Excuse me, officer, don’t you have more pressing business than writing me that speeding ticket? According to John Sullivan in the Chicago Reporter (September), “The Illinois State Police is breaking the law by failing to count hate crimes. …State police have been unable to solve the maddening computer glitches that have left [their aggressive new crime reporting] system useless, said spokesman Mark McDonald. But instead of returning to the previous method of recording hate crimes, the state inexplicably stopped counting them at all....

Bennett Solomon is waiting for me on the Belmont el platform, crouching on a bench, bobbing up and down under the heat lamps. He’s wearing earmuffs and has two tambourines slung across his back. He waves at me and jumps down. “I hear Paul McCartney’s getting back together with the Beatles.” “Well, if it was a little warmer, I’d get out there,” he says, moving his hand up and down his throat....

One of the great disappointments of my brief, disappointing career as a graduate student in English was hearing a recording of the great T.S. Eliot reading his masterpiece “The Waste Land.” Speaking in a flaccid, reedy, neurotic, male-menopausal voice, Eliot not only failed to release one watt of the power coiled in his taut, electric poetry, he actually made it hard for me to ever again read great lines like “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” without snickering....

One of the cinema’s supreme humanists and ironists, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu started his lengthy filmmaking career in 1927. After a remarkably prolific jack-of-all-trades apprenticeship, he eased into directing a series of silent shomin-geki–dramas of humor and pathos in lower-middle-class life–a specialty of his studio and a popular genre in depression-devastated Japan. With each film in the series–from Days of Youth (1929) to What Did the Lady Forget? (1937)–Ozu experimented with narrative, camera angles, and editing; along the way he recruited a core of creative personnel who became frequent collaborators....

Bottle Rockets, The Brooklyn Side. This is a thoroughly wrongheaded record. No one cares about rural America these days (save Newt Gingrich, and that’s just the con artist in him). Country music only appeals to bumpkins and suburbanites, and even they don’t like country rock (it goes without saying that MTV kids don’t either). The few who might like to hear what the Bottle Rockets proffer will be confused both by the title of the band’s second album (a bowling term, not a geographical reference) and the cover photo of a billiard ball....

In a time when the word “fusion” describes instrumental rock and roll (and “jazz” is routinely applied to guys like Kenny G and Fourplay), Tribal Tech stands out like a diamondback in a pile of cotton balls. The original fusion of the early 70s wedded musical complexity to raw energy, in the process becoming jazz’s answer to acid rock; Tribal Tech retains most of the idiom’s virtues with few of the drawbacks....

Dear [Barnes & Noble], Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I and my wife are longtime customers of your store. No longer. Your complicity in the arrest of Joffre Stewart defies logic [Neighborhood News, July 8]. In view of his anarchistic bent, it is entirely up to you, as initiators of the nonesuch, to send your suits to court to quash the warrant. You spilled it, you clean it up....

Marilyn Crispell For the obvious starter, she does not play bebop; she doesn’t even refer to that watershed idiom in her music, which falls into the area generally referred to as “free jazz” or “the avant-garde.” She does not “swing” in any traditional sense. Her music does not fit the externally imposed theme-and-variations format used by the young neoboppers; the structure instead arises from the free flow of her galvanizing improvisations....

Gerry Hemingway Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few drummers can sustain keen interest throughout an entire solo performance. Gerry Hemingway is one of those few. Though Hemingway is best known for some impressive long-term associations (most notably the Anthony Braxton Quartet with Marilyn Crispell and Mark Dresser and BassDrumBone with Ray Anderson and Mark Helias), his own quintet–with trombonist Wolter Wierbos, cellist Ernst Reijseger, reedist Michael Moore, and bassist Dresser–has quietly become one of the most rewarding jazz combos around....

Miguel Lopez-Lemus says that Mexican culture deals with death as an everyday part of life. “It’s like eating hotdogs. It’s a part of the culture.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Images of Mexican archaeological sites and traditional Day of the Dead celebrations, during which people sing and dance in cemeteries, are projected onto a large screen while actors read poems by Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes, Carlos Pellicer, and Aztec king Nezahualcoyotl, among others....

The period between Halloween and Hanukkah forms a perfect pocket in which to view The Golem, director Paul Wegener’s 1920 silent marvel of German expressionism. Based on ancient Hebrew folklore, The Golem is part monster flick, part religious epic. It concerns a Czech rabbi who creates an outsize clay “robot”–which some people think of as the “Jewish Frankenstein”–to protect the residents of his ghetto from state-sponsored pogroms. When he needs to awaken the slumbering giant he uses–instead of a bat signal or supersonic watch-radio–the Hebrew word for “truth,” which he inscribes upon the Golem’s forehead....

Director Yolande Zauberman says the two boys in Ivan and Abraham, her first fiction film, are each “on the edge of…different worlds.” The same might be said of all the characters in this richly evocative, often disturbing depiction of Jewish and Christian life in 1930s Poland. Abraham is friends with Ivan, a Christian who lives with Abraham’s family as an apprentice, and the two eventually run away together. Their community, exploited by a corrupt aristocrat and riven by anti-Semitism, is not a harmonious whole, and the multilingual sound track–we hear Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and a Gypsy dialect–underlines the diversity of cultures....

Buzzworks Theater Company, at Zebra Crossing Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Flanagan’s One-Woman Sound of Music romps through the entire sappy saga of your journey as free-spirited Maria, from cloistered nun to guitar-toting governess to doting stepmother of the eerily wholesome Von Trapp clan. She tells us everything we always thought but didn’t really want to know about the cast of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical....

Kent Szadowski’s letter [March 25] was something akin to a bored mainstream music fan laboring under the mistaken impression that the public wants to know everything about his problem with a critically acclaimed album. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, I must come to the defense of Phair and her album because it happens to be a great record and, well, Kent wouldn’t know a great record “if it crawled up [his] ass....

PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ It’s hard to know who to praise more in the National Jewish Theater’s Puttin’ On the Ritz: An Irving Berlin American Songbook: Sheldon Patinkin for creating a revue as rich as his material and for staging it with industrial-strength pizzazz; Jim Corti for his period-perfect choreography, with the two-step, Charleston, swing, and tap rivaling one another for authenticity; Kingsley Day, whose sure-handed musical direction and supple arrangements bring out the strength of each song; set designers Richard and Jacqueline Penrod, whose cream-colored bandstand is framed by a giant golden fan; or the six-member cast, who hoof and croon, strut and soar to beat the band–without miking, as God meant it to be....

Hot Monkey Pi By Jack Helbig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Napier and his ragtag company, most of them trained at the Improv-Olympic and Second City, created a third camp, one that had room for improvisers who loved the freedom and spontaneity of improv but who also believed you could use it to create an evening-length script that was not a comedy revue. Coed Prison Sluts, the Annoyance Theatre’s first big hit and their still-running flagship show, is now thoroughly scripted but was originally created through improvisation....

RELATIONSHIP HELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most hellish, or meanest, offering is Gorgo’s Mother, Laurence Klavan’s anatomy of love addiction, which seems aimlessly plotted until you see how consistently one-sided its relationships are. Brian (Robert Bailey II), a publisher made larcenous by love, steals books to give money to his demure colleague Joanne (Jacquelyn Ritz), who gives it to her adored Kenny (John Neisler), a dope dealer, who hands it to his obsession, Terry (Mary Booker), a doped-up “escort....

Conversational Placements Conversational Placements–a lucid, articulate one-woman tour de force–represents a breakthrough in the Art Institute’s conservative curatorial policy in its 107-year-old contemporary art series, American Exhibitions: it’s finally included performance art. And Conversational Placements represents a breakthrough in the form: it’s the first one-person show I’ve seen that’s built seamlessly out of characters created from real-life interviews. These characters introduce their stories but in some cases stop midway, their stories intersected and interrupted by those of other characters....

MUDHONEY 6/9, Metro Seattle grunge progenitors Mudhoney have shrugged their shoulders at that classification and spit out another blast of maximal rock rudiments on their new My Brother the Cow (Reprise). Disgusted with the critically sanctioned significance that’s been foisted on them, they rip Gen-X iconography on “Generation Spokesmodel” and viciously assault calculatedly sincere rock stars on “Into Your Shtik,” a tune that coldly suggests “Why don’t you blow your brains out, too?...

The old folks in the wheelchairs in the back of the room were slumbering, chins bumping chests, when Don Komar started tinkering with his piano. Lenny Kaye started blowing his sax and Anita Smith broke into a snappy version of “Silver Bells,” and no one was sleeping anymore. One elderly gentleman in baggy blue pants and a red shirt got so inspired that he rose from his chair and started dancing with his nurse as the rest of the audience clapped and cheered....