What weirdness possesses us, on the eve of the 21st century, to look to the 19th century for guidance? For years conservatives and libertarians have been building a cult of the Victorian era. Now these cultists have rummaged through Chicago history and found an object lesson. In the July issue of “Alternatives in Philanthropy”–a newsletter published by the Capital Research Center, a conservative libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.–editor Daniel Oliver asserts, “The aftermath of the Chicago Fire offers a case study in how to help the needy....

Friday 4/7 – Thursday 4/13 When Peoria native Alan Gillett brought his country-soul-karaoke-dance act to the cable-access Chic-a-Go-Go a few months ago, the show’s dancers didn’t know what to make of his awkward, unself-conscious performance. “They were confused by him,” says coproducer Jake Austen. “You sort of want to laugh at him at the beginning. But he’s so earnest and happy, he wins you over.” Gillett, whose appearances on Nashville cable access have become staples on Comedy Central’s Daily Show, will make his Chicago club debut at tonight’s Chic-a-Go-Go Variety Show....

In the thick of Southern Illinois University’s student ghetto, stretching along Main Street from Logan Avenue to Graham Street in Carbondale, stands an old and curious cemetery. In some ways a typical Victorian graveyard, it’s full of markers commemorating young wives who died in childbirth and clusters of children carried off by epidemics. But what makes these grounds unique are the 60-odd graves containing Civil War soldiers–including a few who died fighting for the Confederacy....

Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Ruth Brown once performed before a segregated audience, the ballroom divided by a long rope. By the end of the concert the rope had broken and the crowd had lost–and found–themselves in the music. It happens here too. Jackie Taylor’s tribute to black doo-wop groups and singers of the 1950s has been a vibrant success since its soul-stirring debut in 1995, moving to the Ivanhoe and Mercury theaters and playing the DuSable Museum of African American History and Navy Pier’s Skyline Stage....

Georges Mazilu By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mazilu, who had extensive art training in his native Romania before emigrating to Paris in 1982, is clearly influenced by the old masters; Sam Hunter’s excellent essay in a book on Mazilu (on sale in the gallery) cites “Bruegel, Bosch, Velazquez, and Goya, among others.” Hunter also discusses the half-human nature of Mazilu’s “hybrid figures” and connects the artist’s representations of “man’s solitary state…even in a crowd” with Camus and Sartre....

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1987 Taiwanese feature is less powerful than the preceding A Time to Live and a Time to Die (showing at the Film Center Tuesday and Thursday, June 20 and 22) but much better than his subsequent Daughter of the Nile (which isn’t included in the center’s current retrospective). It follows two young lovers who move to the city (Taipei) to find work because they can’t afford to finish high school, and slowly but irrevocably their relationship is torn asunder....

JESUS ALEMANY’S CUBANISMO! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In spite of the government’s destructive, insupportable, and hypocritical stance on Cuba–or maybe because of it–that island’s irresistible music now enjoys greater visibility in the U.S. than at any time since the 1950s. In Chicago, not only the music–in the form of salsa from other parts of the Antilles–but Cuban musicians themselves have been showing up with surprising frequency (witness the return, in this engagement, of the percussion master Tata Guines, who came through town just weeks ago with the Thunder Drums show)....

KOL SIMCHA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though the name of this Swiss (yes, Swiss) klezmer quintet translates as “Voice of Joy,” it plays a brand of klezmer designed more for a concert hall than a village wedding reception. Kol Simcha tempers the wildness of eastern European folk song with both its watchmaker’s precision and its unusual instrumentation. Traditional klezmer bands always starred a violin, but in the 20th century it was joined and then replaced by a clarinet....

In February, Chicago sound artist Lou Mallozzi was preparing for a short European tour. Among the tasks on his checklist was to obtain 30 or 40 copies of his first CD, Radiophagy, to sell after performances. But he was having trouble getting in touch with Adam Paul Vales, who’d released the album in July 1997 on his label, Eighth Day Music, and neither Mallozzi nor acquaintances in other parts of the country could even find copies to buy back from the shops that were supposed to be carrying it....

Nihilist Spasm Band, Van’s Peppy Syncopators, Thurston Moore, Jojo Hiroshige, Knurl, Alan Licht & others Every Monday Night Consider Snow’s friends the Nihilist Spasm Band. In the early 60s seven friends founded a Merry Pranksterish society called the Nihilist Party as a front for creative art terrorism in the small city of London, Ontario, in part as a protest against the Conservatives then holding sway over Canada. Visual artist and kazooist Greg Curnoe introduced his pals to the writings of the Russian nihilists, a movement devoted to the negation of existing cultural institutions....

Letter to the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary Edsey and Sharon Woodhouse, sincerely civic-minded citizens who organized the protest, were pushed aside by Alderman Eugene C. Schulter (47th) who “not only attended [the meeting] but dominated it,” in Joravsky’s well-chosen phrase. Schulter, master of telling selected lies in self-pitying terms, got credit from some irate residents for calling the meeting; in truth, he would have preferred there be no meeting at all....

RUEBEN WILSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He may not enjoy the name recognition of Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, or Jimmy McGriff, but Reuben Wilson has enjoyed the renaissance of the Hammond B-3 organ right alongside those stars–in fact, he’s become something of an underground star himself. Born in Oklahoma, he started playing professionally in Los Angeles, and in the mid-60s went to New York, where he played with a whole range of folks from Sam Rivers to Grant Green, in addition to leading a trio of his own....

The home-and-home series between the White Sox and the Cubs were meetings of the tribes–and not in a good sense necessarily. By the time the teams were done with each other Sunday night, both seemed diminished. The Sox had “won” overall, four games to two, but they’d enhanced their reputation only in the minds of their most xenophobic, Cubs-hating fans. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the Cubs went to the south side snorting fire, pawing at the dirt, and seeking revenge, the Sox had the perfect weapon waiting in the person of Mike Sirotka....

Gimmie Indie Rock V. 1 As more and more subcultures get named, made into graspable, thinkable, salable objects, more and more people get the queasy pleasure of recognizing themselves as natives, of being spied on and having the pictures sold. More often than not, the natives are selling them to each other, a situation exemplified by Christopher Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, a much-decorated independent documentary by and about a fan who becomes the “grunge consultant” to Columbia House....

When this New York-based troupe performed at the Dance Center of Columbia College a little more than ten years ago, I was struck by choreographer Susan Marshall’s instinct for drama and her knack for emotionally resonant, kinetically logical movement phrases. One brief sequence in the duet Arms elegantly evoked the push-pull dynamic of close relationships: a woman repeatedly pulled a man’s arm around her shoulders but shrugged it off before it settled; eventually the violence of her movement pushed him away from her–he dropped at the waist–but her shrug turned into a swoop that pulled him back upright....

TENDAI SHOMYO RESEARCH SOCIETY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Buddhists believe that the universe began not with a bang but with a whisper: the quietly intoned syllable “om,” said to be the first sound of creation. In Japan, “om” is where the heart is. It provides the foundation for meditation, prayer, and celebration, all of which come together in bugaku ho-e, a ceremony that incorporates dance, music, and the Buddhist ritual chanting known as shomyo....

The 17th Chicago Lesbian & Gay international Film Festival runs from Friday, November 7, through Thursday, November 20, at the Music Box (through November 13) and Chestnut Station (November 14 through 20). Advance tickets can be purchased at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division, between 10 am and 6 pm on weekdays, and between noon and 5 pm on Saturday; same-day tickets can be purchased at the venue box office starting a half hour before the first show of the day....

By Ted Shen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Bill Florian started WNIB in 1954, the FCC granted licenses for free. But those days are long gone; the Florians paid $1 million for WNIZ in 1983. And the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act (one of Al Gore’s pet projects) loosened the rules for the number of radio stations a company can own, triggering the lust of deep-pocketed national radio chains for full-power independent stations in Chicago and other major media markets....

House of Bondage By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cole’s images illuminate the collision between the quest for self-definition and a repressive structure that at best undercuts and at worst destroys the individual. I looked for some hint of self-expression in a shot of a man in tattered clothes being fingerprinted–and thought I found one in the stylishly ragged beard and askew tie clip of the older black man apparently booking him....

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Stan Brakhage’s Song 7, Ernie Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991) uses the hilly topography of San Francisco to create a deeply subjective cinematic space. Gehr moved to that city shortly before the 1989 earthquake, and his meditative study in perspective presents downtown San Francisco as a shifting, twisting forest of disorienting towers and watery landscapes. Filming from a glass elevator that rises up the exterior of a hotel, he subtly tilts the camera to preserve our sense of stability, training the lens on a single rooftop, then disrupts that stability with shots that are upside-down....