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Friday 5/12 – Thursday 5/18 “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black body swinging in the southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” sang Billie Holiday in her signature tune. According to writer David Margolick, Holiday’s 1939 performance of the controversial song, which was written by Abel Meeropol–a white, Jewish schoolteacher and communist sympathizer who adopted the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg–marked the beginning of the civil rights movement....

Friday, October 10 At the geographic and moral center of Idrissa Ouedraogo’s earlier films (Yaaba, Tilai) there was always the village. Here there’s no village, only a road. On the side of the road is a broken-down jalopy that the title characters dream of fixing up and driving to the city. The dream is an old one–it has defined their relationship for years. It’s not a particularly rational or well thought-out dream, which becomes increasingly evident as it begins to come true....

HIS MAJESTIE’S CLERKES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1993 Frank Ferko wrote a set of motets for His Majestie’s Clerkes that were based on the works of the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen. They displayed not only erudition but a keen understanding of how elastic music should be in conveying the meaning of a text, as they adroitly updated the religious sentiments of a medieval genre....

Jane Siarny and Julie Caffey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Solo movement can be profoundly unengaging: the worst instance I ever saw was a woman performing a whirling-dervish trance dance for what seemed hours on end. She was in heaven; we were in hell. There are tricks to circumvent the form’s potential self-absorption, however. Jane Siarny uses two chairs in her Grammy’s Shoes to juxtapose stability with disorder–expressing her Baptist grandmother’s strength and groundedness, for example, by placing one foot on each chair seat in a plie, then repeatedly scooping up with a big breath that somehow captures the pride and grace of work well done....

By Michael Miner The reporters who presume to cut reality down to size come in two broad types, I told her. There are the clerks who think reality can be reduced to three-by-five note cards that if stacked in the right order turn facts into truth, and there are the sojourners to whom reality is lambent flame, balalaika airs, and the tall tales of blind crones remembering the night of the soldiers....

The Old Neighborhood In his program notes for Northlight Theatre’s beautifully acted production of David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood, director Mike Nussbaum recalls starring in the Chicago-bred playwright’s The Shawl at the Briar Street Theatre opposite Lindsay Crouse, Mamet’s wife at the time. “We were having the usual difficulty of actors doing Mamet,” Nussbaum writes. “What do the words really mean? David never gives such mundane information in the script. [So] Lindsay and I …came up with some wonderful changes in the blocking…long meditative looks out the window, sharp diagonal crosses of the stage....

I’m a 28-year-old woman. My husband is 30. We’ve been married four years and dated three years before getting married. We have a three-year-old child. Sexually, I’m of the “I’ll try anything once” school. We’ve experimented a lot over the last seven years, trying bondage, role-playing, gender-bending play, water sports, and so many positions I’ve lost count. When he said he liked seeing two women together because he liked to imagine he was one of them, I suggested bringing another woman into the picture....

Hey, Faggot: –Not About to “Get Fine” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not the first person to use the following retort to your arguments, but you’re not the first person to trot the porn-oppresses-women pony ’round the track, either. What about gay porn, pictures of delighted boys drilling away at each other’s derrieres–does it oppress women? And porn produced by women, featuring women, for women–does lesbian porn oppress women in general, or just lesbians?...

I read with interest “Day of the Condo” [January 15], the report in which developer Mark Weiss’s proposal to build 30 expensive condos and retail spaces in northwest Uptown was maligned by some of the agitated neighbors who fear “the costs will price many people out, so we’ll lose our diversity.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, I haven’t seen the building plans, but let’s assume the naysayers are accurate in stating that the neighborhood “would lose its character....

LAST POETS Museum of contemporary art, 2/13 & 14 The MCA’s Hip Hop Life series and the Guild Complex’s Musicality of Poetry festival make natural copresenters, and the Last Poets are a particularly inspired presentation. In the late 1960s, the collective took the literary renaissance that accompanied the black power movement and broadcast it over African percussion in a style derived partly from jazz scatting and partly from the incantatory cadences of black preachers....

ZIM NGQAWANA with MAX ROACH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like his countryman and predecessor the late Dudu Pukwana, South African reedman Zim Ngqawana has concocted a potent stew from a motley assortment of African and American ingredients. Ngqawana (to pronounce it correctly, click your tongue toward the front of your mouth on the first syllable) has plenty of jazz chops, but he hasn’t much interest in recapitulating bebop....

Diary of a Mad Worker Bee I’ve never seen more proof of the devil’s existence than when I worked with children. Work began at 5:30 a.m., which is when they rose, spread their black wings, and decided what to destroy first. Oh, such unholy acts were perpetrated by the terror totters. I have seen little Brittany (they are all named “Brittany” unless they are named “Tori”) take a pointed rock and pound another child’s kneecaps to a bloody mash over a swing....

Small Time Crooks By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » September (1987) was an embarrassment, and other low points, the moments when Allen’s energy and invention flagged the most, include A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Shadows and Fog (1992), and Celebrity (1998). Small Time Crooks never attains the diffidence of the last three, but at times it comes awfully close. The way exposition is handled says a lot about a storyteller, and the dialogue signaling that a cynical and snooty art dealer (Hugh Grant) intends to exploit the nouveau riche heroine (Tracey Ullman) is just about as perfunctory as movie storytelling gets....

BENTON FLIPPEN & THE SMOKEY VALLEY BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rural musicians were once a vital part of the community, providing the sound track to social functions, but today that task is often relegated to DJs or the radio, playing the same music everyone else in America is hearing. Musicians who carry on the old traditions are often forced to become careerists, making records and touring, their regional quirks diminished by overexposure and industry pressure....

BOTTLE ROCKETS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the unmistakable Merle Haggard twang in some of their best music, the Bottle Rockets’ name rarely came up during the overexcited predictions of an Americana boom earlier this year. But as the band’s brilliant third album, 24 Hours a Day (Atlantic), confirms, they’re the most vital practitioners of country-inflected rock working today. The band’s tough, lean mix of boogie rock, hard country, and Neil Young stompin’ sounds far more impressive live than it does on paper: singer-guitarist Brian Henneman brandishes his simple hooks like truncheons....

Andrew J. Epstein discovered roller derby through his grandmother, who worked in it–“not as a player but as a concessions bookkeeper,” he says. “We’d watch it together on TV.” In the early 70s Epstein, a longtime Reader contributor, got permission to undertake a photographic study of the game. “Shooting from the infield”–or inside the track–he found his subject: Joanie Weston, aka the Blonde Bomber, the most recognized skater in roller derby history....

DAVID OLNEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Singer-songwriter David Olney favors brooding, bass-heavy minor-key melodies; he populates his vignettes with vagabonds, outlaws, and losers in search of their souls; his voice goes dry at the top of its range, and he tends to mutter or speak the tail ends of his verses–in other words, he might as well have Townes Van Zandt’s name tattooed on his arm....

By Michael Miner If you read last week’s Hot Type and marveled at the blistering hostility to the Chicago Tribune expressed by groups of prosecutors, you might have supposed that the press and the forces of law and order are natural enemies. They aren’t. They share an old, familiar, workaday relationship that cops, prosecutors, and reporters all have an interest in preserving. Cops and prosecutors routinely know things the public finds out....

Hype-o-critical Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fact is, several other factors contributed to the decline of the Seattle scene, and their absence from filmmaker Doug Pray’s field of vision is a black hole that sucks away the film’s credibility. It’s hard not to cringe when Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil indignantly says, “It was our thing, and then all of a sudden it belonged to people who you never thought you would share your music with”–of his own volition, he signed to a major label, made videos, toured arenas, and took millions of dollars from those insensitive jerks....

Four years ago Tony Lindsay had two novels under his belt. The first one, “Prayer of Prey,” was a thriller about a drug addict who dies and is possessed by an evil African king. The other, “Chasin’ It,” was the story of a black drag queen. But try as he might, Lindsay couldn’t get anyone to publish either of them. “People loved ‘Chasin’ It,’” Lindsay says, but “they were not ready for a drag queen protagonist who was happy and comfortable with his gayness....