The highly unusual duo Marimolin was formed when violinist Sharan Leventhal met marimbist Nancy Zeltsman a decade ago in Boston, where both had considerable reputations in the new-music community. Immediately intrigued by the prospect of merging the sonorities of their instruments, they decided to team up. Since then they’ve compiled a unique repertoire, premiering over 70 pieces written especially for them. In concert Marimolin exudes excitement, camaraderie, and downtown sensibility, playing with precision and accenting humor....

ORPHEUS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard is best known to the general public for his endearing portrayal of Papageno in Ingmar Bergman’s sublime film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Now graying but still boyishly handsome, Hagegard has pursued an estimable career in opera houses and recital halls all over the world, inheriting the mantle of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the all-purpose Meistersinger....

A couch potato’s paradise, this highly clever, immensely entertaining second feature by Quentin Tarantino is a chronologically scrambled collection of interlocking crime stories. Apart from the ingenious structure, its charm lies in allusions to other movies and TV shows, and despite all the thematic nudges about redemption and second chances, its true agenda is sort of the opposite of Forrest Gump’s: to make the escapist, media-savvy viewer the real hero of the story....

Railroad Jerk’s ascent from East Village slop merchants to distinctive genre splicers is one of indie rock’s few successful examples of musical evolution. The band’s eponymous 1990 debut found them mired in sonic confusion, though a few tunes suggested that some interesting if unformed ideas lurked beneath the mess. After their follow-up, Raise the Plow, revealed an interest in swampy blues, they released a pile of singles, established a firm lineup, and did some heavily acoustic woodshedding....

A rarely screened classic of 1954, the only major American independent feature made by communists. A fiction film about the strike by Mexican-American zinc miners in New Mexico against their Anglo management, informed by feminist attitudes that are quite uncharacteristic of this period, it was inspired by the blacklisting of director Herbert Biberman, screenwriter Michael Wilson (A Place in the Sun), producer and former screenwriter Paul Jarrico, and composer Sol Kaplan, among others....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Could sleeping in the same bed with his frigid mother be contributing to his sexual dysfunction? Is this situation totally weird and screwed up? Or am I just reading pop-Freudian significance into a perfectly innocent scenario? –Too Close for Comfort I’m a breeder boy that’s miserably in love with my brother’s girlfriend. I love every particle of her being: her scent, her voice, her personality, soul…everything....

Yellow Heat: Vincent van Gogh in Arles I love their historical and theatrical excesses, the way they create myths even as they debunk legends. I love the fantastical melodrama unleashed by the alchemy of poverty and creativity, the struggle that pits artists against themselves and the culture that created them. And when the artist inevitably goes down in a blaze of self-destructive glory, and the voice-over repeats words from the artist’s diary or letters, I listen like a devotee, with renewed faith that the art left behind makes the struggle worthwhile....

These 12 lesbian films and videos express widely, er, wildly diverse attitudes toward sexuality. Karisa Durr’s Grade AA Butt makes no bones about depicting women’s asses (humorously) as if they were meat. Shots emphasizing the sensuality of kneading dough in Nora Sqilagyi and Alex Marshall’s Pastry Girls are intercut with images of a woman being massaged. Fuck Film by Kadet Kuhne makes a joke of object fetishism by showing a woman in a sexual relationship with strips of celluloid....

BOY BASEMENT BATTLES THE DEMONS OF SLEEP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read it, then I read it again. And then I read it again. Finally I got it. Beau O’Reilly, who wrote Boy Basement Battles the Demons of Sleep, has a penchant for this kind of poetic prose, with lots of tongue-tripping consonants and dense images and a logic that dances around rather than walking straight from one point to another....

Buddy Guy and Junior Wells worked together for so long–steadily from the 60s through the 70s and sporadically well into the next decade–that a lot of people never stopped to consider how unlikely a musical combination they really were: Guy’s slash-and-burn guitar style melding with the warbling subtleties of Wells’s harmonica blowing; Wells’s street-tough posturing juxtaposed with Guy’s sly onstage elegance; and Guy’s tormented emotionality laid against Wells’s punkish, signifying playfulness....

Who is the 14th Dalai Lama? Spiritual leader of all Tibetans? International statesman who speaks out against political oppressors? Fund-raiser for the refugee Tibetan communities in northern India and elsewhere? Guru to the stars? All these facets of his personality and more are touched on in this slickly produced hour-long 1993 documentary by Mickey Lemle. Interviews with the jovial lama himself (aka Tenzin Gyatso) and with his relatives and associates–intercut with rarely seen historic footage–present a partial picture of the man, though more as hagiography than biography....

The clothes packed onto racks in the back room of Elizabeth Carlisle’s Wicker Park clothing store Pentimento remind me of playing dress up out of my grandmother’s costume trunk: there are velvet and brocade Edwardian vests and ruffled blouses, cotton shirts silk-screened with wagon trains and cacti, vintage-inspired wool jackets out of His Girl Friday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the clothes in my grandmother’s trunk were always falling apart, and the fabrics were usually bargain-basement....

Randy Duncan is a man with a legacy. His dances might make you feel good, but he’s not just a feel-good kind of guy–like Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle, he looks for the place where the spiritual and the social and the physical come together. Add to that his talent for finding and molding dancers and you’ve got a hot mix. In the last year or so Duncan’s ability to put social issues in the context of individual experience has blossomed....

KLOWN: PRICK US AND WE’LL BURST Around the Coyote Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The four clowns who make up Die Hanswurste–Joel Jeske, Kevin Sherman, Bruce Green, and David Schmidt–are tricksters of the first order. Their show, Klown: Prick Us and We’ll Burst, is filled with sophisticated and finely executed physical comedy routines, winning laughs not with pratfalls but with their wry comments on human nature....

LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre. It takes guts for off-Loop actor Nambi E. Kelley to take on this play about Billie Holiday so soon after Eartha Kitt’s incandescent performance of the same work last spring; at least give Kelley and director Phillip Edward VanLear credit for tackling the challenge. Playwright Lanie Robertson’s near soliloquy, set in a seedy Philadelphia nightclub a few months before Holiday’s 1959 death, takes the form of a concert the burned-out, strung out Holiday interrupts with woozy, sometimes humorous, often bitter reminiscences of her struggles with poverty, racism, heroin, and loving the wrong men....

Peter Jefferies spells out his recording philosophy in the booklet accompanying his new album Electricity, released on Chicago’s Ajax records: “No outboard effects. No compression. No noise reduction.” It might sound limiting, but as a recording artist and producer/engineer working with such like-minded New Zealand artists as the Dead C., King Loser, and Sandra Bell, he has consistently demonstrated that having modest means doesn’t mean you have to make a modest recording....

I haven’t seen the movie (and probably won’t), but based only on what I know of the plot and everything else I’ve heard about it I assume most of the vitriol contained in Larry Kramer’s scathing review of Philadelphia (January 14) is entirely justified. The first time I saw the previews it was obvious to me the movie was nothing more than a monstrous masturbatory Hollywood cop-out. I’m certain the artistic merit of the film can be quickly dispensed with, and so I’m not surprised that the real (and entirely predictable) purpose of Kramer’s condemnation of the movie was rather to condemn our various former and current executive leadership, along with the rest of straight America, as coconspirators obsessed with nothing less than the total extermination of Gay America....

While leafing through my Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, I came upon the horrifying fact that Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” the song that started rock, peaked at number eight in 1958. What seven forgettable songs were deemed better than this classic? –Tim Ring, Montreal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil loves the classics as much as the next guy, but let’s not get carried away....

THREE FLAT WALKUP The problem seems to be that O’Reilly, Magnus, and Magnus haven’t come to a consensus on exactly what this play is all about. Initially, it seems to be an antigentrification play (an appropriate subject given that Curious has to vacate its storefront space on North Avenue because the landlord suddenly raised the rent by $300 a month). Mark Comiskey plays Felch, a lecherous beat generation boho who has gone blind and wants to use his compensation money to rehab a dilapidated, rat-infested three-flat....

Friday 11 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A band of weirdly ambitious and absurdly grandiose performance artists are making their Chicago debut this week at the Beret International Gallery. Cathcart/Fantauzzi/Van Elslander specialize in elaborate, costly, and seemingly pointless projects. For instance, they recently bought a house in Detroit, spent three days dismantling it by hand, and then displayed the parts in a gallery before transporting them to a dump....