BEAU JOCQUE & THE ZYDECO HI-ROLLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the zydeco craze prompted by The Big Easy nearly a decade ago, the music reached new audiences that in many ways it has managed to maintain. As popularity and record sales beckoned, most zydeco bands feverishly attempted to expand their repertoire in search of that elusive crossover appeal; but whereas most of these acts simply watered down their exuberance with rock flash and pop schmaltz, accordionist and bandleader Beau Jocque has pulled off the trick with aplomb....

Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What can bring together William Safire, quondam MTV VJ Mark Goodman, Bulls coach Phil Jackson, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Shulamit Ran, actress Marlo Thomas, and Senator Carol Moseley-Braun? It’s the fourth annual Chicago Humanities Festival. This year’s theme: “From Communication to Understanding.” Nine sites clustered in the Loop and Near North will house more than two dozen lectures and performances by the abovementioned celebrities and many others....

Though City Council meetings are known as the scene of unholy maneuvers and alliances, each begins with a prayer from a local minister. Usually the ministers give thanks and, in a true test of the power of prayer, ask God to guide the aldermen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reverend Donald H. Wheat of the west side’s Third Unitarian Church of Chicago began last week’s invocation by giving thanks for a magnificent city, lulling council members into their customary bowed-head-and-serious-expression poses....

The Coronation of Poppea Opera had many antecedents, among them medieval mystery plays and Renaissance intermedi (musico-dramatic interludes between acts of plays) and masques. Jacopo Peri’s Euridice of 1600 is celebrated as the first surviving opera, the product of a determination to re-create the drama of ancient Greece. A Florentine group, the Camerata, decided that Greek plays must have been sung–which actually makes a certain amount of sense, considering the form’s outdoor amphitheaters....

TINDERSTICKS LOUNGE AX, JUNE 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tindersticks, the latest popsters to catch the wave of ever overinflated British press hype, aren’t so much revivalists as prospectors panning for gold in the stream of 60s pop gems. They seem convinced that certain aspects of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s 20-year-old cubic zirconiums will prove valuable in a 90s setting. But to mistake the time-specific nature of cultural products for timelessness is to misunderstand their essence just as completely as Margasak’s revivalists....

The old-fashioned circus is fading from America’s landscape, but the media circus is now a growth industry, especially during spectacular court trials. Attorney Mindy S. Trossman, who teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, notes that in 1924 the Chicago Tribune Company considered broadcasting Leopold and Loeb’s sentencing hearing live over WGN radio but refrained because their listeners opposed the idea. On Saturday Trossman will be part of a program titled Just Images: Television News Coverage of High-Profile Criminal Trials, which will explore the implications of the O....

IN THE HOUSE OF SARGON My biggest regret was that we didn’t see more of Zerang the actor, for he’s not only a musician but a performer with tremendous presence and charisma, possessed of a beautifully mobile and expressive face. He’s been performing in Chicago for over 18 years, and that experience seems to have given him a command of the space when he’s acting. But when he’s playing an instrument he has a way of becoming almost invisible, allowing the instrument itself to assume center stage....

The emphasis is on singing, not spectacle, in director-choreographer Tony Christopher’s touring production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock reworking of the medieval mystery-play form. With a few selective exceptions–such as Herod’s court (which could have come right out of The Rocky Horror Show), the Supremes-in-Vegas rendition of the title song, and the impressive depiction of the hero’s heavenward ascent–Christopher avoids flashy effects, taking instead a simple, pageantlike approach to the story of Christ’s trial, crucifixion, and resurrection....

Joffrey Dances Around Merger Plans Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Does the Joffrey need Ballet Chicago to make a go of it in Chicago? Certainly not. The Joffrey has a proven artistic leader in Gerald Arpino, an international reputation, a repertoire packed with superb dances, and a company of 40 fine dancers. Does Ballet Chicago need the Joffrey if it is to survive in some fashion?...

Daylight dims on Taylor Street and the festival tempo jumps. Picnickers rise from their blankets, double daters stroll. The crowd careens between food booths on either side of the street. Onstage a sequined entertainer punctuates torch songs with Italian salutations to the audience. In the middle of tourist traffic the neighborhood kids gather, indifferent to anyone outside their teenage circles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two are belly-to-belly like umpire and baseball manager over a questionable call....

An epidemic is a disease that kills the privileged. In normal times, germs recognize the boundaries that separate the poor from the rich; they respect the entitlement to vigorous health that good food, clean housing, and a carefully tutored immune system bestow upon the better off. The confluence of infectious disease with poverty is tolerated perhaps because it implicitly validates social hierarchies. It is as if the debilitating infections and untimely deaths of the lower orders were nature’s way of ratifying the judgment of economy and history in conferring wealth and power on a select few....

SCUD MOUNTAIN BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scud Mountain Boys make music that eludes categorization. The prolific foursome from Northampton, Massachusetts, released a pair of albums last year, and their third, Massachusetts, is due out in April from Sub Pop. They purvey a winsome, ornate, and seriously low-impact sound that incorporates elements of country, folk, and pop. Guitarist Joe Pernice’s vocals are so gentle it seems as if he’s trying to avoid detection....

My wedding dress has been at the dry cleaner’s for ten months. It had already hung by its garment loops in an extra closet for nine years. One hundred dollars is a lot to spend cleaning something, and I vaguely sensed that it was uncleanable, that I’d take it to a professional, and they’d tut-tut me for ruining such a lovely dress. I’d had so much fun at our wedding that I’d trashed the lower two-thirds of it....

DISMEMBERMENT PLAN 11/3, EMPTY BOTTLE Jittery indie rock for people with nervous twitches and short attention spans, the music on ! (DeSoto), the debut album from the Washington, D.C., group Dismemberment Plan, favors skittering riffs and quickly shifting tempos. The spastic vocal machinations of Travis Morrison have little to do with the music churning behind him, instead leaping about without logic like the meaningless rants of a broken-down panhandler. The optimist would say this foursome cram lots of ideas into their music, but my gut sez they just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing....

BROOKLYN FUNK ESSENTIALS 8/18, METRO On their forthcoming Cool and Steady and Easy (Groovetown/RCA) Brooklyn Funk Essentials attempt an inclusive street brew that combines hip-hop, jazz, funk, Latin grooves, dancehall, and soul. They alternately suggest acts like US3, the Groove Collective, Guru, Repercussions, Me’Shell NdegeOcello, and Buckshot LeFonque, among others, but never form an identity of their own. The band–which includes top-notch jazzers like trombonist Josh Roseman, whose contributions in the Groove Collective are far more effective, and percussionist E....

The 14th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival runs from Friday, November 11, through Sunday, November 20, at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, and Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division. Tickets are $6 for evening programs (except on opening night, when they’re $8), $5 for matinees; discount passes are also available. For further information call 384-0605 or 384-5533. Fantastic Imaginings: International Lesbian Shorts Not Angels but Angels This 1990 feature by Youssef Chahine, the most famous living Egyptian filmmaker, concludes his autobiographical trilogy....

By Ted Cox The Cubs are in limbo, as they and their fans have been since 1908, and that was what made itself felt as we took in the spectacle of Wrigley Field two weeks ago while absentmindedly keeping a scorecard right down to the pitches. After the thrilling brilliance of the Bulls and the so-far-so-good anguish of the White Sox, it was a comfort to find the Cubs right back where we usually find them: in their Edenic ballpark, somehow returned to a state of nature, to an innocence beyond winning or losing....

With two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth inning a week ago Tuesday, Frank Thomas–who had been taking the night off–emerged from the dugout and stepped into the on-deck circle. The White Sox were down 5-2 to the Oakland Athletics, Dennis Eckersley was on the mound, and the game was all but over. Yet the fans went crazy, cheering, clapping, and shouting, and one could almost feel the tension in the air....

Why is it that when I rub my eyes I see psychedelic op-art patterns? Could it be the result of too many grueling hours in art-history classes? –Jackie Russow, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’d probably guess the patterns vary with the individual, but they don’t. In 1942 University of Chicago researcher Heinrich Kluver pointed out there are just four basic patterns: (1) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (2) cobweb; (3) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; and (4) spiral....

“God bless you,” said a stranger, after I unleashed an ungodly sneeze in the Palmer House last weekend. This neighborly invocation had unusual overtones. We were waiting for the Parliament of the World’s Religions to kick off with a procession that would take up three aisles of the crowded ballroom. When it finally began, it was a little disappointing. Unlike a Shriner’s parade, the pacing was way off and the costumes lacked panache....