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Is Anybody Listening? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The series will present modern chamber music from a broad sampling of composers, including Shostakovich, Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ives. “We expect to include at least one composition from each decade of the 20th century,” explains CCM artistic director Michael Henoch, the principal organizer of the series. In addition CCM is commissioning new works for the first time in its 14-year history....

Al Green In 1957, Sam Cooke–then the lead singer for the Soul Stirrers and the nearest thing to a matinee idol the gospel field could lay claim to–took a headfirst plunge into the pop realm. Reports of enraged followers booing him at his final church gigs have since been deemed apocryphal, but Specialty Records was leery enough of possible repercussions to issue the singer’s first secular single, “Lovable” b/w “Forever,” under the paper-thin alias “Dale Cook” before handing him his pink slip....

LAUREL AITKEN/NEW YORK SKA-JAZZ ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A hero from ska’s illustrious past and an enticing prospect for its future share the stage this week when 71-year-old Laurel Aitken rolls through town with the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble. The Cuban-born Aitken, who immigrated to Jamaica as a child in 1938, is rightly known as the godfather of ska: in 1958 his hit single “Boogie in My Bones”/”Little Sheila” established the now famous Island label....

MADELEINE PEYROUX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no denying that the most remarkable thing about singer Madeleine Peyroux is the uncanny, almost creepy similarity her voice bears to Billie Holiday’s. Unfortunately, on her debut album, Dreamland (Atlantic), it’s hard to discern what else might recommend her. Now 22, Peyroux moved to Paris at 16 and busked on its streets for the next half decade; back in New York, surrounded by an impressive cast of hired guns (James Carter, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, Cyrus Chestnut, and Leon Parker among them), she’s obviously being groomed as a coffeehouse star–an Edith Piaf for the Starbucks generation, maybe....

MILLY’S ORCHID SHOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once so daring it left audiences in the teens and twenties baffled and/or screaming with rage, Dada performance has long since leaked into the mainstream by way of TV commercials, Fluxus-influenced rock performers, and absurdist comedians like Andy Kaufman and the early Steve Martin. Still, Blue Man Group are unsettling: with their shaved heads and glossy painted bodies, the robotic Blue Man men fuse the cool, alienated spirit of late Dada-Bauhaus performance–they look like a Mies van der Rohe wet dream–with Alfred Jarry’s proto-Dada shit-throwing hysterics....

By Justin Hayford Frank may sound crazy. But every Wednesday night he comes here to talk with people who understand his dream all too well. They are members of a support group for gay men who are HIV negative. Some, like Frank, are struggling to remain uninfected. As HIV prevention specialists around the country will tell you, Frank’s dilemma isn’t rare. For many gay men, worn down by 15 years of devastating plague, finding the inspiration to protect themselves against HIV infection can be a tremendous challenge....

Since cinema’s earliest years, filmmakers have been finding ways to question and sometimes undermine the illusions created by traditional fiction or documentary styles. In the face of this long history, Peggy Ahwesh nonetheless manages to make films and videos that are genuinely original. Martina’s Playhouse (1989) is one of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever seen, transgressing boundaries in the way its mother and child subjects relate to each other and the camera....

By Ted Shen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many subscribed. By the 80s, says McKean, the number had risen from the initial 80 to more than 20,000–enough for Urdang to pay his writers and place expensive ads in the New Yorker. The newsletter format was expanded to accommodate lengthy reviews of new dictionaries as well as erudite articles with titles like “Antipodean English.” The journal ran articles by jail inmates on prison slang, and “businessmen who had traveled to and resided in foreign countries, knew the language, and offered insights on Russian, French, and Chinese, and other tongues,” says Urdang, a self-billed “escapee from the graves of academe....

For 26 years Peter Florakos has been grilling meat and serving up Old Style at the Best Steak House, located at Wilson and Broadway, the epicenter of Uptown. Despite a spotless record with the liquor commission, however, Florakos could be forced to close if newer residents of the 32nd Precinct pass a vote-dry initiative. “These new people come to the neighborhood and think they can just change everything,” says the beleaguered businessman....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The premiere this week of Harrison Birtwistle’s Exody, a Chicago Symphony Orchestra commission, introduces to local audiences a British innovator still largely unheralded this side of the Atlantic. The belated recognition is hardly surprising, given that it took his own countrymen decades to discover him. Educated in Manchester–psychologically and culturally a long way from London–Birtwistle was part of the postwar Manchester New Music Group, formed by students eager to embrace ideas from the continent....

EDDIE HENDERSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of Eddie Henderson’s fans first heard his hot, dark trumpet in Herbie Hancock’s early 70s sextet: on Mwandishi and Crossings, before Hancock trimmed his horn section for Head Hunters, Henderson contributed a tense mixture of Miles Davis’s electric soul and the gritty hard bop Davis had left behind. But by the end of the decade he’d all but disappeared from the national jazz scene, moving from New York to the Bay Area, where he practiced medicine....

Self-aware rather than simply clever, and as earnest as it is tongue-in-cheek, this playfully gruesome vampire western may be the only movie I’ve seen that has a good reason for including the director’s name in the title. Jack Crow (James Woods) is a dedicated vampire slayer whose team of experts includes Daniel Baldwin as the operator of a winch used to haul vampires into the sunlight. After a nasty master vampire (Thomas Ian Griffith) nearly wipes out the crusty good guys, Crow becomes convinced they’ve been set up and accuses his employers of suppressing intelligence....

KLANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The war years took such a toll on Greek art music that it’s now very rare to hear any, other than drivel by Vangelis, Yanni, and Zamfir. That seems to be why the new-music ensemble Klang has chosen to assemble work by five significant Greek figures under the rubric “Deconstructing Agamemnon.” Foremost among the five is Iannis Xenakis: though he is often grouped with important French postwar composers and was in fact born to Greek parents in Romania, Xenakis never lost his deep commitment to Hellenic culture, and he continues to be the best-known Greek exponent of the avant-garde....

By Sridhar Pappu Roth started working on the dictionary in 1979 and became its latest editor in 1996. “I’m just a baby,” she says. “Twenty years is nothing. Only millennia, as we like to say, count around here.” One of the people who read the book was the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the U. of C.’s founder. She and Breasted met and became friends, and by 1919 Breasted had persuaded her husband to hand over $100,000 to create the Oriental Institute, a place that would bring together people from all the social sciences to study the ancient world....

Still Crazy The drooping phallic guitar on the poster notwithstanding, Still Crazy ain’t the next Spinal Tap. It’s a feel-good movie, and the good feelings it generates are scattered high points in the competent execution of a well-worn formula. The guys get together, they fight, they nearly fall apart, they realize what they mean to one another, and they come through when it counts to score a huge moral victory in front of the cheering fans....

SEBADOH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sebadoh backlash was inevitable, even understandable, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t misguided. Sure, the new The Sebadoh (Sub Pop/Sire) isn’t as good as the last album, Harmacy (1996), just as Harmacy wasn’t as good as its predecessor, Bakesale (1994); sure, Lou Barlow’s left the cred-littered streets of Boston for the glitz of (shudder) Los Angeles. But The Sebadoh is still a good album, and a good album is a good album no matter what it follows....

STAN MOSLEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he began performing in the late 60s, still in his teens, Chicago native Stan Mosley dreamed of making it big singing his own songs. But after more than two decades working the midwestern blues and R & B circuits–mostly performing other people’s hits–and a failed early-90s solo disc for a small local imprint, he was convinced that his only hope for success was as a songwriter....

Chekhov in Yalta Unlike Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, John Driver and Jeffrey Haddow’s biographical Chekhov in Yalta doesn’t portray its historical characters in a rampantly ahistorical or anachronistic light. Nor does it descend to the level of the recent Edgar Allan Poe–Once Upon a Midnight at the Mercury Theater, piecing together a semblance of character from the poet’s writings alone–though Driver and Haddow obviously assign a great deal of importance to Anton Chekhov’s writings and their impact....

Curtis Mayfield The hero of blaxploitation cinema strutted across the urban landscape of the 70s looking clean and carrying a large can of Whupass. He (or she, in the case of sisters like Coffy or Cleopatra Jones) was usually a streetwise private eye righting the wrongs of the Man, but he would take out a brother or two if they stood in his way. The fire in his belly was eased only by his woman’s love or the inevitable big payback: pumping major heat into some diabolical ofay....

We’ve been having a heated discussion in the office, and we need to know how Spam luncheon meat is really made. Also, how come they never released a chicken or turkey version (i.e., Spurkey or Spicken)? Finally, what is Monty Python’s true relationship with Spam? –Steve Tolin, Sudbury, Ontario Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I bought a tin and popped it open, fully expecting to be bowled over by who knows what awful aroma....