Though I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success, this highly evocative black-and-white short feature by Chicagoan Louis Antonelli, which has already received some well-deserved praise from Hollywood actress-director Ida Lupino, re-creates (or, more precisely, rediscovers) Chicago between 1945 and the present in a lovely noirish mood piece–shot in both film and video–about one woman’s loneliness, guided by her offscreen narration. In the dislocations between sight and sound, past and present, fiction and documentary, a haunted obsessional nostalgia takes shape, surrealist in feeling....

Some people wait nearly their whole lives to find work they truly love. So it was with Lyndell Zinsmeister. A few minutes later Robert Hudson and Carl McFadden walked in, and a third man, Harold Riggins, appeared in the doorway brandishing a shotgun. Hudson pulled a .38 revolver off his hip and announced, “This is a stickup.” In 1967 prison sentences in Illinois were “indeterminate.” Even inmates like Hudson were entitled to parole and they usually received it....

Out of the sea I saw a beast rising. Life is tough, after all, and the lost past always seems more attractive than the confusing present or the unknown future. The strong shake it off–realize that memory is an illusion, often a lie. We straighten our spines and smile and toast the striking of the hour, resolving to move on, to face what comes. To live. The beast was allowed to mouth bombast and blasphemy....

The Finnish cinema of today probably offers the most distinctive collective vision since Fassbinder and friends contributed theirs in 1970s Munich. In the films of the Kaurismaki brothers and their colleagues there’s a streak of subversive humor lurking under the bleak, dissolute existence of the postindustrial working class. While this idiosyncratic, tragicomic take pays oblique homage to film noir and urban Americana by way of Melville and Bresson, its droll, fatalistic transcendentalism is refreshingly original....

A question gnaws at me. Why are the buttons on those drive-up banking machines identified with braille? –Vox Populi, Baltimore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’re now thinking: Boy, those federal bureaucrats sure are stupid. Don’t they realize a blind person isn’t going to be able to drive to a drive-up ATM? Cecil reserves judgment on the stupidity question, but even if the feds weren’t smart enough to notice this little problem on their own, there were plenty of people who pointed it out for them before the rule was finalized....

“I don’t know anything about art,” boasts Marty Edelston, a cheery, toothy, 65-year-old New York businessman who recently donated his collection of 143 photographs to the Art Institute. “I just bought them for the messages.” Hanging near the Hindenburg thing was a lenticular photograph by Barbara Kruger that reads, alternately, “Our prices are insane!” and “I’m just looking” as the viewer shifts angles. Of Robert Heinecken’s Untitled News Women: Diane Sawyer–a blurry, pointillist rendition taken off the television screen–Edelston says, “Beware of the media....

All of the pieces on this scholarly 17th-century vocal program were either composed by or set to texts written by Italian or English women. The Italian half of the bill consists of a sacred madrigal, a sonetto, and a canzonetto by Francesca Caccini, a celebrated Florentine singer; a witty cantata by the gifted Barbara Strozzi, who espoused feminism in her father’s music academy; and a flowery motet by Isabella Leonarda, a prolific abbess from a well-connected family....

WILBUR CAMPBELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month, when the cultural-support organization Arts Midwest announced Chicagoans Wilbur Campbell and Franz Jackson as recipients of this year’s Jazz Masters award, the only truly honest reaction could have been, What took so long? The octogenarian saxophonist Jackson, a veteran of bands led by a host of legends (including Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, and Cab Calloway), leads his own groups and gets his well-deserved share of the spotlight....

Late on a Friday afternoon in the Annoyance Theatre’s grungy brick- lined storefront performance space, Susan Messing is working with a dozen improvisation students on character-development exercises. The next step, she announces, is to develop scenes using similar techniques. Men, more often than women, make what in improv are called “strong initiations” onstage; they enter a scene with a clearly defined character or physical action that others must follow. Many women find themselves merely reacting to the men onstage, playing roles that depend on the men for definition: fawning wives and mothers, dumb secretaries, whores, sisters, and girlfriends....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best contemporary example I know of in which a large museum has set aside a portion of its space for the exhibition of works by local artists is the Seattle Art Museum, in Seattle, Washington. That particular gallery is the first one the visitor enters, and it is the entry into the rest of the collection....

Beach Boys Skyline Stage, September 8 Joe Thomas, founder of River North, first proposed to Love the idea of a Beach Boys country album. Love, he told Billboard, replied, “If you can deliver Willie Nelson to me, I can deliver Brian Wilson to you.” As executive producer, Love positioned the Beach Boys’ hot-rod songs as forerunners of 90s country. “Both styles of music are uniquely American,” Love has said. “Both are about telling stories....

PERFORMANCE BY BOB EISEN REVISITED His world is utterly insular. Not only does he appear to live in his own little theatrical hole up in the rafters, he seems unprepared to deal with the presence of others. The first thing he does after giving his audience a nervous glance is to examine his face in a shaving mirror mounted on the ceiling. In this opening minute, Eisen deftly creates a wonderfully contradictory and therefore human character....

Today’s debate will consider the following proposition: That it is better for the environment to have a Republican in the White House. Now I’m sure a lot of you out there started giggling as you read that statement. This must be a joke, right? Republican presidents are famous for believing that trees cause air pollution. For trying to change the definition of “wetlands” so the Everglades won’t qualify. The creed of every Republican on the right side of the culture war insists that the only reason God created nature was so businessmen could make a profit by destroying it....

After almost five decades in the business, the Juilliard String Quartet is still one of the freshest-sounding groups around. The remarkable longevity of the Juilliard School’s (and the Library of Congress’s) resident quartet can be attributed to founder Robert Mann’s sense of artistic coherence and fierce commitment–and to his uncanny ability to select just the right people to succeed departing members. Mann knows well how to develop and when to respect a new member’s personality, as he’s done with the latest addition, violinist Joel Smirnoff....

MAVERICKS/JUNIOR BROWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This bill presents a pair of artists who might be tagged “alternative country,” stylistically and geographically operating outside of the Nashville machine, yet both having albums on Billboard’s country chart. Miami’s fabulous Mavericks have been the more successful of the two, tapping into a strong retro-countrypolitan vibe on the strength of Raul Malo’s sublime vocals. The group’s third album, Music for All Occasions, embraces a level of kitsch–an ironic emulation of 50s suburban utopianism, capped by a cover of “Something Stupid,” the schlocky Frank and Nancy Sinatra duet–that would typically sail right over the heads of mainstream country’s constituency....

On his recently issued second solo album, Here I Am (Watermelon), Austin rocker Monte Warden has lost some of the Buddy Holly influence that pervaded his terrific 1993 debut. Opting for a more contemporary sound (a la retro popsters like Nick Lowe, Marshall Crenshaw, and Chris Isaak), he’s incorporated a wider slate of styles, but they’re all delivered with his appealingly Holly-esque swagger. The album’s title track, for example, finds Warden working a soul burner, but his clean, wholesome voice prevents the listener from getting him mixed up with Al Green....

The day may come years from now when Kevin Lamm, his legacy in politics secure, will look back on what happened last Thursday and laugh. On his side Lamm has state senator Miguel del Valle, a politician so independent he refuses patronage, and the usual collection of hardworking and well-intended activists and reformers who usually get bashed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He certainly has an unusual background for Chicago politics–our own Mr....

These days, when trumpeter Red Rodney spins one of his lively, puckish solos, he offers not a snapshot of the moment but a panoramic photograph of his whole life. Thus you hear his roots in bebop, nurtured during his time as a Charlie Parker sideman–but now they flourish in the more contemporary structures gleaned from the younger musicians who have served as Red’s own acolytes. And while you can hear the depth of longing learned in the years away from jazz, it exists side-by-side with the pure wise joy that comes from late-blooming success....

Seattle’s Silkworm released two amazing albums last year: In the West (C/Z), which languished in the can for nearly a year before its release last January, and last fall’s even better Libertine (El Recordo). Their early-90s noise-‘n’-melody excursions may have sounded virtually indistinguishable from those of America’s ever-growing pack of seven-inch producers, but incessant touring brought about a transformation. The new records throb with an unsettling drama, exploiting indie-rock rudiments but somehow twisting them into something unfamiliar....

Curnutte & Maher 11/8, Otis’ I caught a whiff of early Dylan on the verses to “American Fadeaway” from this Nashville-based acoustic folk duo’s recent Alive (Marengo) (“She’s buying up books about romantic looks / And constantly changing her hair”), but these college-circuit entertainers, too nice to go in for the kill, retreat on the chorus to smarmy sentimentality (“She’s watching for blue skies”) that reeks of Neil Diamond. Crown Royals 11/8, Vic Stepping out from its long-standing Bluebird Lounge stint (the last Sunday of each month), this local funkstramental foursome cooks with a cool precision that might at first seem to clash with headliner Jon Spencer’s reckless abandon....