AMY ALT AND SHELDON B. SMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the kind of dance Amy Alt and Sheldon B. Smith do. Oh, they make use of costumes and music, but mostly to underline the movement. Take Dance for Two III, performed on their recent program at Link’s Hall: in this third version of a duet they’ve jointly choreographed and performed, Smith wears a three-piece suit, Alt a black dress with a white Peter Pan collar; the music is Vivaldi....

By Mark Swartz “What ambiguity there is in exalted things,” Don DeLillo writes in The Names. “We despise them a little.” While the new museum, with several times the exhibition space of the old MCA, a video theater, a performance space, and a sculpture garden, is an exalted addition to Chicago’s cultural landscape, it inevitably comes burdened with little extras that, depending on your willingness to forgive, are either merely unfortunate or a little bit despicable....

The division between Billy Bragg’s by turns giddy and serious song crafting and his more unsophisticated desire to preach politics has been de facto resolved by his absence from the pop scene for nearly four years. His partisans (I’m one) recall that Bragg was a jut-jawed folk punker who, stolidly hitting the stage with an electric guitar, took it as his charge to harangue and inspire anyone within earshot with manifestos that vigorously argued his take on romance (randy) and politics (socialist)....

JANUARY Saturday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Train buffs and folks with an interest in public policy might be intrigued by the Midwest High Speed Rail Association’s annual lunch meeting. The group is campaigning for a network of speedy rail lines connecting Kansas City, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Minneapolis/Saint Paul, and Milwaukee, all with Chicago at the hub. High Speed Rail: Building a Midwest Coalition is the name of the meeting; $20 gets you lunch and the strategy session in the offices of the law firm Keck, Mahin & Cate, on the 49th floor of 77 W....

Cecil Taylor’s favorite saxophonist makes his Chicago debut. As that recommendation might suggest, Charles Gayle plays free jazz–very free jazz–and he does so unrepentantly, with storm-wind assaults on hell’s-loose rhythms, rubato wanderings at slow tempos, and plenty of upper-register cries in all cases. Gayle is known as the most ferocious of “energy” players, launching into each piece of improvisation like a starving man let loose at a buffet. But while he deserves his reputation for spectacular and sustained bursts of unrestrained energy, Gayle’s better recordings reveal him as something more than a free jazz marathon man; in particular, the recent Touchin’ on Trane (FMP Records) brims with some of the most excitingly organized freedom since the mid-60s glory days of Coltrane and Albert Ayler....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reading Michael Solot’s review of Mencken: A Life [July 7] made me nostalgic for those simpler times when gross racial and ethnic generalizations could be passed off as acerbic social commentary. It’s so stifling today, what with “crackpots” like Noam Chomsky cluttering up our social discourse with their “saint[ly]” distress over various forms of U.S.-sanctioned genocide....

“They’re probably in those vans over there, filming all this,” says my host Jim, gesturing toward a small parking area. “There are a lot of feds here today.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’re watching a steady stream of people flow between the four buildings that dot the otherwise deserted fairgrounds in Grayslake. The mostly white, male crowd tends toward facial hair and front-facing baseball caps with insignias for Jack Daniels, Harley-Davidson, the Dallas Cowboys, and Walt Disney....

**** THE BLUE KITE (Masterpiece) Directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang Written by Xiao Mao With Zhang Wenyao, Chen Xiaoman, Lu Liping, Pu Quanxin, Li Xuejian, Guo Baochang, Zhong Ping, and Chu Quanzhong. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the Beijing Film Academy reopened after the Cultural Revolution in 1978, Tian was admitted to the directors’ class, becoming a member of the famous “Fifth Generation,” which also included Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), Huang Jianxin (The Black Cannon Incident), Li Shaohong (Family Portrait), Zhang Junzhao (The One and Eight), and Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern)....

This multidisciplinary performing arts festival, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs through December 17, with shows most Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM, as well as children’s matinees on selected Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM. Most evenings feature two or more artists, with intermissions between each act. Blue Rider Theatre, 1822 S. Halsted, 733-4668. Tickets: $10 a night except where noted in the listings below; $60 for a festival pass (good for all performances); some student and senior discounts available....

RAW WORKS But what may have seemed raw at one time, like the oriental dances of Ruth St. Denis, often look hopelessly overcivilized to later generations. Making a dance starts the cultural cooking process, slowly transforming the raw elements into idealized, stylized gestures. The pleasure of Janson’s dances comes from watching her both discover new raw elements and start the cooking process. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The concert’s first dance, Raw Work #1, emphatically illustrates the new elements Janson is using....

By Dennis Rodkin “Steve’s living the dream of every nerd,” says a former employee. “As a kid, he was awkward and probably didn’t socialize much, but now he’s a multimillionaire who drives a Lamborghini and has a beautiful girlfriend with major breasts and a huge house and three healthy kids and a great reputation in his industry. What nerd wouldn’t want all that when he grows up?” Harris got all that–plus the time and money to fly down to his hometown anytime he wants to watch his beloved Kansas City Chiefs play football–by finding a niche that he could scratch better than anybody....

SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SCOTS front man Rick Miller has said that the band doesn’t just give a concert, it throws a party. After seeing the Chapel Hill-based trio play several times over the past five years, I have to agree. The band delivers its energetic, twisted version of CCR-meets-the-Cramps swampabilly with an enthusiasm that’s right on the mark: bouffant-sporting bassist Mary Huff plays with the smoldering, white-trash cool of Poison Ivy while doughy stand-up drummer Dave Hartman keeps time on a minimal kit....

SUNKEN LAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mangrum’s story–about a couple destroyed by a society where abortion is illegal and rape victims are kidnapped by the government and forced to have the babies of their attackers–reminded me less of visionary works like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 than of television movies of the 70s, when supposed conspiracies and futuristic societies were in vogue....

Could you please provide detailed definitions of the terms “drawn and quartered” and “keelhauling”? The former conjures up images of having cartoons drawn on one’s body before being pelted with pocket change. The latter could refer to being bound to the underside of a ship, boat, barge, whatever. My daughter’s Disney movie (Peter Pan) refers to both–didn’t they think kids would eventually have access to the Internet? –Ted Jankowski, via the Internet...

Why Don’t We Live Together Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artists’ housing cooperatives have proved to be welcome additions in other cities like Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Seattle, despite some concerns that artists might not have the financial wherewithal to keep them going. But Saint Paul arts consultant Jan Plimpton published a study last year that dispels many of these doubts. In her report, Plimpton noted that nonpayment of rent is rare in cooperatives: an average of only one tenant is evicted each year from properties that have been operating for five to ten years....

BAYCHESTER AVE.—THE BRONX Playwrights’ Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As premises for drama go, “this system sucks” is as good as any, I suppose. But playwright Dominic Taylor stacks the deck in his episodic narrative Baychester Ave.—The Bronx, conveniently ending scenes at the point when a rebuttal hangs in the air. A frustrated Fuquan answers Mr. A’s reminiscences of the radical 60s, for example, by demanding, “What has your struggle done for you?...

This story starts with the mail lady. The time is the spring of 1984, the place a block of sooty apartment buildings in Prague. The elderly mail lady drags two shopping bags full of little packages. Each box is roughly the size of a small stack of CDs. Some feel light, some are heavy. Most have been sent as registered mail; all are addressed to one Joska Skalnik, an abstract painter....

Daily Southtown Bombs the Competition Kadner’s luck didn’t end when he located Dale Eickelman, a professor of sociology. “He said he valued social contacts more than any other, and it was kind of neat I got hold of him that way. I was the only person he was going to talk to,” Kadner said Eickelman told him. “I thought, sure, until the New York Times and Nightline call him. But apparently they called and he said no, I’m not talking....

Gang threats, drug-addicted parents, drive-by shootings: we know the circumstances of low-income teens in Chicago because the media cover such things on a daily basis. What we don’t know is what all this does to a kid’s soul. TeenStreet’s Learning to Breathe in a Box tells us. The 12 members of the ensemble, Free Street Theater’s youth troupe from all over Chicago, do more than a bit of soul mining–they conjure up their own spirit through poetry, dance, and rhythm....

New Group Party Pooped: Art Bows to Fashion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to MCA spokesman Michael Thomas, the decision to forgo the River North street party was also linked to the opening of the museum’s new home, now scheduled for next July. “We were too busy working on the new building to do a party,” says Thomas, adding that the Oak Street Council is doing most of the planning for the fashion benefit....