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By Ted Kleine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Thursday Carpenter lectured on her book to a small crowd of leftists at the Newberry Library. The occasion: the weekend of the Bughouse Square Debates, an annual revival of one of her father’s favorite public forums. Carpenter was introduced by Lila Weinberg, a woman who knew Ben Reitman in his heyday. “Ben…had an enormous appetite for everything life had to offer,” said Weinberg, leaning on a cane....

MAVERICKS/BR5-49 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years ago this double bill would have testified to nonmainstream country’s hard-won success in Nashville, but not now: the Mavericks may still work out of Music City, but stylistically they’re a million miles away, while BR5-49, hemmed in by the neotraditionalism that got them noticed in the first place, are taking a graceless tumble down the charts....

The U.S. women’s soccer team was already down a goal early in its World Cup match last Thursday when two U.S. defenders collided in front of their net. A Nigerian opponent got the ball, drew goalie Briana Scurry out of the net, and passed wide to a teammate for an open shot. Where I was sitting, high behind the goal in the north end-zone seats at Soldier Field, I thought the Nigerian had scored, but she’d actually pushed the ball into the side of the net....

Asian American Showcase See Critic’s Choice. (4:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jule Gilfillan’s 1998 romantic comedy plays like a picturesque travelogue as it follows two couples around Beijing. In one story, a Chinese-American surfer boy (David Wu) falls for a Beijing girl; like Peter Wang’s A Great Wall it mines the rich comic vein of an overseas Chinese humbled and civilized by the homeland....

BLINK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Fringe and Buskers Festival isn’t happening this year, but the hit of last year’s fest is returning. A “juggling act,” Fritz Grobe and Morten Hansen take the stage and proceed to make both the animate and inanimate dance in ways replicable only in a quantum-physics lab. Even the sounds of balls striking palms and bouncing off the floor are incorporated into the dazzling spectacle as these two young men deftly manipulate a variety of objects in defiance of the laws of gravity (and sometimes anatomy)....

Billy Bragg and Wilco Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For all Woody Guthrie’s standing as a poet laureate of the American spirit, I doubt that the words to “This Land Is Your Land” would have found their way into any English class without the music. And without those words that simple, six-note melody would have faded from our cultural memory years ago, along with thousands of other folk tunes....

ODEAN POPE TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Coltrane spent his formative years in the City of Brotherly Love, and his spirit has hovered there since. Saxist Odean Pope, now 59, grew up in Philadelphia, and as a teenager he surely heard Coltrane in local clubs just before the visionary saxophonist rocketed to fame in Miles Davis’s group in 1955. Though a common stamping ground might not seem like much of a connection, on tunes like “Coltrane Time” and his own “Knot It Off” Pope cements the link with a throaty tone and modal improvisations....

REYNOLS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Argentinean trio Reynols, which has released more than 30 recordings on almost as many labels worldwide since 1993, is not your ordinary electronic noise band. Led–not just fronted–by Miguel Tomasin, who has Down’s syndrome, the trio is capable of both tense ambience and the most exquisite electrocutionary roar; it has performed “psychic energy refractions with toothbrushes” and collaborated with composer Pauline Oliveros....

Take one or the other, but not both. Either the Cubs were right to keep an aging team around for a creaky curtain call of a season after making the playoffs the year before, or the Bulls were right to crash the franchise and rebuild from scratch after their sixth NBA championship in 1998. Consistency says you can’t have it both ways. Me, I happen to think the Cubs were right to bring back their team intact–relying on Kevin Tapani and Rod Beck and Lance Johnson and, yes, even Gary Gaetti to do the same as they had the year before–and I think the Cubs’ record attendance this year bears me out....

By J.R. Jones I knew the song well–it was the most popular cut from Destination Failure–but I’d always heard it as another of Josh’s slightly overwrought romantic reveries: “This world is freezing cold, I long for you to hold me in your arms / This world is burning and I’m waiting for your hand to lead me home.” Now, stripped to bare bones, it had become a prayer: “This world is frightening, I see lightning in the sky, I hear the wind howl / Please help me to be strong, I know it won’t be long till I’m with you / I know that you love me / Oh, I know you love me....

By Ted Kleine Salar, the new president of the U. of C. chess club, is a rookie, one of the few students who venture into this pit. But he’s beaten George before, and George wants to make sure this upstart doesn’t do any more damage to his rep. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George brings out his first pawn. Once he’s made his move, he spanks a button on the chess clock and Salar’s time begins running down....

Bang Zoom! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The signing capitalizes on a growing audience for dance and percussion that’s embraced Stomp, Riverdance, and Tap Dogs–last year the local Trinity Irish Dance Company signed a touring contract with the New York agency International Management Group. But Jellyeye is more of an acquired taste; since debuting in 1992 it’s developed a loyal following among off-Loop theatergoers, but its elaborately choreographed routines, running between 10 and 20 minutes and incorporating drums, gongs, cymbals, and other unusual percussion, are decidedly more abstract than anything in Stomp....

Hu Du Men Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title of this entertaining 1996 Hong Kong movie, also known as Stage Door, is a Cantonese opera term for the imaginary line separating the stage from backstage, which becomes emblematic of the divisions in the story. That story, adapted by Raymond To Kwok-wai from his own play, concerns the producer and star of a Cantonese opera company (Josephine Siao) who’s about to abandon her career to emigrate to Australia with her husband and adopted daughter....

By Dennis Rodkin For decades Huntley has been a smaller, dustier counterpart to Harvard and Woodstock, country towns dripping with charm and picturesque amenities. But in the past few years Huntley’s been bulking up as if on steroids. In 1994 the Huntley Factory Shops opened on 50 acres of land fronting the tollway; a factory-outlet mall stuffed with alleged bargains, it was the town’s first big hit and according to a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune signaled that the little town in south McHenry County was the new outer edge of the metropolitan area....

Landmarks/a Mass of Muscle and Bone There’s a lot to be said on the subject of women’s relationships with their bodies. Yet that thought in itself ought to be ludicrous: how alienated do you have to be to develop a “relationship” with yourself? On the other hand, women’s bodies often seem separate, lumpish, and recalcitrant to their owners, like donkeys we ride. Hence it was a big deal in 1971 when a feminist health book asserted that our bodies were ourselves....

Viva la Difference Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’d think this would bode well for the 11th annual Viva! Chicago Latin Music Festival, which takes place next weekend in Grant Park: by all indications it should be the most diverse and exciting edition yet. But with the exception of Malo, a veteran Los Angeles rock band featuring Carlos Santana’s brother Jorge, all 14 acts performing on the Petrillo Music Shell stage are from either Mexico or Puerto Rico....

OK, I know the answer to this, I just want to hear some reasons. Why isn’t fire alive? It breathes oxygen. It eats wood. It reproduces (sort of). What defines life? How do we know it’s not an advanced non-carbon-based life-form? On that same note, why isn’t a rock alive? If a rock grew at a nanometer every million years, how could we possibly study something like that? –Gwidion15, via AOL...

Friday 1/9 – Thursday 1/15 10 SATURDAY College sports provide countless academically challenged youngsters an opportunity to coast through a few perk-laden years of celebrity and pretension before facing the cold reality that a degree in Rocks for Jocks won’t get them bupkis. The lawyers, media types, managers, and faculty featured as guest speakers for the Alumnae of Northwestern University’s seven-week course on the role of athletics in college life might argue otherwise, but then they’re the ones making money off the poor saps....

Cirque Eloize Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the happy side effects of Cirque du Soleil’s phenomenal success is the number of smaller Soleil-like circuses that have cropped up in recent years. Some of these companies–like Cirque Ingenieux, which came through Chicago last month–play up the artier, more pretentious side of the Cirque du Soleil formula. But others–like the Quebec-based Cirque Eloize, just now arriving on the Chicago scene–manage to re-create the playful spirit of the larger Montreal-based company....

Dark Shadows: Recent Avant-Garde Film Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In various ways, all three of these films explore our viewing experience, finding in the distance between an object and its image a suggestion of death. Peggy Ahwesh has eroticized nude corpses in some recent work; Nocturne (1998), a grotesque spoof of horror films, begins with a woman trying to bury her dead lover....