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The Lovers of the Arctic Circle By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The cultural isolation of Americans has created numerous ridiculous shorthand notions of what constitutes a national cinema. Taiwanese cinema is one of the richest on the planet, but we’ve been stuck with only Ang Lee. Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou are just about our only guides to one-fifth of the world’s population, and the Kaurismaki brothers are relied on to define the Finnish soul (which they tend to do from A to B)....

By Cate Plys Evans showed up at the July 2 meeting, when the council was slated to vote on its new package of ethics regulations. Stubbornly refusing to recognize the irony of his own existence, Evans told reporters he supported the reforms. “I have no problem with that,” he said. Elections were days away, and the aldermen were afraid to vote against ethics right before an election. Even so, they fought hard....

No Girl, Stone Circle Theatre Ensemble, at Voltaire. The workshop process can be a valuable editing tool for a play. In the case of Emma Vogel’s No Girl, however, it appears to have acted more as a shredder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story begins with buddies Mike and Joe loafing in a Sunday afternoon celebration of masculinity (“Sunday! Man day! No women, no girls!...

By Fred Camper “In those days guys who couldn’t afford a guitar would take an old washtub and a broomstick and a string and play juice-harps while singin’ the blues,” he says. There were no amplifiers then; just megaphones. “I liked it. It was for real. But Mama always said, ‘I don’t want you on Beale Street; it will get in you in trouble someday.’ Now I understand what she meant....

As September approached, the White Sox began to pull out of their doldrums. They left on a six-game road trip in late August right where they’d been at the All-Star break six weeks before–at 23 games above .500. But then they won west coast series against the Seattle Mariners and the Oakland Athletics, each a possible playoff opponent, finishing with back-to-back wins over the A’s. They came home and extended their winning streak to five games with a sweep of the Anaheim Angels, in the process climbing to a season-high 28 games over ....

By Tori Marlan It wasn’t a typical meeting. Traditional scouting is out of the question for these girls. They aren’t allowed to make arts and crafts or garden, because they aren’t trusted not to stab each other with scissors or shears. They can’t go camping or take field trips, and they aren’t allowed to sell cookies or tag along downtown with career mentors. They’re inmates at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center....

VINNY GOLIA QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the Vancouver Jazz Festival in June I heard a rare performance by LA-based reedist Vinny Golia’s Large Ensemble–music full of hairpin turns, spectacular shifts of sonic scenery, and an astonishing range of tempos and textures. In 18 years the Large Ensemble has released a half dozen albums, and it seems like the group’s only played about that many concerts; it can’t be a picnic for Golia to marshal a jazz orchestra that sometimes tops 24 members, especially considering the demands of his idiosyncratic original music....

Mary Janes Record No. 1, the long-delayed debut album by the Mary Janes, begins with an ending: “Shooting Star,” the seven-minute opening opus, is a love song to main Mary Jane Janas Hoyt’s former band, the Vulgar Boatmen. Hoyt starts slowly, delicately, with her own tentative guitar and vocals, adding watercolor washes of cello, violin, piano, and more guitar, until the orchestration is as dense with ideas as it is spare in execution....

During several tunes on Live at the Glenn Miller Cafe (Wobbly Rail), the new recording from the AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark, you can hear the audience erupt in midperformance cries of delight. Vandermark and the trio’s leader, Swedish reedist Mats Gustafsson, have developed a palpable connection–the album’s first cut, Vandermark’s “Unit Character,” opens with the two horn men navigating complex lines in perfect unison–but their bond is even more evident when they let go of the song’s head, exploding into piercing, screamed harmonics and prickly split tones....

BUILT TO SPILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Built to Spill’s major-label debut, Perfect From Now On (Warner Brothers), sole constant member Doug Martsch blows up all of his little indie-rock quirks into something that, if not quite larger than life, is almost as long. The band’s previous efforts (including two albums on Seattle’s C/Z and Up labels) framed Martsch’s supple, unadorned hooks with tight, off-kilter pop-rock arrangements and efficient Neil Young-ish guitar splatter; by comparison the new record is downright labyrinthine....

In the law school library, harassed by coffee headaches and razor sharp paper edges, Roz would occasionally drift into a remembered scent–frangipani and pineapple rind, some rotting garbage amid the sweet–and every sense in her would mourn the end of her travels. Yet she recoiled when, studying on her boyfriend’s leather sofa instead of in her carrel, she received word from that other place. Her elbow jutted out to a point....

Organizers of this festival, now in its fifth year, have planned an upbeat program for opening night. Xsight! Performance Group, which usually trades in satirical cultural commentary and sexual provocation, offers an “intimate and elegant” duet to Chopin, Nocturne, choreographed by artistic director Brian Jeffery; he performs with Julia Rhoads, a dream of a dancer. Another new work will be presented by choreographer Harrison McEldowney, he of “the Milly” fame: Dance Sport is a “tongue-in-cheek look” (McEldowney can’t seem to get his tongue out of there) at a dance competition, created for the Hubbard Street Trainee Ensemble, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s newest–and youngest–venture....

DAVID KILGOUR & the HEAVY EIGHTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s never been any question about David Kilgour’s mastery of the irresistibly catchy pop song; his first band, the Clean, will go down in history as having sparked the explosion of New Zealand’s rock underground with its debut single, “Tally Ho!” But Kilgour’s songwriting is less than half the story: any veteran fan of Kiwi pop can go on at great length about his incandescent guitar solos, how he wedded the trebly buzz of his 60s heroes (the Byrds, the Stones, and the Velvet Underground) to the rhythmic immediacy of punk and threw in a giddy wildness entirely his own....

Lead Stories Arrested in Bologna, Italy, in July and charged with burglarizing a pasta shop: Stefano Spaghetti. Barred from the Saratoga racetrack at opening-day races in July because of its inappropriate name: a two-year-old colt named Mufahker (which means “glory” in Arabic). The arresting officer, in an undercover sting operation that charged two 46-year-old men with soliciting sex with other men at a park in Wilmington, North Carolina, in July: Bud LaCock....

Zoot Suit Too bad the Goodman couldn’t have closed out its long stay at the Art Institute–it’s moving to the Loop next fall–with its recent production of Jitney or A Moon for the Misbegotten. Its well-executed revival of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit is exuberant but surprisingly flat emotionally. Yet the show marks several milestones for the theater. Not only is it the first production by a Chicano playwright ever to grace the Goodman’s main stage, it’s also the Chicago premiere of a much acclaimed work: Valdez, who founded El Teatro Campesino, is arguably the best-known Latino playwright of our time....

Halfway through dinner at Bistrot Margot, my companion leaned forward and chuckled, “This place is such an authentic Paris bistro I was just about to complain about the noisy Americans behind me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Judging by the full house on a wintry Monday evening, “they” caught on quick. Only six months old, Margot is Doppes’s second stab at a neighborhood French eatery....

By Jack Helbig For the better part of four decades, Palazzolo has been making movies around town, and he’s been celebrated for his good-natured cinema verite portraits of local wildlife. These humorous documentaries treated such diverse topics as a senior-citizens’ picnic (Enjoy Yourself–It’s Later Than You Think), a massage parlor (Hot Nasties), antiwar demonstrations (Love It/Leave It), patriotic parades (America’s in Real Trouble), a tacky wedding shower in the northwest suburbs (Ricky and Rocky), and stranger rituals on Rush Street (I Was a Contestant at Mother’s Wet T-Shirt Contest)....

V/VM, KID-606 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last three or four years electronic dance music has spawned some decidedly unfunky offspring, from Alec Empire doing his Minor Threat-with-a-sampler thing to DJ Spooky dropping science with Iannis Xenakis to Powerbook maestros Pita and Fennesz jamming with improvisers Phil Durrant and Keith Rowe (on Music in Movement Electronic Orchestra, recently released by the local Perdition Plastics label)....

By Rex Doane “People now keep saying, ‘Andre, you’re too dirty. Quit being so lascivious!’” Williams says. “Lascivious! Shit. I didn’t know what that meant till a week ago, and I’ve been lascivious for on near 61 goddamn years.” In 1954, Williams says, he received some distressing news from back home: Nathaniel Williams, who was supposedly already in the navy, had decided that he, too, needed a change of scenery. Navy officials, noticing that they now had two Nathaniel Williamses with the same parents, opted to keep the real one....

Kicking Out the Jams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Cap’n Jazz fell apart during a summer tour in 1995, its members regrouped in two bands: Kinsella’s current project, Joan of Arc, and the Promise Ring. The Promise Ring, based in Milwaukee, has grown increasingly popular by polishing up the pop facets of Cap’n Jazz’s hard-rocking sound. But Joan of Arc, which originally included Cap’n Jazz bassist Sam Zurick and still occasionally includes Kinsella’s brother Mike on drums, lit out almost immediately for the sometimes fascinating, sometimes maddening territory pioneered by elders like Tortoise and Gastr del Sol–the kind of stuff you might call pretentious if it weren’t your cup of tea....