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Tom Bamberger: Views through June 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These prints are so rich it seems there’s more detail in each millimeter than the naked eye can see. The pumpkins in one photo lie in clusters in the field, their globular forms bumping up against each other. In the desert of another, cacti and desert brushes create repeating designs against the lighter, sun-blanched soil; low-lying houses in the background also seem to echo one another....

By Ben Joravsky and Mary Wisniewski “It’s ironic–you’d think a grad student would support Jimmy’s,” says Rebecca Janowitz, an aide to Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle. “Of course, I don’t know how anyone can be against Jimmy’s. It’s a neighborhood institution. Even my mother likes to have a beer there.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all those bars, only Jimmy’s, which opened in 1949, survived....

Five years ago local filmmaker Allen Ross seemed to drop off the face of the earth. He called his father in Naperville from Saint Louis on October 16, 1995, while he was shooting a documentary on the Mississippi River for Christian Bauer, a German filmmaker who had frequently employed Ross as a cameraman. About a month later someone in Bauer’s office had a brief phone conversation with Ross and arranged to wire his final paycheck....

This weekend is the last chance to catch Famous Door Theatre Company’s production of English playwright Jonathan Harvey’s romantic comedy-drama about two working-class teenage boys–schoolmates and next-door neighbors–who fall in love. This American premiere, which opened last May for a two-month run and ended up being extended into the winter, is moving to New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre; the off-Broadway transfer, which opens on Valentine’s Day, will be presented by commercial producer Roy Gabay, whose credits include Three Tall Women and How I Learned to Drive....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA WITH HANNIBAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An orchestral work as culturally diverse as the story it tells, Hannibal’s African Portraits starts and ends with the sweet, lonely sound of the kora, the 21-string gourd harp from Africa’s west coast, played by the griot Alhaji Bunka Susso. In between, Hannibal–the jazz trumpeter known as Hannibal Marvin Peterson when he played with the Gil Evans Orchestra and Pharoah Sanders–spans four centuries with a series of musical snapshots....

“The goal of welfare reform is not to cut off benefits to a small group of welfare recipients,” writes Katherine Sciacchitano in In These Times (February 3), “but to reshape the whole market for unskilled labor. Any hopes that the law can be patched or ‘fixed’ are illusory. The reform’s basic mechanism is simple: Create a captive labor force that must work or lose benefits….Like similar measures from the 19th century, the law will channel welfare recipients into low-wage jobs, where they will drive down wages even further....

That’s strike one, Mr. Mayor. Cecelia Clark reports from Cabrini-Green in the “Residents’ Journal” (October): “A reporter asked Daley [at the September 22 opening of the Dominick’s at Division and Clybourn] about the problems with President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Daley said, ‘You may have a problem in a family and you don’t say the entire family is responsible. That’s unfair.’ He was speaking in reference to the Democratic Party....

DUETS FOR MY VALENTINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rest easy: this second annual program of duets for Valentine’s Day has something for everyone, even those convinced that love stinks. Julia Rhoads and Holly Quinn’s Royal Flush is an excruciating and excruciatingly funny expose of the fairy-tale illusion that women are princesses waiting to be rescued and men are knights in shining armor. Wearing ball gowns reminiscent of those the heroines wore in the Disney cartoon features, Quinn and Rhoads play Cinderella and Snow White; their leading men are Styrofoam heads sporting really bad wigs....

By Jeff Huebner Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marks, who grew up in South Shore, was five when his father, a sometime horn player, began teaching him how to play the piano. But his father didn’t want him to make a living at music; he wanted him to be a “nice Jewish doctor.” Marks rebelled, enrolling at Oberlin College, then dropping out in 1974 to travel around Europe....

By Brian Nemtusak Gannello got a job with Sears Roebuck, but just before Christmas he slipped and fell on the ice on the way to work. He didn’t hit his head, but the next morning he noticed a veil over his vision that came and went. He had suffered a retinal detachment in his right eye. Doctors said that while the chances for successful surgery weren’t good, it was the only option....

JOHN FAHEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a few years now since legendary guitarist John Fahey returned to performing, inciting an understandable fuss. Now that the smoke has cleared it’s easier to see–and sad to say–that the new Fahey isn’t anywhere near as compelling as the old one. He’s pretty much ditched his trademark deft fingerpicking in favor of a more open-ended approach, but out there on the newly liberated horizon he tends to wander aimlessly....

By J.R. Jones Reeves is as big a gearhead as they come, but when he talks about mixing records he sounds like a painter, weighing color, form, and balance. “I like to take answering parts or parts that mirror each other, and I’ll put one of them on the left and the other one on the right,” he explains. “That establishes my parameters and my wall. Then I start building things....

Ready for the River By Adam Langer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A theater like this is the great equalizer: it allows no sleight of hand, no fancy tricks, nothing to distract an audience from the play and the performances. Put a brilliant production of Hamlet in the SweetCorn Playhouse and the entire audience–all two rows of them–will be riveted. But give them Phantom of the Opera there and they’ll be running for the exits....

Three years after the controversy surrounding the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation, the “documentary” Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific purported to introduce to the world a tribe of man-eaters inhabiting an isolated islet off the coast of Australia. Benign-looking natives posed for the white interlopers and their camera, their quizzical gazes punctuated by images of human skulls and other contrived menaces. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Cleetus Friedman spent most of his childhood with his eyes glued to the TV set. “I was absolutely obsessed with Sanford and Son when I was growing up,” he says. “I used to walk around the house, puffing out my chest and honing my Fred Sanford impression. It probably irritated everyone around me, but I got really good at it. I idolized Richard Pryor and Robin Williams too. From that point on, I knew I wanted to be a comedian....

Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig The first A-bomb threw off such a blinding light and cast such long shadows that ordinary film couldn’t really register the explosion. Photographs of the bombing of Hiroshima exist, as do pictures of the victims, but they are too abstract and too gruesome respectively to bring into focus the mysterious specter that haunts the middle of this century. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Critical Mass, a photography-based multimedia installation six years in the making, Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig undertake the challenge of seeing the unseeable by focusing on the genesis of the bomb, at the laboratory and test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico....

Ike Reilly learned to play guitar while working in a cemetery. He’d held that job every summer through high school and college. He started by cutting the grass, and then moved on to digging graves. He buried a lot of amputated appendages because, he claims, “Catholics do that.” When he was 18, he had to set the stone for his best friend, who was killed in a car accident. He quit the Eisenhowers to join the Drovers....

TITO PUENTE & INDIA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite some notoriously lackluster recent concerts, I wouldn’t write off percussionist and Latin-jazz crusader Tito Puente just yet. “El Rey” has shown himself too scintillating too often, over the course of more than 100 recordings, for us to give up hope so easily. Besides, on disc the same spark that ignited his famous dance bands of the 50s and 60s now lights up his Latin Jazz Ensemble, one of the four or five best Latin-jazz bands of the 90s....

Baglady Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The smile on Lila Michael’s face during the Baglady curtain call last Saturday was tentative at best. Having just reprised her role as the title character for only the second time since a grueling six-week run last fall at the now defunct Voltaire, she looked physically drained and emotionally spent after an hour as the mentally ill vagrant in Frank McGuinness’s cryptic, turbulent script....

Chaos Spoken Here Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know about that, but over the course of a couple more singles and three albums–including the brand-new Talker, which comes out Tuesday–U.S. Maple has certainly warped the old form. The four band members, all of whom were raised in the Chicago suburbs, started out inauspiciously enough, playing in two different bands at Northern Illinois University....