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Beware of Dogma Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » this summer the Southern Baptist Convention performed a feat no less amazing than multiplying loaves and fishes: they staked out a place for themselves far to the right of the pope. They adopted an amendment declaring that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” The Baptists interpret the Bible literally–in this case, a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Ephesians....

Friday 7/30 – Thursday 8/5 31 SATURDAY Eugene Pincham and Studs Terkel may speak eloquently on the soapbox, but the prizes at the Newberry Library’s annual Bughouse Square Debates will go to the best hecklers in the audience. The free debates take place today from 1 to 5 at Washington Square Park at Walton and Dearborn. On Friday at 6 Clarence Darrow and Ida B. Wells, among various departed souls, return to speak at “The Ghosts of Bughouse Past....

A Yard of Sun Fry, a British playwright, set his 1970 “summer comedy” in a Siena courtyard in July 1946. The play opens on the day before the Palio, an extravagant festival dating back to the 14th century that includes a horse race: riders from each of Siena’s 17 wards compete to bring glory to their district. The event is a source of overweening local pride, and this particular Palio–the first since Italy’s humiliating defeat in World War II–may help ameliorate the city’s burden of shame and guilt....

Friday 7/18 – Thursday 7/24 19 SATURDAY For the past four years the members of the Autonomous Zone have attempted to create an antiauthoritarian culture–a real democracy–by implementing a nonhierarchical structure into the group and making decisions from the bottom up. The group’s home has functioned as a library, homeless outreach center, meeting space, and free school where people share their knowledge of everything from belly dancing to bookmaking. Gentrification has forced the A-Zone to move around quite a bit....

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another’s control. If one does not forgive, then one is controlled by the other’s initiatives and is locked into a sequence of act and response. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else’s nightmare. –Lance Morrow, from a 1984 essay...

MICHAEL RAY & THE COSMIC KREWE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you didn’t already know high-voltage trumpeter Michael Ray lived and worked in New Orleans, you’d probably guess it: with the musical stew he calls the Cosmic Krewe, Ray acts as combination chef and voodoo priest, mixing up jazz and pop, soul and hip-hop, second-line R & B and even a little performance art....

Pictures From the Front While he found the market to be “very lively,” he noticed someone was staring at him. “I saw the eyes of a black man looking at me from a corner, and I felt this tremendous hostility, as if he was saying, ‘You don’t belong here.’ I thought, this man doesn’t know me–why is he looking at me like this? It’s hard to figure out, when you’ve just arrived, why all this intense emotion is directed toward you....

Neil Tesser’s Critic’s Choice of Dr. Lonnie Smith at Green Dolphin Street [May 7] contained inaccuracies and exaggerations which need to be corrected. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though absolutely accurate about the amazing talents of Dr. Lonnie, his descriptions of the acoustics are wrong and the listening experience distorted. Green Dolphin Street presents live music seven nights a week. Neil Tesser has not spent enough time at G....

Presented by the Chicago-based documentary production and distribution company Terra Nova Films, the Silver Images Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, May 16 through 22, at Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson; AARP Information Center, 222 N. LaSalle; Atlas Senior Center, 1767 E. 79th St.; Catholic Health Partners/Columbus Hospital Auditorium, 2520 N. Lakeview; Catholic Health Partners/Saint Joseph’s Hospital, Boikan Conference Center, 2900 N. Lake Shore Dr.; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

TIM BERNE & MICHAEL FORMANEK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saxophonist Tim Berne and bassist Michael Formanek have worked together for much of the 90s in the group Bloodcount, whose music thrives on being boxed in. Berne’s knotty compositions are filled with twists and turns, and this superb quartet–with drummer Jim Black and reedist Chris Speed–navigates his mazes by intuition. But as a duo on last year’s Ornery People (Little Brother), Berne and Formanek like to break through the hedges once in a while....

Saying good-bye is the task motivating Michelle Kranicke’s new sextet, Do Us Part. Not necessarily to a husband or wife but to anyone or anything we cherish; as Kranicke, Zephyr’s artistic director, puts it, this dance is about “people and places appearing and disappearing throughout your life, the different forms they can take.” The subject may sound ominously sentimental, but there’s nothing predictable about Kranicke’s treatment of it. For one thing, she chooses difficult music: compositions by 20th-century composers George Crumb (set to Garcia Lorca’s poems for dead children), Peruvian Gustavo Santaolalla, and Charles Amirkanian, who uses found sounds–the first selection here sounds like a windmill intermittently shrieking against a soft backdrop of birdsong and sawing insects....

BRADLEY WILLIAMS & HIS ORIGINAL 21ST CENTURY REVIEW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the reference to the next century, this is not a thematic “revue” but an actual review, and it has nothing to do with music of the future. Rather, it uses the millennium’s imminent arrival as an excuse to look back at the past century’s musical styles–in particular those in which popular music merged or collided with the jazz so close to pianist Bradley Williams’s heart....

Problem wildlife” has become one of the defining difficulties of suburban life, like crabgrass and boredom. Stories of raccoons in the attic, deer in the garden, and geese on the soccer field regularly appear in the media, and every suburbanite I meet can enrich the growing stock of anecdotes with stories of his own. Gehrt and his assistant, Suzie Hatten, a graduate student from the University of Missouri, have been monitoring raccoon populations at six sites in the Chicago area, and what their numbers show is that sprawl creates large increases in raccoon populations....

GEORGE GRUNTZ CONCERT JAZZ BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Swiss pianist George Gruntz has chosen the Ellingtonian model for his sleek but blustery big band, and his success reminds you how few bands exploit that model today. Throughout jazz history most large ensembles have succeeded either by presenting exciting and innovative writing or by collecting enough star soloists to rescue the ho-hum arrangements....

Medea It’s a terrifying tale. But not as rare, for example, as the human sacrifice at the center of Iphigenia in Tauris. There have been several news stories in the past few years about women driven by madness and fear of abandonment to kill their children–most recently the case in Naperville. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Euripides’ play is much more than a bit of yellow journalism tossed raw and squirming onto the stage....

By Harold Henderson Economics professors have long dreamed of putting a price on pollution. But that dream has only just begun to affect reality. Most environmental laws still simply say, “Don’t put out more than two million tons of crud a year” or “Install a catalytic converter on every car.” These laws do reward ingenuity–the kind of ingenuity that enables a company to put out exactly two million tons of crud and not a pound less, or the kind of ingenuity that installs the cheapest catalytic converter you can get away with....

JOHNNY GRIFFIN QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the swallows flocking to Capistrano, the return of the great tenor man Johnny Griffin signals a seasonal shift: if the Little Giant is in Chicago, you know it must be spring. (And you certainly can’t tell from the temperature.) Griffin comes home at the end of every April to play the Jazz Showcase, in celebration of his own birthday and that of the club’s proprietor, Joe Segal, born the same date; but then Griffin could turn a trip to the dentist into a holiday with his eagle-taloned and lionhearted soloing....

KENNY GARRETT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett has plied his trade with Duke Ellington, hard-bopping Art Blakey, and fusion-era Miles Davis–and even in this age of sharply compressed history, that’s a helluva gamut. But the time spent with Miles makes the difference: Garrett, who’s only a year older than arch-neoclassicist Wynton Marsalis but sounds decades fresher, emerged from Davis’s crucible with his focus tightened and his methodology loosened....

MACBETH, Oddlife Theater Company, at Bailiwick Arts Center, and MACBETH, at Barat College. Any staging of the Scottish tragedy sinks or soars with the Macbeths: despite its tragic sprawl and bloody spectacle, the play belongs entirely to the title tyrant and his instantly corruptible hellmate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oddlife Theater’s staging unfortunately doesn’t trust the text, though this debut production is stalwartly traditional, with a minimal set, the usual Scottish medieval wear, and few cuts (too few)....

Jennifer Rexroat thought she was getting a great deal when she signed on as a graduate student in political science and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago: she’d get to study what she loved in exchange for teaching two classes a year. But three and a half years later she finds herself “upwards of $30,000” in debt–not because she’s splurging, but because UIC pays her only about $7,000 a year....