Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month, when Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni traveled to Coolup, Australia, to accept an award for lowering his country’s AIDS infection rate from 28 percent to 6 percent, he implied that the task was made easier because no one in his country is gay (last year Amnesty International issued a report condemning the torture of homosexuals in Uganda)…....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September in Cincinnati, Ohio, Matthew Long (who weighs 116 pounds and has only one leg) was acquitted of assaulting his girlfriend, Vicki Smith (250 pounds), who claimed he’d choked her with their dog’s leash. (Police could not find a leash at the scene, supposedly because the dog had eaten it.) Long’s version of events was that he’d threatened to kill himself in front of Smith (though both are already married to other people, he believed she was seeing a third man), and when she tried to leave he grabbed her to try to keep her from walking out, clinging to her as she dragged him through the house....

In the past most jazz flute players were a snooze because they weren’t really flute players–just saxophonists who could summon a weak rustle from the instrument but never mastered the nuances of timbre and attack. But nowadays the best of them play flute exclusively, like James Newton or Chicago’s Nicole Mitchell. With her clear, forceful tone in both high and low registers, Mitchell can hold her own with aggressive horn players like saxophonist David Boykin and trombonists Steve Berry and Tony Hererra, though when she wants to soar above the fray she plays a little piccolo too....

I moved here nine months ago from New York. There are a lot of perks to this job–fancy parties thrown by magazines where celebrities show up. After a while, celeb sightings were no longer a big deal. Then Jane magazine hosted a business dinner here, and our ad rep said they were bringing in the editor, Jane Pratt. I love the magazine, and I’m personally infatuated with her as well. It’s not like a personal crush–I just have a lot of respect for her....

This touring program of international digital video runs Friday through Sunday, November 7 through 9, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Tickets are $10, $12 at the door; an $85 pass admits you to all screenings. For more information call 312-397-4010. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From Austria, Virgil Widrich’s astounding animation Fast Film offers a dense, encyclopedic survey of American cinema, acknowledging both the primacy of the director and the outsize personalities of the studio-era stars; its dazzling optical effects, suggesting both collapse and regeneration, remind us that Europeans have always responded to the speed, dexterity, and visceral power of American movies....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility to Chicago’s downtown theater district. The Casual Family...

ROSENBERG CREATIVE ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New-music ensembles tend toward the small side, which makes them easy to steer–even celebrated “big bands” like Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet rarely top a dozen. By comparison, Scott Rosenberg’s 25-piece Creative Orchestra, which makes its one and only appearance at this concert, looms as large as a transoceanic liner. On “Hums,” an impressive investigation of tone and timbre from the 1997 recording IE (Barely Auditable Records), a 27-piece ensemble similar in instrumentation to the present group navigates giant icebergs of sound....

Only 35 years old but already a 15-year veteran of the music biz, trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s earned favorable comparisons to some of jazz’s most legendary figures. Among them is Wynton Marsalis, who discovered him at a high-school music workshop, but Hargrove’s playing has more soul and less clutter than his early champion’s; like trumpet gods Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard in their Blue Note days, he builds momentum in his solos through the logic of pure melodic development rather than flashy flutters or histrionic ornamentation....

William Russo was 29 years old in 1958 when Verve Records asked him to arrange Duke Ellington’s stage musical Jump for Joy for a recording that would feature alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Russo had Ellington’s blessing for the project, but no access to the original music for the 1941 show, which he had never seen. All he had to work with was the piano score for some of the songs and–oh, yeah–the advice of Billy Strayhorn....

After much trial and error, it’s become abundantly clear to me that I’m a lesbian. My problem is that I’m having a lot of trouble meeting women. I tried dating a friend of mine, but that turned out terribly. I’m sick of meeting people in bars, seeing as how bars only ever seem to be meat markets, and I’m incredibly sick of hooking up while drunk. My campus LGBT group is so insular that it’s impossible to do anything with someone without the entire community knowing....

The Old Balls Game Pull quote to a Thomas Friedman column in the October 30 New York Times: “Can Bush stay the course in Iraq?” Marquis, a founder of the NDAA’s media committee, courts reporters, and he and I have communicated occasionally over the years. On Sunday, October 26, the Tribune launched a new series, “The Legacy of Wrongful Convictions,” and before that day was up Marquis had e-mailed me tearing into it....

The Pope (and Other Four-Letter Words) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Skover says Bruce was so broadly offensive that the exact motivation for his arrest in other cities was usually unclear, but in Chicago the bit that riled the police most was “Christ and Moses.” In this classic riff, also on the CD, Bruce speaks in the person of New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, dialing up the pope to complain about an unwelcome visit from the biblical pair: “What are we paying protection for?...

I have a question that only you might be able to answer. My brother claims to be well endowed enough that a former “girlfriend” says he bruised one of her ovaries. Now, nothing is totally impossible, but how likely is it that this could happen with normal human beings? Are there ANY cases of it on record? What are the most common injuries from rough sex, anyway? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

A Woman Is a Woman Even after 40 years I’m still not sure how I feel about A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature. The first time I saw it, as a college junior in New York, it was an unmitigated delight. But that had a lot to do with its arrival at a time when it seemed to validate ideas I and other cinephiles had about French and American film culture....

Fall 2001 was a lousy time to start a magazine; the Common Review had just put out its inaugural issue when the World Trade Center was attacked: The difficulties were huge, says editor Daniel Born. “We had to totally rethink [the next] issue. Do you make it topical or timeless?” Ultimately, Born shot for both, writing in winter 2001 that “the life of the mind must go on, and ideas need not and cannot be suffocated under the weight of headlines or even keening, unquenchable grief....

This stunning 93-minute video (2002) by Canadian conceptual artist Michael Snow might be his greatest work since La region centrale over 30 years ago. Almost certainly his most accessible feature, it combines elements from virtually all his previous films: the inexorable camera movement of Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La region centrale; the encyclopedic cataloging of Rameau’s Nephew; the playful self-reflexivity of So Is This. This is also his first encounter with digital video, and it explores all the things DV can do to stretch, compress, and distort bodies, a subject Snow explores formally, comically, and at times even ideologically....

The Seldoms Dance is a better medium for conveying impressions than ideas. At its best, it carries those impressions right past the cerebral cortex and into the primitive brain, or past the brain entirely and into the viscera. Combining with whatever’s already present, these impressions can produce a shock of recognition: oh, that’s what this music (emotion, experience) looks like! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Duet #1 (1999), by Jin-Wen Yu, a guest artist in the Seldoms’ concert, was the most successful of the lot....

When Reader contributor Yvette Marie Dostatni returned in 1997 from England, where she’d been photographing environmental protesters and “living in trees,” she started casting about for new subject matter. A fellow photographer suggested she look close to home, and the 29-year-old wound up turning her lens on her hometown of Whiting, Indiana, and the surrounding community. In Whiting, the site of Standard Oil’s first refinery, “I was looking for things that really mattered about growing up in the region,” she says....

Five Rooms of Furniture Rufus is a divorced retired gardener who lives in the basement of his older sister’s Chicago home. A diabetic, he’s had both legs amputated below the knee but remains determinedly independent, swaggering around on artificial limbs and a cane and sparring with his termagant sister, Ina Mae. Also living with Ina Mae is her sweet-tempered but timid daughter Vernell, who quietly runs interference between her mother and uncle and cares for her mentally ill husband, Gary....

The women’s pictures of 1930s Hollywood carried an emotional wallop partly because they took place in an era of social and economic tumult, which may explain the power of this Iranian feature by Rasoul Sadr Ameli (The Girl in the Sneakers). The title character, a teenage schoolgirl whose widowed father is a political prisoner, marries a neighborhood boy from a good family, but his lack of ambition and responsibility quickly drives them to divorce....