The receptionist at an Oakbrook Terrace hotel directs me to a back room, where the radio program Robert Frazen’s One on One, focusing on the media, politics, and entertainment, is taped every month. Frazen, the host and producer, has invited me to discuss movies. Describing the evening, he emphasizes its unconventional range. “There’s going to be the program, a dinner, music, trivia, prizes, and dancing,” he says. With an almost evangelical zeal, Frazen says that when he’s moderating a discussion, “I feel serene and very joyful,” free and alive....

Only four original members of the Skatalites play on the band’s new album, From Paris With Love (World Village), but the disc is hardly the work of some ghost band cashing in on former glories. The ska pioneers have gone through countless lineup shifts since they changed the shape of Jamaican music back in the mid-60s (they’ve disbanded and re-formed frequently as well), but the group has remained vital thanks to the constant presence of drummer Lloyd Knibb and bassist Lloyd Brevett....

CARDIA 8/1, DOUBLE DOOR Here’s a band that’s much better than it has any right to be, considering it employs members of Rival Schools, Shudder to Think, and the Verve Pipe. On its debut (on Silverthree) it’s going for a windswept, stadium-size postpunk sound that owes as much to Simple Minds as it does to Soundgarden (as it does to Coldplay as it does to the Smashing Pumpkins). That’s a recipe for dreadful in nearly anyone’s hands, and this doesn’t start out promisingly, with front man Ian Love repeatedly crying “sublime” in a familiar Bono flutter....

MISTREATERS 2/23, HIDEOUT On their first official full-length, Grab Them Cakes (Big Neck), which reprises one song from their 1999 full-length cassette, The Mistreaters Don’t Do Drugs and Stay in School, these Milwaukee boys demonstrate how it’s done–it in this case being greasy, raw, and ruthlessly paced garage punk. Controlled sloppiness within dazzling tightness, a big thick swampy sound with a distinct swing, basket-weaving riffs, and garbage-can drums evoke a smoky little dive so packed and steamy that guys sweat beer and girls disrobe....

Rosetta By Jonathan Rosenbaum All of this is a roundabout way of underscoring my point that it’s silly for the mainstream American press to go on assuming that foreign movies are neither relevant to American audiences nor important. Rosetta, a Belgian film that’s starting its second and final week at the Music Box, won the top prize at Cannes, the world’s top film festival, and its 18-year-old lead, Emilie Dequenne, shared the best-actress award....

Say what you like about the United States–I’m proud to live in a country where ethnic tension produces offbeat comedies instead of mass graves. This feature by Benny Mathews is Indo-America’s entry in the “Big Fat Wedding” sweepstakes, but instead of broad swipes at colorful immigrants and bland WASPs it offers some surprisingly pungent satire of Americanized “Desis” and their industrious efforts to distance themselves from their homeland. A sunny but hopelessly dorky Indian student (Sunil Malhotra) arrives in Houston, moves in with his aunt and uncle, and immediately becomes a social drag on his hip, materialistic cousin (Kal Penn, who’s hilarious)....

The sentiment prevails even in indie-experimental circles that the venerable Japanese heavy-psychedelic scene is way out over the edge of listenability, the very definition of obscure–just about everything short of “inscrutable.” It would be nice if the appearance of Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.–the big, marvelous communal venture loosely led by guitar giant Makoto Kawabata of Musica Transonic–on the cover of the latest issue of the Wire did something to dispel that perception, but I’m afraid nothing will do that, short of more exposure to the music itself....

It’s past midnight at Wicker Park’s Big Wig nightclub, and Dr. Pants Laroo is sitting at the bar, looking glum. She’d been painting on the dance floor for over an hour, but the management felt the bright spotlight shining on her canvas was dampening the party vibe. “They asked me to take a break so they could turn out the light for people to dance,” she says. “I don’t really like it, but I understand it needs to be done....

Lunchtime diners at Piece, Wicker Park’s busy pizzeria and brewpub, occasionally spot a man in in coveralls and rubber boots through the brewery window. “Essentially, I’m a janitor,” quips Jonathan Cutler, Piece’s brewer, as he hoses out the 217-gallon copper tanks. Much of his job involves cleaning–filters, pumps, three tanks for every batch of beer–but his serious attention to sanitation is critical: the cleaner the equipment, the less likely the beer is to be cardboardy or skunky....

Robert Otto’s Marilyn Monroe collection is not for sale. Not for $1 million or $3 million. “It’s not for sale at any price,” Otto says. At least not right now. Maybe he’ll think about it after “Marilyn: The American Treasure,” the exhibit he’s organizing, is over. Though its venue and opening date are up in the air (Otto says several Las Vegas hotels have been vying for the chance to host it), its content is not....

Friday 10/12 – Thursday 10/18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 13 SATURDAY Following the end of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war–the longest armed conflict in Latin American history, in which more than 150,000 people died and some 45,000 “disappeared”–the Archbishop’s Office on Human Rights in Guatemala interviewed nearly 7,000 people for its Recovery of the Historic Memory Project. “We are gathering the memories of the people because we want to contribute to the construction of a different country,” said Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera in 1998....

Friday 1/5 – Thursday 1/11 6 SATURDAY How do year-round cyclists keep their feet warm and toasty in winter? One trick is to trade the bike shoes and tights for lace-up boots and rain pants. At today’s free winter cycling class, all-weather bicycling “professor” Gin Kilgore will elaborate on how to dress inexpensively and handle a bike in inclement weather. The Bike Winter event also promises “hot bikers modeling layering–and unlayering–techniques,” a riding demonstration in a confetti “snowstorm,” and door prizes....

HARRY ALLEN & JOE COHN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When most people hear tenor saxist Harry Allen, they immediately think of Stan Getz–as well they should. Though Allen wasn’t yet born when Getz released his hugely popular early-60s bossa nova albums, he revels in the cool, hard tone and heated swing that first made Getz famous in the 40s; on ballads in particular Allen nails Getz’s throaty, questing upper register like William Tell at ten paces....

The hands on the wooden clock in Susan Cayton Woodson’s dining room haven’t moved since her repairman left town. Though it’s a Thursday afternoon in August, the clock–which has rotating windows displaying the month and day of the week–says it’s 6:26 on a Friday in March. Jefferson Davis gave it to Woodson’s great-grandfather, Hiram Revels, who in 1870 became the first black man elected to the U.S. Senate. Woodson, who runs an art gallery out of her Hyde Park condo, is one of Revels’s oldest living descendants....

Baseball fans know that the problem with a perfect game is that it’s boring. The pitcher has thrown a work of art—no hits, no home runs, no sacrifices, no bottom-of-the-ninth heroics—but the genius is in the details, not the highlight reel. Who knows—maybe people were thrown off by Spielberg and his old pal Martin Scorsese trading places this season. Scorsese released Gangs of New York, a fat-budget epic of questionable historical accuracy, but he doesn’t have Spielberg’s talent for convincing us that his movie is at least as important as the actual history....

Lead Stories In January, Kaziah Hancock and Cindy Stewart won almost $300,000 in damages from a breakaway Mormon sect in Manti, Utah, after self-proclaimed prophet Jim Harmston persuaded Hancock to give the church 67 acres of land, promising to produce Jesus Christ himself in the flesh. According to Hancock, Harmston told her the church would provide her with a home, but made only one payment on it, ostensibly because God told him to renege....

In the neighborhood joints where blues guitarist Sammy Fender has been a mainstay since the 50s, emotional honesty and the ability to generate excitement are at least as important as originality. Fender borrows heavily from B.B. King’s string-bending style, but he also plays declamatory chords and crisp single-note clusters adapted from late-50s west-side stylists like Magic Sam. When he takes on a classic like Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” (retooled as “King Bee’s Tale” on his 2002 disc Live in Chicago!...

Scapin I don’t know if this vignette takes place at every performance of Scapin. The script–adapted by playwrights Shelley Berc and Andrei Belgrader and composer Rusty Magee from Moliere’s farce Les fourberies de Scapin–is designed to accommodate the actors’ comic contributions, both planned and spontaneous. This superb show–directed by Christopher Bayes, a theater teacher at Juilliard, Yale, and New York University, and presented in conjunction with Seattle’s Intiman Theatre–shrewdly juxtaposes carefully rehearsed scenes with bursts of improvisation....

It took guts, in McCarthy-crazed 1953, to get up and publicly argue for clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Ruby Dee did it without hesitation, though it could have meant the end of her career. “I don’t remember how I happened to be asked to speak [at a rally for the Rosenbergs],” she wrote in With Ossie & Ruby, the autobiography she and husband Ossie Davis published a few years ago....

I met him in October, at the opening of my first solo show in New York, a series of ten portraits. I was saying good night to my sister-in-law at the door when he parked his silver coupe at a hydrant in front of the gallery. We watched him walk to the center of the room to greet my dealer and two of her clients, an older couple he seemed to know well....