MOTION POETS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s in a name? The last time this particular band came through town it called itself the Little Big Band. That moniker went beyond the obvious pun involving the name of the group’s leader, alto saxist Doug Little: it suggested compositional and textural concerns of a greater range and stature than what you’d expect from a simple, hard-blowing jazz sextet....

Patient A Then last month Far West’s postcard for the “Chicago premiere” of Patient A arrived in the mail, emblazoned across the top with three words: “Innocence. Ignorance. AIDS.” After enduring the media’s misconceived eulogies for Oklahoma City’s “slaughtered innocents” (who were neither innocent nor guilty but simply unlucky), after seeing half a dozen HIV bills emerge from Springfield during the last legislative session offering a pound of punishment but not an ounce of prevention, and after years of witnessing our culture’s facile division of people with AIDS into “innocent” and “guilty” camps, my toenails faced irreparable deformation....

INFLATION With Edward Arnold, Horace McNally, Esther Williams, and Vicky Lane. It’s a virtual truism that rewriting history entails–and to some extent derives from–rethinking the present moment. Just as the recent change in presidents can be linked to the public’s revised reading of the last 4 (or 8 or 12) years, our highly selective sense of film history is determined not only by which films have survived but also by the present-day concerns that dictate what interests us about the past....

POO POO LE ARSE! Metraform Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Which may explain why Napier’s most recent shows have been a marked departure. In his last show, for example, Dumb Ass Leaves the Carnival, he abandoned the inspired silliness of his earlier work in favor of a rich, resonant, heartfelt allegory about show business and the destructive allure of money. His current show, with the rather infantile title Poo Poo Le Arse, is another radical departure–it’s surreal and absurdist....

ELECTRAFIXION, ECHOBELLY 11/17, METRO Perpetual prima donna, English celeb, and former Echo & the Bunnymen crooner Ian McCulloch has reunited with Will Sergeant, his old band’s guitarist, to form Electrafixion, a brazen attempt to cash in on the alternative-rock frenzy with loud, leaden, ponderous muck. One listen to their debut, Burned (Sire), plainly establishes what the average American must already think: “Ian who?” Meanwhile Echobelly’s new album On (550 Music) proffers more of the same terribly pleasant, crisp, and catchy new-wave-ish pop songs that filled their debut....

In trying to eat healthy, I have started to buy “fat-free” or “light” versions of the real thing, whatever it may be. But I started to wonder: how do they get it to be fat free? Is it chock-full of chemicals that will slowly fester in my body until it explodes? Is fat-free food really safe to eat? –Cautious Health Nut, Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t be such a stiff....

WFMT on the Move What WFMT gains may be nothing less than its salvation. “Being able to get out from under the rent at 303 E. Wacker,” Schmidt says. “We were paying something short of $500,000 a year. I figure we’re saving $300,000 a year [of a $5 million budget]. It’s given us the ability to step back from the edge a little bit. We’re able to take that savings and put it into making radio instead of rent payments....

Lurking beneath the surface of Wilco’s new A.M., an extremely pleasant collection of country-tinged rock songs, are more than a few touches that slowly grow on you. First you notice them, then look forward to them, and then get a bit obsessive about them. In the opening track there’s a soaring, keening slide riff–reminiscent of David Lindley’s gorgeous sound on early Jackson Browne albums–that cements the song in your head. In “I Thought I Held You,” bandleader Jeff Tweedy sings, “You’re the reason / I’ve run out of metaphors”; he then falls silent, letting the song go for a verse or two with no words....

A MAP OF THE WORLD At the conference in Bombay, Mehta clashes with left-wing journalist Stephen Andrews. He is also told by officials he must qualify certain remarks made in his fiction (he calls socialism “the luxury of the rich” and ridicules Madam Mao) or risk jeopardizing the conference; but he refuses, seeing himself as a “lone voice” pointing out the absurd truths of human nature through his fiction. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Painter Julian Schnabel’s feature is a biopic about Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright), a black graffitist in New York who became famous in 1981 and died seven years later. Art critic Robert Hughes titled his obituary for Basquiat “Requiem for a Featherweight,” and part of what’s so interesting and unexpected about this picture is that it makes fresh observations without actually refuting that judgment. It’s also quite energetic–there isn’t a boring shot anywhere, and writer-director Schnabel is clearly enjoying himself as he plays with expressionist sound, neo-Eisensteinian edits, and all sorts of other filmic ideas....

Captured at newsgroup alt.fan.super-big-gulp Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Had my first Double Big Gulp this weekend. My apprehension was clearly unfounded. It felt so natural, so limitless. Looking at the cup when I finished, it didn’t seem very big anymore. I would like to see a larger size become available. I want someone to give me a huge popcorn bucket, fill it with coke and ice, and slap a lid on it....

The Hammond B-3 organ does not breed diffidence. With its multiple (presynthesizer) sound effects, the instrument all but demands exuberance; and with its fast-action attack and that sound-swirling Leslie speaker (can’t forget the Leslie!), it fades into the background about as well as a tarantula. For those who play it, the challenge comes in living up to the B-3’s expectations without caving in to them–a challenge that the delightful Chris Foreman meets head on....

Elvis Costello Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elvis Costello, on the other hand, has tried, over the course of his last few records, to avoid falling into at least the first two holes. Since jettisoning the Attractions, the incisive trio he recorded ten albums with, he’s turned to a diverse slate of musicians, from the other Elvis’s onetime guitarist James Burton to Tom Waits crony Marc Ribot....

It’s a few minutes after 11 on a Friday night, and a crowd of about 30 people has come to Chicago Filmmakers to see the latest edition of Talk Show With Johnny White, a 90-minute variety program with live interviews, music, games, and screenings of locally produced films and videos. The 29-year-old White has been staging the show since March on the first Friday of each month. Despite the late starting time, the overall mood is festive and relaxed, no doubt abetted by a keg of beer stashed off to the side of the raised stage....

A reunion of sorts: Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio had its genesis in the mid-80s, pairing the versatlie percussionist with Art Ensemble of Chicago bassist Malachi Favors. Their first recordings were with, alternately, trumpeter Lester Bowie and violinist Billy Bang before they settled down with saxophonist Ari Brown. This performance could well summon up the spare beauty evoked by 1986’s Another Kind of Groove (Sound Aspects), recorded with Bang, who’s still best known for his lengthy stint in the String Trio of New York but has numerous solo albums to his credit....

My mother-in-law is losing her marbles. They’re just about gone actually, if you consider having marbles the ability to remember what happened five days or even five minutes ago. Margaret Wildhack’s few remaining long-term memories embrace her sister and her brother, people whose histories she has shared for 70 years or more. Everyone else–including her own three children, their spouses, and grand-children–is a bit of a puzzle. She recognizes a few of us in some fundamental sense as people who are important to her, but the labels of “daughter,” “son-in-law,” and “grandchild” have disappeared....

MARIAN MCPARTLAND TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With elegance, wit, and precision, the septuagenarian Marian McPartland has made so much good music–which throughout the 70s and 80s traced a steadily progressing arc of creative growth–that it’s easy to take her for granted. It became even easier once she added “oral historian” to her resumé, hosting the popular and acclaimed public-radio interview series “Piano Jazz....

CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN: 1923-1993 The exhibit was organized by John Zukowsky, curator of the Art Institute’s Department of Architecture, and his staff. But much of the attention has focused on the man who designed the installation, architect Stanley Tigerman, who also figures prominently in the show. Of the 657 items in the exhibition catalog, 19 are credited to him in one way or another. Only the firm of Murphy/Jahn, with 23, has more....

Sometimes percussionist and composer Michael Zerang gets nostalgic for his early days, the late 70s, on Chicago’s music scene. “Back then I think the scene was healthier, because the visual arts, performance art, and music were all part of the same scene. You’d go down to some loft on West Randolph, and there’d be sculpture and someone hanging paintings–but there’d also be bands like ours playing and performance art. It was all very underground, but it was really vital....

Lead Story In March the Medical Board of California charged orthopedic surgeon Fereydoune Shirazi with improper behavior during a 1990 operation. Shirazi allegedly took an 11-minute rest-room break while an operation was in progress and forgot to turn off a machine called a nucleotome, which has tiny blades that cut inside a patient’s spinal column. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In February, minutes before a jury would have ruled against her claim, Joyce Caudle reached a settlement with the company that sold her the stationary exercise bicycle she claimed was responsible for a $200,000 injury in 1991....