Peter Drake Lee Tracy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drake, who lives in New York City and was born in 1957 in a nearby suburb, traces his interest in art to an eye operation when he was seven: “I could see the world clearly for the first time. I started drawing everything I saw, and I never stopped.” Vermeer was an influence later because of “his appreciation of the lens” and lens-related effects like depth of field....

David Cale is relentlessly unassuming and subtle onstage, nothing like the manic, quicksilver John Leguizamo. Cale’s material is devoid of high-octane social and political rants, unlike Eric Bogosian’s. He avoids torturous explorations of his personal demons, unlike Spalding Gray. And he’s the most consistently satisfying, funny, insightful, and moving solo performer I’ve ever seen–Cale understands perfectly how to make a huge, beautiful world out of small, truthful details. His shows were a staple at the old Goodman studio in the early 90s, and now he returns to Chicago for one night, thanks to impresario Brigid Murphy and her Milly’s Orchid Show....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second, why does Henderson represent Heat Wave as an expression of liberal values but fail to notice that most of the political changes it criticizes–“reinventing government” in the spirit of business, delegating social service work to “community police” while cutting funds for other agencies, and “revitalizing” working-class neighborhoods by eliminating affordable housing–were primarily liberal projects? Henderson lauds Heat Wave for transcending “the usual left-liberal analysis” by examining the vulnerability of men, SRO residents, and elderly African-Americans....

Steve Asma has seen a lot, but he’d never seen a translucent rat until his brother gave him one for his birthday. It floats in a jar of formaldehyde, twisted awkwardly, as if its back were broken. You can see through the skin and muscles. Its bones have somehow been dyed red, so that a rodent skeleton looms in ghostly outline beneath the tissues. “The rib cage and spine and feet and hands are articulated very clearly,” says Asma, who doesn’t like the rodent much....

Madame de Sade Contemporary Americans may not understand how a writer so far right of center could celebrate the Marquis de Sade, which is what Mishima did in this neoclassical swoon through the raptures of sexual cruelty and degradation. To us, sexual insurrectionists belong on the radical left. But in Mishima’s worldview, eroticized mutilation harked back to Japan’s samurai code, which held that disembowelment was the purest expression of devotion to the emperor....

I’m a man in my mid-30s and I just started dating after the end of a five-year relationship. The last three dates I’ve had have been with women on Terminator-style search-and-be-impregnated missions: “Has job…does not live at home…Full head of hair…MATCH! MATCH! MATCH!” For these women, a successful date isn’t “Gee, I kind of like you, let’s hang out, get to know each other, and maybe have sex.” It’s more like “OK, you’ll do; let’s buy a house and have kids now....

As a filmmaker who’s always philosophizing about his family, his southern heritage, and the meaning of life, Ross McElwee can get a little high-flown at times. The funniest shot in the latest installment of his autobiographical saga, Bright Leaves, brings him down to earth a bit—and shows that McElwee actually may have learned something from the deflation. The shot occurs toward the end of the film and there are several reasons it’s so funny....

Six years ago, Barry Bauman and his colleague Margaret Nowosielska pulled up in front of the YMCA on South Wabash, a gloomy five-story redbrick building with boarded-up windows. Mark Marshall, a YMCA development consultant, greeted them outside, then tussled with the rusty padlock and chain that secured the wooden doors. Turning on flashlights, they walked into the pitch-black building. Unlike most other African-American children, Scott attended an elementary school for whites....

I appreciate Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of In the Mood for Love and his general understanding of director Wong Kar-wai’s intentions in terms of its direction. At the same time, I believe that, owing to his unfamiliarity with the culture during this period [1962], some of the nuances so finely expressed in this movie may have eluded him. For example, the “neck brace” he describes is what is known as a Mandarin collar and is generally part of what constitutes a traditional Chinese dress....

Less than two months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, mainstream country’s best singer sang a new song called “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” at the Country Music Association Awards. Within days the treacly soft-rock ballad had become a smash hit on country radio; in fact it shot to number one faster than any country song in four years. At its best country music speaks to universal emotions, but though “Where Were You” runs the whole emotional gamut–horror, anger, sorrow, pity, pride–it’s a prime example of country at its stereotypical worst....

In 1979–the year WLUP hosted Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park and I learned to polka in gym class–the boys of Brave Combo turned to polka, not punk, to thumb their noses at commercial music. Like any polka purveyors worth their pilsner, they’re brilliant musicians but modest enough to make sure that every flickering clarinet run and deft horn minisolo slavishly serves the danceable tunes. And like anybody who’s stuck with an endangered music for 25 years, they’re as stubborn as my gramma: in liner notes, in PR materials, and in interviews, they insist nonstop that the genre they love is hip and relevant, goddammit....

Friday 9/27 – Thursday 10/3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 28 SATURDAY Although the local group Animal Rights Mobilization disbanded in January because executive director Kay Sievers was leaving town for New Mexico, several members weren’t ready to give up the fight. In June they launched Compassion Into Action, a new animal rights organization that focuses on the problem of overpopulation. Strategies will be hammered out at the group’s second meeting, which takes place today from 1 to 3 at the Edgewater Public Library, 1210 W....

I make no secret of my belief in Chris Potter’s preeminence, not only among his generation of jazzmen but also in the long legendry of the music’s saxophonists. Potter echoes Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, and Wayne Shorter but he imitates none of them. On all his instruments, from soprano sax to bass clarinet, Potter speaks with an improvisational logic that belies his years, but he still does his primary work on tenor, producing a focused, throaty timbre that further narrows on the highest notes, giving them an extra urgency....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have been working closely with inmates who create art for 12 years. Their artwork has been shown in galleries and museums in New York, Indiana, Georgia, Michigan, and Illinois. I was very interested to read the Reader [July 13] and Chicago Tribune stories on the intended official declaration of a ban on art supplies in Illinois prisons....

The last time pianist Danilo Perez played the Jazz Showcase, he did something his fans have been begging him to: he recorded his working trio live in a club. Now he returns to the scene to celebrate the imminent Web-only release of that recording. Of course, the clamor for a live disc didn’t arise because there’s any lack of fire, expertise, or conceptual depth in Perez’s studio albums: over the past decade he’s recorded ambitious compositions, brilliantly executed, with groups ranging from a trio to a ten-piece ensemble (the latter for Suite of the Americas, commissioned by the city for the 1999 Chicago Jazz Festival and excerpted on the 2000 Verve disc Motherland)....

The fourth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, February 23 through 25, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Admission is $7, $3 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-443-3737. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended. The Restless Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A tremendous commercial success in Finland, this 2000 debut feature by Aku Louhimies explores the desperate narcissism of the privileged young, who question love and cling to their freedom in the face of marriage and parenthood....

Four of the new season’s best shows are hot and sensual rather than cool and conceptual–though they’re not lacking ideas. At Bodybuilder and Sportsman, Leslie Baum’s abstracted landscapes based on her travel photos are striking for the way their contrasting forms intensify the lovely colors. Flat tan rocks outlined in black in I Remember Rock River Valley suggest a cartoon style while large washes of fuzzy browns and grays are as diffuse as clouds....

Cinema Without Borders: Films by Joris Ivens Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have to confess that my acquaintance with Ivens’s work has been spotty, and it remains so, even though I recently crammed in several videos; 16 of his films will be showing in brand-new prints at the Gene Siskel Film Center over the next three weeks, part of a traveling show that started in New York and will end in Vancouver....

Jazz singer Karrin Allyson scored the biggest commercial success of her career with last year’s Ballads, which contained covers of all the songs that appeared on John Coltrane’s famous 1962 recording of that title; next week she’ll release another thematic disc, In Blue (Concord), on which she explores the most familiar hue in popular music. Some of the songs stick close to traditional blues forms–the jazz standard “Moanin’,” the hard-core Bonnie Raitt fave “Love Me Like a Man”–while others, such as Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy,” refract the genre through a sophisticated jazz sensibility; Allyson’s palette also includes Joni Mitchell’s considerably lighter (but no less soulful) “Blue Motel Room,” as well as several songs (“Angel Eyes,” “The Meaning of the Blues”) that aren’t structurally blues at all, but qualify because of their melancholy and longing....

With their small central images surrounded by rectangles of mottled red or yellow, the eight paintings by Marjorie Guyon at G.R. N’Namdi recall the ruined wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but in place of natural decay she offers craft. Made of marble dust mixed with pigments from soil, her luminescent color fields seem to lift off the canvas, giving the space around them a vibrant glow. Abyssinia #15 sets a hard-to-identify shape–actually a picture of a pitcher’s spout taken from a book and collaged onto a panel–in a field of red....