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SIR CHARLES THOMPSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some are born to greatness, others have greatness thrust upon them, and still others thrust it upon themselves–pianist Charles Thompson, for instance, granted himself a sort of knighthood in the early 40s simply by adding “Sir” to his name. Presumptuous, perhaps, but not entirely unjustified: Thompson’s sparse chords and light touch recall the style of another jazz royal, Count Basie, a resemblance that helped him land a gig with former Basie saxist Lester Young at New York’s landmark Cafe Society in 1942....

African Film Festival Two documentaries by Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando. My Footsteps in Baragua (1995) focuses on the West Indian community in Cuba and three Caribbean intellectuals; Oggun: Forever Present (1992), her first video, is chiefly about Yoruba philosophy and singer Lazaro Ros. Rolando will attend the screening. (Ferguson Theater, 7:00) An hour-long 1995 film by director Pearl Bowser and screenwriter Clyde Taylor about the black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux and the early development of black American cinema....

Asian American Showcase A collection of eight film or video shorts, most of them film-school projects. Greg Pak’s Fighting Grandpa is a cut above the rest, a compact but emotionally complex portrait of a Korean immigrant family whose harsh, selfish, and elusive patriarch put his wife through hardship and barely tolerated his children. Ronald Eltenal’s A Good Lie is a slick, clever, but unnecessarily convoluted joke about a hit man haunted by the ghost of one of his victims–watch for references to John Woo action flicks and Hong Kong ghost comedies....

Contemporary Vocal Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » North of the border, Mexican composer Mario Lavista is almost unknown outside academic circles. In his native country, however, he’s recognized as the most influential musician since Carlos Chavez: he ushered in the New Instrumental Renaissance, a movement that emulated the European avant-garde and its desire to expand the ways Western instruments can be used. In one of his better-known works, Reflejos de la noche (“Reflections of the Night”), a string quartet is asked to sound as if it were amplified....

Among Willows It’s common to compare contemporary theater with ancient religious ritual but much less common to see an event that actually recalls those roots. Like many religious services today, theatrical events often have more to do with seeing and being seen–gotta get those grants, gotta have someplace to go on a Friday night–than with sharing a spiritual experience. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The concert was divided into three solos, one by each dancer-choreographer, and a final collaborative trio, but the dividing lines were fudged: a brief trio opened the program, and musical interludes bridged the gaps between the sections as the “stage crew”–mostly performers not performing at the moment–changed the set pieces....

HOUSE OF LUCKY, at Bailiwick Repertory. It takes guts to bring a one-man show to Chicago without a major publicity campaign or a national reputation: intelligent, charismatic solo performers are a dime a dozen here. Fortunately, San Francisco’s Frank Wortham has guts to spare. His unpredictable House of Lucky follows burned-out wannabe poet Harper Jones through a world of overzealous hippies, visionary junkies, sex-crazed rockers, and other self-serving radicals. Hoping to find a moral foothold within this quagmire of compromise, he nevertheless spurns every hand up that might pull him from the mud....

The farcical, often satirical Kyogen style developed as part of the ritualistic No theater to provide comic relief between No plays, showing the foolishness of ordinary people and mocking their frailties with rhythmic vocalizations, stylized physical movement, and minutely detailed timing. Often compared to commedia dell’arte, Kyogen has some of the same charm but lacks that form’s frenetic energy and loud stereotypes. The Nomura troupe is one of Japan’s all-male family-based Kyogen troupes, started when Mansaku Nomura left his father’s sake-making business to become an actor....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The dispute over the South Loop School described in Neighborhood News, “Sign of Trouble” (May 7), does indeed go much deeper than a simple fight over a sign. To find the true epicenter, you need look no further than the local school council. As a new resident of Dearborn Park, I decided to attend an LSC meeting to see where my tax dollars were going....

LUKE SLATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back when Afrika Bambaataa inaugurated electro with “Planet Rock,” nobody could’ve guessed that such a narrowly defined genre would be undergoing such a broad revival more than 15 years later. In the present crowded field, Luke Slater stands out: like Aphex Twin, he’s as interested in emotional depth as in cool noises and effects. On the new Wireless (Novamute) he offers plenty of bumptious “freek funk” (to borrow the name of his first album) offset with starkly beautiful trance like the serene “Weave Your Web....

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Roughly 150,000 people have seen Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind since it premiered here 12 years ago. Some 3,600 plays, three theaters, and countless lineup changes later, the show remains an example of experimental theater at its finest. Too Much Light was the beginning of a breeding ground at the Neo-Futurarium for some of the most original productions to hit Chicago in the past few years: Greg Allen’s literary deconstructions; John Pierson’s manic, fragmented musings; Greg Kotis’s dark allegories....

Nothing beats the winter blues as quickly as the whimsical spectacle of Redmoon Theater’s annual Winter Pageant. A 45-minute fantasia of puppetry and mystical circus magic created in collaboration with various Chicago communities, the pageant is a kaleidoscope animated by an enthusiastic collective of children and hell-bent-for-pleasure grown-up actors and volunteers. This year’s celebration of the mysteries of winter and the promise of spring offers puppets created and scenes performed by children from the Logan Square Children’s Art Class and from Gallery 37 and DCFS programs....

A lot of people think Ken Ellis is a vampire. “They never see me in the daytime,” he says. “I’ve been sitting at doors at different clubs for years, so people probably wonder what else I do.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I find it very soothing for my nerves to sew late at night when there’s nothing in the street,” he says. “It’s especially therapeutic after coming home from the bar and listening to blaring music and people talking....

schultz2.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Miner presents the “nuanced” interpretation that Onan was struck dead by God for violating the Levirate law, not for practicing coitus interruptus [Letters, January 30]. How then does Mr. Miner “nuance” the fact that neither Onan’s father, Judah, nor his brother, Shelah, both of whom also broke the Levirate law, were not struck dead? Is it not compelling that, among the violators of the Levirate law, only Onan practiced coitus interruptus and only Onan was struck dead?...

“Regrettably, it sometimes takes concern about the middle class to get school boards to invest in quality,” writes Linda Lenz in Catalyst (November). “That’s what happened some 20 years ago, when Waller High School was converted into Lincoln Park High School, and nearby LaSalle, Newberry and Franklin elementary schools became specialty schools. Better late than never. While these programs were designed to keep or lure the middle class, they benefit low-income kids, too....

garrett.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Can we please get rid of the critical waste that is Monica Kendrick? This woman has proven for months now that she can’t review a band or show to save her life, with practically every critique she writes ending with her being unimpressed. In the past six months she’s neglected major concerts that the rest of the papers, at least, gave a review and/or a mention to....

DJIVAN GASPARYAN & MICHAEL BROOK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Armenian folk music’s dominant instrument, the duduk–a double reed usually carved from the wood of an apricot tree–has only a one-octave range. But in the hands of Djivan Gasparyan, the music’s most prominent modern exponent, it produces a seductively melancholy sound few woodwinds can match. Whether playing the melodies of folk dances or improvising around a fixed tone, Gasparyan uses gentle repetition and airy, gradually shifting lines to build expansive, painterly soundscapes....

FATBOY SLIM/Q-BURNS ABSTRACT MESSAGE/GEARWHORE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last year it’s become pretty clear that electronica isn’t going to save pop music–and that pop music isn’t going to give electronica the weight it was asking for in return. Though a handful of electronica artists on the fringes of pop, Autechre and Squarepusher among them, have created work that resonates past the morning after, most of the genre still has an extremely short half-life....

JOHNNIE TAYLOR/CLARENCE CARTER/LATIMORE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though you wouldn’t know it from listening to Chicago radio, Johnnie Taylor’s hit 1996 single, “Last Two Dollars” (Malaco), rejuvenated the soul-blues scene from here to Mississippi. A gambling blues rife with sly social commentary and slick synth backing, it also nodded to blues heritage with a few growls that harked back to Howlin’ Wolf. Taylor’s voice isn’t as muscular as it was during his heyday in the 60s and 70s, but he remains a riveting performer, stalking the stage with sinewy grace and digging into his repertoire of over 30 years of blues, soul, and R & B hits with little regard for genre or generation....

Like a lot of kids in the late 50s and early 60s, Art Burton grew up watching Gunsmoke and Rawhide and reading books about the western frontier. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His background has made him more sensitive than most to the issue. Though Burton was raised in south suburban Phoenix, his mother was born in Oklahoma, where he often visited as a boy, riding horses and attending black rodeos....

Prometheus Bound But I say leave the script to the historians and academics and keep it out of the hands of directors. If you think nothing happens in Beckett’s dramas, you haven’t read this snoozefest. At the top of the play, Prometheus gets chained to a rock while Zeus’s goon Power and his unwilling handyman Hephaestus make big speeches. That’s the end of the action. Of course Prometheus is being punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind–but more to the point for theatergoers, he can’t move or gesture for the rest of the play....