Of the entrants in this year’s Onion City Film Festival, three of the best are idiosyncratic portraits of places. Jules Engel’s Toy Shop is five-minutes of charming animation in which toys and figures come to life, not in the conventional way but as abstract moving patterns. The film’s rhythm is like a merry-go-round’s; this is a toy shop of the imagination. James Schneider sets his ten-minute film Oasis in Green Valley, a new gated community near Las Vegas, presenting it as a patterned world that seems as artificial as that of Toy Shop....

The Symphony of the Shores has titled its latest program “An Homage to Janus,” and in this case the two-faced Roman god of portals looks backward to Bach and forward to composers Doug Lofstrom and Glen Buhr. Bach is represented by his seldom-heard Concerto for Oboe d’Amore, with soloist Judith Zunamon Lewis. The Canadian Buhr’s 1992 Double Concerto for Flute and Harp is said to be an accessible, almost pop vehicle for the increasingly common instrumental pair (here, flutist Darlene Drew and harpist Stephen Hartman of the Shores)....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to some of the letters appearing recently, regarding the “displaced” Hispanic community in Wicker Park, I feel a need to respond as someone who may have unwittingly aided in the “transformation” of the area. When I moved into the neighborhood over ten years ago, it was with other classmates of mine from the School of the Art Institute, we were initially drawn there by the low-cost spaces as well as the proximity to town....

1 My father taught me this: My father had been left on his own that early summer of the war. His older brothers were all enlisting: his mother was a widow with a clutch of young children to raise; and he was just old enough to get scooted out of the house first thing every morning so he’d stay out of everybody’s hair. He became the ringleader, since he was the only one who could spend all his waking hours on the gang....

Why couldn’t we have been mighty Bulls instead? Governor Jim Edgar in Area Development (May): “Illinois has for decades been among the mightiest pistons in the national economic engine.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rewriting and editing, on the other hand, are optional. From a suburban quality assurance consultant’s brochure: “With these new standards the quality profession has been legitimatized. It is no longer an option whether a company has a quality program or not....

The Case of the Missing Parking Fines Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Daley Boys were sitting in Rich’s office. Rich was mayor of the city of Chicago, just like his father had been before him. His brother Bill, older by two years and balder by a lot, was a prominent downtown attorney and Rich’s most trusted adviser. The brothers had just found out that city employees owed more than $6 million in parking fines, and they weren’t sure what to do about it....

I’m flipping through the Moody Bible Institute Student Life Guide with one hand and the Bible with the other, trying to determine exactly where it is in the Bible that the Lord tells us going to movies and playing cards is a sin. It doesn’t seem like things have changed much since superevangelist Dwight Moody founded the college in 1886. The mission is to “educate and train individuals to proclaim the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, to promote evangelism and to serve the evangelical Christian church,” according to the undergraduate catalog....

To whom it may concern: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former surgeon general Dr. C. Everett Koop has expressed a goal of having a smoke-free society by the year 2000. This does not mean a complete ban on smoking. What it does mean is that the nation’s 46 million smokers would not be free to light up in the presence of other persons without their permission....

Wax Trax Redux Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From such tempestuous origins was the label that introduced industrial rock to America born. Wax Trax’s fourth record was from an extremely challenging Belgian dance band called Front 242. “They toured with Ministry in 1983,” Nash notes, after the album came out, “and hit it off great. The rest is history.” The history, in this case, is ten years of extremely rough and uncompromising mechanized dance conflagrations by such groups as Ministry, Meat Beat Manifesto, KLF, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and a total of perhaps a million records sold....

I saw Cycles of Unveiling in rehearsal, without costumes or set. When you see it, tattered cheesecloth will hang from the ceiling between the audience and the dancers. Five of them will be nude except for lengths of cheesecloth wrapped around their hips or chests. A sixth clothed dancer is “a voyeur–a representative of the audience,” according to XSight! artistic director Brian Jeffery. This sixth dancer keeps pulling back the curtain of cheesecloth, displaying the others in mysterious, often simple movements....

The cliquishness of the Chicago poetry scene led poet/publisher Batya Goldman, 31, to become a professional pen pal. Frustrated by the lack of communication between poets who, for the most part, only met within their own groups, Goldman began to distribute a “chap,” or self-made collection of her work, and to swap addresses, chaps, and zines with poets and writers around the country. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The magic of zines, says Goldman, is the chance they provide for anyone to become an author....

CHICAGO ON TAP The show’s curator, Sarah Petronio, chose to include both old-time tappers and young dancers. One of the young dancers, Chicago native Ted Levy, started the show by walking onstage, tapping out a syncopated jazz rhythm, repeating it, then tapping out variations on it. When the rhythm became baroquely complex, he stopped and joked with the audience: “I just want to see if it works.” He gestured to the four-piece jazz band, they started to play, and Levy became the band’s soloist....

A reflective autobiographical film (1985) about filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s youth in the late 40s and early 50s. Largely filmed in the same places in Taiwan where the events originally happened, this unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical significance that may not be immediately apparent. Working in long takes and wide-screen, deep focus compositions that frame the characters from a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own memories and experience, so that, as in Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Tian’s The Blue Kite, we come to know them almost as intimately as touchstones in our own lives....

The fact that improv requires nothing more than an empty space and a willing audience makes it very attractive to neophyte comedy groups with little or no capital–and often, unfortunately, little or no original material. That’s what makes a company like Bang Bang, with its discipline and considerable wit, almost a revelation. The company consists of a core group of some of Chicago’s finest actors (Paul Dillon, Tracy Letts, Reggie Hayes, Tara Chocol, Michael Shannon, and Eric Winzenreid, to name just a few)....

CSO principal clarinetist Larry Combs, like many of his colleagues, is a jazz aficionado, so it’s only natural that he invited a crossover clarinetist to play with his group the Chicago Chamber Musicians. Eddie Daniels, who has a master’s degree from the Juilliard, is one of those rare instrumentalists who possess both classical technique and a jazz sensibility–a combination Combs resignedly admits he lacks. At this season opener Daniels and Combs will team up for Poulenc’s rarely heard 1918 Sonata for Two Clarinets, in which a B-flat clarinet jostles for attention with one in A; its spiky rhythms and sharp contrasts in tempo rather resemble Stravinsky’s Rossignol....

Nothing breeds nostalgia like an imminent finale. Apparently not even Joe Segal can exempt himself from that dictum; with his Jazz Showcase counting down the last weeks at its current address, he’s reached back into jazz history to briefly resurrect the twin bill, a program of alternating sets by two bands. Nonetheless, the booking couldn’t be more contemporary: it features two of the hotter young lions in jazz (or in this case, one lion and one lioness)....

In the 30s listeners could turn for variety to “all-girl” jazz orchestras–full-fledged big bands that usually camouflaged some pretty fair musicianship under the banner of “novelty act.” These days, of course, no one would countenance the use of “all-girl” as a descriptive; Diva, a jazz orchestra comprising women only, get around the problem by punningly characterizing themselves as “no man’s band.” That’s not entirely true; much of a big band’s musical personality derives from its arrangements, and most of the arrangements Diva played on its debut album were written and produced by Michael Abene and John LaBarbera (both excellent scorers)....

In the 70s, when Rufino Osorio was just a teenager, he used to take the Montrose Avenue bus west out to the Des Plaines River. He would scout the woodland openings for remnants of the vast prairie that once spread out there, before O’Hare and Woodfield and Morton Grove existed. That is what Osorio liked to do, comb the groves for native plants and grasses, newts and foxes. On one of these searches he found an isolated colony of orchids, lovely, creamy white, showy things raising up their stalks in a sun-spattered opening....

FUGEES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Fugees have come a long way from the Bob Marley-esque, dancehall-hip-hop fusion that marked their 1994 debut, Blunted on Reality. The trio’s terrific new follow-up, The Score (Ruffhouse/Columbia), allows the raps, toasts, and singing of Prakazrel, Wyclef, and Lauryn Hill a freedom that the often cluttered debut inhibited. The second album also proves that the Fugees aren’t the quaint “alternative rap” curiosity the press labeled them to be....

Though distinguished veteran cellist Gary Hoffman gets top billing in this duo, his lesser-known sidekick, pianist David Golub, deserves equal attention. Golub, a Chicago native who’s been on the concert circuit for quite a while, is one of those versatile musicians who follow a hectic international itinerary while keeping out of fame’s way. He’s recorded fairly extensively on the Arabesque label: his 1988 recording of Gershwin’s Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue set a standard for Gershwin interpretation, and his latest CD, a solo effort, sheds light on some of Schubert’s more obscure piano pieces....