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GOLDEN SMOG 12/11, METRO Like its obvious role models the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, this country-rock supergroup–whose core is the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris and Marc Perlman, Soul Asylum’s Dan Murphy, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Run Westy Run’s Kraig Johnson, and Big Star’s Jody Stephens–is on a crusade to reclaim the airwaves with a vision of timelessness. But on the band’s second full-length, Weird Tales (Rykodisc), its Exile of the Rodeo shuck and twang–which isn’t above pinching licks from the R....

By Robert Heuer Former Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith, whose uncle Clark Griffith had owned the Washington club, denied that Estalella was black. “It was said that some of our Cubans had black blood, which made them black according to the standards of the world,” Griffith told me a decade ago, shortly before selling the franchise that he’d brought to the midwest in 1961. “They may have been black in the minds of blacks....

Activist-filmmaker Maggie Hadleigh-West got so tired of being stared at and harassed on the street that she decided to fight back and started filming as well as interrogating the men bugging her. Usually she held one camera while behind her a camerawoman held another, and she carried out this counteraggression in several American cities, meanwhile recounting the experiences of other women who didn’t have cameras at their disposal. To the filmmaker’s credit, she doesn’t always select the confrontations in which she comes off best and the men come off worst; just about everything she shows, however, is fascinating, revealing, and provocative....

In 1940 the people we rented from on Menard said they wanted the apartment back. So of course we were all desperate. We hated the thought of giving up Austin. So we went out walking–blocks and blocks and blocks–and the only place we could find in the neighborhood only had two bedrooms. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then Rosemarie and I got together and decided, if we can’t find a place to live out in Austin, which we loved, then let’s go back to the neighborhood near Sears, so we can at least have the advantage of walking to work....

Bailiwick Directors’ Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailiwick Repertory’s tenth annual showcase of directorial projects features one-acts ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material. This year’s edition, in which several different plays are presented each evening, finds 18 directors chosen from “numerous applicants . . . identified only by their social security numbers, not names, so that the merit of their directing proposal and resume outweighed any personal influences,” a press release proclaims....

Sean Guinan is a refreshing exception–a young man of ambition with a teeming imagination yet not another journalist who cheats. He’s not a journalist at all, actually, but he’s doing what some of those fabricators might like to do, if they had a little more talent and there were money in it. “I am a filmmaker/video artist and have been producing works for CAN 19, Chicago’s Cable Access Network, for the last six years,” announced his recent note of introduction....

The dirtiest 10 percent of 18,320 cars leaving Algonquin Road for southbound I-290 September 15-19, 1997, produced 61 percent of the carbon monoxide, 46 percent of the nitrogen oxides, and 44 percent of the hydrocarbons emitted by vehicles at that spot. That’s the news in a report from the University of Denver team that took the measurements (“On-Road Remote Sensing of Automobile Emissions in the Chicago Area: Year 1,” August 1998)....

The Evanston Historical Society’s annual flea market has always been a pretty good reason to roll out of bed on a Saturday morning. First there’s the allure of all that serendipitous stuff–donated by folks moving out of big old Evanston houses, assiduously collected by the ladies of the Guild of the Evanston Historical Society all year long, washed, boxed, and squirreled away in the far reaches of the mansion until the single fall day when, in one fell swoop, it’s all offered up for sale....

Hands on a Hard Body Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aside from some unnecessarily repetitious sound bites, this is a perfect documentary on a subject that might not seem rich in meaning: an annual days-long contest sponsored by a Nissan dealer in Longview, Texas, in which entrants compete for a new pickup by trying to keep one hand on the body of the truck longer than anyone else....

By Ted Kleine The museum, at 9801 S. Avenue G, memorializes what Stanley calls “the forgotten part of Chicago.” Like many young men who grew up in East Side, Stanley graduated directly from Bowen High School to a job in the steel mills. He worked 40 years for Wisconsin Steel and by the time it closed in 1980 was the personnel manager. “The steel mills ran real good from 1939 until they closed,” he says....

LIQUOR GIANTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Liquor Giants leader Ward Dotson seems destined to languish in obscurity despite his key roles on some of the best rock albums made in the last two decades. He played guitar on the first two Gun Club albums, splitting before the band garnered most of its acclaim (and before it became a caricature of itself). More impressive and truer to his personal aesthetic were the four albums he then made with the Pontiac Brothers, whose three albums in the 80s delivered some of the best straight-up Stones-style rock of the decade....

Animation Fetishist: At that time filmmaker Jim Trainor was living in a dumpy upper Manhattan railroad flat, having long since moved from the east-coast suburbs where he grew up to New York City to attend Columbia University. Later he actually moved to Avenue B, the East Village street where he lives today. He meets every one of Hoberman’s racist, sexist, classist criteria for a filmmaker we don’t need. His films were largely unknown then: he was only a year into the 11 it took to complete his longest film–the 38-minute The Fetishist (1997)–supporting himself mostly with office jobs....

The 33rd Chicago International Film Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Being what it is and coming when it does, the Chicago festival can’t help but be something of a hand-me-down event, skimming items from various international festivals that precede it and adding a few selections of its own. Invariably it screens too many films–unlike, say, New York, which is restricted to only 20-odd programs–and it’s never revealed as clear or consistent a critical position as either Rotterdam or Toronto....

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra It was an awkward situation. Nothing gives you a purer rush of trapped-behind-enemy-lines paranoia than realizing you’re the only one in the room who isn’t wildly enthusiastic about what’s happening onstage. I was reminded of when I saw Star Wars on its opening weekend 20 years ago; everybody in the movie theater was cheering so furiously they were like the possessed mob in Euripides’ Bacchae, and I was afraid that if I didn’t join in they’d turn on me....

By Bill Stamets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When you start out you dress yourself, you do your own makeup, your own hair, and you write your own jokes,” explains Vilanch. “Then you become a great big star and you’re so busy doing things like this–talking on the phone and making appearances–there’s no time to sit around and write new material.” Recently elevated to head writer on Hollywood Squares, on which he also appears, Vilanch swears he doesn’t have his own writer coaching his interviews....

RESIDENTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They may be anonymous, but the Residents need little introduction. Since the mid-70s they’ve been held up as genuine, slickproof eccentric holdouts–a band to be cherished, if not necessarily listened to. Not to mention they were tech geeks before it was cool, which still endears them to tech geeks everywhere, even those who realize that pop’s avant-garde has long since caught up to them....

RETROGRASS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mandolinist David Grisman is best known for the fusion of bluegrass, jazz, and Grateful Dead-style jamming he’s christened “dawg music.” But in Retrograss, his trio with folk icons John Hartford and Mike Seeger, he applies old-fashioned bluegrass instrumentation to rock and R & B numbers–an idea that came to him when, years ago, he heard a European group tackle bebop and post-Coltrane free jazz with a Dixieland lineup....

Hey, Faggot: I am quite shy about stating my needs, and only during our last encounter did I manage to muster up the courage to tell him I didn’t come from the dry humping. His response was surprise, followed quickly by guilt about being a “selfish male.” It obviously falls to me to show him the ropes, which I expect I’ll find easier with time. That we care about each other and communicate well will undoubtedly make it easier....

Most of the fuss over the Halifax pop scene–Zumpano, Thrush Hermit, Jale, Eric’s Trip, Super Friendz–can be explained by how it stands in relief to the rest of Canada’s underpopulated musical landscape. Apart from the underrecognized Jale, Sloan is the best band of the lot and one of the most important too: some of the members run Murder Records, the indie that’s been crucial in putting the Canadian underground on the international radar by releasing stuff by most of the above bands....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. AMERICAN ENGLISH Beatles tribute band performs at a benefit for the District 214 Community Education Foundation....