After I dropped my daughter off at high school–she was running very late–I made the mistake of taking a right turn to go home instead of a U-turn and found myself in a maze of one-way streets. At Damen and Rogers I came to a stop sign and watched a rather slim man with matted hair drop a small plastic bag on the sidewalk. Another man bent down, picked it up, and went on his way....

Audience Appreciation “Go make something happen.” The directive came from his writing teacher, John Schultz, who thought De Grazia might be able to collar an editor to read his novel. American Skin is a coming-of-age story rooted to the corner of Belmont and Sheffield. Alex Verdi, the narrator, is a young man searching for a home and anything resembling a family. He is taken in by skinheads after a fight on the el....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thank God John McDermott [Letters, November 10], as an aside really, set us all straight as to the intolerable state of affairs that rampant pornography has elicited in our society, including growing rape, STDs, and harassment. I hadn’t realized that most of what ails us sexually can be fairly well pinpointed to my local smut peddler, shrewdly posing as a 24-hour newsstand....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nothing in my essay precluded Corbett’s argument that free jazz has developed its own quite sophisticated language; I simply didn’t focus on that element in examining a quite different point. Corbett quotes me as saying that free jazz “operates on a primal level.” But that comment did not appear as the blanket assertion Corbett makes it out to be; it represents my theory about why this music still makes people angry, more than three decades after it burst on the scene....

Tenor saxist Franz Jackson constitutes a living chunk of jazz history. He grew up playing jazz as handed down by Louis Armstrong, then worked with a rogue’s gallery of the swing era’s most colorful bandleaders, including Roy Eldridge, Fats Waller, and Fletcher Henderson, and as a mainstay of Earl Hines’s Grand Terrace Orchestra (based here in Chicago). Yet despite his resume, Jackson refuses to become a museum piece: his unprepossessing personality and ingenuous energy ride roughshod over most genre-specific considerations....

Amy Alt, Ann Boyd, and Marianne Kim Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The language of movement is difficult to master. All of these women are young, impressive dancers now trying their wings as choreographers in the Hedwig Dance Lab program, which serves as an incubator for them by providing rehearsal space, mentoring, and a series of showings during which choreographers and audience members discuss the dances....

Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young: for all intents and purposes, the history of the tenor saxophone begins with these two dialectical opposites, whom the players of the 1940s drew upon in creating a tenor tradition that would serve jazz for the quarter century. Hawkins was the thesis, with his swaggering tone, pronounced vibrato, straightforward rhythms, and richly complicated harmonies; Young’s style–characterized by its rhythmic boldness and streamlined approach to harmony, its light yearning tone devoid of hot-jazz melodrama–posed the antithesis....

When it comes to Nicholas Payton, the latest jazz trumpet wunderkind, comparisons to Louis Armstrong seem almost too easy–but also too obvious to ignore. Like Armstrong, Payton hails from New Orleans, and his trumpeting, especially onstage, often attains the hot tone and rawboned swagger that remain Armstrong’s trademarks. With his short, burly build Payton even looks a bit like Armstrong. But while Payton doesn’t actively invite such comparisons–hell, who would?–he doesn’t exactly wilt under them either: I’ve heard him summon up enough of both the power and the glory to stiffen the hairs on the back of my head....

Carter Martin’s 30-minute Preservation of the Song is far from perfect cinema. The cinematography isn’t consistent from scene to scene, and the editing often advances the story by fits and starts; one never feels a fluid narrative progression. But it has an emotional authenticity that most slicker films lack, stemming from the story’s autobiographical roots. Victor (a Caucasian) and Renaldo (a Filipino-American) are lovers with different approaches to activism. Renaldo helps AIDS patients, while Victor prefers going to demonstrations and getting arrested....

Sif Safaa: New Music From the Middle East Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cairo remains the dominant city of the Middle East, so it’s not surprising that most of the music on the collection is Egyptian. The country’s pop music was significantly transformed in the 60s, as the nation faced industrialization and the Nasser era came to a conclusion. Nasser had stressed Pan-Arab unity, but the masses who flocked to the cities for work ended up being exploited and ghettoized....

Sebadoh’s new album Bakesale proves there’s something to be said for self-editing. With the off-the-cuff, decidedly ragged collections Freed Man and Weed Forestin, which were never intended to be released as albums, the band blazed the way for the lo-fi obsession that’s infected much of indie rock. At first much of their charm lay in their reckless abandon: record everything, release it all, and let the listener sort it out. But as the band (anchored by former Dinosaur Jr....

Anything to keep from having to go outdoors and feel the ground. Colorado State University is trumpeting its development of a “Smart Valve”–complete with pistons, metering chambers, valves, hydraulic fluid, and a porous ceramic wick–which can sense the amount of moisture in the soil and turn off automatic sprinkler systems when it’s raining. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “No one is ‘endangered’ immediately …when the kids borrow the batteries from the smoke detectors–until it happens in conjunction with a fire,” writes David Kraft of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, putting a corrective spin on Com Ed’s cheery PR responses (“the public was not endangered”) to its blunderful management of its nuclear reactors....

Since you seem to know everything, just what is “tantric sex,” anyway? –Tina S., Montreal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are many ways to accomplish this, of course. I can do it thinking about the Chicago Cubs. But your classic adherent of tantric yoga, or nowadays your reader of supermarket magazines, may do it by practicing the “Set of Nines.” Supposedly the man enters his partner with nine shallow thrusts, then after a pause eight shallow and one deep thrust, then seven shallow and two deep, and so on until nirvana or total boredom is achieved....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t read the original Globe and Mail story, but I have been to the (fairly well-touristed) town in question, and to me Shepherd’s treatment of this material does seem sufficiently misleading as to warrant a slightly fuller description of the religion of the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (a mountain village just a few kilometers outside the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, in the state of Chiapas)....

Films by Bela Tarr All six of these features were shown at the Toronto film festival last fall, with Tarr in attendance, but none has received adequate–or in most cases any–distribution in this country. So it’s a tribute to the indefatigable persistence of Facets Multimedia’s Charles Coleman (who’s also recently brought us invaluable retrospectives of Marguerite Duras, Robert Bresson, and Krzysztof Kieslowski) that all six are showing in Chicago this week....

Kitty Hawk: First Solo Flight Then again, storytelling has been in our blood since cavepeople’s grunts first evolved into language. We tell stories to solidify shared values, to clarify confusion, to recognize one another. Foucault may see institutionalized confession as a tactical deployment of regulatory power, allowing the Authorities to “normalize” and delimit behavior. But it can also bring us together and remind us of the limitless potential of human experience....

Mark Dresser Peter Kowald Heron Moon (Rare Music) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Onetime Miles Davis sideman and Anthony Braxton cohort Dave Holland, who recorded a set of bass duets with Phillips in 1971, was also fairly early into the water. Emerald Tears (ECM), his first stab at solo from 1977, has just been reissued on CD, and it’s a real ear opener: Holland’s giant, woody sound (“woody” being the sound of choice for bass snobs) and imagination applied to a composition by Braxton, Davis’s oft-played “Solar,” and six other tracks bearing Holland’s signature....

CARMINA QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Zurich-based Carmina Quartet has garnered critical notices that mark it as extraordinarily promising, a successor to, say, Quartetto Italiano. Judging by their performances of Haydn’s opus 76 quartets on the Denon label, the foursome–Matthias Enderle and Susanne Frank (violins), Wendy Champney (viola), and Stephan Goerner (cello)–excel at producing a well-blended, marvelously textured sound built on impeccable intonation and refined gestures....

Captured at http://www.cheme.cornell.edu/-slevine/ Manhattan, 5th Avenue, Gioretties Imported Shoes. Only one pair of black, lamb fetus leather, spiked pumps left. Coming through the front door, freshly released from Club Fed is Leona Helmsley. She spies these oh-so-perfect shoes in the showcase and makes a beeline for them. She must have them at any cost! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the same time, in the rear of the store, a door marked “VIP Secret Entrance” opens....

Removing a traditional ritual from its original cultural context in order to place it on a foreign stage can sometimes produce stilted and misleading results. But for hose of us who can’t always afford long trips, these traveling ritual shows can be well worth seeing–especially when they contain elements so compelling that they survive the transplantation from life to stage, as they do in this funeral rite from the Korean island of Chindo....