Friday 5/7 – Thursday 5/13 The massive exhibit that is Art 1999 Chicago will be open to the general public from 11 to 7 today through Monday and 11 to 5 Tuesday in Festival Hall at Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. Tomorrow six members of the Chicago Art Critics Association will each give a slide lecture on a local artist followed by a discussion called “Chicago Critics on Chicago Art.” It’s from 4 to 6 in room 325; Reader contributor Fred Camper will moderate....

ERNAN LOPEZ-NUSSA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Cuban-American relations continue to thaw, “baseball diplomacy” like this spring’s exhibition series between the Cuban national team and the Baltimore Orioles will keep on grabbing headlines–but the real detente has occurred in the arts. Over the last few years American music lovers have had opportunities not only to attend stateside concerts by masters of Cuban jazz they’d only heard stories about before, but also to discover some of the island’s younger players, like pianist Ernan Lopez-Nussa....

PICK-UPS AND HICCUPS, Boom Chicago, at Live Bait Theater. In the five years since its inception, Boom Chicago has jump-started the careers of many of Chicago’s most gifted improvisers, who can now be seen onstage at Second City and ImprovOlympic, among other venues. The Amsterdam-based Boom Chicago is also one of the best-paying gigs around, and it enables performers to travel overseas and sharpen their skills in front of packed houses: Boom Chicago is an unqualified success in Amsterdam, where it has virtually no competition....

Rain or Shine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1930 circus film is worth seeing almost entirely for the performance of Joe Cook, a long-forgotten vaudeville star who began as a juggler and soon added dance, piano, magic, unicycling, and wire-walking to his act. (Though active on Broadway, he seems to have appeared in only one other film, Arizona Mahoney in 1937.) Frank Capra’s direction here is characteristically bland, and the story, extracted from a stage musical, is unexceptional....

Resfest Digital Film Festival See Critic’s Choice. (8:00) Included in this program of 14 music videos from the last couple of years are three by Chris Cunningham, the genre’s current whiz kid. His growing stylistic confidence and command of digital technology–and fetish for androids–can be charted from his first video, Second Bad Vibel (1996), to his latest, All Is Full of Love, which ingeniously matches Bjork in a duet with herself with a vignette about a female robot who creates a clone, then embraces and kisses it....

RHYTHM & BRASS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Musicians never tire of “Caravan,” the famous 1937 bijou written by Ellington Orchestra trombonist Juan Tizol: it’s been grist for everyone from nouveau swing bands to contemporary Latin-jazz outfits. Even Rhythm & Brass–a hip, eclectic sextet parading in the guise of a classically trained brass-and-percussion ensemble–is not immune to its charms. But the group does find a different route through this well-traveled tune....

by Mike Sula Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it wasn’t until ten years ago, when he was down and out in sandlocked Scottsdale, Arizona, that Gumbinger realized there was an untapped market in people thirsty for tales of submerged vessels. He’d recently left his home in Kenosha, scuttling a chain of video stores, a lucrative career as a financial planner, and a sunken relationship, to try the “starving artist thing,” he says....

In a room on the third floor of the Chicago Children’s Museum, Quraysh Ali Lansana is teaching a poem to two little girls. The girls read it silently, then Lansana directs them to the front of the room and asks them to interpret the poem physically. As he reads each line the girls repeat it and act it out, miming a snowflake and a flower. Within ten minutes they’re able to perform the poem on their own....

When the venerable Old Town School of Folk Music opened its new headquarters last fall, few knew the future of folk music was under debate. But the genre that gripped generations in the 1950s and ’60s is being reinvented in the ’90s. What do we mean now when we talk about folk music? Back in the 1960s, Peter Yarrow says, traditionalists used this argument against his group, Peter, Paul, and Mary....

Don’t expect much of a conventional plot from this 1997 feature from the Czech Republic, the dramatic debut of veteran documentarian Ivan Vojnar. A Viennese dentist, seeking spiritual refuge on the eve of World War I, journeys deep into the Bohemian woods and arrives at a tiny village, describing it in voice-over as if recalling random memories. Silenced by solitude and familiarity, the villagers barely speak to one another, but Vojnar is less interested in character development than in charting the seasons and capturing a world whose isolation is about to be shattered by war....

Upright Citizens Brigade Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For five years the Upright Citizens Brigade performed in relative obscurity here, receiving little or no press for their inspired, cranky shows. True, they loved to lash out at authority–in one show, a member impersonating Tribune critic Richard Christiansen became embroiled in a shouting match with the performers. It wasn’t always easy to decide whether to laugh or gasp at how gleefully the troupe fucked with their audience’s minds....

skupien.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a periodic customer and nearby resident of Betty’s Resale Shop, I was very interested in the article “Trouble in Store” in the September 25 issue of the Reader. It was a well-written piece that offered views of both sides of an extremely important issue that is relevant in the ever-increasing gentrification of Chicago. When does a business become a nuisance to the neighborhood it inhabits?...

Writer-performer Barrie Cole creates wonderfully contradictory characters at once playful and inhibited, verbally dexterous and inarticulate, intellectually strong and emotionally vulnerable. In the first of three monologues on this program, “Gasp,” she launches into a formalist deconstruction of the language worthy of Gertrude Stein, based on counting to 100, only to have her prose poem shatter to bits when the word “nine” triggers a series of memories about a trip to India....

CONCERTANTE DI CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When composer William Neil came to Chicago in 1984, he was out of sync with new music’s orthodoxy. Until the early 90s academic fashion favored atonality and consistency of voice, but Neil liked to choose from a variety of styles, old and new; he had more in common with Samuel Barber or David Del Tredici than Roger Sessions or Milton Babbitt....

martin.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wasn’t too taken aback to read theater editor Albert Williams disagreeing with Justin Hayford’s original unfavorable review [Section Two, May 29] of Famous Door’s show Beautiful Thing (Critic’s Choice 6/12/98), accusing Justin (not by name) of being a “political doctrinaire” who “misses the point” of a “tender, funny tale” for his attempt to place the production, with disapproval, into a larger social context....

East Side Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The words “communist musical” may call to mind tractors and factories–both of which are certainly in evidence here–but this fascinating and enjoyable documentary by Romanian-born filmmaker Dana Ranga and American-born independent Andrew Horn presents the singular genre as a conflict between capitalist glitz and socialist poetry, revealing both the Marxists’ tragicomic efforts to beat the West at its own game and the homegrown folksiness of their efforts....

By Ted Shen Neither Xiang nor Yang had heard Bach’s music before 1979, when the Cultural Revolution ended. But once Western music returned to Shanghai they began exploring it. When Yang got into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in the late 80s he was required to minor in the piano, which meant digging into the vast European repertoire. “Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and even pieces by contemporary Chinese composers. And, of course, Bach....

By Michael Miner “Gore Bush in. Gore Bush out,” Eyre proclaimed. He glanced around the bar in hopes that his witticism had been overheard and admired. “Then there’s Howard Phillips, whose Constitution Party garnered 4,280 votes, and Harry Browne, who cornered 18,854 for the Libertarians. Add any of those figures to Al Gore’s totals and nobody would be wondering who the next president is.” Eyre looked about to see if he was holding court yet....

New Films by Stan Brakhage His work is not easy to like. Most of his films are silent: Brakhage argues that the viewer will be better attuned to the rhythms of the imagery without a sound track. In recent years, most of his films have been abstract. And the elements that have given some abstract films, such as Norman McLaren’s, a degree of popular appeal are absent. Brakhage’s shapes are hard to limn; the imagery goes by very quickly; there’s no obvious “compositional logic”; the rhythms are unpredictable; there’s little repetition....

By Ben Joravsky “I’ve seen a lot, but this may be the worst,” says Eric Outten, cofounder of Schools First (a parents’ group) and chair of the local school council at Burnside Academy on the far south side. “It’s the lack of inclusion. It’s the fact that Vallas feels he can dictate anything. This time I think he may have crossed a line.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet for all his power, busing remained a $100 million-a-year line item just beyond his reach, since it was used for legally required (and hugely popular) special-education and magnet programs....