ROKIA TRAORE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Malian singer Rokia Traore, who’s just 26, is already a savvy international citizen: she grew up in Bamako, the capital of Mali, and thanks to her diplomat father she’s spent significant time in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, and France. The label she records for is based in France, and her reputation was launched by performances there. But her worldliness surfaces in her music with an unusual subtlety....

By Ben Joravsky To the south and east of the harbor rise the skyscrapers of the near north side, hovering over the lake. “It’s that view, that vista, with the lake sweeping out to the horizon that makes this spot so special. It’s a spot that makes me appreciate how wonderful Chicago is. There’s no place like this spot in the east. My husband is from India, and he says it reminds him of the oceanfront in Bombay....

By Ben Joravsky Over the years her friendships evolved. “It’s pretty complicated how things are at Young,” she says. “There are different groups. They’re not negative cliques–at least I don’t think so. You just sort of hang out with your friends. And your friends hang out with their friends. And the circle grows. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They were the sort of students who challenged authority, she says....

Cecil, I’ve got a question for you that has me stumped. How are shrunken heads made? I’m sure they have to take the skull out, but how? And why do certain cultures shrink human heads anyway? -Headhunter Joe, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally the raiders returned home, and the whole tribe celebrated with a series of ritualized drunken revels. These events were the highlight of the Jivaro social calendar and gave the warriors a chance to show off their catch, no doubt the real point of the whole enterprise....

Under Milk Wood Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one expected much when Barto Productions’ Under Milk Wood opened in the fall of 1991 at Wrigleyville’s Cafe Voltaire. Over the years Dylan Thomas’s 1953 verse comedy, about the waking and dreaming lives of the inhabitants of a mythical Welsh fishing village called Llareggub (“buggerall” spelled backward), had daunted many theater companies who tried to put this “play for voices” onstage; the script’s fluid exploration of inner and outer reality defied attempts to give the play visual, physical life....

Sometimes we forget that multiculturalism isn’t just a much funded, much maligned trend in the arts but the way some people live their lives. Hema Rajagopalan, artistic director of the bharatanatyam troupe Natyakalalayam Dance Company, and Jan Bartoszek, artistic director of the modern group Hedwig Dances, have put their heads together on an hour-long piece about the experience of immigrant mothers and their children, Amma (which means “mother” in several Indian languages)....

Saturday, June 26 2:30 PM Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel The must-see of the festival: Myles’s Highways & Honky Tonks (Rounder) was the finest slice of straight-up Bakersfield-style honky-tonk I heard last year. The California native had issued a few passable albums earlier in the decade, but she arrived with this one, singing in an effortless, soul-fueled twang in front of a crack band. Her songs take on familiar themes without ever sounding formulaic, from the working life (“Playin’ Every Honky Tonk in Town”) to cheatin’ (“Who Did You Call Darlin’”) to carpe diem romance (her smooth duet with Merle Haggard, “No One Is Gonna Love You Better”)....

Friday 12/12 – Thursday 12/18 13 SATURDAY Time between jobs can be horribly depressing, leading to feelings of inadequacy that won’t help to end an employment search. The Robert Taylor Homes’ Boys & Girls Club’s Jobs- Path Program provides kits on job training and how to ace an interview. Proceeds from tonight’s holiday celebration–which features Arnita Boswell, founder of the League of Black Women, and harpist Sadhana Mi–will go toward continuing the program....

HIM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his previous recordings as Him, percussionist Doug Scharin has conducted expansive experiments in dub: steady bass lines and his loose-limbed rhythms provided a framework for everything from spaced-out reggae licks to Middle Eastern textures. But compared to the new Sworn Eyes (Perishable), those records were positively rigid. This time out, Scharin’s support cast includes two jazz players–cornetist Rob Mazurek and guitarist Jeff Parker–along with bassist Bundy Brown, and their influence is evident....

INNARDS ON THE INTERSTATE, HeIsComing Theatre Company, at the Playground. First the facts: late one summer afternoon, on Interstate 80/94 near Gary, a truck braked to avoid hitting another vehicle and spilled its cargo–lamb entrails–all over the highway. From the bare, uh, bones of this incident Jeff Grafton has fashioned a play filled with mystical manifestations, in which the ovine offal and the human body concealed within it are less bizarre than the personnel sent to investigate the accident....

Lawyered Up Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Hodes, LCA was created to address the specific needs of artists, which he says were not well served by the pro bono program of the Chicago Bar Association. Many of LCA’s early clients were small arts organizations that wanted to incorporate as nonprofits; over the years LCA has aided such local institutions as the New Art Examiner, Chicago Latino Cinema, the Organic Theater, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a September meeting of Christian Coalition leaders in Atlanta, founder Pat Robertson said the religious group should heighten its influence by modeling itself after the notorious political machines of Chicago and New York’s Tammany Hall and that God will personally select the Republican best suited to advance the coalition’s agenda in the next presidential campaign. At the beginning of his remarks Robertson had said he assumed he was talking only “in the family” and if any members of the press were present, “would you please shoot yourself?...

By Deirdre Guthrie A tragic-looking creature dressed with Amish severity, a long brown braid streaked with gray hanging somberly down her back, ochos demurely, scissoring in a series of tight kicks with an almost invisible lick of pleasure on her lips, while her partner, despite being nearly two heads shorter, anchors her with his firm stance. Beside them a haughty woman brushes one fishnet-stockinged leg across the floor in a slow semicircle before abruptly hiking a spiked heel to her thigh and leaning into her partner, who appears a bit bland in comparison, as the bandoneons swell to a close....

The Seven Streams of the River Ota The theater must be larger than you are. –Robert Lepage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lepage is out to tell seven delicate little stories that fold in and around one another throughout the evening. The piece begins in Hiroshima during the American occupation, as a GI tours the city taking official photographs of the physical destruction wrought by the Bomb....

6 STRING DRAG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was only a matter of time before the wiser denizens of alternative country ran for the border. The four guys from Raleigh who make up the mildly punkish 6 String Drag aren’t breaking new ground like Jeff Tweedy and Wilco did on their second LP, but they have at least let their record collections take them on some long side trips out of Twangville....

When he worked as a messenger for Facets Multimedia, Brett Bloom was responsible for stocking the theater’s dispensers around the city with film schedules. “I hated that part of the job,” he confesses. But he also saw how the dispensers, when filled, created a point of informal street-level interaction for passersby, and as an artist he appreciated the boxes’ design, which allowed for the efficient dis-play of images and informa-tion. When local artist and teacher Dan Peterman in-vited Bloom, a recent grad-uate of the University of Chicago, to submit a proposal for a public art project last year, Bloom suggested using the dispensers as mini art galleries....

By Harold Henderson “She is in the mold of Abraham Lincoln,” press secretary Edward Marshall explained. “It’s how she thinks of herself. In Illinois she thinks most mainstream Republicans are in the mold of Abraham Lincoln. If you want to read it as excluding somebody, that’s your conclusion.” (As comptroller, Didrickson did strike a blow for “individual rights and freedoms” by instituting an employment policy of not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation....

Produced by Jonathan Pitts and Frances Callier, this ambitious event runs through April 5, bringing together companies and fans from around the city as well as out of town. A slew of workshops and lectures by such notables as Del Close, Mick Napier, Keith Johnstone, Tim Kazurinsky, and Denise DeClue augment nightly performances by improv groups from New York, LA, Minneapolis, Portland, and Amsterdam, as well as Chicago. Most events take place at the Annoyance Theatre, 3747 N....

DANILO PEREZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Danilo Perez seems to have divined the likely course of jazz in the next century, as the boundaries between Americas continue to fade. Still in his 20s, the pianist has established himself not only as one of the sterling jazz musicians of his generation, accepting the torch from Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, but also as a master of Afro-Caribbean music....

Ginuwine In the information age, the music of choice is the music uploaded with the most information, natch, like Ginuwine’s number-one R & B single “Pony.” In the space of just a measure and a half you get car skids, “Atomic Dog” panting, that bleep you hear after you swallow the strawberry in Pac-Man, and a mad funny bass line that sounds like Zapp’s Roger Troutman after a mighty swig of bicarb....