To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ben Joravsky’s June 3 Neighborhood News column on suburbanites who work in Chicago addresses a crucial problem, but shows the lack of solutions being offered, either by the City Council or most of its critics. Suburbanites who work here are not a problem per se, since there are also thousands of city residents working in the suburbs....

About Place: Recent Art of the Americas Grynsztejn’s insightful catalog essay begins somewhat misleadingly with quotations from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Description Without Place”: the lines “Description is revelation. It is not / The thing described, nor false facsimile” suggest the romantic and modernist traditions, in which the artist is given free rein to invent whatever subjective landscape he wishes. The artists in this exhibit are considerably more modest. Almost all give the stuff of physical reality equal weight with the artist’s vision, painting from photographs or using purchased or found objects....

A FUGUE FOR STRANGERS Pillar Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most successful of the monologues is Nathan Carver’s bittersweet “A Girl in Every Town,” a series of woeful encounters between a traveling salesman and women who have caught on to his line. As directed by Jeff Christian, Carver offers a take on romantic losers that has neatly suited his story to his style....

This year has seen reissues of Betty Carter recordings from 1958 (I Can’t Help It on GRP) and 1965 (inside Betty Carter on Capitol Jazz). And with this month’s release of At the Village Vanguard (Verve), all the albums made for her own Bet-Car label–for which she recorded in the 70s and early 80s–will be available on CD. Taken together they give a clear picture of Carter’s development from a fresh-voiced, adventurous, but still conventional songstress to the galvanic, extravagant, and still-hungry improviser of today....

Bob Greene must scorn the scientists over at Fermilab, scrambling every day to fit their knowledge of the world into a single, consistent theory. Bob accomplished that feat long ago, cramming every last fact and press release into a lone unified principle: The World Is Bad. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bad Fact A: car alarms, “the nightly American symphony…a song that’s heard every day and every night....

For almost three decades the Contemporary Chamber Players have served up cornucopias of new works that are, for the most part, worthy of first hearings. The programming, to be sure, reflects the taste of founder and director Ralph Shapey, who tends to favor academic colleagues and disciples with a neo-romantic and abstract expressionist bent. This season opener is a telling example. Each of the four movements of the jazzy Transformational Etudes by New York’s Edward Smaldone is inspired by “semi-abstract” canvases....

DRINKING IN AMERICA Drinking in America, the show that made Eric Bogosian famous and allowed him to step out of Soho’s arts ghetto into the lucrative mainstream, is only a little more than seven years old, but it’s already showing its age. Written and first performed when both solo performances and the backlash against booze and drugs were still something of a novelty, Drinking in America now seems trite, obvious, and artistically exhausted....

It’s mid-March and the frogs are beginning to stir. As I write this I can hear the scrape of snow shovels on my neighbors’ sidewalks. Last night it got cold enough to freeze a frog so solid you could use it as a paperweight, but despite the wintry weather this is the time of year when frogs come out to play. They announce spring to me when I visit the Somme Woods Forest Preserve very early in the morning at this time of year....

To the Editor: The Reader has many knowledgeable and worthy critics and writers who listen to music with open ears, not only in the city’s “hip” neighborhoods but everywhere there is music to be heard. They’re usually “right on” with their Critic’s Choices, and they appear to spend a lot of time listening and talking to the people who make the music they write about. Why not rotate Wyman’s Hitsville with these other music writers, who could bring a different view on Chicago’s different musics?...

Rollover Postmodernism comes in many flavors, but one hallmark is rough-and-ready appropriation of the techniques of one kind of art for making a different kind of art. Atlas/Axis appropriates the structural forms of classical and modern dance, such as theme and variation and ABA form; dance in turn borrowed these forms from classical music. The overall structure of Rollover, which Atlas/Axis (Ames Hall and Ken Thompson) performed at Link’s Hall, is ABA: an idea introduced in the beginning returns at the end with a greater depth of meaning....

*** DIVERTIMENTO (A must-see) Directed by Jacques Rivette Written by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette With Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Beart, David Bursztein, Gilles Arbona, Marianne Denicourt, and the hand of Bernard Dufour. Divertimento represents the fourth time in Rivette’s career that he’s carved two films out of the same basic material, and the third time this process has yielded a shorter, inferior, compromised version. In the 60s the producer of Rivette’s first lengthy feature, the 252-minute L’amour fou, demanded a version half as long– the version that premiered in Paris, which Rivette disowned....

BEDHEAD 5/20, LOUNGE AX This Dallas quintet couches its subtle pop tunes in slow-building minimalist patterns; the sound of its three guitars tends to start out as deceptively simple patter, then grow in tension and power until it explodes into lush crescendos. Clearly indebted to New York’s Codeine and Chicago’s Seam, Bedhead gives simplicity a surprising elasticity, demonstrating that even simple musical elements can always be broken down further. The band performs as part of the second annual Cardigan Festival, a benefit for the Howard Brown Health Center; Tortoise joins Bedhead and headliners Seam (rumor has it this is their last gig ever) tonight, while tomorrow Red Red Meat, Mint Aundry, Number One Cup, David Grubbs, and Weedy perform....

STEVE RAMSDELL GROUP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the surface Chicagoan Steve Ramsdell’s quartet–showcased on his eponymous debut of last year (issued on Ramsdell’s own one-disc label)–resembles dozens of other guitar-led bands. Head a bit further into the disc, however, and little surprises pop up. A track called “Hang Zone” starts with twangy, lightly strummed chords, promising anything from a Neil Young song to one of the Yellowjackets’ more commercial ventures....

This 1993 feature certainly has its flaws–including a wholly unnecessary literary quotation that appears on-screen at the worst possible moment–but it’s still one of maverick independent Jon Jost’s most forceful efforts to date, in part because it stars the most talented actor he’s ever worked with, the resourceful Tom Blair. Mainly known as a stage actor and director, Blair also starred in two of Jost’s best earlier features–as a wandering, jobless malcontent in Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977) and as a misguided, bullying real estate speculator in Sure Fire (1990)....

On the bottom of most plastic containers I’ve noticed a triangle-shaped symbol indicating that the container is recyclable. In the middle of this symbol is a number ranging from one to six or higher. I know these numbers have something to do with the classification of plastic products, but what is the difference between a one and two or six in terms of recycling? Finally, why do most recycling centers take type one or two containers but not three through six?...

Tiger Trap loves early punk–the clenched-fist guitar strums, the banged-out melodies–but favors its less aggressive side, its naivete and humanism. On their debut Tiger Trap and a new EP, “Sour Grass,” both on K, the underground label cum naif refuge in Olympia, Washington, the songs are jangled up and bounced along by a thumpy bass, jaunty drums, and rushed vocals, then halted now and again by some pretty, girly harmonies. The lead singer has that breathy, matter-of-fact falsetto down cold, and the band–an all-gal outflt from Sacramento–has a very do-it-yourself approach to arrangement and musicianship, and ditto for the songs....

IT’S ALL TRUE: BASED ON AN UNFINISHED FILM BY ORSON WELLES Too much effort and real love went into the entire project for it to fail and come to nothing in the end. I have a degree of faith in it that amounts to fanaticism, and you can believe that if It’s All True goes down into limbo I’ll go with it. –Orson Welles, writing to a Brazilian friend in the 40s...

Dear Letters Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is a Puerto Rican saying that goes “El pillo juzga por su condicion”–the thief judges by his own condition. Molzahn and Obejas’s review of Familias would be suspect on the grounds of its internal contradiction and misrepresentation alone. These critics complain that Familias is both unclear and too straightforward; that it tends “to underscore the most tragic images of Latinos,” yet is also too idealized and hopeful....

ZEPHYR DANCE ENSEMBLE Maureen Janson’s Mallet Ballet starts with a clever idea, however, and goes nowhere. Her dancers use mallets and balls to re-create the polite veneer of croquet and reveal its cutthroat heart. There’s a story of sorts, but it’s not easy to follow. And the combination of modern dance, croquet moves, and mimed interactions is odd without being fun. The idea in Paul Cipponeri’s Quieter and Deeper Than seems old: new-age nature music, tropical-print pants, and familiar solemn choreography make this a pretty ho-hum effort....

The Bloody Child By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All four films star Menkes’s sister Tinka, who’s also credited as coconceiver and coeditor (there are no writing credits on any of them); Nina is credited as producer, cinematographer, director, coconceiver, and coeditor. As sisterly collaborations, these works, to the best of my knowledge, have no parallel in movies. Tinka Menkes plays different characters in each movie–a Jewish girl who leaves Israel for Morocco in The Great Sadness of Zohara, a schizophrenic prostitute who murders her pimp in Magdalena Viraga, a Las Vegas blackjack dealer in Queen of Diamonds (my favorite Menkes film), and a marine captain in California as well as various undefined characters (or guises of the same undefined character) in northeast Africa in The Bloody Child–and in all of these parts she seems to figure to some degree as her sister’s surrogate or alter ego, making her way through a male-dominated universe....