Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A generation separates Gus and Nan Giordano, the father-daughter team who choreographed Le Firebird de Jazz, but that gap doesn’t seem to have bothered them; indeed, this new dance spans even more disparate choreographic and musical generations. Using some of Stravinsky’s original 1910 score for the Fokine ballet as well as Charlie Parker’s 40s variation on the music, Le Firebird de Jazz reveals the connections between early-20th-century ballet and mid-century jazz dance: both are highly stylized forms whose tableaux, flying leaps, and sometimes grotesque contortions of the head and neck, torso, and arms are justified by Firebird’s fairy-tale origins and ornithological characters....

Henryk Musialowicz: The Mystery of Darkness David Humphrey Other animals in the same series are like vacant shadows or dimly lit ghosts: Musialowicz’s depictions are never literal or naturalistic. Instead he tries to fill his paintings, he’s written, with “a subjective feeling of the form’s pureness, to paint what I feel and not what I see.” Born in Poland in 1914, where he lives today, he expresses interest in “primitive art” and in plant and animal fossils–“geological messages and traces of cataclysms....

Lead Stories John Glover, 74, explained in June that his car was in the middle of New Jersey’s Deal Lake because the gas pedal got stuck. Billy W. Parkham, 68, said his minivan smashed into a dress shop in Seekonk, Massachusetts, in August because the gas pedal got stuck. Marie Wyman, 87, claimed her Buick crashed into a restaurant in Winslow, Maine, in July because the gas pedal got stuck....

PAULINHO GARCIA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even under normal circumstances, it would be time well spent to go hear Paulinho Garcia on a January evening. And this week, as he sings and strums the glorious pop-music legacy of his native Brazil–summoning bright beaches and lush rain forest and the slow-samba pace of life under the balmy sun–he presents the perfect reprieve for Chicagoans in the midst of a cold snap....

RICHARD THE THIRD: THE STORY BECOMES THE HISTORY, Open Eye Productions, at the Greenview Arts Center. Like would-be king Richard Nixon, real-life king Richard III has been the subject of revisionist history from the moment he took power. Contemporary opinion varied greatly–one bishop said, “He contents the people where he goes best that ever a prince did,” whereas a priest remarked that “like a scorpion he combined a smooth front with a stinging tail....

A culture clash worthy of Samuel Fuller lies at the heart of Susumu Hani’s unsettling 1963 Japanese feature, in which a housewife repeatedly leaves her small, modern, antiseptic apartment to visit a nearby encampment of ragpickers. Among them she finds an old college friend of her husband’s who prefers his present life to a “respectable” job, and her fascination with the man and his community begins to threaten her marriage. She and her husband share an apartment in an anonymous building whose almost surreal disconnection from the land contravenes centuries of traditional Japanese architecture, making them even more rootless than the ragpickers....

The 13th annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, continues from Friday, April 11, through Monday, April 14. Film and video screenings will be at the Chestnut Station, 850 N. Clark; Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; Spanish Coalition for Jobs, 2011 W. Pershing; First Chicago Center, 1 S. Dearborn; and Calles y Suenos, 1900 S. Carpenter. Tickets for most programs are $7....

Of course we all know you’re the world’s smartest human. However, I’ve heard about this guy, William James Sidis, who might have been the world’s smartest person when he was alive. Harvard’s youngest graduate, he was a lightning calculator and a linguistic genius, supposedly publishing papers anticipating the existence of black holes and other astronomical phenomena. On the other hand, he lived in obscurity, on the run from the law, and frankly most of his writings sound like gobbledy-gook to me, not that I’m any judge....

TONY OXLEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » English percussionist Tony Oxley didn’t even begin learning his instrument until the age of 17, but within a decade he was the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s prestigious London jazz club, performing with American legends like Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, and Lee Konitz in their heyday. Before long, however, Oxley’s mastery of the jazz idiom left him itching for a new challenge....

U.S. Open? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alma, 21, lost the tips of her fingers on a punch press at a factory she’d been assigned to work at by a day-labor agency. Dan Giloth, an organizer of day laborers for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, says day-labor agencies put workers at risk daily. “Oftentimes employers will specifically request ‘Spanish-only’ workers because they’re putting them in work conditions where they’re likely to have their rights to a safe workplace violated in some way....

In Mark Street’s laid-back, loosely structured 50-minute Why Live Here? (1996) three people describe their reactions to living in different places: San Francisco, Florida, and Montana. At the end one of them says, “We live where we live because we like it, or we don’t hate it enough to move.” Sometimes the footage illustrates the voice-over humorously–as when we see rain and hear Florida described as a place “where the sun shines all the time....

Pussy, King of the Pirates In his philosophical-historical study Pirate Utopias, Peter Lamborn Wilson envisions the Barbary corsairs as a sort of radical anarchist collective on the high seas, putting into practice the maxim “Property is theft” and establishing their own laws and societies in uncharted territory. “The pirate,” he writes, “was first and foremost the enemy of his own civilization. And once again, ‘the enemy of my enemy’ just might prove to be my friend....

Cabaret Comes to Wicker Park Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kirchman and Davenport came up with the idea five years ago, when Davenport was a bartender at Spiaggia and Kirchman was an advertising executive who frequented the restaurant. After discovering a common interest in cabaret music they vowed to open their own club, but they spent years wrestling with zoning laws as they searched for the right spot....

OCTOBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 14 SATURDAY The Organ Historical Society’s Autumn Organ Crawl of the Northern Suburbs offers organ lovers a chance to hear four great organs in four historic churches. It starts at 10 today at Saint Paul Lutheran Church in Skokie (Niles Center and Galitz), where the instrument is a 1974 Phelps. The next stop, at 11:15, is at Saint John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wilmette (Wilmette and Park), to listen to a 1990 Evanston-made Bradford....

By Bruce Hirsch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It would seem to me that it’s the poultry families who are getting the short and greasy end of the stick here, bravely sacrificing up the children each year, just like little feathered Abrahams offering up their firstborn to those big-footed, flop-eared Wascally Wabbits, some of whom are acting out the role of God in this extended crypto-biblical gothic-charnel-house scenario, where the embryonic journey of those “preemie” shell creatures leads them to be boiled alive while still ensconced within the supposed safety and serenity of the only one-bedroom starter home they’ve ever known, the at once protective and suicidally confining maternal shell, and even more hideously to have these little mobile homes painted up like the abodes of preadolescent streetwalkers in “gay” commercial colors and “festive” dyes, and then to be hidden all over the neighborhood by fantastically garbed, heavily furred hopping hare harbingers (who are notoriously rumored to be committed vegetarians, I might add) without benefit of a decent interment, only to get snatched up by the chubby little hands of the greedy spawn of yet another species, and thence thrown in together with “Peeps” (crudely fashioned from sugar to resemble the extended family members they’ll never know) and those ubiquitous “jelly beans” horrifically resembling the youngsters themselves, in an especially cruel and ironic twist of fate, in a temporary group home, a flimsy container lined with military-industrial-complex-spawned long-chain-molecule-based artificial grass, an organic basket-shaped device, just one more fashioned in an endless assembly line by starving, poorly clothed third-world non-union artisans, each ersatz nest painstakingly assembled by hand from the dying remnants of chlorophyll-based life-forms gathered from the receding swamps and vanishing global wetlands, to remain there for an uncertain but certainly temporary period, and finally, after proper display, to be ripped gleefully open and wolfed down with salt or combined with a few perfidious condiments, oils, and herbs and thereupon to be turned into a lumpy monochromatic salad while their still-colorful outer raiments are discarded and rendered into a molecular mulch for the nourishment of ravenous microbes, while the once embryonic children wind up passing through vitreous china plumbing and are ultimately piped into solid-waste recycling plants, and those unfortunate enough to be consumed in southwest Wisconsin may be sold yet again into hideous proto-slavery, being bagged and labeled as “Milorganite” and strewn into urban and suburban gardens as brunch for the worms, why, the food chain is very nearly just too hideous to contemplate....

I like to talk to cabdrivers. Especially the old salts. When my efforts to engage them in conversation are successful, they’ll inevitably ask me where I’m from. “Cairo, Illinois,” is what I reply, and the reaction is almost always the same. I swear I’m not exaggerating, this has happened at least 15 times: “Goddamn, that’s a rough town.” Always “rough” and almost always “goddamn” for emphasis. The next thing I knew we were bouncing into the parking lot at Saint Mary’s Hospital....

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....

In late October 1978, Mayor Michael A. Bilandic was about to present his budget for the coming year, and Sun-Times reporter Harry Golden sat at his Underwood typewriter, rapidly pecking away at its keys with the index fingers of both hands. Mouthing his words as they formed on the paper, Golden–the dean of the City Hall press room–planned to break one of his usual budget exclusives. He wasn’t about to be sidetracked by any distractions....

My first glimpse of Chicago was through the smoked windows of a black stretch limousine. It’s one of the many that zigzag between O’Hare and the NBC Tower, depositing guests such as myself at the nexus of talk show controversy. I’d never seen the Jerry Springer Show prior to that wintry February day, and my first glimpse of the man himself was under the bright lights of his stage when action rolled and Jerry asked me, “So, Salem, what’s going on?...

In the opening minutes of Frederick Wiseman’s Public Housing a woman named Helen Finner argues on the phone with an official from the Chicago Housing Authority. “But it is an emergency,” Finner insists. “She’s a young girl with a baby and no place to stay.” The scene distills to a single conversation Finner’s two decades of battling the CHA. She complains about the red tape that leaves 200 units at the Ida B....