For hip jazz diggers nothing beats a set so off-the-path that only musicians and a very few aficionados know about it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a long, dark upstairs room where horizontal blinds screen out most of the street light bouncing off the hotel wall across King Drive, the crowd is small but way attentive. Dark silhouettes form the classic grouping: bass, trumpet, sax, drums....

“What kind of article are you writing?” the Miss Tri-Village pageant coordinator asked skeptically when I began questioning her about her involvement with the Miss Illinois program. She had me there. I’d been hanging around at the pageant’s “leadership conference” all day, and aside from a bad case of the snubs–which I’d received from everyone from Miss Illinois herself right down to one of the contestant’s moms–I didn’t have much to write about....

The 17th-century French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier wrote his share of theatrical and other secular music, but he’s best remembered as a composer of works on religious themes, most notably from his years as master of music at Sainte Chapelle, one of France’s two most prestigious church music posts at the time. His harmonic inventions and idiosyncratic use of vocal color make his music particularly engaging. In this week’s concerts Music of the Baroque will offer a pair of Charpentier premieres–The Prodigal Son and (pushing the season a bit) Midnight Mass for Christmas–and one revival of a Charpentier work presented in the group’s first season, Laetatus Sum....

Lead Story In March Robert Licciardi, 36, freshly convicted in California of killing his disabled father to get the family fortune, claimed in a letter to the Stockton Record that he’d had incompetent counsel, that the judge was “unfair,” “prejudiced,” and “unreasonable” for having allowed Licciardi to represent himself. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stewart R. Flaharty, 64, who worked in the morgue at York Hospital in York, Pennsylvania, for 22 years, was fired in August and charged with abuse of a corpse....

Rebels of the Neon God Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang acknowledges that this film, his first, is part of a long tradition: focusing on four alienated youths, he has one of them confront a large James Dean poster. Two characters, brothers, steal phone coin boxes and video-game innards for a living; the third is one brother’s flirtatious girlfriend, lusted after by the other brother and by the fourth character, Hsiao Kang, who’s dropped out of a grueling preparatory program to wander about Taipei....

ECHOBELLY But echobelly–responsible for two albums so far, the 1994 debut Everyone’s Got One and last fall’s On–is far more spunky than punky. Though the band often draws comparisons to the latter-day Britpop of bands like Elastica and Blur (and to earlier New Wave acts like Blondie), echobelly’s best songs–“Insomniac” from the first album, “King of the Kerb” from the latest–recall some of the sheer fun of early bubblegum punksters like the Undertones, who sang songs about “chocolate and girls” (as they put it) as if their lives depended on it....

This third compilation of clips from MGM musicals–introduced, like its predecessors, by many of the leading performers (June Allyson, Cyd Charisse, Lena Horne, Howard Keel, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, and Esther Williams)–has so much pleasure to offer that any purist quibbles seem minor. Not only have writers-directors-producers Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan, who worked as editors on the two previous films, come up with heaps of wonderful and fascinating new material (excluded numbers from Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Cabin in the Sky, The Harvey Girls, Easter Parade, and even I Love Melvin); they’ve also introduced a welcome critical note into the proceedings, demonstrating how dubious some of MGM’s aesthetic decisions were and allowing Horne to voice some of her own misgivings about the bigoted policies that limited her activity....

Headlines we were afraid to read beyond: “Toothbrush manufacturers bristle with activity” (Chicago Dental Society news release, August 16). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There’s no such thing as a parent,” one stay-at-home dad tells the Chicago-based Claretian Publications newsletter Bringing Religion Home (August/ Cost-effectiveness is where you find it. “One story in particular illustrates [the late University of Chicago physics Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan] Chandrasekhar’s devotion to his science and his students,” according to a U....

Trance Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwright David Hauptschein’s metaphors have fangs, claws, razors, and blades. His refined and condensed version of Trance, first presented last fall, disembowels the American dream by slicing up the luckless Fleegler family, who hope to strike it rich selling pencils with fortunes tucked under their erasers. First, though, they’ll have to stop tearing one another to shreds. Miraculously Hauptschein crafts this blacker-than-black tragicomedy without a trace of malice, opting instead for limitless empathy and crooked humor....

ELIZABETH LAYTON: DRAWING ON LIFE Despite its humorous elements (including a perplexed-looking woman who recalls Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) this drawing–made when Layton was 74–depressed me. I wanted to deny its truthfulness; I preferred not to see that its entrapped woman had been done in by her own shortcomings as well as by the actions (or inaction) of other women. All of Layton’s best drawings display this same sort of unflinching honesty, both in the way they’re made–anchored in the act of observation–and in their analysis of personal and social issues, including women’s rights, male and female relationships, aging, AIDS, hunger, capital punishment, censorship, and racism....

In most hands, the jazz harmonica remains a somewhat limiting instrument, with an unwieldy design that would seem to defy its practitioners’ creativity. But the harmonica–especially the chromatic model, which contains all the sharps and flats of the scale (unlike the little Marine Band blues harmonicas)–also has a vocal, arioso quality. In the right hands, like those of Bruno De Filippi, it can uniquely express the flightier aspects of improvisation. You might think of De Filippi as Italy’s answer to the better-known Toots Thielemans....

Friday 28 Get the visitors’ perspective on the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 from three professors and a photographic scholar at this morning’s program at the Chicago Historical Society, Clark and North. Experiencing the Fair will look at, among other things, “how photographs reveal people’s thoughts about the fair” and “what people actually did when they went to the fair,” say organizers. It runs from 9 to 12:30 in the Rubloff Auditorium....

Friday 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The London Observer called it “an immensely enjoyable pop Hamlet”; the Manchester Guardian said it was “expressionistic, thrilling . . . operatic and emotional [with] a theatrical dynamism and energy which is usually lacking from our own cerebral, austere and word-bound stages.” They’re all talking about the Theatre of Moscow-Southwest’s Russian-language version of the lonely prince’s story, which along with their Romeo and Juliet (both translated by Boris Pasternak) will be at UIC for two weeks of repertory performances....

The tenth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, runs from Friday, April 22, through Thursday, May 5. Film and video screenings will be at Pipers Alley, 1609 N. Wells; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at the Three Penny, 2424 N. Lincoln; at the University of Chicago’s Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St.; at the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall, 5500 N....

Fran Lebowitz is coming to Chicago, which she considers to be one of two “real” American cities—the other, of course, is New York City, where she has lived since 1970 (a transplanted Jersey girl). She will be onstage April 15 at 7:30 PM at the Auditorium Theatre, where she will be engaged in conversation with […] Tired of the rough stuff in Rogers Park, Curious Theatre Branch will take its shows on the road....

“It’s a wood nymph.” Doug Taron’s voice sounds tight, urgent. “Gary, can you catch it?” But Gary doesn’t need us. “Got it!” he hollers. We run toward him. I’m a novice here, but even I know that Gary’s hostage won’t turn out to be a nubile Lolita. We gather close to examine his catch through the web of the butterfly net. The wood nymph’s wings have the brown color and dusty texture of a dirt road, yet it has the elegance all butterflies seem to possess....

Focusing the Sun-Times Dantrell Davis and the throes of the CHA dominated the front page of the Sun-Times for ten straight days. Even when the lead story was about something else, the paper worked Dantrell in. A page one dedicated to the huge Democratic rally in the Loop carried a box that said “‘We owe it to Dantrell Davis. We have an obligation to the children who cry themselves to sleep at night out of fear because our streets are so dangerous....

Did Jacques Offenbach sacrifice his true potential to be accepted as a Jew in a Christian world? Was Iago driven by unconscious homosexual feelings for Otello? Did Wagner suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This collection of 18 essays on 24 operas–four by Mozart are treated in a single chapter, as are the four of Wagner’s Ring cycle–started 20 years ago as scripts to accompany the Thursday-night opera broadcast on Indiana Public Radio....

MESSIAH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A false messiah is the strongest test of a true believer. That paradox finds powerful proof in Martin Sherman’s 1982 Messiah, a fast-moving folktale set in a turbulent time: 1665, when Eastern European Jews, weary of pogroms by Ukrainian Cossacks, were inspired by a messianic figure. Shabbetai Tzvi, it was said, would ride into Constantinople accompanied by the prophet Elijah, dethrone the sultan, then march triumphantly to Jerusalem’s rebuilt temple to be crowned King of the Jews; the ten lost tribes, rediscovered in Arabia, would attack the Jews’ other enemies....

Street photography has typically been linked to stories of on-the-scene reporters and lucky snapshots. But its power comes from a deeper interaction between the shooter and the street, according to photographer Joel Meyerowitz and Art Institute curator Colin Westerbeck, who collaborated on the new book Bystander: A History of Street Photography (Bulfinch Press). A related exhibit of 120 photos is currently at the Art Institute along with a show of color photographs from Meyerowitz’s early years, “Joel Meyerowitz on the Street: The First Decade....