Thee Speaking Canaries Songs for the Terrestrially Challenged (Scat) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For one thing, the Canaries’ music displays all the wrong influences. Alternative rockers periodically rediscover unjustly neglected artists whose music subsequently influences the scene. Fifteen years ago, the music of the Velvet Underground was rediscovered and suddenly influenced innumerable bands. More recent rediscoveries include Big Star and Scott Walker. Currently, early 70s German art rockers like Can, Faust, and Neu are as de rigueur as analog synthesizers....

No Chicago band has inspired more critical applause in the last decade than Edward Wilkerson’s 8 Bold Souls. That kind of attention stems in part from the rangy palette of Wilkerson’s arrangements and the refreshing solos and exuberant interplay of the instrumentalists, but even more from the brilliantly crafted audacity of the concept. It has plenty of precedent: like so many of their colleagues in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Souls use their music to telescope the history of jazz, connecting its African roots to the techniques and creative concerns of post-60s experimentation....

AND THEY PUT HANDCUFFS ON THE FLOWERS Set in a Spanish prison, where four revolutionaries have been condemned for crimes against an authoritarian state, Handcuffs is, in Arrabal’s words, “to be thought of as a shout.” Specifically it’s a shout against the atrocities of the Franco regime, as well as a shout on behalf of human dignity. Arrabal writes from firsthand knowledge, having lived under Franco as a child and become a political prisoner himself in Spain in 1967....

With their frequent gig cancellations–usually blamed on good old laryngitis–Cincinnati’s Ass Ponys are a perfect example of a band not really giving a fuck. About success, that is–they invest plenty in their music, both emotionally and creatively. Their slightly rotund, average-guy looks and their music’s superficially good-timey flavor belie the subtle intelligence and craft at work. Exploiting a strum-happy, rolling and rollicking groove, the quartet’s two hard-to-find albums are packed with head-wagging tunes that creep up on the listener; gorgeous folk-flavored melodies emanate from the spinning chord cycles like heat from a sunbaked tarmac....

This documentary about composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who were companions for many years until Cage’s recent death, gives a good sense of their achievements by including many fragments of their works (there’s some wonderful archival footage of Cunningham dancing from as early as 1944) and also through its relatively loose form. Director Elliot Caplan understands that these major artists cannot be pinned down: pieces of music and dance are included, but are cut together so as not to lead to any obvious conclusions or even imply a linear evolution....

The tenth annual Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, featuring films and videotapes from about a dozen countries, continues from Friday, October 15, through Sunday, October 17. In the listings below, films and videos not identified by country are from the United States. All screenings are at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Single tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for children and Facets members; a pass good for four films is $15 for adults, $10 for children....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » City of secrets. “In most major American cities, a complete list of [major capital] projects and their project costs is adopted by an elected body to become legally binding on a city’s administration,” according to the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group’s January report on the Chicago’s Capital Improvement Program 1990-1999. But not here. The city has a Capital Improvement Program (CIP) but no capital budget–which means that the city “1....

“By the time I started writing I was in such a state of grief that the only thing that sustained me was that I could go outside and just lie facedown on the earth,” said Alice Walker, describing in a talk in San Francisco how she survived the trauma of writing Possessing the Secret of Joy, a book about genital mutilation in Africa. “Somehow I got the energy that I always get from the earth directly…....

My young son, Eli, and I ran to the river to see what was splashing. We arrived to see the flashing caudal fin of a fat goldfish spawning in the lush outgrowth of arrowleaf and elodea. This was a happy sound. The whole scene was bittersweet and happy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s going on with the fish in the Chicago river system?...

I’m halfway through spring rolls at Dee’s on Armitage when I get this warm dripping sensation inside my head that, nine times out of ten, tells me I’m about to get a torrential bloody nose. I make an invisible check mark in the air for the waiter. He brings the bill. The blood is running out of my nostrils down to my lips and tastes a little salty. I pinch my nose with a thick cotton napkin to stop the flow, and a suburban-looking couple just across the aisle shifts nervously at the sight....

Jeff Buckley’s ascent to stardom has been bolstered by substantial MTV airplay of his latest single, “Last Goodbye,” and this sold-out gig at Metro caps his carefully orchestrated rise. His first Chicago appearances were the intimate solo coffeehouse shows de rigueur for breaking new acts in today’s industry. When he debuted his band a few months later, he played HotHouse and Green Mill, using high-visibility jazz venues to lend his distinctive rock music a rarefied air....

It’s the ultimate long shot–three women and one priest trying to revive interest in a church in a high-crime, gang-riddled neighborhood that was written off long ago, a church whose dead haunt its living. The interest in their mission is so weak that they haven’t been able to sell enough raffle tickets to break even on their upcoming December 3 fund-raiser, which is intended to help erase the $90,000 debt the church’s school is carrying....

Over the years the Newberry Consort has presented a number of pre-Baroque musical personalities and styles ripe for reappraisal. Johann Rosenmuller, the subject of the ensemble’s season opener, promises to be a major find. Slightly older than Buxtehude and a couple of generations ahead of Bach and Telemann, Rosenmuller (1619-’84) is now viewed by most scholars as a key transitional figure in the music of northern Europe, skillful at injecting Italianate elements into his compositions while retaining his fundamentally Lutheran outlook....

Power Transfer at the Chicago Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the new group’s first tasks would be to decide who to hire to manage and book the theater. Speculation continues to focus on Jam Productions as a leading contender for the job, though Jam honcho Jerry Mickelson claims he has not heard from the city recently about the job or his company’s likelihood of landing it....

PR Trend: Reports on Reporters PR directors throughout Chicago recently received a letter that began like this: “Is the image and reputation of your organization worth protecting for $185? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Accuracy; Verifying information, quotes; Knowledge of subject/industry (industry covered _____); Interviewing skills; Balanced reporting; Writing ability; Integrity (honoring release dates, unexpected questions, etc.); Personality (outgoing? sense of humor? reserved? etc....

ROB MAZUREK & THE CHICAGO UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The enthusiastic commingling of disparate ideas is one of the unspoken ideals of jazz, but all too often members of a given group display a predictable homogeneity. Not so with cornetist Rob Mazurek, guitarist Jeffrey Parker, bassist Josh Abrams, and drummer Robert Barry. Mazurek’s brash but lyrical attack may be associated with hard bop–as heard on last year’s terrific Badlands, with tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander–but with this unit, he’s taken his playing toward the fringes....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, KK: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The boyfriend knows what happened. Maybe he’s convinced himself that, since you were so drunk, you have no idea what happened. Ass and pussy are very different sensations, and any guy too drunk to tell the difference is too drunk to get it up. So he knows. There’s probably a letter from him in my stack of unopened mail asking how to approach you: “My girlfriend was so drunk, she had no idea I was fucking her in the ass....

By Jeff Huebner How much? Schwartz, the owner of Wicker Park’s Beret International Gallery, split the cost of a $10,000 booth at the art fair with Joel Leib, owner of Ten in One Gallery in Wicker Park, and Richard Kelley, who runs Tough Gallery on the near west side. For the last five years they’ve been aligned as Uncomfortable Spaces, sharing the costs of mailings and art fairs while trying to build an audience for their product–recent art with a conceptual bent....

By Ben Joravsky Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But race plays no part in the Villa debate. Indeed, the Villa seems remarkably devoid of great urban conflicts. Conceived years ago as a village within the city, it’s a peaceful triangular refuge of 126 single-family homes wedged between Addison and Pulaski west of the Kennedy expressway. Some of the north-south streets have grassy medians on which children and dogs frequently frolic....

Friday, October 20 Les rendez-vous de Paris: Eric Rohmer returns to 16-millimeter for three sketches about “false appearances and the paradox of truth–true falsehood and false truth,” working with a cast of unknowns in Paris locations. (Fine Arts, 5:15) Les miserables: Not an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s book, but a 20th-century story, nearly three hours long, “inspired” by this literary touchstone. The corny and flamboyant Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman) is the writer-director, and Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the replacement for Hugo’s Jean Valjean–an illiterate fellow named Henri Fortin who befriends a Jewish family fleeing Nazi persecution....