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Forward Motion Medieval artists found transcendence in Jesus’ suffering. Bach tried to build a circular staircase to heaven with counterpoint. Ignoring God and human society, Keats and Tennyson aimed to find direct spiritual access to nature. Christian mystics spoke of seeing the face of God in moments of religious ecstasy, though the brilliance of God’s face forced them to turn away once they’d glimpsed it. Transcendent moments tend to slip away, and true religious ecstasy often feels like torment rather than comfort....

John McGivern has two voices, one high and whiny and self-consciously fey, the other lower, more grounded and sensible. One of the hardest truths they had to face was that McGivern is gay. “When people would ask, my mother used to say, ‘John is a bachelor.’ And that was it. Now she says, ‘He’s a professional homosexual.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McGivern, who is 42 and has been out for nearly 15 years, grew up as the middle child in a typical working-class Irish-Catholic family in Milwaukee....

BARNBURNER: A hot game. This phrase has been adopted by sports announcers nationwide, especially ABC’s Keith Jackson, but it originated in Indiana, where early high school basketball contests were played in barns. THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICA: Indiana’s motto. Mayer Richard J. Daley was attempting to borrow this phrase when he called O’Hare airport “the crossroads of America.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE GENERAL: Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight....

The Sweat Girls Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a new incarnation of the Sweat Girls, that talented gaggle of local actors, playwrights, and singers who take over small theaters and deliver short, market-minded monologues. The most recent Sweat Girl collaboration–“Sweat Girl Swing,” at the Swedish American Museum Center–is a modern family-entertainment salon, complete with music, an improvisational spirit, and literary ambitions. In the Andersonville landmark, six of the sweaty ones perform new pieces as poignantly sweet as the museum’s tiny plastic garden, vintage cereal boxes, and photographs of Swedish strongmen....

Several people appear to be playing themselves in this lyrical fusion of drama, improvisation, and what may be reenactment–a movie that keeps open the tantalizing question of whether it’s more like fiction than documentary by seamlessly combining techniques associated with both. Thirteen-year-old Nina (Wilhamenia Dickens, the daughter of Lillian Folley, who plays her mother) retreats into the mountains of Virginia, and family, friends, neighbors, and social workers try to figure out why she’s disappeared, hoping this will help them find her....

Captured at www.summum.org/mummification/modern.htm Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike the mummification techniques used by ancient Egyptians, which left the dead shriveled, discolored, and ugly, Summum’s method is designed to keep you looking healthy and robust for millennia. The appeal may be to anyone who has labored to stay in shape. Why spend thousands of dollars in health club fees while you’re alive, then let everything go to pot just because you’ve died?...

“Responsible people benefit from the drug war,” laments drug-legalization crusader James Gierach of suburban Oak Lawn–“prison contractors, prison guards, drug-treatment providers, drug-testing firms, 100,000 new policemen and legislative budgeteers, whose city and state coffers are gilded with zero-tolerant, mandatory-minimum, three-striking, gang-fighting, juvenile-detaining, liberty-eroding Washington dollars….Not only does money drive the illicit drug business, it drives the drug war too.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Increased wounding of fish by the sea lamprey [in Lake Michigan] has been noticed,” reports the Splash, official publication of the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in Wisconsin....

GOURDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stadium Blitzer (Watermelon), the second album by Austin’s Gourds, is one of the most maddening records I’ve heard this year. You’d probably call it country–it is dominated by wheezing accordions, sturdy acoustic guitar strumming, palsied banjo plucking, and the baying-at-the-moon vocals of Claude Bernard and Kevin Russell–but the Gourds rarely limit themselves to a single idiom in any song....

By Michael Miner On Wednesday, November 12, he says, publisher David Harrison called him into his office. Harrison told Biermann a Hollinger paper was facing a strike in Chicago. In the event one was called, trained reinforcements would have to step in to keep the paper going. Harrison wanted Biermann to spend Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Chicago learning to run the Sun-Times computers. It was a lousy choice, but to Biermann a clear one....

Lead Stories In January the general manager of a Ford-Toyota dealership in Lake City, Florida, told reporters that the vandalism incident on his lot involving acid should be punished as a hate crime because only Fords were hit. And in Berlin, owners of pit bulls and other aggressive breeds planned a May protest against proposed legislation to ban the dogs; organizers planned to have their dogs wear yellow Stars of David....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To make a long story short, school ended for the summer; I thought about her constantly, sent her postcards, and dreaded the day I was to return for work. For an unrelated reason, I was fired right before school started. I looked her up where she works, stopped by, got her number, called a few times, and finally asked her out....

CALVIN KRIME 8/21, EMPTY BOTTLE Another good noisy angry band bites the dust at the height of its powers: this Minneapolis trio’s parting shot, You’re Feeling So Attractive (Amphetamine Reptile), lurches nicely between train-wreck speed and mud-slogging slow, luring the kiddies in with a hint of sweetness and then knocking them back ten feet with a blast from the speakers. Braid and Lustre King coheadline; We Ragazzi, who have just released a very promising first seven-inch, open with intricate blasts of deep-sea riff funk....

Creation Pretty Things But the music business is less like a tree than an ocean full of fish, the big ones gobbling up the small, some innovators languishing while others consolidate their gains and move on. Neither the Creation nor the Pretty Things scored very big in England, much less the States, and for years their releases have been difficult to find on CD. But late last year both bands were sprung from the where-are-they-now file when independent labels reissued their early records en masse....

By Michael Miner Goldring is a Chicago-based actor who makes commercials and was sent west to serve his union as a strike captain. He knew his mission would be arduous, but he didn’t expect a brush with death. “The road got narrower and narrower,” he says. “There were boulders and trees in the road. Big huge ruts.” Luckily, at the wheel of the Lumina was an icy-nerved stunt driver out of Portland, Oregon, named Michael Hilow, and riding shotgun was Mary McDonald-Lewis, a gritty voice actor from Portland who’d brought a map of the back roads....

Black Harvest International Film and Video Festival A personal documentary (1996) by Macky Alston about his family’s history as slave owners in North Carolina. (6:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moussa Sene Absa’s French-Senegalese film comments on the problems of a developing Africa. Daam, an idealistic politician from the town of Tableau Ferraille (whose name means “junk scene”), ascends to power and tangles with a local construction firm, President & Company....

Blue Groove Moves Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to club owner Brendan Witcher, it wasn’t what happened inside but what went on outside, once the bar was closed. “We would get done at two and everyone would leave and hang out on Lincoln just outside the club, just yelling and screaming, turning up the radios in their cars,” says Witcher. When four pricey new condo developments cut their ribbons within a block of the club toward the end of last year, he guessed the new neighbors might have a low tolerance for the noise, and tried to nip potential confrontation in the bud....

Friday 9/1 – Thursday 9/7 2 SATURDAY There are tall ships docked in ports all over the world, but five of the eight on display at Navy Pier this weekend hail from Canada; along with the big boats they’ve brought a bunch of talent from the great white north. Today’s entertainment includes the Kanata Native Dance Theatre, the world music/drumming/improv group Subtonic Monks, the multicultural Quebec group Eval Manigat & Tchaka, and Shakespearean combat demonstrations straight from Ontario’s Stratford Festival....

Citizen Langlois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 68-minute documentary about Henri Langlois, the idiosyncratic cofounder of the French Cinematheque and spiritual father of the French New Wave, was awarded the 1995 Forum prize at the Berlin gathering of the International Federation of Film Critics; the jury (of which I was a member) cited it as “a brilliant essay revealing a multifaceted grasp of a major pioneer for whom cinema was the ultimate nationality....

Finish school–save a life. Suburban-based Pediatrics magazine (May) reports that a Tennessee study found that children five and younger are 19.4 times more likely to die in a fire if their mother has less than a high school education. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not always avant-garde. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “omission of a spire from Unity Temple was also consistent with ideas current in Chicago’s architectural culture of the period [90-plus years ago],” writes Joseph Siry in Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion....

The River Bi-ying, and Tsai Yi-chun By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That I regard The River as a masterpiece and the work of a master doesn’t mean that I consider it fun or pleasant–terrifying and beautiful would be more appropriate. It’s been a subject of dispute ever since it won the special jury prize in Berlin in 1997, and I can’t exactly quarrel with those who complain that it’s sick or boring; I can understand how one could have these responses, even though I don’t share them....