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MILFORD GRAVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the title track of his first solo album, Grand Unification (Tzadik), legendary free-jazz percussionist Milford Graves accompanies his drumming with spoken text about the various regions of the brain and what they control–a subject he’s familiar with in a way even the most dedicated neuroscientists may never be, because Graves, like no other drummer in the world, can use his four limbs as four completely independent music machines....

“This is not a poem / It is a celebration of the road we have traveled,” wrote Nikki Giovanni, once a rebellious daughter of the Black Panther movement, now a university professor whose outspoken opinions continue to remind us that pride in one’s people must begin with pride in oneself (“Show me a person not full of herself, and I’ll show you an empty person!”). Now, after a monthlong run at the South Shore Cultural Center, the compilation of her work called Nikki Giovanni: New Song for a New Day has moved north....

PLASTIC PEOPLE OF THE UNIVERSE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few bands have demonstrated the revolutionary power of rock music like the Plastic People of the Universe. Though formed in 1968, shortly after the Soviets rolled into their hometown of Prague, the Plastic People weren’t overtly political–in fact all they did initially was cover songs by American bands like the Velvet Underground and the Doors....

In 1991 Reed Paget was huddled in a dark hotel room in Israel with ten strangers, waiting for Iraqi bombs to fall. Paget wore a gas mask and held a 16-millimeter camera. In the accompanying narration to this climactic scene of his documentary Amerikan Passport, he confesses, “I’ve never felt more alive.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amerikan Passport, which opens the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Friday, is part adventure travelogue, part polemic, part analysis of man’s bloodthirsty nature....

All right, Cecil, this will stump you. I’ve asked many people this, and none knows. If you can provide a verifiable answer, I will send $20 to a charity of your choice. The question: What was Mrs. Howell’s (of Gilligan’s Island fame) given name? Her maiden name was Wentworth. Sorry, “Lovey” doesn’t count. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steve Cox is the fellow who wrote The Munchkins of Oz (1996) and helped us get to the bottom of that silly legend about a Munchkin committing suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz (May 9)....

Kris “TigerLady” Slawinski’s first love was horses. But when she was 12 a family friend gave her a ride on his motorcycle, and horses took a backseat. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s the most freedom you can have,” says Slawinski’s business partner, Gina Woods. For the past two years the pair has produced and hosted Open Road Radio, a two-hour motorcycle talk show that airs Thursday nights at 8 on Elgin’s WJKL (94....

Beautiful Thing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Political doctrinaires might look down on this gentle and touching play about two teenage boys, neighbors in a London public-housing estate, who fall in love. But worrying about whether this tender, funny tale is intended for gay or straight audiences misses the point: director Gary Griffin’s beautifully played production, like English playwright Jonathan Harvey’s script, is concerned with bringing people together....

Friday 9/3 – Thursday 9/9 Since they got together in 1995, the Havana-based group Bamboleo has set the tone for style, dance, and language in Cuba. The 13-member ensemble specializes in timba, a kind of funkified son, and features complex arrangements fronted by four vocalists. They play tonight at midnight at HotHouse, 31 E. Balbo (312-362-9707). Tickets are $15. See the Critic’s Choice in Section Three for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CLARK TERRY QUINTET WITH HARRY “SWEETS” EDISON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One band, two trumpeters, and more than 100 years of experience. Now 78 and 83 respectively, Clark Terry and Harry “Sweets” Edison are the last great horn players of the generation that got the good word directly from Louis Armstrong; growing up both men could listen to Armstrong’s recordings hot off the presses....

DELGADOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back home in Glasgow, the Delgados operate the Chemikal Underground label, which has released records by critical darlings like Mogwai, Bis, and Arab Strap–all of whom have made bigger splashes on both sides of the Atlantic than they have. The name of their new album, accordingly, is Peloton–the cycling term for the riders stuck solidly in the middle of the race....

Wes Mills One of two drawings titled Memory Line reminded me of viewing Chartres’ spire. Each line in a row of 45 on the right side of the paper starts at the bottom and goes a bit more than halfway up; unevenly spaced and often broken–each is in several segments–they create a dialogue with the space around them. The lines meet a curved horizontal band of gum arabic that’s slightly darker than the pale tan paper; the gum arabic causes the paper to bend a bit, and the various folds produced give these drawings an almost sculptural three-dimensionality, taking the lines off the paper and into space....

Peace and Salvation: Wall of Understanding (completed 1970; whitewashed 1991), 872 N. Orleans. All of Mankind (1971-’73), interior and exterior, 617 W. Evergreen, the former San Marcello Mission, now the Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My people are workers,” Walker says. Here he pays tribute to them. Before painting the mural, he boned up on labor history–reading such books as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and attending college classes–and then undertook a study of contemporary working conditions by visiting packinghouses and talking to union officials and employees....

Filmi in the House Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Singh, who was born in Burma (now Myanmar), emigrated to Chicago with his parents when he was seven; they moved to Milwaukee when he was a teenager, but throughout high school and college (at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), he returned to the area frequently. In the summer of 1989, at a Sikh temple in Palatine that his family still attended, he met Manpreet “Tony” Talwar, another ethnic Indian teenager whose family had come from Burma....

Pierre Huyghe makes art out of the rights of individuals. His work’s a romantic parry against what could be called the virtual slavery of copyright laws, under which your voice, your life story, and your identity can be bought and sold for their entertainment value. In two new videos, Huyghe reunites the disembodied voice of the French Snow White with its rightful owner and grants the last word to the bank robber played by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon....

GOURDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I first learned that Austin’s Gourds were covering the Snoop Doggy Dogg hit “Gin and Juice,” I felt a little sick that this truly twisted roots band would resort to Weird Al-style novelty tricks. In fact, on last year’s EP Gogitchyershinebox (Watermelon), they made a great song out of it, a skittering, mandolin-driven, egotistic folk-rock rant a la Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” with a swagger that suited singer K....

GREEN VELVET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dance artists and DJs tend to have personae aplenty–one for each mild stylistic variation–but they don’t often have much personality. Chicago techno auteur Green Velvet (aka Curtis A. Jones, who uses the name Cajmere for his house-related projects) is a giant, glaring exception. Pairing hilarious, borderline insane monologues with lean, hard, propulsive beats, he brings techno into the tradition of interplanetary lunacy that extends from Sun Ra to George Clinton to Lee Perry to Kool Keith....

By Frank Melcori I don’t know why it bothers me. I’ll only be 54, not an important year. I’ll go out to buy the paper, see what my horoscope says. I don’t really believe in astrology, but it can’t hurt. In India they believe in all sorts of things–the elephant god Ganesh, the god of good fortune, the remover of obstacles. Maybe Ganesh can lower my taxes, I say to myself as I read the flyer again....

By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the mid-1980s, Dr. Charles Smith heard the voice of God, and God had one word for him: art. Smith, a Vietnam vet, had lost his job as a rehab counselor and was feeling the cumulative pain and anger of a lifetime. “God said, ‘Use art. I give you a weapon,’” he recalls. “Just like he gave Dr....

Goat Island performs this series of ritualistic, choral, bleakly vaudevillian hauntings in its own relentless, physically taxing style. Originally staged in October 1996, How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies weaves together abstracted stories of wartime torture, death, and survival. Fans will recognize the group’s Rorschach method of storytelling, created by a constantly shifting machinelike collage of prisoner-dancers and their historical alter egos: Amelia Earhart, the sideshow performer Mr....

Freelance curator Alfonso Morales was poking around a warehouse on the grounds of Mexico City’s giant printing company Galas de Mexico a couple years ago when he made the find of a lifetime. Morales had been talking to Cesareo Moreno of Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum about mounting an exhibit on calendar art and was hoping the warehouse would yield a few pieces he could use. What he found was more than 200 paintings, including the originals of images he knew nearly as well as his own face–paintings that are national icons but had never been displayed....