FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14 The Servile Didactic cinema is seldom seen in the U.S., though it’s common in cultures where moviemaking has become an extension of oral tradition. In the hands of a master like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, an instructive tale of good and evil doesn’t have to sacrifice individuality, humanity, or entertainment value. Take The Servile, which charts the moral destruction of Tommi, the timorous tenant farmer of Patelar, a cruel land baron....

The Right Fight: Jeff Colby The 1986 Rainmaker looks like a fetish object, common among African peoples, intended to have special powers. A black handle supports a stick that leads to a comb; hanging from the center of the stick is a doll leg complete with a hinged knee joint. On the stick below are shards of colored glass; pieces of glass are also affixed at the base of the comb’s teeth....

The people who owned the building where we lived wanted our flat for their son. Now, apartments were very difficult to find in 1920. So my mother and father went looking. They looked at this flat on Flournoy Street, but the man said, “No, I don’t want children.” After a while the landlord, Mrs. Graham, who had been my mother’s good freind, decided to evict us. She got an eviction notice against us....

By Ben Joravsky The irony in the selection was not lost on Fred Montejano, a lifelong Pilsen resident and activist who openly sought the job. “I wish Danny well, but yes, I’m disappointed,” says Montejano. “I think the level of politics in the Latino community has changed. You shouldn’t be anyone’s gofer or automatic vote.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For over two months rumors swirled about whom Daley would name; the list of candidates included such mayoral loyalists as Leonard Dominguez, Daley’s former deputy mayor for education, Teresa Fraga, a former schoolteacher, and Solis, who’s the director of the community group UNO (United Neighborhood Organization) and whom Daley had already appointed to the school board nominating commission and the boards of the CHA and the RTA....

Bands better and worse than Belly or Radiohead have found themselves in the enviable but still problematic situation of having a reputation and a no little success based on one fluky single. For Belly that single is “Feed the Tree,” an outlandishly confectionary rock concoction that soars and sings. The group is the solo turn of Tanya Donelly, who did time in both Throwing Muses and the Breeders, where whe was overshadowed by Kristin Hersh and Kim Deal, respectively, for her trouble....

Friday 9 A “topping out” party marks the placement of the final structural beam in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s spectacular new digs on East Chicago Avenue today at 10 AM. The museum will greet well-wishers with warm beverages served under a heated tent at Fairbanks and Chicago (one block east of Michigan Avenue). There’ll be a few words, and visitors will get to sign the last beam before it’s hoisted into place sometime around noon....

MANN IST MANN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Written in 1926 by Bertolt Brecht and an unacknowledged team of coauthors led by Brecht’s assistant Elisabeth Hauptmann, and offered here in Gerhard Nellhaus’s translation, Mann Ist Mann is a hell of a hard play to pull off, which makes Famous Door’s brash and tasty production even more impressive. It’s got to be funny and thoughtful, extravagant and subtle, coarse and sensitive all at the same time–as it is here....

Dana Easter’s Hyde Park apartment looks like a museum. African masks and paintings cover just about every inch of available wall space; statues and sculptures sit in corners and on small tables. Near one corner of the room is a wooden CD rack, handmade and imported from Africa, and in another there’s a magazine holder wrapped in brown leather and decorated with seashells and leather strips. At a glance it could be an African drum....

The Chicago Jazz Ensemble–a superlative jazz repertory orchestra–regularly peppers its concerts with music from jazz’s misty past, as well as newer works by its director, William Russo. You’ll find both on this program, but it all plays second fiddle to a rare performance of Duke Ellington’s lively and moving New Orleans Suite. In fact, as far as anyone can tell, this will be only the second public performance of the nine-movement work–and the first did not come under Ellington’s baton....

The Choral Ensemble of Chicago has been around for almost three decades, and as its many fans well know the quality of its singing is uneven. But the Christmas program seems to bring out the best in the group. This season the fare is once again an assortment of holiday carols and hymns: sections from Gounod’s Saint Cecilia Mass for tenor solo and chorus, his arrangement of Bach’s “Ave Maria,” an excerpt from Saint-Saens’ Christmas Oratorio, and of course a selection from Handel’s Messiah....

Cheryl Purnell was hauling lumber and hammering nails at a west-side work site last month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a white-owned construction company in Colorado had been unconstitutionally denied a federal subcontract by affirmative action. The construction trades have been very slow to open their ranks to women. There were no more than a handful of women in the trades until a 1978 affirmative action directive by President Carter, according to a study by Chicago Women in Trades, a not- for-profit group....

Suet May Ho wasn’t frightened at first when the women began to lay stones on her body. But then they carefully put stones over her mouth and her eyes. Ho couldn’t breathe easily or see, and she could feel and hear something being burned next to her. Then she did feel frightened, breathing rapidly from her sense of helplessness. But she knew that she was the willing container for the women’s own overwhelming sense of helplessness, and that to become too frightened would betray their trust....

There is a man who believes his life was saved by Chicago author Eugene Izzi. It wasn’t anything dramatic: Izzi didn’t pull him out of a blazing apartment, or take a bullet for him. “Rick” was a drug addict and an alcoholic, a working burglar and a repeat criminal offender who had been in trouble with the law since he was a little boy. Nobody could help Rick, not even the local detox centers....

Not many jazz musicians actually deserve the descriptor “living legend”–that is, besides J.J. Johnson. At the dawn of the bebop era, Johnson confronted a formidable task. Such giants-to-be as Bud Powell (piano) and Dexter Gordon (tenor sax) had begun to adapt the innovations of Parker and Gillespie to their instruments; but Johnson’s instrument was the slide trombone, best known for sweet ballads and swing-band special effects and seemingly resistant to the high-speed exactitude of bebop....

Neo-Nazis Nixed Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Beacon Street Gallery director Pat Murphy apparently saw the work in a different light once the photos were on view. The gallery has been housed for the last 14 years in the Uptown Center Hull House, which is also home to social service organizations counseling troubled youths, battered women, and immigrant torture victims. Murphy says clients and workers in Hull House were disturbed by the imagery and wondered if it was promoting violence since it carried no explanatory text or disclaimer....

RACE Plays with ideas are great. There are far too few of them around these days. But plays about philosophical ideas, written to express a point of view rather than tell a story, are almost always clunky and dull: dramatic intrigue is held hostage to the author’s need to preach. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pachino was already at something of a disadvantage bringing Terkel’s Race to the stage....

RATIONAL MALAISE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This lurking malaise is the best part of Ross’s plays. Second best is that they’re funny in an easy, familiar way. But this is the first time Ross, a poetry and fiction writer, has written for the stage, and all of her plays are short, as if she were afraid to jump into a full-length drama. And because they’re so short, they often sell their ideas short....

Hey, Faggot: Our first sessions weren’t very successful, until he told me the incredible magic secret no one had ever told me: You can stop when you get tired! You don’t have to set your jaw and suck him till he comes. Try long licks up the shaft, sucking the balls, a little hand-job action. When you’re ready, dive back in there with your mouth. Do something for as long as it’s fun, and switch when it isn’t!...

In describing the terrific debut album from this most inventive Berkeley-based quartet, you don’t know whether to start with its oddball name (there is no T.J. Kirk), its strange lineup–three guitars and drums–or its even wackier premise. Actually, it all runs together. The name of the band comes from the repertoire: T.J. Kirk’s self-titled debut comprises compositions by protobopper Thelonious Monk, funk king James Brown, and the visionary saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk....

The situation the owners of Lounge Ax have found themselves in is an example of the repercussions the city’s strict liquor laws can have on valuable and law-abiding institutions. The situation seems intractable. Since there’s little money to be made in rock ‘n’ roll, the live-music industry–on the club level at least–has become a subset of the liquor industry. Since most bars, even most of the ones that provide live music, are little more than watering holes, it makes sense for the city to monitor them closely....