White, British-born Cecil Williams was a well-known stage actor and director in South Africa following World War II, but he played his most important role in the backseat of an elegant automobile, where he sat, the embodiment of complacent white privilege, while exiled African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela posed as his chauffeur. Williams actually flubbed his performance–he couldn’t resist taking the wheel as he and Mandela drove down dusty back roads, an act of courtesy that drew unwanted attention from sharp-eyed cops....

TYRONE DAVIS/OTIS CLAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Veteran vocalist Tyrone Davis is one of Chicago’s most influential and best-loved R & B artists. He got his start in the 60s on the west side, waxing several sides for the Four Brothers label before 1968’s “Can I Change My Mind,” on Dakar, catapulted him into the national consciousness. He followed that up with a remarkable string of more than 50 hits and by the late 80s ranked 30th among Billboard’s top 200 R & B artists–putting him ahead of such luminaries as Al Green, the Commodores, and the Jackson 5....

YORON ISRAEL & ORGANIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yoron Israel has lived in New York for more than a decade, but he spent his formative years drumming in organ combos on Chicago’s south side–so when his own organ trio, Organic, put out its debut disc last year, he called it Chicago (Double-Time Records). The organ-trio format has a special appeal for drummers. Since the organist plays bass lines with his feet, the rhythm section consists of only two players, not three–which makes things click a bit more efficiently and lets both musicians stretch out a little....

BABY JANE DEXTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York cabaret star Baby Jane Dexter returns to Chicago this week with a new show, The Real Thing–a collection of love songs Dexter calls “an intimate opera,” which suggests she’ll be doing less talking and more singing this time around. That’s not necessarily good: Dexter’s open-hearted, big-mouthed spontaneity is a natural complement to her vocal style, a gritty yet surprisingly supple sound that injects the adrenaline of blues and rock into the usually mellow milieu of cabaret....

BARDO POND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last couple years, the sounds of space have been reclaimed from the crystal merchants by a legion of rock bands equally inspired by 60s psychedelia and 70s Krautrock. Bardo Pond’s first two albums, with their unabashedly druggy titles (Amanita is a psychoactive mushroom and Bufo Alvarius is a toad that secretes a hallucinogen) and vertiginous music, launched the Philadelphia-based quintet into a choice position in this orbit....

BLUR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As if it weren’t already obvious that Oasis murdered Blur in the ridiculous battle for pop stardom in the U.S., Blur’s fifth and newest record, Blur, closes the case: the album feels like an attempt to escape the largely self-imposed media circus, and it’s for darn sure guaranteed not to sweep America. On previous UK chart toppers like Parklife and The Great Escape, Blur set wry, often cutting observations on Britain’s middle class to snappily arranged, remarkably catchy, Kinks-derived tunes....

24 FRIDAY Last year on this, the biggest shopping day of the year, there were Buy Nothing Day anticonsumerism actions in over 30 countries. In Vancouver a gold-clad Mr. Materialism thanked shoppers for their enthusiastic spending, while in Kyoto a “Zenta” Claus sat meditating in the lotus position for eight hours on the city’s busiest shopping strip. The annual protest, started eight years ago by the Vancouver-based Adbusters Media Foundation, encourages spontaneous pranking and DIY street theater by whoever wants to participate–or you can simply buy nothing....

Math challenge. From a recent policy paper of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless on the gross inadequacy of substance abuse treatment facilities: “Over the last 11 years 77% of federal drug control funding has been spent for law enforcement, leaving only 33% for treatment, prevention and research.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Standard descriptions of Latino political identity go something like this,” writes Peter Beinart in the New Republic (August 11 & 18)....

Paula Person remembers listening to the news in the late 60s and hearing a shocker. “Out in California there was a young person who answered back to a principal of a school,” she says. “I was appalled by that. When I taught school, principals were gods and children obeyed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout the cultural upheaval of the last few decades, Person has maintained her belief in the importance of good manners....

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have read your review of Dr. Akagi with much interest [May 7]. One point especially caught my attention: In your discussion of the conflict between WWII and the war against hepatitis you say “To compound the anomaly, Akagi and Piet converse exclusively in German.” This would actually not have been such an anomaly. Many (perhaps most) Dutch at least understand German, and German was an important second language in Japan, particularly among people with interest in the natural sciences....

Johnny Frigo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Happy Birthday, Johnny. And while we’re on the subject, how does an 80-year-old man, recently recovered from bouncing off a car and onto the sidewalk, continue to play jazz violin with a dexterity and facility that musicians half his age can’t quite attain? Frigo spent a good part of his professional career as a jobbing bassist, putting in time with the big bands of Jimmy Dorsey and Chico Marx (!...

LOOSE KNIT, Frump Tucker Theatre Company, at the Bailiwick Arts Center. A heady amalgam of Waiting to Exhale, The Women, Quilters, the Oprah show, and your favorite soap, Theresa Rebeck’s energetic but overlong comedy assembles five friends who gather weekly to knit sweaters and purl secrets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rebeck is a savvy if formulaic TV writer who knows how to press audience buttons–and how to trigger the breakdowns and confessions that fuel this therapeutic fare....

Lead Stories A physician in Canton, Illinois, told a judge in February he didn’t know why he filed 150 false medicare claims. A man in Calgary, Alberta, told a prosecutor in June he didn’t know why he killed a guest at his sister’s wedding. In New Jersey Samuel Manzie told a judge in April he didn’t know why he killed an 11-year-old boy. Quebec union leader Lorraine Page told a court in April that she didn’t know why she left a store with leather gloves she hadn’t paid for....

The Great Gatsby By Lee Sandlin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I still think a Gatsby opera is a good idea. One of the most striking things about the novel is how incipiently operatic it is–it’s practically a libretto as it stands. Behind the brittle, chic neoromantic prose, the story of Gatsby’s hopeless love for Daisy is told in a succession of eminently stageable big scenes: ecstatic assignations between doomed lovers and over-the-top confrontations with betrayed spouses....

PADDYWACK, Profiles Theatre. Despite some clunky exposition and a thematically appropriate but implausible conclusion, Profiles’ Chicago premiere of Daniel Magee’s one-act about bigots in a London boardinghouse rooting out a suspected IRA terrorist provides a well-paced, compelling 90 minutes of theater, thanks largely to two nuanced portrayals of Irishmen on opposite sides of the political fence. As the working-class Michael, who seeks to ingratiate himself with his English roommates, Chris Farrell is a deft model of understatement....

Ravenous Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This dark fantasy-adventure set in the Sierra Nevada in 1847 is at its best when it’s least overtly allegorical–and fortunately that’s most of the time. Guy Pearce plays a strangely hapless captain whose inadvertent heroism during the Mexican War gets him dispatched to a desolate outpost where the soldiers have too much time on their hands. When a half-dead traveler (Robert Carlyle) turns up with a harrowing story to tell, the men embark on a mission that becomes the ultimate test of their mettle....

RON SEXSMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Thinking out loud is all I’m doing,” sings Ron Sexsmith at the start of his 1997 album, Other Songs (Interscope). “Trying to raise my love above these ruins / With each song I kick it around.” I can’t imagine a more apt or graceful description of this Toronto songwriter’s elusive gift: he treats his often troubling subjects with calm, clarity, and honest melancholy that pass effortlessly into wisdom....

AFGHAN WHIGS 3/5, METRO Setting the standard for generic alt-rock since 1992. Despite crisper production and incongruous interjections of somebody’s idea of R & B, Greg Dulli’s tuneless heavy breathing on the band’s new 1965 (Columbia) isn’t even worth hating–but I can certainly muster some mild resentment. JO SERRAPERE 3/5, HEARTLAND CAFE; 3/7, uncommon ground On her debut, My Blue Heaven (on Chicago trad-music label One Man Clapping), Detroit singer-songwriter Jo Serrapere’s forays into blues are more convincing and engaging than her obligatory folkie whispers or her swipes at swing....

THOMAS MAPFUMO & THE BLACKS UNLIMITED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zimbabwe’s most famous singer, Thomas Mapfumo, got his start in the late 50s playing what was known as “copyright music”–covers of American rock and soul songs. But in the 70s, while Zimbabwe–then still Rhodesia–was in racial turmoil under a minority white government, he began experimenting with traditional sounds, adapting the hypnotic patterns of the mbira, or thumb piano, for electric guitar, mimicking the rattle of gourds with the hi-hat, and singing in Shona, the language of the country’s largest ethnic group....

By Jeffrey Felshman But Henry understood there was no cause for jealousy. Janina was only 14 in 1942, when she’d risked her life to sneak food to Shalom, his two younger brothers, and his sister. Janina knew that Henry understood. She worried about being able to understand Shalom. Before this postcard the last sign Janina had seen of Shalom had been in 1943–a note left under her family’s farmhouse door. “I was here,” he’d written, and signed his name....