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FREDDY COLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The career of vocalist and pianist Freddy Cole refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous epigram twice over: he’s a second act with his own second act. Blessed (or cursed?) with a set of pipes almost identical to that of his legendary sibling, for years Freddy slipped under the radar as “Nat ‘King’ Cole’s brother.” But in the 90s Freddy’s finally blossomed, with a series of well-regarded albums (most of them for Fantasy) and a steadily growing audience for his unflappably cool yet frankly emotional blues-inflected balladry....

By Ben Joravsky Besides, the work crew was a pain in the neck. Yes, she knows how hard it is for anyone to feel sorry about anyone else’s construction woes. Hasn’t everyone on the north side had to suffer the noise and dirt of construction? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moreover, the front of the building remains cluttered with discarded wood, nails, bottles, and other debris....

JESSE DAVIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good jazz players seem to turn the corner in their 30s–when they distill the lessons of their youth and start channeling their early esprit into meaningful music–and alto saxist Jesse Davis is right on schedule. The several albums he made in his 20s revealed him to be the most adept Charlie Parker imitator of his generation–a dubious distinction, but one Davis mitigated with his fulsome tone and obvious commitment to the bebop idiom....

By Michael Miner Then there are the essays, the debates, and the conspiracy theories. But all this is gravy–what about the meat and potatoes? Like the stolid premillennial City News Bureau whose name it appropriated, City News USA provides a daybook, but one so sketchy it’s now prefaced with an apology: “Please excuse our Daybook. We need a Daybook Editor.” The daily report of breaking stories leans too heavily on brightly rewritten press releases, but there’s no disputing its idiosyncratic charm....

ORGASMO ADULTO ESCAPES FROM THE ZOO, at the Theatre Building. There’s something inescapably slipshod about this production of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s vicious feminist commedia, written in 1977. Actually, there are many things: the random assemblage of set pieces, the broad washes of unfocused light, the clunky scene changes, the overall lack of visual interest. And few scripts are more in need of precision: the playwrights depict the farcical horror of unchecked patriarchy in vivid, exacting detail....

By Paul Turner Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite that horrifying first day (“I never really got over it”), Downs kept the job. His press card read “artist/reporter” and he drew for every section: front page, sports, food–he was even sent as far away as Australia for the travel section. He also covered the courts, witnessing every major trial in town. When the Daily News folded, in 1978, he continued on at the Sun-Times....

Hey, Faggot: How the hell should I know? The exact percentage of men who like hairy women, women who have big clits, guys who like to be spanked, people who’ve fucked their mothers, the risk involved with various sex acts–even if I could produce these stats (which I guess I could put my research assistant on if he weren’t busy with more important things, like doing my laundry), what good would it do you?...

Serious Stepping Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Howard the Joyce debut is the realization of a long-standing goal. “I always wanted to go to the Joyce and wanted to be a part of that dance community,” he says. For the Joyce, Trinity’s appearance is an acknowledgment of the public’s increasing fascination with a dance form that has previously been overlooked in North America....

John S. Hall, BOB WISEMAN, Betsy Years 5/9, Lunar Cabaret John S. Hall will probably be remembered as the man who blew Beavis and Butt-head’s minds with “Detachable Penis,” but that’s pop culture for you. As the force behind King Missile, he’s actually got a lot of other jewels under his belt, like “Jesus Was Way Cool,” “Sensitive Artist,” and my personal favorite, “Take Stuff From Work.” Lately he’s been on the spoken-word circuit and lurking on the edge of actual literary respectability....

Released from prison, an aging bandit from the eastern hills of Turkey travels to Istanbul in search of his old lover and the man who sent him to prison in order to marry her. In the city the bandit bonds with a young street punk who’s also trapped in a life of crime and clinging to an outdated code of honor, and writer-director Yavuz Turgul deftly parallels the craggy terrain of the hill country with the urban jungle of Istanbul....

Warp Speed: Stop, Sit, and Listen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Tuesday, through Matador in the U.S., Warp celebrates its tenth anniversary with three more compilations, each containing two CDs. The first collection, Warp10+1: Influences, spotlights the late-80s sounds that tickled the fancy of founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell when Warp was still merely the name of their record store. The second, Warp10+2: Classics 89-92, collects 18 hard-to-find singles released by the label in its early days....

For years the post- and even preconcert events around the Chicago Jazz Festival have taken on a life of their own, creating in effect a second, further-flung festival to complement the official doings in Grant Park. This year these ancillary programs shoulder a little added weight, because to celebrate the festival’s 20th edition City Hall has chosen to abbreviate it. All city music festivals now must end by 9:30, which lops one slot off each night’s schedule, making the ’98 festival nearly 20 percent smaller than last year’s....

Chicago International Children’s Film Festival The best shorts on this international animation program are the ones that don’t spell everything out, leaving a little room for our imagination. In Susan Kim’s Australian Shadowplay objects come to life through their shadows, which seem more powerful than the objects that cast them. Sungyeon Joh’s puppet animation Grandma alludes to her Korean grandmother’s mistreatment by the Japanese in World War II; one memorable image conveys the grandmother’s isolation by placing her between cutout waves that bob back and forth....

For starters, quit mowing and tear down the fences. Intending to encourage bird feeding, the March-April issue of “Bird’s-Eye Review,” the Northbrook-based newsletter of the National Bird-Feeding Society, says, “Habitat loss deprives birds of both food and shelter and leaves them more vulnerable to predators. If everybody does something, we can offset forest fragmentation–one backyard at a time.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new union busters....

Star Wars: Special Edition Rating — Worthless Directed and written by George Lucas With Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, David Prowse, Eddie Byrne, and the voice of James Earl Jones. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Star Wars launched its own set of enduring pop personalities, only some of them belonging to people. But the prospect of spending quality time with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), C3PO, Han Solo (Harrison Ford), R2-D2, Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), Chewbacca, or even Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi (Alec Guinness) is at best incidental to the pleasures the movie has to offer....

Christ always rises Saturday at midnight. But this Easter eve He rose at 11. The priest in the Greek seaside village where my uncle has a cottage had too many other villages to visit. The announcement of the time change was made during siesta by a buzzy voice from a megaphone-wielding pickup truck. We slept through the proclamation–or maybe we dismissed it, assuming it was the usual traveling salesman hawking melons or cleaning implements....

GONZALO RUBALCABA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first time I saw Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba play, it took me the better part of an hour to get my jaw off the floor. This was in 1990, in a little Blue Note showcase for new artists at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Rubalcaba, still virtually unknown in the U.S., buried his labelmates under avalanches of 32nd notes, while his complicated Tatum-esque arrangements carved captivating structures and pathways from the chaos....

The Hyde Park Art Center’s main gallery is usually your standard exhibition space: well lit, airy, and whitewashed to its lofty ceiling. But these days, unsuspecting visitors open the door and step into musty, claustrophobic semidarkness. Overhead, a solid wooden structure fills the room. Held aloft by metal posts, it bulges down almost to the floor in two inverted domes. The space shakes with a loud, low rolling sound, punctuated now and then by a tremendous clattering impact....

Hey, Faggot: As for the counter-arguments: It doesn’t work for everyone. True, but neither does the pill or latex rubbers. People can make mistakes (user failure). Well, gosh, that’s true. I might even have to get an abortion if I don’t use it right! But I had to get an abortion at age 19 because I didn’t use a diaphragm right. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As for fertility awareness, she’s right that it shouldn’t be confused with the rhythm method....

By Michael Miner What Clemente has done, the Sun-Times reported, is to use state Chapter 1 funds to bring in lecturers and entertainers who appear not just at Clemente but also at MLN fund-raisers. That connection was a little too rickety for the executive director of Chicago’s Latino Institute, who last Thursday called a news conference. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times had reported: “Between 1992 and 1995, records show that more than $150,000 in anti-poverty funds were spent to fly in pro-independence speakers, artists, dancers and entertainers from Puerto Rico to lead ‘cultural workshops’ and assemblies at Clemente....