The iconic portrait of Che Guevara stoically gazing past the camera, captured by Cuban photographer Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (aka Alberto Korda) and reproduced on T-shirts by innumerable radicals stateside and abroad, is but a single glimpse of the photographic documentation of revolutionary Cuba, though it’s about the only image most of us know. Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution, which presents more than 100 photographs by 16 photographers covering the 40-odd years of Castro’s Cuba, opens Saturday at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S....

The final weekend of the 12th annual festival offers dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by writers and scholars on the theme of “Words & Music,” as well as theatrical and musical performances (see listings in this section and in Section Three). The following events take place at these locations: Alliance Francaise, 54 W. Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Chicago Historical Society, Clark at North; DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E....

Can you teach foundation officers new tricks? The journal of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Responsive Philanthropy, seems to have some doubts. An article in the fall issue reiterates findings of a 1997 study by the group, since confirmed in a follow-up analysis: “Conservative foundations often work in a similar and well-coordinated fashion. For example, they often provide general operating support to their grantees, expecting no specific outcomes for their investment....

By Ben Joravsky and Melody Rodgers The decision to build a new courthouse was one of those ideas that must have sounded great to the planners who hatched it in their cubicles in the County Building. That was about two and a half years ago, when county judges had begun to complain to Cook County Board president John Stroger that they were running out of courtrooms. In particular, they said, they needed new rooms for domestic-violence court, traffic court, and misdemeanor court....

The merchants of Roseland are begging for business. There are 27 hip-hop clothing boutiques on South Michigan between 111th and 113th, and their window displays of Fat Albert T-shirts, puffy K-Swiss sneakers, orange calf-length shorts with matching tops, and Daisy Duke cutoffs with pink satin roller-disco jackets just aren’t bringing in the customers, especially since every other store on the block is selling the same outfits. Samir, who’s 24, has been working at the sportswear shop for a month....

Jedi Mind Tricks started out in the mid-90s as fantastically dippy as PLUR ravers–but instead of blathering about Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect, they carried on about crop circles, tarot, auras, the Pleiades, magick, voodoo, Atlantis, vortices, and suchlike. But with each release they sound like they’ve degenerated a little more into straight-up thugs–even Ikon the Verbal Hologram dropped his moniker, now going by plain ol’ Vinnie. If you pay closer attention to their oeuvre though, you notice that their newfound anger comes with pulling their heads out of their cosmic asses and drawing influence from real-life violence....

Saturday, November 2, 8 PM: Two 30-ish men near the bar at TBA Exhibition Space in River North tipped their plastic shot glasses of Scotch toward each other. “To, uh, literature,” said one. “Yeah,” said the other, and they drank up. Hemon’s previous book, The Question of Bruno, a collection of short stories and a novella, came out in 2000. Before that, he was an unknown, a Bosnian writer and editor who’d come to the U....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s 15th annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe runs through 11/20 at the Curious Theatre Branch, 7001 N. Glenwood. Admission is $12 or “pay what you can”; for information and reser-vations, call 773-274-6660. It’s not easy to negotiate the subject of motherhood–to chart a course between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of gleeful attack. Veteran solo artist Jenny Magnus makes the attempt in Cant, a 45-minute monologue (with songs)....

New Dances 2003 Rituals can be stifling, to be sure–choreographer Liz Lerman says the best way to decide whether something needs changing is to substitute the word “convention” for “tradition” and see if you’re still interested in its preservation. But these choreographers managed to maintain their artistic vitality as they rang changes on the traditions in which they chose to work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paul Christiano, whose piece addresses rituals most explicitly, was the evening’s MVP....

Aaaaargh! Do you really want to go prancing around Las Vegas with the kind of loser who could win your impossible plagiarism contest? I went on-line to figure out who you plagiarized, thinking it would only take a day or two to track down the authors of the responses in your plagiarized column. Twelve hours later, I gave up. The only person who could win this contest is some professional research geek!...

hello cecil. my question is, the song lady marmalade, what are they saying? is it in another language, or what??? –thanx, kandy :o) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? It’s French, honey. It means, “Want to lie down with me this evening?” Lady Marmalade is a badass chick from the Moulin Rouge, see, and she has these needs....

Rock, Pop, etc. DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY CENTER STAGE performs “Remembering Rodgers and Hammerstein.” Sun 5/6, 3 PM, Lund Auditorium, Dominican University, 7900 W. Division, River Forest. 708-524-6942. CHESTER GREGORY, PACO, JIMMY TILLMAN, CRUMAR, RICK & DAVE, PHIL HOWARD, RAN JOHNSON, MEDIC PHIL PERKINS perform the music of Jackie Wilson. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 PM, and Sundays, 2:30 PM, Black Ensemble Theater, 4520 N. Beacon. 773-528-2428. KIM, KEVIN SO, JENNY CHOI, SU NAM Free concert entitled “Emerging: Asian American Sounds” also features Filipino theater group Pintig....

One Arm The Glass Menagerie. Now another important and compelling Williams work makes its debut here: director Moises Kaufman’s stage version of “One Arm” and Williams’s unproduced 1972 screenplay of the same title. A collaboration between Steppenwolf, About Face Theatre, and Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project, One Arm is still a work in progress. But in Kaufman’s sensitive adaptation, it’s far better than most of Williams’s later efforts. And as a showcase for a breathtaking lead performance by the brilliant and charismatic young Reynaldo Rosales, it’s not to be missed....

Grace O’Malley was a ferocious 16th-century pirate who captained her own ship into her 70s, plundering other vessels off the coast of Ireland. But Stockyard Theatre Project’s production of Marki Shalloe’s play is landlocked; we see Grace drinking mead she stole during her expeditions, but until the very end, when she meets Queen Elizabeth, she never even mentions what it feels like to sail the seas. Katie Cary Govier as Grace is amicable and charming as her character learns to fight, falls in love, and battles to save her county from a cruel English governor....

See Sunday. Gal joins local musicians Brian Labycz, Vadim Sprikut, and Jason Soliday for a set of live electronic improvisation. TV Pow headlines and the quartet of cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, trumpeter Axel Dorner, percussionist Michael Zerang, and bassist Jason Roebke plays second. Friday 1, 8:30 PM, Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee, second floor, 773-342-4597, $7. All ages. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local composer and bass clarinetist Gene Coleman has been organizing the Sound Field festival of new music every year since 2000, and one of the subtexts to emerge from the event is that the world is shrinking....

James Joyce’s The Dead It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan / And the fair and the brave whom we loved on earth are gone. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” depicts how a routine holiday tradition can explode with wonderful and terrible new meaning. Written in 1907 and published in Joyce’s landmark 1914 collection Dubliners, “The Dead” has now been adapted for the stage....

Like milking a rattlesnake. “You don’t have to expand gambling in Illinois to raise more tax money,” says University of Illinois business professor John Kindt in a recent university press release. “Just raise the taxes on casinos in operation, and you’ll get revenues right away.” Nevertheless, he thinks everyone would be better off if gambling were recriminalized. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Straight talk you won’t hear from the governor–or any other elected official....

In all the years I’ve been going to DanceAfrica Chicago–since 1991–I’ve never seen anything like Sidi Goma before. A group of musicians and dancers from the Indian state of Gujarat, it’s made up of African-Indian descendants of slaves and traders who came to the far western corner of India eight centuries ago. Its dozen members are Sufis–Muslims who believe in direct access to God through ecstatic experience–and they do seem to access whatever part of the brain houses the pleasure principle....

Since moving to New York six years ago, former Chicagoan Deanna Witkowski has continued to turn heads with a tough, wiry, and dynamic piano style; her shy demeanor and unassuming, girlish vocals only accentuate the effect. After twice reaching the finals of the Great American Jazz Piano Competition, she took first place in the 2002 edition, and her second release, this year’s Wide Open Window (Khaeon), documents a considerable leap from her self-produced debut: her playing has more power, and her treatment of material reveals a new depth of texture....

Byron Coley nails it in his liner notes for the reissue of Eleventh Dream Day’s Prairie School Freakout (Thrill Jockey) when he says that it sounds “rough, ready, and standing on the verge of flight into what seemed like a future of impossible promise.” When the record was first released in 1988, EDD was the brightest light in Chicago’s underrated indie-rock scene. Much as Marquee Moon had done for Television (an obvious influence), Prairie School Freakout revealed the extent of the band’s songcraft in a way that its live sets, however exhilarating, did not....