Eight years ago I wrote a story about the Cook County Forest Preserve District for Chicago magazine. The story was, overall, considerably less than complimentary. The uncomplimentary parts of my story were mostly about the district’s failure to manage the lands it had so nobly acquired and defended. Prairies on district land rapidly turned into brushy thickets, alien species invaded the woodlands, and the district’s own forestry department was filling open fields with a weird mixture of trees that had never appeared together in any natural community anywhere in the world....

CHARLES WIESEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seasoned salegoers always check maps and addresses before they leave home–who wants to arrive late and miss the good stuff? Tough Gallery is located on a dead-end stretch of Sangamon Street, in a nether zone between Greektown, River North, and Fulton Market where it’s easy to lose your bearings. Trucks and trains rumble through the area on dilapidated roads and railways whose poor condition is evidence of Chicago’s waning industrial might....

Veteran folk-pop singer-songwriter Jim Post (“Reach Out in the Darkness”) is no actor, but he’s a wonderful vocalist and tale teller–and nearly a dead ringer for Mark Twain. So this delightful family-oriented entertainment, smoothly directed by Brian Russell, is a natural: impersonating Twain in late middle age, Post matches the great writer’s anecdotes about growing up in Missouri with original songs extolling the mystique of the Mississippi. The tunes, belted out in Post’s clarion country-gospel tenor, are catchy and charming (though one wishes Jenny Armstrong and Luke Nelson, who accompany Post’s acoustic guitar on banjo, fiddle, accordion, and bass, were more prominent)....

To many folks the tuba is inextricably linked with traditional German oompah-laden beer-guzzling songs performed by portly guys in lederhosen. Yet the instrument has a lengthy if near invisible jazz history, from serving a bass function in Dixieland to the big, polished bottom Bill Barber puffed into the modernistic big-band music of Gil Evans. The British tubaist Melvyn Poore has pushed the instrument in directions that would have made John Philip Sousa blush....

DIANE LEVESQUE Painted crockery, toys, clown faces, plastic body parts, and carpenter’s squares appear in several of the paintings, and at least three depict a mirror or some other reflecting surface. In There Are No Bad Guns, which is filled with guns and gun-related images, a garden globe reflects houses with TV antennas across the street from the still life, and in The Noisy Body the surface of a metallic roly-poly clown seems to reflect the painter and a landscape....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clifford Olson, serving a life sentence in Saskatchewan, announced through his lawyer in March that he had registered with Canada’s copyright office to protect his proposed video series offering psychological insights. Olson, who sexually assaulted and murdered eight girls and three boys in 1981, plans to call the video Motivational Sexual Homicide Patterns of Serial Child Killer Clifford Robert Olson....

Red Rodney, who died this spring, became a great trumpet player twice. He first achieved jazz personage when Charlie Parker hired him in 1949, and then again in the 1970s, when he returned to jazz after a long hiatus and proceeded to play rings around his best work of a quarter-century earlier. His relationship with Parker–which occupied a good chunk of plot in Clint Eastwood’s film Bird–made Rodney the perfect choice to inaugurate this year’s Charlie Parker Month at the Jazz Showcase; his passing turns the occasion into a double memorial, celebrated by musicians worth hearing even if they hadn’t shared the stage with him....

Show Boat –from Show Boat, by Edna Ferber Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ferber’s best-seller found sympathetic readers in three of the hottest talents of her day. Composer Jerome Kern, librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, and producer-director Florenz Ziegfeld were attracted by Show Boat’s commercial appeal and dramatic potential, but I think they were also turned on by Ferber’s populist vision. The kind of theater Ferber was advocating was the American musical–only in 1926 it hadn’t been invented yet....

The neglected Canadian animator Richard Williams directed and coscripted this mind-boggling London-made cartoon musical feature, the first to be made in ‘Scope since Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in 1959. It’s a movie that’s been in and out of production since 1968, apparently because Williams mainly worked on it as a labor of love in between more lucrative projects (such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Eventually he lost creative control, and it’s impossible to say whether the movie would have been more or less coherent without the postproduction interference: the storytelling is perfunctory, but the imaginative animation, which revels in two-dimensionality, is often wonderful–an improbable blend of Escher, op art, Persian miniatures, and Chuck Jones that shoots off in every direction and seems great for kids....

A woman of East European heritage is floating out in the middle of Axehead Lake. She’s about five foot six. She weighs about 300 pounds. She’s wearing a string bikini. There’s another one on the other side of the lake. I drive over in my squad. “You! Get out of the water!” The toothless guy finally staggers out of the water. He’s drunk, of course, and grinning like a monkey. “No swim!...

Everything but the Girl Walking Wounded (Atlantic) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The band’s 1994 album, Amplified Heart, was appealingly dark and sultry, with lyrics that vividly illustrated a relationship on the brink of collapse, but Watt’s dense arrangements smothered his delicate melodic confections in schlock. The record eventually attained gold status in the United States. But in February 1995 New York house producer Todd Terry’s pounding house-driven remix of the song “Missing” accomplished for EBTG what countless singles from eight albums had failed to do: score the duo a bona fide international hit....

The 1916 Prague production of Leos Janacek’s third opera, Jenufa, put the Czech composer on the musical map and turned him into a national hero at the age of 62. It’s easy to see why: the tragedy of misdirected love between stepdaughter and stepmother unfolds in a style best described as peasant realism, which contrasted starkly with the heart-on-the-sleeve melodramas and sweeping Wagnerian legends of the time. What makes the opera so moving, of course, is Janacek’s highly expressive score, with its exotic patterning of timbres and rhythms, its long swells and sudden crises of harmony....

L’Affaire de la Queen’s Necklace Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Call it the Epcot Syndrome of script writing. Like that multicultural annex of the Magic Kingdom, which re-creates cities from all over the world so you don’t have to bother going to see them, writers seem more and more intent on creating new “period” dramas, reasonable facsimiles and pastiches of centuries-old scripts. Theater and film audiences alike have been subjected over the past few years to “new” Moliere (La Bete), “new” Frank Capra (the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy), and “new” Fritz Lang, Anton Chekhov, and Ingmar Bergman courtesy of a certain neurotic Manhattan scribe....

The last completed essay film of Orson Welles, and the last of his features to be released during his lifetime (1979), this wonderfully candid, rarely screened account of the making of his first wholly independent feature offers a perfect introduction to that movie and to Welles’s “second” manner of moviemaking, which became necessary once he parted company with the studios and mainstream media. Significantly, the only section of the original Othello we see and hear in its original form is part of the opening sequence; everything else–usually shown silently with Welles’s narration–is an intricate reediting of the original material....

Taxi Driver By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This interface of art and business is fundamental to the achievement of his Taxi Driver score, which helps disguise or at least rationalize the film’s ideological confusions, all of which circulate around the psychotic hero, Travis Bickle (De Niro). It assigns them an emotional purity that nothing else in the movie expresses–an emotional purity that coalesces around two contrasting themes that are endlessly reiterated and juxtaposed....

Me’Shell NdegeOcello’s stunning 1993 debut Plantation Lullabies (Maverick) stands up as a work of great promise from an intriguing artist. A multiinstrumentalist who sticks primarily to electric bass–that’s her with John Mellencamp, playing bass and singing on his cover of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night”–this young woman (her bio says she was born in the “late 60s”) has traversed the wilds of hip hop, jazz fusion, funk, rock, and soul to forge a wholly unusual and sumptuous creation....

Lead Story In August the National Endowment for the Arts hurriedly withdrew funding it had granted to three California artists after it came under criticism in the New York Times. Artists David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco, and Louis Hock were participants in La Frontera/The Border, a project that consisted of passing out signed $10 bills to illegal immigrants to demonstrate the impact they have on the economy. Said one recipient, “People don’t usually give us money....

THE CRADLE WILL ROCK at the Synergy Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Radical for their time and still unusual in ours, these two landmark musicals focus on the place of common folk in a society that preaches human equality and Christian charity but rewards ruthlessness and corruption. Threepenny uses the criminal underclass of Victorian London as a reflection of bourgeois pieties and pretensions....

Save the World, Bomb the Suburbs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How the privileged son of an upper-middle-class white family came to embrace black culture is the framing story of Wimsatt’s book, Bomb the Suburbs, which was self-published last year and excerpted in the Reader. It’s a brave and ambitious work that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The book, now in its second printing, is a spirited paean to graffiti, a screed on the suburbs’ role in the decline of the late-20th-century city, an intellectually fearless exegesis on black-white relations, a hymn to public transportation, and a good, if slightly disconnected and quite pessimistic, overview of the evolution of hip hop in the last five years....

Perhaps the best thing about Ken Hannam’s 1975 film about sheepshearing in central Australia in 1956 is that he doesn’t try to impose too much structure on the action. He appealingly captures the landscape, the repetitive actions of shearing, the shearers’ drinking, and the sometimes slow, sometimes competitive aspects of their lives. There are a few fights, some personality conflicts, a labor struggle, and an unfortunate bit of silliness in which two men’s asses wiggle in time to music, but the film, rather than seeking high drama, has an unforced gentleness that celebrates ordinary labor....