I was afraid I’d find this Swedish period piece by Ake Sandgren cutesy, but I wound up liking it quite a bit. Based on an autobiographical novel by Roland Schutt, it’s set in Stockholm in the 20s. The ten-year-old hero’s mother is a Russian Jew, his father’s a revolutionary socialist, and his older brother, an aspiring boxer, keeps punching him in the nose. The anti-Semitism of Roland’s teacher and schoolmates and the illegal activities of his parents–which include distributing condoms to workers and attending incendiary political meetings–make him something of a defiant outcast....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who knows? Maybe she’s waiting for the electrician or someone like him. Your enclosures raise an interesting point, but one that, far from complicating matters, is in line with the view I presented. Had I not taken that second coffee break I would surely have thought of it myself. The point is this: recent research suggests that Native Americans lacked “genetic diversity”–bluntly put, that they were inbred; virtually the entire indigenous population of the Americas was descended from just four women, or at least four groups of closely related women....

If a match is lit in an atmosphere like earth’s but outside of gravity’s pull, will it suffocate? Will it snuff out from its own gases faster than if it had a steady earthbound updraft to refresh it with more oxygen? I heard the space shuttle astronauts were doing tests with fire in microgravity. I missed reading any results so all I can do is guess: it snuffs. My earthist rivals insist fire will burn in zero Gs; some say heat rising will start a draft which in turn ventilates the reaction....

The Feelies, Hoboken’s legendary and influential strum-groove rockers, kind of faded away a couple of years ago, eclipsed by the “alternative” explosion. Those still pining for that hot post-Velvets frenzy should find Wake Ooloo cause for celebration. Featuring ex-Feelies Glenn Mercer and Dave Weckerman, Wake Ooloo pick up the ball the Feelies dropped and blast off with it. On their debut Hear No Evil (Pravda), guitarist/vocalist Mercer, who always seemed to be trying to drive the Feelies faster and faster, pushes his new quartet with speed-of-light velocity, his fleet-fingered, strum-driven epiphanies consistently pushing heavenward....

Gertrude Stein: As an adapter of literary work, however, Galati is somewhat less successful. Unshakably faithful, even to a fault, he’s partial to long passages of unedited narration and dialogue straight from his source. Galati’s fidelity may be admirable, but often it has the opposite effect of the one intended. Rather than spellbinding the audience, his approach more often anesthetizes them to the beauty of a particular passage. Like a nattily dressed but monotonous storyteller, he attracts more attention to the trappings of the tale than to the content....

This summit of a young virtuoso of Chicago blues and a veteran who helped forge that tradition should set off some unique and satisfying sparks. “Steady Rollin”‘ Bob Margolin first came to national attention playing guitar with Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson in what was arguably Muddy Waters’s last great band, the 70s-era aggregation anchored by pianist Pinetop Perkins, bassist Calvin “Fuzz” Jones, and drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. From Waters Margolin acquired the lessons of taste, timing, and how to ride deep in the pocket of the classic shuffle rhythm; on his own he developed a style that fused Waters’s traditionalism with a young man’s restlessness–equal parts deep blues expression and contemporary technical flash....

Klangbuhne Guricht at the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, through February 25 Quite the opposite. Klangbuhne Guricht may look like parodies of German angst-ridden pretension, with their black clothing, disheveled hair, severe expressions, and austere aesthetic. But the group transforms an exhausted form–spoken text alongside free-form jazz–into a cunning, continually surprising sonic adventure. Last weekend they performed the world premiere of That’s What I Feared, based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges....

When compact discs arrived on the scene in the early 1980s, most audiophiles started preaching the advantages of digital technology with all the zeal of true believers. CDs ran vinyl records out of town in no time flat. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days, hardly anyone listens to the small coterie of vinyl lovers who insist on the superiority of analog recordings. It’s almost impossible to find records in record stores, unless you visit one of a handful of used places, including 2nd Hand Tunes and the Jazz Record Mart in the city and Vintage Vinyl in Evanston....

GRASSY KNOLL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most music under the silly rubric of “acid jazz” sounds like little more than watered-down funk, but Grassy Knoll lends the coinage some meaning. The San Francisco outfit’s recently released second album, Positive (Antilles), delivers a muscular amalgam of sounds owing as much to the guitar-heavy jazz-funk psychedelia of mid-70s Miles Davis as to the punishing sampledelia constructed by the Bomb Squad on Public Enemy’s best work....

The term “new country” is, I’ll admit, used pretty sloppily: It now describes everyone from metaphysical cowboys like Jimmie Dale Gilmore to antique warblers like Iris DeMent to rockers like Steve Earle. But think of it another way–as country music that isn’t embarrassing–and it all fits into place. Latest submission is Junior Brown. This guy’s very trad: rollicking two-steps, flashy steel guitar playing, unironic homages like “My Baby Don’t Dance to Nothin’ but Ernest Tubb,” and that’s about it, all delivered with unapologetic chops and a fairly malleable voice that ranges from a Johnny Cash basso to a George Jones-ish (I said “ish”) tenor....

Tim Rollins is a New York conceptual artist with a mission: he wants to turn inner-city teenagers into college-bound budding painters. Since 1984 his studio in the South Bronx has served as a training ground and refuge for talented, largely Latino kids handpicked by him to participate in group painting projects. Their large-scale mixed-media canvases caught the attention of the art world in the late 80s, resulting in publicity blitzes that, for the most part, portrayed Rollins as either a WASP savior or an abusive drill sergeant to the self-billed “kids of survival....

Midsize Theater Watch: Committee Without a Consensus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The longer this secret committee of 20 or so philanthropic do-gooders deliberates (all have been sworn to keep quiet about the process), the more it seems to back itself into a corner where no decision is possible. Though the Navy Pier site comes with a lower price tag, it apparently does not appeal to a number of people on the advisory committee who argue that the pier might turn into a wasteland once it reopens, leaving the new theater stranded in the middle of an unsuccessful development....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For example, in every judicial election there are about a dozen candidates who are rated qualified by the Chicago Bar Association but unqualified by the Chicago Council of Lawyers. Obviously judicial evaluations are subjective since local bar associations never even come close to agreeing on them. Also, the Chicago Council of Lawyers recently issued an evaluation of the Seventh Circuit (the local federal appellate court) in which every liberal judge was praised and every conservative judge was harshly criticized....

NEMO ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our city’s latest cross-Atlantic musical exchange continues this week with more concerts introducing composers from European countries considered noteworthy pioneers of current aesthetic tastes. One composer to watch is Italy’s Ada Gentile. A longtime professor at Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, Gentile first visited Chicago six years ago when some of her chamber works were performed in an Art Institute recital....

These 17 films spread over two nights are mostly by School of the Art Institute students, and the 9 available for preview range from the intriguing but tedious (Motion Sickness) to the sometimes portentous (Baptism of Thieves) to the movingly personal (Spiritual Treasure). The Friday program includes two strong works. Stephen Rowland’s A Beginner’s Guide to Cockney Rhyming Slang is a charming animated depiction of slang phrases in which objects are fused with their rhymes: pies appear inside of an eye; a road appears in the mouth of a toad....

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hymn is a very strange work, part lesson on dance, part promo for the company, part genuine revelation of the people in it: Anna Deavere Smith’s “libretto,” drawn from interviews with Ailey, current artistic director Jamison, and individual dancers, makes up a good part of the sound track. At first I was offended by all the preaching, by the bald statements and rambling talk....

Supercop With Jackie Chan, Michelle Khan, and Maggie Cheung. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The American action film of the 80s and 90s has depended almost entirely on special effects for its thrills. Terminator 2 captivated audiences with one of the first and most expert uses of morphing. Every year since, there’s been some new special effect in the latest Schwarzenegger epic to satisfy the American taste for novelty....

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY, LeftEye Productions at O Bar & Cafe, and Theatre Q at the Halsted Street Cafe. With politicians on all sides using the bugaboo of same-sex marriage to score easy points with conservatives, this 1989 one-act by east-coast lesbian playwright Christi Stewart-Brown is especially timely. Set in a future America where Pat Buchanan’s “holy war” has been won by the moralistic right wing, this dystopian satire concerns two same-sex couples, one male and one female, who pose as married heterosexuals to deceive their friendly fascist overseer Officer Weiss, who periodically barges into their apartment to conduct spot urine tests and check whether the women are pregnant....

Minimum standards for cars to be donated to the Big Brothers-Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago, according to a recent press release: “The owner must have a title, and there needs to be an engine in the auto.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “No jackboots, everything’s cool?” Fascism is more than a dated style, warns Northwestern’s Adolph Reed Jr. in the Progressive (August). “This bowdlerized view overlooks the most significant and frightening point about fascism–its roots in self-righteous ordinariness....

Who exactly were the Aryans? Being Indian, I’ve heard all about the mythic accomplishments of my forefathers, who were reputedly Aryan. But how much of it is true and how is it that Aryan blood is prized from Calcutta to Berlin? Where exactly did they come from and where did they go? When people make mention of Indo-European languages, cultures, etc., are they referring to Aryans? What did the Aryans look like?...