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At first it seems odd to see this slice of Chicago oral history by Studs Terkel on the wildly western set of The Ballad of Little Jo. But his 33-year-old collage of interviews on the subjects of racism, alienation, and renewal creates its own world. Steve Totland’s adaptation preserves the fluidity of Terkel’s book, and Curt Columbus’s staging conveys the divisions that afflict more than one street, effectively indicting the unkept promises of the 20th century with testimony about Chicago’s jim crow segregation, the glory days of Jane Addams Hull-House, and the “ban the bomb” and civil rights movements....

Bad Livers This summer the Nashville-based Gospel Music Association revamped its standards for the Dove Awards, the Christian recording industry’s equivalent of the Grammys. Previously the only prerequisite for nomination was that one’s record be sold in Christian music stores, but apparently the GMA was disturbed that some product distributed that way, while “inspirational and/or wholesome,” was not sufficiently Christian. From now on, it announced in July, gospel shall be considered music in any style whose lyric is “substantially based on historically orthodox Christian truth contained in or derived from the Holy Bible; and/or an expression of worship of God or praise for His works; and/or testimony of relationship with God through Christ; and/or obviously prompted and informed by a Christian world view....

By Michael Miner To acknowledge the changing times, the tradition-caked Golden BAT–for Baseball Acumen Test–shall henceforth be known as the BAT.com, a virtual award for virtual perspicacity applied to virtual competition. And in our winner we find an apt symbol of the modern era. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Kiley of the Sun-Times copped his first BAT by picking the Yankees, Indians, Braves, and Astros, and also the Arizona Diamondbacks in the NL West and the Mets as the NL wild card....

Architect Bruce Goff said he threw out all preconceived notions of what a building should be when he started a project. The Myron Bachman house, at 1244 W. Carmen, proves his point. This was a typical 1890-vintage two-story wood house before Goff remodeled it in 1947 into a combined family residence and recording studio. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goff was an internationally regarded architect known for tailoring his buildings to each client, often using common materials in unconventional ways....

R.L. BURNSIDE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the obligatory protests from purists, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Fat Possum label’s attempts to graft hip-hop technology onto the deep blues of Mississippi hill country guitarist R.L. Burnside–at a juke joint or a house party, the groove is all that matters once things get hot. Burnside’s latest, Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down, is pretty crowded for a blues record, featuring the contributions of turntablists DJ Pete B and DJ Swamp as well as assorted other programmers and techies, but the hip-hop elements enhance rather than overwhelm his brooding, ominous intensity....

Saint Clara Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In an unnamed industrial city in Israel, Eddie (Halil Elohev) and Rosy (Johnny Peterson), junior high vandals who’ve been friends since they were little boys, realize they’re in competition for the affections of Clara (Lucy Dubinchik), a classmate with precognitive ability who’s the pawn in a scam they’ve instigated to ace quizzes (1996). Clara’s mysterious power and wacky family could easily have been the subject of a pretentiously bizarre narrative bereft of meaning and realism, but this story of teenage romance, compulsive rebelliousness, and preapocalyptic anxiety seamlessly integrates its realistic and hyperbolic elements....

Hey, Faggot: What I would like to find is a woman interested in a long-term “friendship with sex,” but I don’t know if that’s realistic. I will never leave G or go behind her back, but I’m sexually frustrated. Assuming G would be willing for our relationship to be “open,” how could I find a lover who would get involved with me under these circumstances? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Scary Business Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given Strauch’s lack of publishing experience, he seems to have made a respectable debut. Alice Bentley, whose Lakeview store The Stars Our Destination specializes in horror and sci-fi, called the three titles “very nicely produced paperbacks” and the writing “much better than serviceable.” Chicago writer Rick R. Reed, who has published two horror novels with Dell, contributed a story to The Darkest Thirst and was also impressed by the design....

An antidote to the sensationalism and banality of music biopics like Shine and Hilary and Jackie, this exquisitely crafted documentary concerns four violinists and a pianist, most of whom seemed destined for a degree of success they either didn’t achieve or couldn’t sustain. Nineties interviews with Philipp Hirschhorn, Berl Senofsky, Mikhail Bezverkhny, Gidon Kremer, and Yevgeny Moguilevsky are combined with footage of them performing at a prestigious Brussels competition in the 50s, 60s, and 70s; the juxtapositions aren’t mere devices for moving between the past and present but provide access to the musicians’ perspectives on their careers, as when Hirschhorn watches himself on videotape or Senofsky marvels at an old audio recording filmmakers Paul Cohen and David van Tijn have unearthed....

WILLIE D. & Z.Z. HILL JR. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vocalist Willie D.’s dusky timbre sometimes falters when he’s trying too hard to sound like a sex machine, but when he’s relaxed he lets loose an amiable blend of traditional and contemporary soul and blues. Either way, though, the real treat is his band. Anchored by Willie Black’s no-nonsense bass, the unit features two of Chicago’s most exciting young guitarists: Johnnie Sanders and Bert Mell....

Businessmen gather around a conference table, the Chicago skyline in the background, but the scene looks a bit grotesque. The mottled colors of Hank Feeley’s paintings are at once sensuous and garish, seductive and almost ugly, and the businessmen seem ready to climb the walls. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Feeley was born in 1940 in Boston, and his family moved here in 1952....

Jorge Felix’s painted constructions resemble body parts. But that observation only goes skin deep. He mixes and matches, combining male and female genitalia. The edges are jagged, and sharp objects protrude, breaking the “skin” to reveal raw “guts” beneath the surface. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The work provokes a bit of a shock, especially when you learn that Felix is the product of a strict religious upbringing in a small town south of San Juan, Puerto Rico....

Chronicle of a Death Foretold Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this 1987 adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella Italian director Francesco Rosi melds his own sensibilities and narrative concerns with those of the writer. To a surprising extent, Rosi succeeds in evoking the tropical drowsiness and colonial splendors of the riverfront town where the story of a murder unfolds through a series of well-timed flashbacks....

Colin Mochrie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though we Chicagoans still like to think of improv as our baby–born and raised here and still living close enough to mother Second City to visit on weekends–the form is really an international phenomenon now. And this expansion is likely to accelerate as shows like ABC’s version of the BBC hit series Whose Line Is It Anyway?...

Cornershop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ethnic fusion is quickly becoming as common as electric guitar in pop music, but the Indian-Anglo group Cornershop has managed to slip in some cultural reappropriation as well: on the group’s latest album, When I Was Born for the 7th Time (Luaka Bop), Tjinder Singh swipes the raga-rock classic “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” back from the Beatles by singing its words in Punjabi, and the MTV Buzz Bin hit “Brimful of Asha” uses a pared-down rock approach (bass is heard only on the song’s chorus) to canonize Indian filmi singers Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mohammed Rafi in much the same way Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music” fetes his raspy-voiced predecessors....

Friday 8/1 – Thursday 8/7 2 SATURDAY Flying monkeys, melting witches, magic slippers, and warbling midgets are nothing compared to the shenanigans in Frank Baum’s original Wizard of Oz. In his novel the tin woodsman dismembers himself with his own ax, Dorothy falls for a rich munchkin, and the scarecrow wrings the necks of 40 crows. All that in a book written for children. Tonight the Cook County Theatre Department celebrates its fifth anniversary with a summer-stock production of Baum’s story created by actors, designers, and musicians from various theater companies, including Redmoon, Plasticine, and Doorika....

Ben Joravsky: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s all too obvious that the methods by which the city issues tickets for parking violations need some major revamping. I’m sure hundreds of tickets a month are issued unjustly for absurd and outdated laws, or in many cases (like mine) for no apparent reason at all. Of these, I’ll wager that only a fraction are disputed because, unfortunately, experience proves that the city always wins, fair or not....

FLAMING LIPS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Soft Bulletin, the ninth full-length by Oklahoma City’s Flaming Lips, is an unqualified masterpiece, a record so full of beauty, wonder, and generosity of spirit that the Gideons should start putting it in hotel rooms. The Lips are probably still best known for “She Don’t Use Jelly,” their goofy mid-90s alternative-rock hit, but at least as far back as 1987, on the nuclear nightmare “One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning,” singer Wayne Coyne has been pondering the nature of the cosmos and the problem of evil....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Reader theater critic Lee Sandlin had tried a bit harder I am sure he could have come to a better understanding of Philip Glass’s and Mary Zimmerman’s “unreadable” Akhnaten at the Chicago Opera Theater (July 28 review). Sandlin also complains that (a) the action is presented in highly formalized tableaux, but that the specifics are wholly mysterious, (b) Akhnaten himself sings in such a high voice range that it’s as if he’s from another galaxy, and (c) he is seen cuddling blissfully, unpharaohlike, with his children....

Hellbound That put Mertz, who is legally blind, out of the running. He and his brother were both born with a rare neurological condition that interrupts messages from the eyes to the brain. “I have to hold papers close to my face when I read,” he says. “I get harassed on the train about that. People say, ‘Why are you holding the paper so close? Do you want to borrow my glasses?...