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Danzas Folcloricas Colombianas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colombia’s rich cultural stew of Indian, European, and African elements has produced a remarkable array of folk dances. An early European influence can be seen in a courtship dance with mincing steps and stiffly held arms–it looks like the courtly exercises that were the precursors of ballet, all decorum and rigid floor patterns. Several dances use scarves as romantic links–the men swing them at the women’s ankles, or a couple clasps one by either end....

I’m probably going to get some of this wrong, but I was in pain and just a little high on hospital drugs when they brought me back from the recovery room after my kidney-stone operation. I saw that I had a roommate, an old man flat on his back with tubes running in and out. He didn’t look like anyone I would want to know. I didn’t break my neck, but I didn’t make it to the bathroom either....

By Ted Kleine In November the Weinmanns moved into a smaller one-bedroom apartment in Edgewater, east of Broadway, but both still felt they were given the bum’s rush from the place where they’d spent half their lives. “They should have had some consideration for the senior citizens, given them a little more time to move,” James says. “It would have been better if they’d waited until May, when it was warm out....

Lead Stories Michael Guilbault, 19, pleaded guilty in December to robbing a convenience store two months earlier in Raleigh, North Carolina. According to the prosecutor, a delayed getaway aided police in their capture. Guilbault and his accomplice were to meet their friends Heather Beckwith, 18, and Curtis Johnson, 19, at the getaway car nearby, but when the robbers arrived, they found the doors locked and the couple engaged “in the act,” as the prosecutor put it....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra The biggest risk was the choice of composer. Shostakovich, unlike Debussy or Stravinsky, doesn’t have a nice, staid, settled reputation. It’s been 25 years since his death, and his career and his music are still the subject of rancorous debate. One of the biggest pleasures of the festival was to see so many first-class musicians participating just because they were Shostakovich fans. It was an even bigger pleasure to see the house so full at each concert and the audience so wildly enthusiastic....

The Vagina Monologues Ensler repeats “vagina” as often as possible–with deliberate, even excessive emphasis. “I was worried about vaginas,” she says, opening her mouth unreasonably wide around the vowels. “I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them….So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues,” and so on. And every time she says “vagina,” the audience obligingly titters....

I am a 17-year-old girl who doesn’t believe in casual sex. While all of my friends are relishing the thought of doing it at college, I’ve made the decision not to have sex until marriage. I’ve had the opportunity to have sex many times and have rejected all of them. I’m not asking for advice or approval, but I would like your readers to know that women (or men) who hold out for sex don’t just exist in a convent....

ARAB ON RADAR 3/17, FIRESIDE BOWL There was a time when great rock ‘n’ roll front men–Iggy Pop, Alan Vega, Johnny Rotten–courted physical confrontation with audiences in intimate settings (or at least coped with it admirably when it came unbidden). But audiences have thicker skin now, and Arab on Radar’s William Tell is one of the few singers who can get a real rise out of them, acting very very convincingly like that smelly Tourette’s sufferer on the bus....

LONESOME ORGANIST 10/18, Lounge Ax Former 5ive Style keyboard whiz Jeremy Jacobsen might just be making a vain play for sympathy by calling himself lonesome, because on his debut Collector of Cactus Echo Bags (Thrill Jockey) he generates a lot more excitement in collaboration with himself than the hundreds of guitar-toting boys who conceal the fact that they’re starting to hate their band mates behind a facade of grim purpose. And as anyone who’s caught his previous live performances has undoubtedly marveled, Jacobsen is a genuine one-man band in concert as well as on record, banging spastically on multiple keyboards, junkyard guitar, traps, and various other toys while blowing a harp and yodeling through a heavily reverbed vocal channel....

ACUMEN NATION 12/12, METRO Normally my view is that the remix phenomenon has gotten way out of hand, but in the case of Acumen Nation, I have to admit that sometimes an additional cook or two can improve the broth. I should know: these local industrial rockers have sent me every possible permutation of their third album, More Human Heart (Conscience), including “teaser” EPs, prerelease masters, and the remix EP Unkind/Revelations per Minute, which turns out to be the best of the lot....

It doesn’t take a lot of brains to parody Samuel Beckett. The clipped, repetitive dialogue and absurd, hopeless situations of his bleak minimalist plays are ridiculous enough, as Beckett well knew; he often had his characters comment on how boring and stupid everything around them was. So it’s no surprise that the combined brainpower of Greg Allen, Ben Schneider, and Danny Thompson has produced much more than a straight parody in this piece....

Excerpts from Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Kitchen Sessions With Charlie Trotter–It’s always good to see a cooking show from Chicago (with a vaguely Prairie School set and jazzy end credits, no less). I say this despite the fact that traffic in front of Charlie Trotter’s restaurant blocks the way to my therapist’s office every other week, despite his slightly off-putting uber-ambition and also despite his goofy and confusing cameo in My Best Friend’s Wedding (he was supposed to be in New York?...

BILLY STRITCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billy Stritch’s best asset, his versatility, may also be his biggest liability. The Texas-bred, New York-based singer and pianist is equally comfortable with cabaret singing, in which the focus is on dramatic interpretation, and jazz, in which the emphasis is on musical skill. Because the two genres tend to appeal to different audiences, performers often find themselves restricting their artistic range for commercial purposes, but Stritch plans to bridge the gap in his upcoming appearances....

Sonatine By Patrick Z. McGavin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in Tokyo in 1947, Kitano is a hugely popular figure in Japan as a result of his work as a stand-up comedian, television personality, poet, essayist, novelist, cartoonist, newspaper columnist, musician, and painter. Since 1989’s Violent Cop, Kitano has directed, written, and edited six more films. He’s starred in all but two of these under his stage name, Beat Takeshi (derived from his start in show business: he was half of a comedy team known as the Two Beats)....

After last year’s outpouring of complaints about the lack of big-name talent at the Chicago Blues Festival, the Mayor’s Office of Special Events has put together a heavy-hitting main-stage lineup that should help restore some of the respect journalists, musicians, and fans have lost for the free fest in recent years. Little Milton, the Gulf Coast-bred guitar legends Lonnie Brooks, Long John Hunter, and Phillip Walker, and our own queen of the blues, Koko Taylor, would all be right at home headlining any world-class blues event....

The 22nd annual Chicago Jazz Festival strikes a pretty good balance between what the people want (Dianne Reeves, Charles Lloyd, Big Band Monk) and what they need (Andrew Hill, Roscoe Mitchell, the Italian Instabile Orchestra). But it’s nearly impossible for any jazz artist to please everyone these days, and though the current democratic format of the festival does encourage serendipitous discovery, I’m starting to think last year’s multi-venue World Music Festival or the Montreal Jazz Festival might be a better model....

CHROME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fate of Chrome seemed sealed with the passing of cofounder Damon Edge in 1995, but in this age of ceaseless reunions and reinvigorations, even dead bands play again: the legendary San Francisco group’s other founder, Helios Creed, is using the name to take a new version of the freaky outer-space show on the road. In 1977 Chrome came out of the same mad-scientist movement that had already produced the Residents and Devo and would shortly give birth to Gary Numan, blending Meddle-era Pink Floyd psychedelic elements (tape effects, analog synthesizers, Waterphones) with proto-punk garage rock, a processed voice that made a method of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” intro, and a menacing, cyborgasmic, postapocalyptic sci-fi fetish....

Dead Heart Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Infidelity is a crucial part of a murder investigation and a self-conscious metaphor for cultural relations in the Australian village of Wala Wala, where contradictions between the laws of the aboriginal population and the laws a constable has been assigned to enforce spark violent confrontations with no simple resolutions. The constable (Bryan Brown, who also produced) is a terrifying, ambiguous good guy, as full of hypocrisy and mania as conviction about the ideals it’s his job to implement....

By Michael Miner Sengstacke intends to be the next publisher of the Chicago Defender, which her great-granduncle Robert Abbott founded 93 years ago and her grandfather John Sengstacke ran from 1940 until he died in May 1997 at the age of 84. Robert Sengstacke, who is Myiti’s father and John’s son, isn’t so sure John Sengstacke could ever have approved of anybody but John Sengstacke running the Defender. But he doesn’t mind if Myiti wants to think differently....

By Michael Miner Chipper voice: “Charles, it’s Adrienne Levatino at Unicom ComEd. Umm, I actually have [senior vice president] David Helwig on the phone. I was going to conference us in to talk with you about the report. I don’t know how long he’s going to be there tonight. If he’s going to be there for a while I’ll call back and give you his number. Thanks.” Helwig: “Yeah, sure.”...