By Michael Miner Lee Bey: “In real life, black people fall in love–though you’d never know that from watching movies. All black folks don’t kill each other with assault rifles, either.” Oclander not only understands the role, he’s meditated on it. When he was 13 he moved with his family from Argentina to New York. When he was a high school student in Indiana he read Harry Golden Sr.’s Only in America–a collection of columns from Golden’s monthly Carolina Israelite–and got so excited about journalism that he headed straight to the local paper and nailed a job as a copyboy....

No Room for Un-Conventional Art But last week Guinan received a telephone call from his Paris-based dealer Albert Loeb, who said a prominent Chicago art collector with close ties to Mayor Daley told him that city officials “wanted something else in the Cultural Center during the convention.” A new exhibit, “Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris 1945-1965,” has now been slated to take its place. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the past three years since I’ve adopted the appearance and apparatus of science in my sculptural vocabulary, I’ve noticed some interesting things about the way viewers respond to the authority of those visual references. I discovered how potent the images and constructs of science are in our culture. This has led me to think about the authority of science, and hence, the “authoritarian” cultural voice of science, the notion that some people want to believe in the truthfulness of science so very badly, they feel tricked when encountering something that appears to be science but is in fact art....

One night last April a black man with a bushy beard, in baggy dark pants and an old army field coat, entered the glitzy Barnes & Noble bookstore in downtown Evanston, a shopping bag in his hand. Within minutes he was ushered from the store by a security guard and arrested for trespassing. The irony of his dilemma has not escaped local poets. “Barnes & Noble should be ashamed for arresting one poet for the high crime of attempting to attend a poetry reading,” says Darlene Pearlstein, a Chicago poet who’s known Stewart for years....

Growing up in Iran in the 50s and 60s, filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa remembers praying with her mother and experiencing a profound sense of magic underlined by a profound sense of despair. “I would go to mosques with all these mirrors and silver doors and become overwhelmed with the beauty. But then I would see women, including my mother, who cried when they prayed. I could sense their pain in the midst of all this beauty....

BENT, European Repertory Company. In his introduction to the forthcoming new edition of Heinz Heger’s The Men With the Pink Triangle, historian Klaus Muller points out that “a mere quarter of adults in the United States know that gays were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.” So any time a production of Bent reaches a new audience it’s worthwhile. Martin Sherman’s moving if manipulative drama recounts the experiences of a gay man in 1930s Germany: hunted by the gestapo after he picks up a storm trooper in a bar, promiscuous party boy Max ends up in the Dachau death camp, where his love for a fellow prisoner transforms him from a selfish, apolitical deal maker into a doomed but dignified man of conviction....

Tjinder and Avtar Singh use satire to attack Asian stereotypes head-on, starting with their band’s name, Cornershop. Their songs are full of shrewd political commentary, and deal with racism, politics, and pop culture, sometimes all at once. Their single “England’s Dreaming” name-checks the Sex Pistols, Morrissey, and Public Enemy as it takes on the “racist, sexist, homophobic powers that be.” The brothers’ syncretic music reflects their experience as children of immigrants....

When are your editors going to banish Harold Henderson? His article entitled “Natural Facts” [August 11] is another example of the twisted turn to the right his so-called environmental reporting has taken. Clearly Henderson’s diatribes would be more appropriate in a conservative rag rather than a publication such as the Reader which targets a progressive and socially concerned audience. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allow me to refute two of his statements in this recent article....

Just a few lines about Neal Pollack’s cover story about Mayor Richard Daley and open government [May 5]. It is well done and I commend your treatment of the issue, which is vital to the future of the city. However, the reply by mayoral chief of staff Gery Chico [Letters, May 12] is terribly disappointing. Mr. Chico claims the mayor has “respect” for all the people of Chicago and that “government [should] be as open and accountable ....

It’s December, which means it’s time for pianist Laurence Hobgood’s annual preholiday treat at the Green Mill, hooking up his trio with a visiting star soloist. Last year saxist Bob Mintzer made the trek; this year the veteran guitarist Larry Coryell joins the fray, answering the musical question: “How do you spell synergy?” One can scarcely imagine a scenario in which this pairing does not produce musical fireworks. First of all the band will include drummer Paul Wertico (who, when not on the road with the Pat Metheny Group, graces Hobgood’s trio here at home)....

Marketing the Arts A million-dollar arts marketing initiative backed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Sara Lee Foundation is under new management. Since its inception early this year, the program–which includes a study of why some people don’t attend arts events, technical assistance to performing arts groups, and pilot marketing projects–had been run by Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Over the past several months, however, executives at the two foundations have shifted responsibility for its administration to the Arts & Business Council of Chicago, the local branch of a national organization known until recently as Business Volunteers for the Arts....

On a June morning in 1976, Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic waited in a Phoenix hotel for an informant who’d offered to fill him in on a crooked land deal. Bolles was called to the telephone. Then he was seen walking swiftly out to the hotel parking lot. He climbed into his white Datsun, six sticks of dynamite planted under the car’s frame exploded, and Bolles died 11 days later....

When Jorge Hernandez graduated from Roberto Clemente high school a decade ago, he was among the distinct minority in his class who went straight to college. “A lot of kids dropped out. They did drugs, got pregnant, or ran with the gangs,” he recalls. “And that was, and still is, the public’s perception of the school. They tend to think of the bad things. What they don’t realize is that a lot of kids do graduate and start on respectable careers....

The cooperative spirit that often shines through when a storm hits a community was nowhere to be found at Evanston’s Dempster Plaza strip mall in early February. When I stopped by the Phar-Mor there during the snowstorm that left up to 13 inches, a plow truck that had been clearing the road directly in front of the stores had stopped its work because of a car blocking its path. A man sat in the late-model car with engine running, apparently waiting for someone in the Phar-Mor....

The tributes to John ” Birks” Gillespie started well before his death in January–a full year earlier, in fact, in a series of jam-session concerts at New York’s Blue Note nightclub (captured on two Telarc CDs, Gillespie’s last recordings). But not even those gala lineups, filled as they were with talented younger musicians, had the historicity of this event. It includes Max Roach, who played drums on the ground-breaking records with which Gillespie and Parker signaled the arrival of bebop in the mid-40s; James Moody, who played in Gillespie bands over a span of 20 years; and trumpeter Red Rodney, who also knew Gillespie (and who eventually filled his role as frontline partner in Parker’s quintets)....

Last summer, presumably in place of a humor column, the Washington Post ran a public-opinion survey sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Among other things, the Post reported that only 39 percent of the people polled cared much about “botany”–but 77 percent expressed an interest in “plants and trees.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scientific literacy isn’t advancing much, according to Miller’s numbers, which have changed little in 15 years....

THE DIVINERS This play revolves around a sort of idiot savant. At 14, Buddy Layman can barely tie his shoes and only speaks about himself in the third person: “He can’t help it if he’s daffy.” Yet Buddy has a strange talent for “feeling” water–seemingly the result of surviving the drowning accident that killed his mother ten years earlier. He’s delighted to help farmers find underground water sources and to warn them when heavy rains are coming, but terrified to touch the stuff....

Excaliber Shakespeare Company, at Di Falco Gallery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum in Old Town were still open, Excaliber director and actor Darryl Maximilian Robinson would probably get his own wing. He’s the kind of deliciously melodramatic elocutionist who disappeared about a century ago, after doing declamatory readings of “the classics” on every vaudeville stage and in every state fair tent in the northern hemisphere....

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s darkly sarcastic, gloriously messy absurdist play–about an alien named Phoebe Zeitgeist who comes into the world naked and guileless and learns to play all our dangerous games–may be the least spiritually bankrupt show running this holiday season. Unlike the golden-throated Mr. Dickens, for example, who argues for both charity and self-indulgence, for feeding the poor and clothing the rich in finery, Fassbinder is an equal-opportunity misanthrope. Everyone in his universe is a Scrooge or a Grinch....

It’s been almost a decade since The Big Easy first made zydeco popular, and now hardly a week goes by without an opportunity to hear it played in some Chicago club. With Clifton Chenier long gone, the mantle has been inherited by several spirited modernists–Chenier’s son C.J., Terrance Simien, and Buckwheat Zydeco, among others. But still at it is Boozoo Chavis, the man behind the first-ever zydeco recording, 1954’s classic “Paper in My Shoe,” and for uncut, exuberant zydeco he remains nonpareil....