Rodney Cozart knows that at 27 he’s a little young to appreciate his own mortality. Yet he’s lived on the west side most of his life and has seen it become a place where young people have to face death every day. “I recollect that when I was coming up, if a kid died, they were either sick or got hit by a car. But now a kid will come home and say, ‘Oh yeah, mama, we stepped over a body coming across the parking lot....

Like other Cuban musicians such as Lazaro Ros and Orlando “Puntilla” Rios–who have both performed in Chicago within the past year–Los Munequitos de Matanzas are masters of roots rumba. This hauntingly beautiful music wraps a paper-thin Spanish veneer over a visceral and intellectual feast of polyrhythmic percussion, Yoruba chanting, and dance, all derived directly from the West African traditions that came to the Caribbean with the 18th-century slave trade. Los Munequitos’ U....

Brilliant, problematic, and hyperbolic, Mike Leigh’s postapocalyptic look at post-Thatcher England may look like allegory, but only because the picaresque story line, this time involving lone individuals rather than families, seems to sprawl more randomly than usual (which, incidentally, makes the customary clash of acting styles all the more glaring). What passes for a plot involves the restless, random movements of a working-class pontificator on the dole who’s visiting his former girlfriend in London, to no clear purpose, and a number of the people he encounters, including his former girlfriend’s roommate, a homeless couple, a philosophical night watchman, and a couple of women who take him in....

Photography may have roots much older than its 155-year history, a clever exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art suggests. “An Eye for Antiquity,” on loan from the Tampa Museum of Art, is 80 photographs from the eclectic collection of nearly 3,000 amassed by Mr. and Mrs. William Zewadski, who, after acquiring classical Greek and southern Italian vases, turned their passion for collecting to photographs on Greco-Roman themes. And perhaps the Zewadskis’ shift from acquiring antiquities to acquiring the photographic record of antiquity is not so odd: it does reflect a trend in the technology of collecting....

“Look,” the old man said, stopping me as I walked down Lincoln Avenue. “They moved out and left them behind!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I looked through the window of the empty storefront, which until recently had housed a computer store. Sitting close together were three gray-and-black cats, a mother and two kittens. I’d seen them a few times before, rubbing up against the glass or napping next to the software programs and mouse pads....

As it begins its 19th season next week, the small but well-respected Chicago String Ensemble struggles to regain its bearings in the wake of the resignation earlier this month of its only two full-time staff members, music director Alan Heatherington and general manager Mary Jo Deysach. Heatherington, who didn’t return calls for comment on his resignation, helped launch the CSE almost two decades ago and has conducted all but one of the group’s concerts....

SCHWA 8/4, DOME ROOM It’s tough to tell just where this Chicago foursome is coming from, but after suffering through a pair of its CDs I’m unwilling to work too hard at figuring it out. Their 1993 album Nine Days Out of Prison (Phonetic) lurks along the fringe of industrial disco with a foot planted firmly in melodramatic rock, particularly in regard to the painfully tuneless, overwrought caterwauling of Beverly Gibson....

In a gas oven you can cook a turkey for five, six hours, and the oven is not vented to the outside. But run your gas furnace for any time at all without a vent and somebody is gonna die. Huh? A gas range typically uses 10,000-15,000 BTUs of energy per hour. Most houses are sufficiently leaky that ample fresh oxygen can be drawn from outside to replace what’s lost to combustion....

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf There’s a marvelous show at Steppenwolf right now–a thrilling all-black production that fuses inventive poetry, tightly choreographed movement, evocative music, and sensitive visual design into a powerful, moving, politically committed work of theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Controversial at the time it opened because of its anguished, scathing perspective on male-female relations in the black community, For Colored Girls is a landmark work of American theater–an uncompromisingly raw yet exquisitely poetic outpouring of what its opening lines proclaim to be “dark phrases of womanhood,” built around the theme of women’s need to love themselves before they can share their lives with men....

Peggy Robinson: Cracked Most of us no longer really see the city we live in. We walk or drive through it preoccupied with our thoughts or, if we’re consumers of the news media, apprehensive. Received thinking about the city is that the streets contain only fear and danger and that all its pleasures are locked up, accessible only to those with money. If, however, we happen to turn off the streets we’ve become incapable of seeing and cut through the Chicago Cultural Center, we’ll come across a quite different vision of our city’s streets in the paintings of Peggy Robinson....

TRANSCENDING TIME AND SPACE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though the theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival–birth and death–serves as the raison d’etre for this chamber concert by mostly Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians, what makes it noteworthy is the inclusion of Duke Ellington in the program alongside Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and George Crumb, each an influential iconoclast of his generation of American classical composers....

Angele With Orane Demazis, Fernandel, Directed by Betty Thomas Michael McKean, Christine Taylor, But even though I’m not an expert on Pagnol or Angele (1934)–commonly regarded as his greatest film, playing this Saturday in a beautiful new 35-millimeter print during Facets Multimedia’s long-overdue Pagnol retrospective–or on The Brady Bunch Movie, still playing commercially all over town, these very different films offer fruitful comparisons. Released 61 years apart, they are both highly popular populist entertainments about the way a particular group of people in a particular closed environment live and behave, and together they provide a good many clues about how popular entertainment has changed during those six decades....

In the wake of REM’s success in the mid-80s, jangle-laden guitar pop inundated college radio airwaves; arpeggiated guitar chords and wispy harmonies were the order of the day. Back then drummer Ric Menck, a Champaign native, and bassist Paul Chastain, who’s from Evanston, were knee-deep in nasally wimp-pop: the Reverbs, Choo Choo Train, Springfields, Bag O’Shells, and Paint Set were among their bands. When they relocated to Rhode Island their irresistible pop developed more of an edge, and at the start of this decade a couple of other fortuitous things happened....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently heard, in a scientific meeting, that Icelandic women are raised so that they are unable to let go of emotion and to permit closeness. Matta seems to contradict this. For example, and I quote from the story, “She’ll hug you when you say good-bye,” etc, and “Kids [in the outreach center where she works] hop up on her lap and hug her....

Shirley Collins The Holly Bears the Crown Bridget St. John (See for Miles) Behind Closed Doors By Byron Coley Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The material on this album is as dark as anyone could want. Stories of infanticide, kisses from poisoned lips, lovers dangling from gallows, and forced servitude are all woven into the music’s starkly gorgeous fabric. Shirley’s voice is a magnificent instrument, moving the lyrics surely along while conveying the sense of desperate hope that called them into being....

Ali Farka Toure sometimes sounds like he has one foot planted in the Mississippi Delta and the other in the Niger. His work is deeply rooted in Malian tradition; in one interview he explained that he sings about “education, work, love, and society.” But although he sings exclusively in West African languages, he sounds like a country bluesman. His guitar work betrays his admiration for John Lee Hooker, and there’s also a formal resemblance: Malian griot songs and the blues both rely on pentatonic scales and repetition....

TANGO EDWARDO Herrera is cute in a sweet, naive way. He’s a young man delighted by the discovery of his own homosexuality and femininity and consequent attraction to female role models. Yet this delight is tinged with irony, because he seems to know that he can never be the women he emulates. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout Tango Edwardo, Herrera seems like a woman trapped in the body of a very gentle man....

Last month I raised the awful possibility that Bob Greene’s entire persona–the aw-shucks, semiretarded bit–was just an act, a sham, a convenient pose to facilitate the cynical grinding out of yet another daily column. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Look at “The cameras roll, and the ugliness keeps spreading” (November 7). At first it seems typical Bob boilerplate. A black high school football player punches a white ref....

In all his is various roles–pianist, bandleader, journalist, raconteur–the jazz and blues musician Art Hodes proved himself an enthusiastic and valuable historian. For instance, at the height of the bebop era Hodes edited a publication (The Jazz Record) dedicated to the traditional jazz of the 20s and 30s–even as he was assembling a group of like-minded musicians to demonstrate the validity of that music with a series of famous recordings for the young Blue Note label....

San Francisco performer seeks Chicago audience for weekend of high-energy, thought-provoking fun. In his early 20s, Fred Adler is an artist in progress; this two-part work about a young man’s anxious quest for employment and housing is less strong on subtlety than on brash vigor. But it’s an intelligent and exuberant piece that will speak especially effectively to anyone who’s ever suffered the identity crisis that can accompany sudden joblessness or living-space insecurity....