: art. Against a background of projected images by such artists as Picasso, Botticelli, and O’Keeffe, the two perform Don McLean’s paean to Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Simon’s portrait of Rene and Georgette Magritte, and Leonard Cohen’s and Bob Dylan’s tributes to, well, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan....

To the editor; Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That December 10 Hot Type item lists four different cases as evidence that free speech “can be bought and sold.” One is from a Hollywood movie, of all things, one of those ones that claims to be “based on actual events” (which, as every moviegoer over the age of 12 knows, is Hollywood-speak for “a fantasy world that makes TV sitcoms look like documentaries”)....

When Arnie Bernstein was a student at Niles West High School, every afternoon he had to choose which of two great men he would study: Euclid, the Greek philosopher who’s considered the father of geometry, or Groucho Marx. The book is an encyclopedia of Chicago film history, from the early part of the century, when the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was one of the leading silent-film studios in the country, through the industry’s rediscovery of the city in the 80s and 90s....

LAZY COWGIRLS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not long after forming in Vincennes, Indiana, 15 years ago, the Lazy Cowgirls moved to LA to make it big–a giant and highly risky leap at the time for a charging, meat-and-potatoes punk-rock band that looked like it spent a lot of time in the local 7-Eleven parking lot. Not surprisingly, the band has barely been lucky enough to stick with one independent label for two albums in a row, let alone get rich....

Making Beautiful Music Together Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taylor and Mazurek first met in 1990, but half a decade passed before they would work together seriously. Taylor was playing jazz with local legend Lin Halliday, but he still considered drumming a hobby. Mazurek, now 33, was earning his meager bread playing in clubs like Faces and the Get Me High six nights a week....

Hey, Faggot: If X doesn’t make junk, and X made me, then X made my bodily fluids, right? I would think that my bodily fluids on a bad day are better evidence of X’s goodness and glory than, say, one of PS’s letters ever could be, what with his bad handwriting and lousy grammar. Even if X prefers PS’s letters to Dan’s fluids, I don’t think X is nearly as squeamish or thin-skinned as you Xtians are always makin’ him out to be....

For almost 20 years music videos have been ripping off the iconography and editing techniques of the avant-garde, so it’s nice to see the tradition of silent experimental films alive and well in this strong program. The silence is meant to focus our attention on the movement within the image and on the rhythms suggested by editing, and few films do this better than Nathaniel Dorsky’s extravagantly sensual Variations (1998). Combining almost diaristic images of people, nature, and the city, Dorsky links images through movement but more often creates images with a sense of inner completeness....

SHADOW RING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many pop bands strive to transcend their daily trials and tribulations, but not the Shadow Ring. Instead the trio from Folkestone, England, magnifies life’s most mundane details until they distort into something strange and sinister. (Even the band’s name, which seems to suggest some malevolent cabal, is really just a term for the stain left in an unwashed coffee cup....

By Michael Miner An ancient angry desire to “get Daley” is going to well up again in a lot of people as they read American Pharaoh, a big, meticulous new biography of the first Mayor Daley. These were the independents–mostly young, white, and educated–who until the day of his death in November 1976 despised him. It wasn’t simply the corruption of the government he presided over, or his brutal police, backward schools, and inhumane public housing that they found unforgivable....

In the answer about the guillotine in your on-line archive, you say that “the fatal blow induces immediate unconsciousness.” In actuality the human head does remain conscious 15 to 20 seconds after decapitation. This was proven when a scientist condemned to the guillotine in the 1700s told his assistant to watch and that he would blink as many times as he could. The assistant counted 15 to 20 blinks after the head was severed, the blinks coming at intervals of about one second....

Volume Dealers After this gentle interrogation I was given an address. I found my guide, along with eight other books for my story on Cairo. I’ve been back often since, each time leaving with additions to my bookshelf I didn’t know I needed. My last trip netted me a biography of the beer-making Busch family, one about Warren Buffett for my father-in-law’s birthday, and a three-volume Civil War set by Shelby Foote....

Once a sort of star with the now defunct Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, Winifred Haun was always a strong dancer and a strong person: she formed her own company several years ago and helped start the Next Dance Festival–all while raising her young daughter. Now she lends her strength to another cause, a collaboration with musician Robbie Hunsinger celebrating the current show at the Peace Museum, “Women’s Peace Initiatives: Transforming Community,” an exhibit of photographs and artifacts showing through the end of November....

The Rough Guides (World Music Network) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So where does the neophyte begin? A cross section of titles from various labels is usually the way to go. But I got curious when I started seeing World Music Network’s Rough Guide series, an offshoot of the Rough Guide travel and music reference books. Each CD is dedicated to a different region or genre–some general (The Rough Guide to the Music of Eastern Europe), some specific (The Rough Guide to the Music of Zimbabwe)....

Illinois Women Artists: The New Millennium Still, it’s been difficult for artists and viewers to reach any kind of consensus on this exhibit. I’ve heard some people comment that a show segregating women will ghettoize their art and result in a diminution of quality. Others worry that people won’t attend an exhibit restricted to works by women. Some have argued that a greater effort should have been made to include black, Asian, Native American, and Latina artists....

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Chicago theater scene is a general lack of interest in work created anywhere but this country or the British Isles. (In fact, next month the Goethe Institute is hosting a conference to examine, among other things, why contemporary German theater is almost never produced in Chicago.) Chicagoan D.B. Griffith and his International Think-Tank for Conceptual Terrorism have taken a modest step toward rectifying this situation by hosting CeDeCeCe, a collaborative piece by Berlin’s Grotest Maru and Prague’s SCO....

According to Northwestern University’s Roger Schank, the Internet is the greatest invention of the past two millennia. He says it will do away with, among other things, shopping malls and newspapers. “Life (and human interaction) in fifty years will be so different we will hardly recognize the social structures that will evolve,” he writes on-line (“What Is the Most Important Invention in the Past Two Thousand Years?” at www.edge.org/ documents/Invention.html). “I don’t know if we will be happier, but we will be better informed....