Crumb A member of Crumb’s former band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and a fellow collector of rare 20s and 30s blues and jazz records, Zwigoff has previously made documentaries only on musical subjects–blues artist Howard Armstrong in Louie Bluie, a history of Hawaiian music in A Family Named Moe. He noted in one interview that he was in therapy while shooting Crumb, a fact that’s surely left its mark on the material....

WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE Artists who depict violence, brutality, and oppression face a paradox that’s troubled Western art at least since medieval painters began creating spectacular images of hell. If a work of visual art is powerful and compelling (if not “beautiful”), the viewer tends to develop an empathy with the subject. Simply put, it’s hard to create a strong yet repellent image of something one hates. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Bill Wyman: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In your rush to pat these three pandering sluts on the heinie, you miss what has been obvious to the “bullshit” crowd all along: These are not “alternative” artists any more than their historical precursors. They are by, of and for the mainstream. Liz Phair is Rickie Lee Jones (more talked about than heard, a persona completely unrooted in substance, and a fucking chore to listen to), Smashing Pumpkins are REO Speedwagon (stylistically appropriate for the current college party scene, but ultimately insignificant) and Urge Overkill are Oingo Boingo (Weiners in suits playing frat party rock, trying to tap a goofy trend that doesn’t even exist)....

Britain’s Tindersticks inhabit a strangely intellectualized netherworld: while they definitely derive at least part of their spare, emotional sound from the Velvet Underground, leader Stuart Staples pointedly lacks Lou Reed’s self-conscious sense of the melodramatic, and they don’t sound anything like the various drone bands currently seen as carrying on the Velvet’s good works. What Tindersticks do do is perform deeply cinematic, heavily emotional, and very adult rock music. The sound–as dependent on ghostly, Eno-ish synthesizers and expressive violin and reeds as guitar and drums–is extremely unmodern and alluringly atmospheric, at times achieving a sense of mood and place as potent as, say, the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions or the Vulgar Boatmen’s You and Your Sister....

I remember driving home from the Ailey company’s final performance of its last engagement here, on a Sunday afternoon in May 1994. I was stopped at the big bend of Lake Shore Drive, where it turns into Sheridan Road, and I saw a trio of elderly women stumping along the sidewalk arm in arm. Their painfully slow and undancerly progress filled me with joy–the result, I knew, of having just watched Judith Jamison’s Hymn, which celebrates through dancers’ words and movements the spiritual striving that’s at the center of all great dance....

In “Policia! Mira como trabajan tus impuestos cabron!” (“Police! Look How Your Taxes Work, Bastard!”), one of Carlos Cortez’s black-and-white woodcuts that hang in the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum as part of its permanent collection, a woman nurses an infant as she’s being arrested by two skulls wearing dark visors and helmets. In the more benign “Ars lunga, pito breve, sin safos No se mueve!” (“Art Lives Long, Penis Short, Without Feeling It Doesn’t Work!...

FLOWERS FOR ALGONQUIN, OR DES PLAINES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALKANS Even more inspired is a splendidly built scene in which two writers for Bozo’s Circus (Aaron Rhodes and Jim Zulevic) unveil their long-concealed hatred for Bozo and Cookie; Rhodes finally erupts in a surreal soliloquy detailing the tragedy of not making it to bucket number six. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If every Second City revue has an obligatory sentimental scene, this one has a gem: Hildreth plays a black orphan boy who builds a gigantic tree house in the backyard of his temporary foster home (the rear of the theater) so that he can never be moved again....

From Junkyard to Jazz Room Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Others on the jazz scene are watching the project with considerable interest. “This is the first time in a while that someone who really knows the business side of the business has opened a jazz club in Chicago,” says Jazz Institute of Chicago executive director David Sack, adding that the jazz business is in a state of flux in Chicago....

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre. “Mediocrity is not a mortal sin” is the refrain of “Brotherhood of Man,” the faux-gospel showstopper that climaxes this 1961 musical, and this revival of Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’s satire on big business proves the point. Some performances are bland (Sam Samuelson as J. Pierrepont Finch, the window washer who schemes his way to the top of a company “so big that nobody knows what anyone else is doing,” and Kelly Anne Clark as the secretary he chases until she catches him), some hilarious (Don Forston as blowhard boss J....

UNDERGROUND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sobol’s brilliant epic Underground, now onstage at the National Jewish Theater, deals with human beings struggling to survive in a moral vacuum. The play is mostly set in the hospital of the Jewish ghetto in Vilna, Poland, in 1943. The Nazis have proclaimed Jewish births to be illegal; pregnant women, if discovered, will be shot along with their husbands....

Most dance music is released on 12-inch singles, and most of them are sold to club DJs–the music has never really taken off with the buying public. Matt Adell–the brains behind Organico, one of Chicago’s most important dance-music labels–wants to change that. “I want to work hard against the disposability of dance music. The shelf life on a dance record is often shorter than the period of time it took for the artist to make it, and I just think that’s insulting....

Hey, Faggot: Lemme get this straight: every time she wants to fuck, you’re either too tired or not in the mood? Every time? And she never gets mad or frustrated? Hmm. Well, she’s either cheating on you, has a great relationship with her vibrator, or is some sort of Latter-day Saint. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But you know what I really think is up with the girlfriend?...

Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys 4/12, Fitzgerald’s As Beausoleil have drifted further away from their traditional Cajun moorings, Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys have quietly taken up the slack. While revealing the band’s own modernist impulses–smooth, keening harmonies, high-octane romps, and zydeco bluster–the recent La Toussaint (Rounder) also showcases the group’s zesty traditional side, particularly through the spirited accordion and fiddle playing of Riley and David Greely. 7 Year Bitch 4/13, Lounge Ax The members of Seattle’s 7 Year Bitch must be really nice or charming, because it sure ain’t their music that’s kept them in the spotlight....

It is absolutely true, I swear it, that as Michael Jordan stepped to the plate in the sixth inning of the Windy City Classic last Thursday, the sun reached my seat down the first-base line at Wrigley Field. It was sunny but cold in the shade of the grandstand, with the wind humming in over the right field bleachers. We were all shivering against the chill, and the friend next to me was keeping score while wearing those fingerless gloves I thought were unique to Bob Cratchit....

‘Scuse me, but … how do they grow more seedless fruit?–Just askin’, Salt Lake City, Utah Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Luckily, sex is only one method of propagating a species. There’s also asexual reproduction, such as that engaged in by our parents. By means of cuttings, grafting, or what have you, it’s possible to make multiple copies of the parent plant. What’s more, the offspring plants have the advantage, from a horticultural standpoint, of being perfect genetic duplicates or clones of the parent plant....

THE UNWILLING BRIDE and It’s probably cynical to say that a first play is like a first pancake–you should throw it out and get to the good stuff. So I didn’t say it. But new works like these glib one-acts from Quando Productions suggest a warning to novice playwrights everywhere: if you write two-dimensional sitcoms, don’t be surprised when audiences wonder why they didn’t stay home. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Born Guilty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I could be writing about America, whose history of slavery and genocide shapes the economic, class, and racial tensions that plague our present. As it happens, the play that stirs these thoughts is Born Guilty, about the legacy of Nazism in contemporary Germany. At first this production, running at A Red Orchid Theatre, sounded to me like yet another example of Chicago theaters’ willingness to address social problems on every front except the one at home....

Meret Oppenheim: Beyond While still a teenager, Meret Oppenheim completed a simple ink drawing called Suicides’ Institute, one of the earliest pieces in a compact retrospective of the artist’s work now at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A young boy holding a ball observes a row of four people with nooses around their necks. Three of the figures are presumably dead; the fourth–about to kick away the support from under his feet–points upward, directing the boy’s attention to one of the nooses....

For almost a decade now the a cappella quartet Anonymous 4 have regaled audiences with dramatic and heartfelt evocations of 12th- and 13th-century Europe. Thoroughly researched and meticulously transcribed, the music on a typical program–from chants to multivoiced songs to complex polyphony–is built around a theme that illuminates its historical background. But it’s the exquisite, neatly tuned blending of four similar, high voices that distinguishes the Anonymous 4 from other early-music choirs....

During idle moments I sometimes wonder what sort of trauma arrested Bob Greene in late adolescence. Did a girl do something dirty? Did a couple of mean boys subject him to some grotesque humiliation? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jones, as we all know by now, was Bob’s high school principal. This time, Jones’s spirit is conjured up by the local school regulations “here in Roanoke....