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One of the best things about Art Chicago is the opportunity to see the work of internationally famous artists rarely shown here. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Snow, from Toronto, is noted for his avant-garde films but less well-known in Chicago as a prolific artist in many media: drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, books, slide performances, holograms. Snow often takes a humorous approach to the creation of representational art, particularly the way imagery changes nature–and distances the viewer from it....

By Ben Joravsky The World War II generation is hot these days, the stuff of best-sellers and blockbuster movies. But what’s generally left out of the tales by the Spielbergs and the Brokaws–apparently being too controversial for mainstream consumption–are the leftist roots of that generation’s great struggles. “We don’t want history to be revised,” says Charles Hall. “We want the real story told.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By 1935 he had joined the Young Communist League, having been moved by their fiery speakers in Bughouse Square who denounced evictions and lynchings and called for a unified labor movement....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a Chicago debate in 1993, in which I participated, Lundberg publicly admitted that he was no expert on this subject. He furthermore did not answer any of the substantive questions that I or others posed to him. During this same weekend he had the audacity to invite only members of his side for a TV program that later aired on the AMA network....

Though not the best known of Kenji Mizoguchi’s period masterpieces, this 1939 feature is conceivably the greatest. (For me the only other contender is Sansho the Bailiff.) The plot, which oddly resembles that of There’s No Business Like Show Business, concerns the rebellious son of a theatrical family devoted to Kabuki who leaves home for many years, perfects his art, aided by a working-class woman who loves him, and eventually returns....

By Linda Lutton Olbrisch and Rose belong to a local group that’s adding a new tool to the arsenal of Chicago activists: art. “Visual images are a very quick, easy, attention-grabbing way to get your message across,” says Kim Feicke, a founding member of Art and Revolution Chicago. “It’s a way of bringing culture into the movement that we’re creating. We consider culture and art to be a very important part of our lives, and it needs to be an important part of the world that we’re trying to change....

From the pages of Devil’s Elbow, the Magazine That’s Salty, Crusty, and Tough as a Boot ¥ Number 6 (119 Chestnut Street, Oxford, MS 38655; $7 for 4 issues) By Lori Robbins Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The path to the birthplace takes you past the Pat and Dick gravesite, so be prepared and make sure your camera is loaded. Many of you might be tempted, as I was, to commemorate your visit by photographing yourself doing something clownish and disrespectful in front of the graves, i....

Patronage in the 90s. “During the six months he worked for CAPS [Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy] in 1997, [Roderick] Smith said, he was forced to do public relations when he preferred helping residents solve problems,” writes Alysia Tate in the Chicago Reporter (February). “He said he tried to spend his time with block clubs and did help create a video that taught residents how to get rid of rats. Smith said his police supervisors never gave him direction–except when he was told to dress up as McGruff the Crime Dog to appear with Mayor Richard M....

By Mario Kladis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Wow,” I said, turning to the guy next to me. I was going to say, “Hey, look–Mayor Daley!” But it was Bill Kurtis. The mayor headed over to him and said hello. To someone who grew up watching local TV and who had never seen either of these guys in person–and who was already a little drunk–it was like seeing the Shedd Aquarium shake hands with the Field Museum....

Of course the Trocks’ big shtick is men dancing women’s roles in famous ballets, something they’ve been doing since 1974. But that’s only one of the many transformations they achieve in their affectionate parodies of what is often a very silly art form. Sometimes the transformations are contemporary and cultural: in the blink of an eye a graceful swan will suddenly turn into a scolding black mama, or a shy young girl will show us the Jewish mother lurking behind her coy facade....

MELT-BANANA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Japanese four-piece plays a dazzlingly intricate, perpetually wired, sometimes childlike, and nakedly joyous mix of hardcore, noise, improv, and pop, bringing the various subcultures together in a rapturous orgy of pure energy. K.K. Null took them under his wing in 1993, putting out their first album and giving them their earliest international exposure, and since then they’ve toured and recorded with luminaries both Japanese (the Merzbow collaboration of 1995, Merz-Banana, was a landmark) and American, including John Zorn and his posse, Mike Patton’s Mr....

Moving Pictures “I used to be quite the polemicist,” admits Weber, who cofounded the Chicago Mural Group (now the Chicago Public Art Group) in 1970 and would go on to do dozens of murals, reliefs, and mosaics throughout the city and the world. “I used to write manifestos saying, ‘We must do this! We must do that!’ But I’ve mellowed over the years.” Last year Weber was involved in the painting of his first outdoor mural in Chicago in two decades....

Other Worlds: Time and Place in Recent Avant-Garde Film Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The six works on this program are connected only loosely, but the strongest three evoke feelings of almost surreal dislocation. Lewis Klahr’s Marietta’s Lied, concerning the forced emigration of Jewish-German composers in the 1930s, uses cutout animation of performers floating across shifting backgrounds, often of ruined cities, to suggest displacement and loss....

What this young troupe has always had is a sense of urgency–a sense that the dancers are deeply invested in what they’re doing. It seems to have affected even outside choreographer Ron De Jesus in the untitled piece he’s created for the company, headed by Jason Ohlberg and Anna Simone Levin. Partly De Jesus plays off the imbalances inherent in his quintet for four women and one man: his staging opens with the man upstage in one chair and the women downstage in four chairs....

This week we got contest prizes. As any film novice knows, “Second prize: a set of steak knives. Third prize: you’re fired” was spewed by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, the greatest movie ever made because not one member of the cast possessed fallopian tubes! Not an XX in the bunch. –Carter Belleau, Seattle, WA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The movie? Mommie Dearest, of course....

I’m male, primarily hetero, and my wife and I are in our early 40s. We’ve been married for six years, have two great kids, a nice house, and life is good, except–for a couple of decades I’ve wanted to have a threesome with two women. (In college I did several guy-guy-girl three-ways, and it was fun.) My wife has never been interested in my fantasy, but before we married she agreed that she’d explore it with me....

LIQUID SOUL 12/25, DURTY NELLIE’S; 12/27, DOUBLE DOOR; 12/31, the roxie If you weren’t inclined to see this hard-gigging, upbeat local funky-jazz outfit earlier in the year, you’re probably even less so now, since there’s already enough good cheer in the air to choke a reindeer. But a Liquid Soul set could be just the thing on, say, Christmas night–especially if you’re already in the suburbs and looking to escape the family for a few hours....

By Ben Joravsky On one side are gay activists such as McKeon and Illinois Federation cofounders Garcia and Art Johnston. On the other are leaders of the right who liken homosexuality to a curable disease and predict various disasters–molested children, higher insurance rates, the annihilation of family values–should the bill pass. “It is beyond logical explanation why any sensible person would want to involve themselves with a group that is defined by the sex they perform,” reads one lobbying letter sent to legislators by Jack Roeser of the Family Taxpayers’ Network....

UNION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The members of Union have accrued a fair amount of name recognition in other settings–pianist Laurence Hobgood as Kurt Elling’s musical director, bassist Brian Torff in frequent collaborations with George Shearing, and drummer Paul Wertico as a member of the Pat Metheny Group. So presumably they’ve chosen this anonymous handle to advertise their democratic approach: instead of leaving the task of leadership to the pianist, they attempt a three-way interplay that would’ve delighted Bill Evans (who tried it first)....

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Ailey company has always been about connection. Alvin Ailey made the solo Cry in 1971 “for all Black women everywhere–especially our mothers.” And he made it for Judith Jamison to dance, which she did to great acclaim; now she’s artistic director of the company, a position she’s held since Ailey’s death in 1989....

ALWAYS…PATSY CLINE, Apollo Theater Center. This commercial transfer of a 1996 hit has lost a lot of the warmth that made the show so appealing at Northlight Theatre. Originally a gentle celebration of female friendship grounded in the musical and emotional values shared by country-music star Patsy Cline and her fan-turned-confidant Louise Seger, the show now has the slick, forced feel of a TV variety show: Hollis Resnik’s Patsy comes off as a singing talk-show host, and Sarah Underwood’s Louise less Patsy’s friend than her sidekick....