The Cry of Jazz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ed Bland’s 35-minute essay, made in Chicago in 1959, argues that jazz is an essential expression of the African-American spirit. That idea may seem like a truism now, but this remains a fascinating and unique sociological document, not to mention one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen. It’s intensely serious yet filled with contradictions; rare, energetic footage of Sun Ra illustrates the film’s arguments, while other scenes have the feel of cheesy 50s instructional films....

Recently I’ve been hearing a lot about the dangers of bioterrorism (germ warfare), in which some random group of fanatics gets the world’s attention by, say, using a crop-duster plane to spray Washington, D.C., with anthrax and wipe out a couple hundred thousand people. The articles say we’re totally unprepared, it’s just a matter of time, etc. But so far all the terrorism I hear about involves the usual bombs and bullets....

Young Poets Society Classmate Jonah Thompson takes the floor and matter-of-factly announces his poem “Death,” which he recites from memory with a hint of a smirk. “You can’t escape your awful fate… / But death isn’t always so bad / If you do what you’re supposed to / It’ll make you glad… / I wish I could tell you more / Just pray that death skips past your door.” In the manner of a poetry slammer, Thompson talks about his inspiration....

By Neal Pollack Some of the larger ones, Chamizo says, took him more than two years to complete. Others look like he shot them off in about two minutes. They depict many of the interests Chamizo has accumulated in his 61 years: baseball, Cuban music, Latin-American history, and the movie Casablanca, which he’s seen more than 100 times. Some are portraits of his friends and business neighbors. Quite a few feature colorful quotes he’s heard while listening to sports talk shows on the Score....

By Ben Joravsky Like many of these students, Bryant began his dance career despising ballet. Growing up on Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands, he watched ballet classes at a local dance school and sneered at the dancers. “I was like many of the students I see every day, very stubborn. I didn’t think ballet was for me. It takes a lot of discipline. There’s a rigidness to ballet that we don’t have in tap or jazz....

FLOATING RHODA AND THE GLUE MAN, Vitalist Theatre, at the Blue Rider Theatre. According to a huge sign posted in the Blue Rider’s window, Eve Ensler considers this to be the best production of one of her plays she’s seen–proof that she’s as poor a judge of theater as she is a playwright. Her tiresome, overwritten, laughably implausible Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man asks us to care about the tortured sex lives of four cartoonish characters with the emotional maturity of two-year-olds in midtantrum....

HEATHER MACRAE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heather MacRae’s cabaret show Songs for My Father, which features tunes her dad, Gordon, sang in the 1950s movie musicals he made with Doris Day and Shirley Jones, could easily have been just another evening of breezy nostalgia. MacRae has her father’s engaging earnestness (as well as his strong chin and apple cheeks) plus a gift for yearning lyricism, which she puts to good use on selections such as “If I Loved You” (from Carousel) and an exquisite, slow rendition of “I Only Have Eyes for You” (from Tea for Two)–which recalls a French impressionist art song as MacRae’s slightly breathy mezzo caresses the melody over musical director Mark Nadler’s rippling piano arpeggios....

When did school overtake the post office as the place a person is most likely to lose it? Over the past couple of years, crazed student gunmen have outnumbered AK-toting postal workers by a ratio of four to one. Is it the decay of standards in the mass entertainment media? The number of students using E-mail? The Internet? Certainly the proliferation of guns is a contributing factor. But it doesn’t explain the increase in the use of deadly weapons by kids in particular....

KING ERNEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blues and R & B vocalist Ernest Baker began his career in Chicago in the 60s in the rough-and-ready band of blues guitarist Byther Smith, but soon gravitated toward the more sophisticated sounds of soul music. He became a local celebrity, working alongside such established stars as Tyrone Davis and Syl Johnson, but though he recorded for several labels and established a reputation as a stellar live performer (it’s said that his dancing rivaled James Brown’s and Jackie Wilson’s), he never managed to find the kind of material necessary to crack the national charts....

A friend pointed out a haunting secret tucked away in the depths of The Wizard of Oz. Way in the background at the end of the scene where the angry trees shake apples onto Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow, you can see a man who is supposedly hanging himself. As the trio dances off on the yellow brick road singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” you can catch a glimpse of this man supposedly setting out a block, hanging himself, and lastly kicking the block out with his foot....

Memory Works: Film and Video by Matthias MŸller Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Matthias MŸller, a founder of Germany’s maverick Alte Kinder collective, creates elegant yet primal experimental shorts whose stream-of-consciousness montages are fraught with Freudian imagery. Alpsee (1995) connects memory fragments of an early-60s boyhood governed by a solicitous Barbie-doll mother. In Pensao Globo (1997) an HIV-positive man in a Lisbon hotel conjures up lovers from his past, some of whom become doppelgangers; the multiple-exposure shots and lap dissolves add to the disquieting sense of memory unhinged....

Morseland: Show’s Over Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No beef is actually the problem: the Morseland was busted for not serving food. Though it hasn’t really functioned as such since 1995, it’s licensed as a restaurant that can sell alcohol, not as a bar. Duggan, a 31-year-old former Loyola student who’d worked as a cocktail waitress and bartender there since 1993, took over the Morseland from the previous owner, who still possesses the building at 1218 W....

How do you photograph a dull, vacuous place without making dull photographs?” The New American Village is the second installment in Thall’s ongoing effort to document the Chicago area’s built environment. His first book, The Perfect City (1994), surveyed the changing face of the Loop between 1972 and 1991, a period of massive reconstruction. Made in a fourth of that time, between 1991 and 1996, The New American Village may be his most focused effort yet....

The Plethora Effect Janusz Walentynowicz Artists have addressed this problem in various ways, often by making works that sprawl. Multipanel paintings, sculptures with many parts, and installations cannot be grasped all at once. All five artists in “The Plethora Effect”–which doesn’t look like a student show even though the participants are recent MFA graduates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign–make work that’s dispersed in space. Kevin Kaempf not only designed the wall sign announcing the show but also redesigned the announcement card and catalog....

Pop Goes the Country Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Nashville Sound, sometimes called “countrypolitan,” was developed in the late 50s and early 60s by a handful of producers, including Chet Atkins, who worked with Jim Reeves, Skeeter Davis, and Don Gibson, and Owen Bradley, who made stars of Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, and Patsy Cline. In fact, though the press materials that accompanied my copy of the album take pains not to mention it, Barnett spent three nights a week through most of 1994 and ’95 playing Cline in the hit musical “Always…Patsy Cline” at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and at times on I’ve Got a Right to Cry, she still sounds an awful lot like her....

REFUGE, Plasticene, at the National Pastime Theater. In Refuge, Dexter Bullard’s movement-theater troupe introduces audiences to a dislocating, fascinating world where walls of glass, wood, and paper careen around the stage, depositing and gathering up mysterious suitcases and their owners with hypnotic speed. Just as the actor-dancers form tableaux, relationships, and rivalries but find no lasting refuge, these walls form ever-changing rooms, alleys, and barriers. But the performers’ brief gestures and confrontations overlap to create compelling, cryptic stories in this tour de force of physical narrative....

REX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rex’s second album, C (Southern), stood out from last year’s mope-rock horde for how the trio spun its bittersweet melodies in huge arcs without losing control of them or inducing boredom. Once again, on this year’s 3, the muggy guitar arpeggios and mournful, country-influenced singing of Curtis Harvey, deceptively complex bass lines of Phil Spirito, and hydroplaning drumming of Doug Scharin blend with a sensitive, low-key verve....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest; now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the Rhino Fest, now in its 11th year, features shows by such local notables as Theater for the Age of Gold, the Billy Goat Experiment, Blair Thomas, Antonio Sacre (now based in LA, but returning for the festival), John Musial, Michael K....

Empire Building: Larry Tucker’s World of Meat Chicago may be considered a rib town, but relatively few places outside of black communities make genuine barbecue. Most restaurants parboil or prebake the meat, then finish it on a grill. You get a mushy texture and little real smoke flavor this way–losses no sauce can compensate for. Tucker’s culinary gift to the north side is the real thing: great ribs, Texas brisket, and Tennessee pork shoulder, as well as chicken and turkey....

WAGON CHRIST/DJ KRUSH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years ago, before electronica became a marketing pigeonhole, Luke Vibert (aka Plug) released Throbbing Pouch under the name Wagon Christ. It’s a thick slab of dazzling, funky sampledelia that was never given its proper due–and it still tops what most of the competition is doing, even today. Vibert has proved to be one of the genre’s most versatile and clever practitioners, casually mixing up all sorts of styles with humor and panache....