FRIDAY 13 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Abbey Pub, which for 20 years has been an Irish cultural mecca, will host a high-octane night of traditional music. The all-star session features internationally known Chicago fiddler Liz Carroll, championship accordionist James Keane from Dublin, flutist Joanie Madden and singer Cathie Ryan of the all-women group Cherish the Ladies, New York piper Jerry O’Sullivan, and guitarist Zan McLeod....

COURTNEY PINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even though Courtney Pine plays saxophone instead of trumpet, his first recordings showcased him as England’s answer to Wynton Marsalis: a young, gifted black jazzman committed to the music’s tradition and willing to convince others of the respect it deserved. This proved especially novel in 1980s Britain, where jazz remained a basically white domain and young black musicians tended to dive right into ska, reggae, and funk....

An excellent one-hour documentary (1987) that charts the pivotal year in the career of Elvis Presley when he went from being an obscure rockabilly/blues performer who drove a truck to a national icon with several gold records to his credit. Armed with fascinating archival footage and rare still photographs, Alan and Susan Raymond, who originally made this for cable, do a persuasive job of suggesting that, contrary to most versions of the all-American success myth, Elvis’s artistic freedom and the authenticity of his relationship with his audience dwindled as he became more and more rich and famous....

Cross-cultural explorers usually venture across space, whether the city or a continent. But Georgina Martinez is a time traveler who wants to rediscover the ancient dances of her native Mexico. Trained in contemporary dance forms, notably modern, Martinez is grounded, slow moving, attuned to her own rhythms: forget any thoughts you might have about high-heeled shoes and swirling skirts, Mexico’s heritage from Spain. Martinez draws on whatever traces she can find of earlier forms–from the 16th century on, the conquistadors suppressed Mexico’s native dance and music, so Martinez relies on Aztec codices, on the drawings and architecture of Mesoamerican culture....

GREEK Transient Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven Berkoff strikes me as a third-tier British playwright. Not quite a hack, but not Gray either. True, in Greek and Lunch Berkoff displays a talent for capturing the poetic rhythms of speech and for whipping off evocative and arresting monologues. Yet there’s an emptiness behind all the virtuoso wordplay–fancy language and stage tricks substitute for something genuinely original....

JAMES MOODY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week the unsinkable James Moody makes Chicago the first stop on a summer tour celebrating his newly released Young at Heart (Warner Brothers), a collection of standards set against simpatico big-band and small-group backdrops, with relatively short solos long on listenability. The CD serves to remind us that Moody can handle this kind of thing just fine–even though his career rests on a considerably more venturesome base....

This ten-year-old Ann Arbor quartet’s biggest shortcoming has been its incessant self-ghettoization. While their music is clearly an extension of the proud Detroit rock lineage–MC5, Stooges–their insistence that they’re a modern blues band is just plain dopey. Infighting and drug problems have laced the band’s history, but that’s hardly unique. Their somewhat offensive claims of affinity with down-and-out southern bluesmen aside, their music packs a significant wallop. Although the music on their earliest recordings unrelentingly bludgeons the listener with brutality, within John Brannon’s white-noise ranting resides an undeniable expressiveness....

Growing up Jewish may be a cliched subject for a film by now, but intelligently explored in a sociopolitical context it can be fresh, timely, and instructive–as Mexican director Guita Schyfter demonstrates in her 1993 debut feature. Set in Mexico City during the 50s and early 60s, the story juxtaposes the lives of two friends on the brink of adulthood–Oshinica, whose parents are Sephardic immigrants from Turkey, and Rifke, whose parents are Eastern European refugees of the Holocaust....

Celebrated prodigies face a tough challenge easing into adulthood. For every Itzhak Perlman there’s been a Eugene Fodor, unable to live up to early promise. In 1982 11-year-old Japanese violinist Midori was invited to perform with the New York Philharmonic, and she became the first Asian prodigy certified by the West’s musical establishment, praised for her uncanny virtuosity and winsome personality. Now 23, Midori’s luster has dimmed a bit–her rival, the Korean-born teenager Sarah Chang, is equally impressive and charmingly prim–and she must now rely on the depth of her musicianship rather than technical virtuosity....

Oak Park was about to celebrate its beloved lecherous literary drunk. I envisioned giddy Junior League ladies squirting wine from leather pouches down the open throats of half-naked young golf caddies. Sweaty brawls breaking out between a dashing matador and a gastroenterologist and a pair of postal workers. Everyone arribaing and oleing and drinking the town dry. Then, at the peak of the debauchery, half a dozen bulls ransacking Lake Street....

Flipper Sex Bomb Baby (Infinite Zero/American) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s kind of ironic that punk rock is now as American as apple pie and produces multimillion sellers like Green Day and Offspring, considering that it began as an irksome though negligible force on the cultural margins. Themes of boredom remain the music’s vital legacy, but today’s kiddie punks generally opt more for bubblegum melodies amid the bashing than the brutal rants from days of yore....

Hey, Faggot: –Questions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years before you dumped him, he realized he wanted out of this relationship: he was bored, he wasn’t into you sexually anymore, he was different, you were different–whatever the reason, he wants out. But he can’t quite face it–the reality of breaking it off, that is, the moment of looking you in the eye and saying, “Honey, it’s over....

Scenes From Goethe’s Faust By Sarah Bryan Miller Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It didn’t take long for the legend to grow. The powerful, wicked necromancer Dr. Faustus became a staple in popular stories, puppet plays, and ballads; in 1587 he was immortalized in Historia von D. Johann Fausten, author unknown, the first of many books to take him up as a subject. The early versions of the story showed Faust choosing to continue in his wickedness and being therefore condemned to everlasting torment....

The first annual Silver Images Film Festival, “celebrating images of aging on film,” presented by Terra Nova Films, a Chicago-based production and distribution company specializing in films and videos of this nature, runs Friday through Sunday, May 19 through 22, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. For more information call 881-8491. Roulez jeunesse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 1992 French feature by Jacques Fansten that concerns an encounter between residents of an old folks’ home in southern France and two teenage thieves who briefly hold them hostage....

STILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drawn out over 140 minutes, Komarnicki’s clumsy fusion of The Twilight Zone and Sam Shepard violates the cardinal rule of playwriting: Don’t assemble characters onstage whose sole reason for being there is the playwright’s manipulation. Michael and Melissa are a young college couple en route to the University of Arizona who stop in the desert to either assist or plunder a stalled BMW....

Bulletin: Health Nazis take over luxury hotels. According to a Northern Illinois Tourism Council newsletter, at least one San Francisco hotel no longer leaves a chocolate on your pillow–it leaves a “beta-carotene antioxidant tablet” instead. “The rooms’ minibars are stocked with rice cakes, vegetable chili, organic wine.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My own attitude is that being gay is like being left-handed,” says Northwestern historian Peter Hayes in Bowdoin (January)....

Fourth Wall Productions, at Wright College. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most Chicago theater artists don’t study their own traditions, much less anyone else’s, imagining that a bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts college or a heavy dose of “commitment” entitles them to charge admission to the wholesale butchering of great works of world theater. So it’s no surprise that Fourth Wall’s production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s masterpiece The House of Bernarda Alba–steeped in the rich tradition of Spanish poetic drama–is as flat and uninspired as our midwestern landscape....

Perhaps you can help. Being someone born with very different hair, I am often perplexed at why things are the way they are. That’s why I read your column–to find out things that no one else could answer. For example: (1) Why is it that two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left? (2) If it’s a penny for your thoughts, why does everyone put their two cents in?...

Cubs pitching coach Ferguson Jenkins is a towering presence as he watches young Steve Trachsel warming up in the bull pen. Sure, Fergie’s a tall man, but there’s more to it than that. He doesn’t yell. He isn’t animated. He doesn’t gesture grandly. He exudes the quiet confidence of a man who’s seen the best and worst life has to offer and stoically accepts whatever may come his way. At this point in the season the idea that the Mets might snatch the pennant away from the Cubs was considered outlandish; no one thought the mighty, swaggering Cubs would end up giving it away....

Since their founding in 1970, the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players have excelled at blending the old and the new while making the most of their unusual instrument lineup. This Chicago recital offers an overview of chamber musical styles and genres starting with Haydn, represented here by the first of his London trios, a delectable mix of lilting charm and carefree lyricism. On the other hand, Schubert’s famous pastoral scena, The Shepherd on the Rock, scored for soprano, clarinet, and piano, exudes profound yearning in spite of its naive text....