This summer Father Brendan Curran, a young priest at Pilsen’s Saint Pius V Church, was asked to write the reflection for Labor in the Pulpits, a nationwide celebration of workers held the Sunday before Labor Day. He thought of Pedro and Leticia, a Guatemalan couple new to his parish. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We got some of the hardest work because we didn’t have the legal status,” says Pedro, who was often assigned to clean out sweltering ovens in a gum factory....

Some years ago, as I sat on a professional committee, the subject of the Mingus Big Band came up. A colleague asked, “You mean they play only Mingus’s music?” When told yes, she put her foot in her mouth: “He wrote enough music to fill a whole album?” An innovative bassist and volatile bandleader, Charles Mingus was also the most important jazz composer after Duke Ellington, his catalog bursting with indelible hard-bop anthems, deathless threnodies, multilayered blues tunes (some of which double as pointed political commentaries), turbulent tone poems, and sprawling, occasionally massive symphony-length works....

PIANO and TWELFTH NIGHT, OR WHAT YOU WILL, Court Theatre. Both these serious comedies, performed in repertory, explore themes of sexual folly and social inequality. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night portrays a muddled romantic quadrangle: Viola, dressed as a young man, loves Count Orsino, who pines for Olivia and sends Viola to woo her on his behalf; Olivia falls for the disguised Viola, and Olivia’s servant Malvolio is tricked into believing that his mistress will love him if he behaves like a madman....

What Time Is It There? With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-ching, Miao Tien, Cecilia Yip, and Jean-Pierre Leaud. I’m thinking in particular of two French filmmakers who are quite distinct in most other respects: Jacques Rivette and Jacques Tati. Rivette is the more obvious reference point because all of his films from 1968 through 1974 (far and away his richest and most exciting period to date)–the roughly four-hour feature L’amour fou (1968), the 13-hour serial Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971), the four-hour feature Out 1: Spectre (1972), and the three-hour feature Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)–are constructed as elaborate two-part inventions, oscillating back and forth between the members of a couple, 35- and 16-millimeter footage, theater and life, sanity and madness (L’amour fou); between various pairs of improvising actors, city and country, conspiracy and chaos (both versions of Out 1, which also move between theater and life, sanity and madness); and between two alternating stories, two heroines, and many rhyming shots and situations (Celine and Julie Go Boating)....

With a billowing tone on alto and tenor, a sinuous sound on soprano, and a juggernaut quality to his improvisations on all horns, saxophonist Sonny Fortune is a vital reminder of the power and promise that lit jazz from within during the 1960s. Fortune first grabbed the attention of jazz fans in the early 70s as a member of the McCoy Tyner Quartet; that particular edition of the band recorded a breakthrough album, Sahara, which remains one of the pianist’s finest....

During a recent trip to Shanghai, I had a chance to see the city’s basketball team, the Sharks, and watch 22-year-old star center Yao Ming in action. The next day, checking out of my hotel room, I unfolded my minicam and showed the desk clerk some video of the Chinese phenomenon. She asked me how I knew of Yao. When I told her that he was very popular in the U....

In 2001 the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois thought it had found a home for its new museum and educational center, in a residential neighborhood in Skokie. But early last year Skokie Village Board officials rejected the plan after a series of volatile hearings where future neighbors voiced objections, including their fears of vandalism. He’s held his tongue and kept a low profile as he tinkers with his design and tries to help raise the $25 million it’ll take to build the museum and endow it....

Cassandra Wilson spent most of the 80s looking for an identity. As the voice of Brooklyn’s envelope-pushing M-BASE collective she strove to find a distinctive voice, introducing original tunes with austere funk grooves, but she also interpreted standards with a conventional piano trio and unleashed her mahogany tones in the wide open spaces of Henry Threadgill’s New Air. By the end of the decade her open-ended improvising approached the brilliance of Betty Carter’s–but it wasn’t until 1993, when she recorded Blue Light ’til Dawn, that she figured out how best to channel what she’d developed....

It’s official–Mayor Daley is human. For the many who doubted, the 2004 city budget process proved it. The short version of that high-pitched, excited response: “I don’t have absolute power! You’re greatly mistaken! I’m just a human like anyone else!” Still, Daley’s budget had passed the City Council nearly intact. Nearly. During the October budget hearings the aldermen had pounded their chests a bit and won a couple of skirmishes. They’d also come up with some useful ideas, two of which are already heading toward reality as new ordinances....

Mary J. Blige’s drug problems, abusive relationships, and bad business decisions have all been well documented in the press; her rise, fall, and redemption fit so neatly into the media paradigm that it was hardly surprising to see her featured on VH1’s Behind the Music last fall. But I’d rather hear the story from her, and with No More Drama (MCA) the greatest and most enduring soul singer of the hip-hop era asserts a new independence and pledges to walk away from destructive influences....

Upstaging a microphone fiend as charismatic as Atmosphere’s Slug is no easy task. But on “The Two,” the wittiest piece of metacommentary indie hip-hop has yet produced, Murs (of LA rap clique Living Legends) effortlessly steals the spotlight from his Minneapolis collaborator. That song, the highlight of the recent Murs and Slug Present Felt: A Tribute to Christina Ricci (Access Hip Hop/Rhymesayers Entertainment), is a comic narrative in which the duo rescues the world from mainstream-rap supervillains, only to end up back at their old record-store jobs, broke....

The steel pan doesn’t turn up often in jazz, for several good reasons. Its shimmery, floating timbre–you might even call it eerie–mixes uncomfortably with the focused tones of horns and piano. And technique presents even bigger problems: Since a pan lacks the sustain of a piano or vibraphone, the player has to execute a single-note trill (like a gentle drum roll) just to keep any one pitch sounding for more than a fraction of a second–which makes it more difficult to achieve the elaborate melodicism that most postbop jazz demands....

The skillful writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) is mainly known for his corrosive misanthropy (his creepy The Raven, a story about poison-pen letters in a village made during the French occupation, was subsequently and unfairly castigated for being anti-French). Yet surprisingly, this accomplished 1947 noir turns that misanthropy precisely on its head without ever resorting to sentimentality or stereotypes; whereas everyone in The Raven seems a villain, no one is truly a villain here....

By Michael Miner But before getting into that, let’s go over what the BAT is and stands for. Thanks to the miracle that is Jim Romenesko’s Media News site, Hot Type now enjoys a national readership, and both those readers deserve to be brought up to speed. The Golden BAT–standing for Baseball Aptitude Test–was founded 20 years ago by my predecessor in this space, Neil Tesser, who was not a nice man and wanted to show sportswriters what he thought of them....

In the bottom of the fourth inning of Bruce Kimm’s Wrigley Field debut as Cubs manager last Friday, Mark Bellhorn led off with a double. It was the Cubs’ first hit–their first base runner, in fact–and as they trailed the Florida Marlins 1-0, the old-school baseball book called for a bunt. Don Baylor certainly would have bunted; during his two and a half years with the Cubs they bunted more than any other team....

The Fantasticks, Pegasus Players, and I Do! I Do!, Drury Lane Theatre Evergreen Park. Ideally, courtship and marriage are different phases of the same great experience. The challenge lovers face–to embrace their differences while retaining the romance–fuels these small-scale musicals by composer Harvey Schmidt and lyricist/book writer Tom Jones. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The earlier and vastly more popular of the two (it just completed a 42-year run) is The Fantasticks, which tests the dreams of next-door neighbors seeking both adventure and security....

In the summer of 1956, an ailing Bertolt Brecht spends one last day at his cottage on the outskirts of East Berlin, presiding over a wide assortment of lovers like an exasperated patriarch. Among the women jostling for his attention are Danish actress Ruth Berlau, editor and translator Elisabeth Hauptmann, stage ingenue Kathe Reichel, and Isot Kilian, the mistress of a hotheaded political agitator–not to mention Brecht’s long-suffering wife, Helene Weigel, and resentful daughter, Barbara....

Remixes are dance music’s common currency, but rarely does one version redefine both the track it tweaks and the genre it works in. Dusseldorf trance producer Timo Maas’s “Club Mix” of Azzido da Bass’s obscure “Dooms Night” did just that, though. Maas combined a turbocharged, gleefully evil woob-woob bass riff, an easy-riding synth glide, and crunchy breakbeats for a sound he refers to as “percussive wet funk”; the track was not only a trance hit but a favorite of everyone from two-step garage DJs (it opens Warner ESP’s Pure Garage II mix compilation) to Jamaican dancehall jocks....

Video From Punk’s Delivery Room Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not long after they met, Ivers took Armstrong to CBGB to see Patti Smith. “It was such a relief from Yes and Chicago and all of those awful bands,” says Armstrong, 50. She’d once been a big music fan, catching concerts by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix as a teenager in the 60s, but had been turned off by the excesses of the 70s....

I have to admit that at first the media blitz about the Glenbrook North hazing incident–the May 4 powder-puff football ritual that turned so vicious it sent five juniors to the hospital–didn’t register. Hunting for updates from Iraq, I scanned the headlines about it and felt a vague, removed contempt toward the students involved. But I didn’t read the articles. Yet viewing the abbreviated clip I mostly just smelled the chill grass, the damp earth, the beer, the shampoo and the hair spray....