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Leroy Jenkins Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Violinist Leroy Jenkins is rarely mentioned in the same breath as AACM heavies like Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, or Henry Threadgill, but he’s their equal in many ways. Like many of the organization’s founders, the Chicago native studied under the legendary Walter Dyett at DuSable High, and after attending college in Florida and teaching music for four years in Mobile, Alabama, he became one of the earliest members....

Do you look like your mother? Your daughter? Your father? Harry Potter? Who do you like in the sixth at Hawthorne? Who wants to know? The Chicago Sun-Times, that’s who. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times was curious this year. It didn’t ask hard questions, like why is the sky blue? where do babies come from? how much does a man have to take?...

The Deep End of the Ocean With Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams, Jonathan Jackson, Ryan Merriman, Whoopi Goldberg, Cory Buck, John Kapelos, and Michael McElroy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Certainly one can rationalize this shift of gears. The late Dwight Macdonald–the film critic for Esquire back in the early 60s, when it was still possible to write for that magazine about movies as an art form rather than as a combination of sport and business–suggested in one of his columns that a shift of focus from one character to another is often a good thing....

You’d be hard-pressed to come up with an artist less likely to inspire a play than Joseph Cornell (1903-’72), who lived his life in boxes. Working at a series of mind-numbing clerical jobs, he spent most of his life with his aging mother and disabled brother in the same small house in Queens. He never dated, never married, never even had lovers until his mid-60s, when he lost his virginity to a young art student....

POSTER CHILDREN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two months ago, riding home to Champaign from a gig in Houston, Poster Children bassist Rose Marshack saw her first dead guy. “Cars were parking everywhere,” she writes in the band’s on-line tour diary. “There were people running up and down the highway with cellular phones….On my left, crashed into the side wall of the highway, was an overturned car, looking like an upside-down cockroach–and laying on the ground in front of it, sticking out the window, was the body of a young man…....

Offered as an adjunct to the annual summer Rhinoceros Theater and Performance Festival, this monthlong showcase of fringe entertainment features mostly new work by such ensembles and individuals as the Curious Theatre Branch, Dolphinback Theatre Company, Ira Glass, Frank Melcori, Theater Oobleck, Jamie O’Reilly, Michael Smith, the Saint Ed theater company, and John Starrs, among others. The festival runs through March 9 at three locations: the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, 2827 N....

Hey, Everybody: As soon as I saw an invitation to answer the question “Is come really that nasty?” I had to jump at the chance to tell all men: YES!!! It is!!! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It tastes like hot, salty shampoo. Not that I’ve tasted hot, salty shampoo, but I know hot, and I know salty, and I know the consistency of shampoo....

STEVE RILEY & THE MAMOU PLAYBOYS 7/10, FITZGERALD’s Those square folkies who booed Dylan for plugging in at Newport were wrong in the specific, but not unjustified in their fear of the impending ubiquity of rock music. While traditional regional music still hasn’t been wiped out by a long shot, going electric sure isn’t the answer for everybody. Thankfully Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Cajuns who wanna rock, amp up with a little more taste and sensibility than a lot of their peers–their take on rock is unpretentious and straightforward and they got their trad chops down first, the result being that the tunes on their new Bayou Ruler (Rounder) are still too down-home to sound at home in the faceless suburban sprawl....

Just the thought of an afternoon of clowns leaping around trying frantically to entertain an auditorium full of little Nintendo-heads brings back memories of my little brother’s seventh birthday party. An unnaturally happy woman with pink hair, red nose, bad breath, and one balloon-into-poodle trick she kept repeating over and over “entertained” until my brother (and a handpicked pack of his better friends) left to go play with his new toys....

For the next two weeks, Corn Productions’ campy revisions of the New Testament will run in repertory as the last shows in their Andersonville theater, slated for demolition and condo-bondage in June. It’s a fitting swan song for the storefront space, where so many classic stories have been transformed. In “The Passion Follies,” the Tiff and Mom team has created three remarkably respectful spoofs of Christ’s earthly career: The Madonna in Spite of Herself, Jesus–the Wonder Years, and The Last Dinner Party of Christ, all enthusiastically performed, with clever scores that blend the sublime with the ridiculous....

An Ideal Husband With Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, John Wood, Lindsay Duncan, Peter Vaughan, and Jeroen Krabbe. I’ve seen An Ideal Husband, writer-director Oliver Parker’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, twice–once before reading the original and once after. In Connolly’s terms, it was a bit like going from Oscar to Oscar plus Wilde and then back to Oscar again. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We were sorry to read several of the letters published in the November 26 Reader, which seemed simply to repeat, in various ways, the old assertions that any questioning of Israel’s history or discussion of Palestinian history is part of a long-standing, generalized conspiracy against the Jews. Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, and Zeev Sternhell have been at the forefront of reexamining the origins of the State of Israel and giving the Palestinian experience its appropriate place in the narrative....

By Mike Sula By the second day of the cat’s absence, they began to grow more concerned. “He used to come in, go out, then come back, to eat, to sleep,” says Bara, a 36-year-old biology student at UIC. “My mother told me there is something wrong. I said maybe he will come. So we waited. The next morning I went to the university and coming back in the evening, we knew at that time the cat was gone....

Friday 8/29 – Thursday 9/4 The sight of a 1959 Volkswagen bus painted like the official Jerry Garcia credit card may not be enough to convince patrons of the Chicago Jazz Festival to unload all those cans of creamed corn and lima beans weighing down their picnic baskets. But that’s the idea anyway. While the Jerry Garcia Fan Bus probably isn’t filling the void in the lives of any bereaved Deadheads either, it will be in town collecting nonperishables for the duration of the festival, then donating them to the Greater Chicago Food Depository....

EVELYN GLENNIE AND THE KING’S SINGERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the busiest and most versatile of classical percussionists, Evelyn Glennie has amassed a collection of over a thousand instruments–tam-tams, Peking Opera gongs, thunder sheets, steel pans, taiko drums, flexatones, ceramic bells, rototoms, even jury-rigged contraptions fashioned from automobile exhaust pipes or kitchen utensils–and she often brings dozens of them to a performance....

IMPERIAL TEEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although their new What Is Not to Love (Slash) doesn’t quite measure up to their 1996 debut, Seasick–which is, to be fair, one of the decade’s best first albums–they remain the most quotable indie band in existence. Even if “Why you gotta be so proud? / I’m the one with lipstick on” and “My prodigy / Outsmarted me” and “So you’re fucking movie stars?...

Mystery writer Alex Matthews’s latest novel, Vendetta’s Victim, opens not with a crime but with an argument. Her protagonist is a thirtysomething psychotherapist named Cassidy McCabe, who wants her live-in boyfriend, reporter Zach Moran, to accompany her to a family function. “It’s not like I’m asking you to marry me or anything,” she snaps. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What causes McCabe’s irritation, says Matthews, is a “fear of abandonment....

Chuck Hall was 23 when he volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the force of Americans defending the left-wing government of Spain against fascist insurrection in 1937. Hall, whose father was a schoolteacher, had finished three years at the University of Chicago, but the Depression had forced him into a factory job when he learned of Francisco Franco’s military revolt against the newly elected Republicans. “It was a time when people got radicalized very rapidly,” he recalls, “because of the situation in the country, and also because the danger of fascism was great, starting with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, then Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia....

MARK DRESSER TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Dresser is a swinging, propulsive bassist with a hefty sound, but when he’s not playing in jazz-related groups–with, over the past two decades, folks like Anthony Braxton, Ray Anderson, Gerry Hemingway, Tim Berne, and John Zorn–he dedicates himself to exploring the nebulous area between free improvisation and composition. In co-op groups like the Arcado String Trio and the new-music troupe Tambastics, he has set daring improvisational turns amidst lovely chamber writing, and his evocative scores for old silent films blend everything from tango to brokedown bits of Ellington....

Black-and-white photographs of blacks born into slavery line the walls of the International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry in Beverly. Pat Bearden is giving a tour when she stops at a picture of Priestly Reed with his wife, Alle Camaron, and their daughter Inez. An index card says that Reed was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, in 1865 and died in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1939. Reed and his wife are looking natty in stylish long coats....