The Smart Museum’s current exhibit, From the Oceans of Painting, examines 400 years of India’s folk, tribal, and popular urban painting traditions. This 1985 watercolor by artist Gauri Chitrakar is an example of jarano pata, or scroll painting, which is used as a visual prop in story telling. The painters and storytellers belong to low castes and in rural areas still travel from village to village. Chitrakar’s picture depicts an episode from the great epic poem the Ramayana....

With “alternative” rap, i.e., hip hop consumed predominantly by whites, getting all the positive media attention and gangster rap all the negative, one could get the impression that there’s nothing else out there. This terrific hip hop review proves such is not the case. Resurrection (Relativity), the second album by Common Sense, is not only the best Chicago hip hop album ever, it’s one of the two or three best hip hop efforts to come out last year, period....

All in the Timing David Ives is a clockwork playwright. He’s fond of bells. They go “ding” in his plays for dramatic effect. He is enamored of clocks. They go “ticktock, ticktock” between his scenes. Like Philip Glass, he is more mechanic than artist. His words ignite his jokes, which lubricate the motors of his plots. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ives is quite clever when he mocks composer-hypnotist Glass, as he does in one of the six short plays that make up All in the Timing, but his writing technique is not all that different from the approach taken by this occasionally brilliant but migraine-inducing composer of dizzyingly repetitious music....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Olsen took the risk of using a primitive incendiary device to illuminate a viaduct. It was a risk because she should have wondered whether it was legal, especially since it could harm anybody who is nearby. What if things blew up, or fell over and set somebody on fire? What if they fell over on a passing car?...

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back when all the publicity was blasting the DCFS system and the family preservation program, I wrote letters to both newspapers. Other Family First (preservation) supervisors and workers of private agencies did the same. Not one letter was printed. Our intent was to inform the general public that the family preservation program was not just doling out money and things to “bad” families, as public guardian Patrick Murphy would have you believe....

Like Gone With the Wind, Chen Kaige’s blockbuster–half a century of contemporary Chinese history (1925-1977) seen through the lives of two Peking Opera actors and a former prostitute–is worth seeing largely for its pizzazz: riveting performances, epic sweep and story telling, a bold and melodramatic use of color, and a capacity to generalize suggestively about large historical events through a few interlocking individual stories. Needless to say, there are certain limitations as well as advantages to this approach....

The summer heat has gotten sullen. Zucchini and tomato plants thrive in the sweating air. My zucchini explode at dawn with gigantic yellow blossoms, and before you know it inflate their fruit to the size of dirigibles. I walk from neighbor to neighbor offering these fine logs of food, good only for zucchini Parmesan and zucchini bread. My brother Bob, who lives on a farm in Wisconsin, warns me to lock my car if I drive to Kenosha this time of year or people will stuff it full of swollen orphaned zucchini....

KABUKI MEDEA at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Treating a classic tale in popular Kabuki style, Shozo Sato achieves the brooding stillness of a painting. His florid hybrid of East and West employs ritual dance, painted faces, mimed combat, a musical score punctuated by wooden beaters, and bright, sumptuous costumes attended to by masked koken. Behind the actors’ lines are grand gestures: Medea crossing her eyes when she reads the paper of divorce or sticking out her tongue in a moment of unbridled rage....

Aphex Twin Amber In urban clubs the beat is the thing, existing almost solely to provide a relentless groove for frenzied dancing. Its machine-made rhythms drive the body to unceasing movement, and the conflation of sweat, exhaustion, and claustrophobic sound induces a sort of sensory nirvana. In the last decade or so other elements of the disco song have fallen away; melody, harmony, and texture have given way almost exclusively to rhythm....

Lead Story In December Rory Thompson, 57, was granted a patent for a device that allows people to see an ordinary color TV or computer screen in three dimensions. Thompson developed the device while in Risdon Prison Hospital in Hobart, Australia, where he’s been since he was declared insane following a 1984 conviction for killing his wife and flushing parts of her body down a toilet. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra At Ravinia the music director is expected to be more than most: recitalist, accompanist, and teacher–as well as principal summertime conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He must take the foreground role of soloist/colleague in chamber music, the less spotlighted role of accompanying and assisting other artists in their solo endeavors, and the patient role of educating, encouraging, and occasionally discouraging the upcoming generation of musicians. Of course in a larger sense these are things any conductor should be doing with an orchestra–the orchestra, after all, is the conductor’s chosen instrument; under his guidance it accompanies soloists, and his selection of musical programming educates as well as entertains an audience–but the duties are more explicit and less abstract at Ravinia....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, as well done as his response was, he failed to mention what, to me, is the biggest problem of the movie. In the entire thing, there is not a single human being. This movie is populated entirely by violently heterosexual men, and homosexuals who are exactly what the heterosexuals want them to be–shallow, nondescript, and indistinct beings who are kept in the shadows where they can be easily ignored....

The midwest’s long and proud big-band tradition–which includes such giants as Basie and Goodman, Earl Hines and Jay McShann–has always centered on the regional jazz capitals of Kansas City and Chicago. But these days you can add the Queen City to the list. Last year no jazz orchestra in the midwest–and only a couple around the country–came up with an album as impressive as Supreme Thing (Cabin 2 Music), the debut from Cincinnati’s PsychoAcoustic Orchestra....

R.E.M.’s Death Murmurs When Eric Clapton lost a son in a freak high-rise fall, he was so broken up he hired a songwriter to help him write a tune about it. He sold the resulting “Tears in Heaven” as sound track fodder for a dumb, exploitative movie about drugs (Rush). A year later he inserted it into his Unplugged album, which used an eight-piece band to do low-key “acoustic” renditions of old blues numbers and his own “Layla....

As USA Today is fond of reminding us, ascetic health consciousness is on the wane, and self-indulgence is back in fashion. If so, that’s fine with Nathan Jarvinen. The fortysomething real estate developer so relishes a good cigar that he converted the first floor of one of his residential properties into a cafe that would accommodate his leafy love. As Jarvinen, who lacked any prior experience in the restaurant business, puts it: “I created this restaurant to have a place where I could smoke cigars without getting kicked out....

Roy Haynes is crisp and exacting, chattering and then explosive, dark followed by ferociously funny. You could describe his drumming in much the same way. Haynes started out during bebop’s infancy–Charlie Parker considered Haynes one of his favorite drummers–but he’s traveled a wide variety of musical paths since. (How many others could have supplied the beat for such divergent leaders as Thelonious Monk in the 50s, John Coltrane in the 60s, and Gary Burton after that?...

By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is there any venue so depressing as a suburban high school? A pall falls over you as soon as you enter. The stifling, familiar halls reduce you in an instant to the trapped child you were. Here you are again, they say, and what to show for it? I followed a maze of them to the auditorium....

In the Michael Jordan era, Tex Winter’s triple-post offense was the set scheme the Bulls could improvise from; it was the chord progression to “I Got Rhythm” in Jordan’s performance of “Cherokee.” Since Jordan’s retirement, however, the triple post has become an end in itself. Where once it was the framework for bebop, it has now been orchestrated in sonata form for a symphony. The notes are all there; it’s the energy and crispness, rather than the serendipity of inspiration, that distinguishes the performance....

Why is Jesus so popular? I mean, how did he become so incredibly well known after his death when up to that point he was a rebel and a heretic? His crucifixion is irrefutable evidence of his singular lack of popularity with the powers that be at the time. It can’t be the miracle thing, as he’d already performed many before they nailed him to the cross. I don’t understand the contrast between his infamy during his life and global superstardom still going strong 2,000 years later....

About 15 years ago I read an obscure government publication on the use of uranium in dental porcelain. It said uranium is added to dental porcelain for cosmetic reasons, to make the porcelain more luminous like natural teeth. It was estimated that this use of uranium causes about 2,000 cases of cancer per year. I’ve since mentioned this to many dentists, but none of them had ever heard of this....