Jeff Wall The Vampires’ Picnic also contains shocks and contradictions more subtle than its gory subject. A security guard at the left holds a pair of red high heels, and a nude man in the center, blood streaming from his neck, holds a green apple aloft almost triumphantly. The light-box display recalls commercial advertising, especially movie ads; but it also makes the blood oddly ethereal. No two characters are clothed or posed alike or wear the same facial expression, and there’s no apparent narrative explanation for these differences....

By Justin Hayford But now Wilson finds himself in an unexpected public performance drenched in futility but drained of poetry. In mid-March, he got word from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that Uncle Sam wants him out. He now must convince bureaucrats in Lincoln, Nebraska (the site of the regional INS office), that his work scrubbing monuments, shaking hands, lying under statues, and delivering shirts qualifies him to continue teaching performance art at the university level and makes him a valuable member of American society....

Benton Harbor, once home to the Eden Springs Amusement Park and one of the greatest semipro ball teams of all time, is not a place one should spend any more time than necessary. I’d advise just blowing through it on Business I-94, pausing to check out the ruins of old theaters and the once-majestic Landmark Hotel (a sign outside reads “Transients Welcome”), before zooming left onto Britain Avenue. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In assembling this ambitious project–which began with Monday night workshops and has blossomed into a weekly bagatelle at the Bop Shop–pianist Brad Williams wanted something that reached beyond the pure-jazz audience. And he’s got it: an easygoing, slightly haywire melange of styles ranging from gospel to torch songs and from Dixieland to cool jazz. His versatile ten-person ensemble boasts two reeds, including the ageless hipster Rich Fudoli; two brass, with Sean Flanigan’s trombone antics especially impressive; and three vocalists, led by the impetuous self-assurance of contralto Aisha de Haas....

Friday 12/27 – Thursday 1/9 28 SATURDAY It’s too late for kids to register to play in this weekend’s Holiday Hoops Basketball Tournament, but between games they can take a shot at winning free-throw contests and giveaways, make a tape of themselves “reporting” the sports news in a simulated TV studio, or participate in a free kids’ clinic, which offers lectures, demonstrations, and drills for children 8 to 12. The event also includes a Media Celebrity Challenge, featuring former NBA and NFL players, media people, and second-string politicos such as state’s attorney-elect Dick Divine and Cook County Recorder of Deeds Jesse White....

AS THE BEAVER Zebra Crossing Theatre at the Avenue Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soon after the play starts, Johnson begins raising the stakes–making Beaver gay is a mischievous but not especially adventurous first step. It takes an inspired writer to keep pushing the limits of his premise–to the point where comedy turns into tragicomedy, and mild joshing into astringent satire. It isn’t that Johnson’s comedy is solemn–far from it....

Big Flame Big Flame integrated self-reflection and intellection into the substance of their songs. Then they set the whole mess ablaze, cutting a panoply of antipop slogans with slashing-machete guitar and precise stop-time rhythm bombs. Like some of the very best mid-80s British postpunk groups, Big Flame unleashed its attack on pop through a small label called Ron Johnson Records. Plenty of the label’s bands–the Shrubs, Jackdaw With Crowbar, the Noseflutes, Splat!...

FRANK TEDESSO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given a superficial listening, Frank Tedesso’s songs all sort of sound the same, with similar chord changes and melodic contours. But if you pay close attention to his words, you’ll hear the kind of genuine talent that’s rare in this day of overhyped poetasters. Tedesso writes his songs with his brain switched on–he knows how to mix tenderness with dirt, to balance every glimpse of “the blue in the baby’s eyes” with a domestic argument that “gets ended with a butcher knife....

Great Women in Gospel, Black Ensemble Theater. This is an “awake and sing” for gospel enthusiasts, believers and nonbelievers alike: the Black Ensemble cast gives a two-hour tour, written and directed by Jackie Taylor and shaped into extraordinary music by Jimmy Tillman. Celebrating the songs and stories of gospel’s women preachers, composers, singers, publishers, and organizers, the piece is more an invocation of the ancestors than a detailed history. The spirit of love, its endurance and triumph, energizes the tribute’s feminist pride in women’s accomplishments and courage in the face of sexism, a strength told more powerfully in the songs than in the rhymed stories that provide the historical framework for the revue....

Like many young writers, Donovan Webster at first wanted to write fiction. While at Kenyon College and later while working at an ad agency in New York City, the 1977 New Trier graduate diligently sent his short stories out into the world and watched the piles of rejection notices grow. He regularly sent stories to the New Yorker and got back rejection slips that “shrank over time from form letters to note cards down to business cards....

Lead Story Marketing executive Leonard Schwartz, 34, was arrested in New York City in July and charged with impersonating a medical doctor in his swanky Manhattan apartment building. Schwartz allegedly took a female neighbor’s temperature rectally, tried to administer an enema to her, and offered to examine the 11-year-old daughter of another resident. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a western-wear store in Omaha last February a well-dressed man in his 40s asked to see a horse harness for a costume party and went into a dressing room to try it on....

Nick Lowe’s been a lot of things: cofounder of quintessential pub rock band Brinsley Schwartz, ground-level coperpetrator of the Stiff Records punk rock/new wave revolution, producer-at-large for Elvis Costello, the Damned, Pretenders, and John Hiatt (to name a few), roots revisionist in Rockpile with Dave Edmunds, postroots all-star in Little Village with Hiatt, Ry Cooder, and Jim Keltner. He’s also led a checkered solo career. Long considered a master of the perfect pop song–remember the spritely “Cruel to Be Kind”?...

It seems the more technologically advanced we become, the more we covet the streamlined body–fat-free, hairless, and odorless. It makes you wonder when we’ll amputate our very limbs. To what lengths will we go to make the flagrant fragrant? Must we be hoary before we give in to being hairy? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These are among the questions raised by Girl Germs, an installation by artists Annie West and Mary Del Monico opening Friday at Randolph Street Gallery....

Opera Factory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Half a century after his death, Manuel de Falla’s stock has risen among musicologists and concertgoers: the epithet “Spain’s greatest composer” is now indisputably his. While he was alive, however, the Cadiz-born Falla invited controversy in his native land by imaginatively marrying Andalusian folk elements with French impressionism, even though the introduction of folk material was already the hallmark of eastern European and Russian musical styles....

The Korean woman who ran the little grocery store in the middle of my block wasn’t about to win any popularity contests with her neighbors, even before she had a public telephone installed out front. It was ostensibly a neighborhood store, the neighborhood being Ravenswood Manor, a tiny island of comfortable suburbia surrounded by less palatable sections of the north side of the city. But why anybody would shop there was beyond me....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wish the neighborhood I own a home in (Edgewater) could catch just such a disease. I imagine most of Chicago’s neighborhoods would love to catch a disease that sends property values skyrocketing, adds great wealth, culture, and education to the community, creates thousands of jobs, utilizing every available lot for residential or commercial development. City Hall would like to know exactly where Englewood, Pilsen, West Town, Jackson Park, Uptown, etc....

It’s tough to know where to begin with the Red Krayola. Since the combo was first heard from–on 1967’s Parable of Arable Land, a highly literate excursion through wiggy psychedelia–its mainstay has been Mayo Thompson, a man with a restless artistic spirit and a scathing sense of humor. Thompson has led the group on numerous stylistic excursions; suffice it to say that their various strains of dadaist art rock remain singular and influential–most notably on Pere Ubu, whom Thompson joined briefly during the early 80s....

TELEGRAM FROM HEAVEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ground covered in Telegram From Heaven–the travails of a Jewish family in New York during World War II–has by now been trod into tiny clumps, in works from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to more recent fare like Woody Allen’s Radio Days and Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. The elements seem to form a cultural family album: love furtively snatched before war can kill it off; women finding new power in their first jobs; constant scraping, and the urge to spend since tomorrow is so uncertain; and near nostalgia for the poverty of that time....

CIRCLES OF LUST That sense of one form refreshing and invigorating another is what made Circles of Lust, performed by the Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal Company, so effective. This group of eight dancers and two musicians–the first troupe to appear in a two-week “Festival of Israeli Dance”–brought theater, music, and dance together in the most natural way. Natural, but not easy or pleasant: this dance is at once exhilarating, horrible, and true....

Having spent 15 years in prison, James Newsome knows how far the tentacles of the Illinois Department of Corrections extend. So when he decides to respond to a prisoner on death row who’s trying to reach him, he doesn’t just call the Pontiac Correctional Center and leave a message. Instead he gets a third party to call and leave a message for a fourth party, another death-row prisoner who happens to be the brother of a friend....