People who went to work at Columbia College when Mike A Alexandroff ran it were clear about the trade-off they were making. “The premise under which I was hired,” says photography professor Peter LeGrand, “was you’ll never have a great salary at this institution, but you will get a wonderful working environment, a great set of health benefits, and a retirement plan that provides a sufficient amount of money to live out your life comfortably....

In her first Chicago engagement in two years, New York cabaret artist Baby Jane Dexter ranges from rock songs to standards, relying more on familiar fare than she has in the past. Her new show, Another Spring (Then and Now), includes the Blood, Sweat & Tears hit “Spinning Wheel,” the Beatles’ “Got to Get You Into My Life,” Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” and a version of the Sammy Cahn gem “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” that probes the tune’s turbulent subtext of obsession....

On Eric Bachmann’s third release as Crooked Fingers, Red Devil Dawn (Merge), the former Archers of Loaf front man abandons the morose, creaky feel of earlier efforts for a baroque 60s-pop sound marked by warm violin, cello, and trumpets: the fanfare on “You Threw a Spark” recalls Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” while “Sweet Marie” is driven by a sweep of romantic strings. This is easily the most lush music Bachmann has ever recorded, and the overall effect is lightly melancholy....

APRIL “The results will be amazing, strange, weird, confusing, abstract, and definitely something you’ve never seen before,” says Dexter Bullard, artistic director of the Plasticene theater company, of tonight’s improvisational jam, in which a dozen performers will create a piece using objects sprung on them at the start of the show. In the past Bullard’s used beanbag chairs, giant rolls of paper, PVC pipes, aquarium gravel, and plastic drop cloths for inspiration in creating the group’s physical performance pieces....

Hi Pete– Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wanted to draw reference to your postscript item of June 20 and then make a quick comment about the preceding article. The postscript reads: “There were several errors in last week’s column on Pete Cosey: Melvin Gibbs never played in Living Colour; Cosey is approaching 60, not 70; and Gibbs, Johnny Juice, J.T. Lewis, and MC Baba Israel are members of Children of Agartha, not Burnt Sugar....

A friend I’ll call Doug goes to California on business a lot, and he met his new boyfriend in a leather bar in LA. After months of back and forth, Chi–pronounced “sky” without the s–sold all of his furniture, shipped 25 boxes of miscellanea to Chicago, and moved in with Doug a few days before Christmas. I called them on New Year’s Eve and suggested we meet for an early drink, mostly because I wanted to check out the new boyfriend....

Every time I see this 1992 backstage comedy, about a mediocre theater company enduring an NEA site visit and its annual production of A Christmas Carol, I find myself expecting it to be sharper and funnier than it turns out to be. The problem is that its creators, Daniel Sullivan and his unnamed collaborators at the Seattle Repertory Theare, fill their work with lots of deserving comic targets–oblivious directors, tin-eared NEA representatives–but pull back just when they should be lowering the boom, settling for safe, palatable jokes about egotistical actors and theater bloopers....

Is Amy or Annie an Ann? The AP story began, “Newspaper readers who once turned to Ann Landers for advice can now ask Amy,” and went on to say that “Dickinson’s new column will fill a void created by the death” of Lederer. No, says Mnookin. He points to the Tribune’s July 9 story introducing Dickinson and reads what editor Ann Marie Lipinski had to say: “Eppie’s passing was a painful loss for readers....

Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter counts among his role models Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, and Leonard Cohen–all refugees from middle-class respectability who combined the boho-folkie aesthetic with high-art lyrics. Ritter, born in the late 70s “to two neuroscientists” per his bio, first recorded in 1999, but it was his self-produced Golden Age of Radio, released in 2001, that made the contemporary folk world take notice. The single “Me & Jiggs” made him a pop star in Ireland, and since then he’s played gigs on both sides of the Atlantic, sharing bills with such diverse figures as Liz Phair, Damien Rice, and Joan Baez (whose latest album includes a cover of “Wings,” from Ritter’s new CD, Hello Starling)....

Jiang Hu–The Triad Zone With Tony Leung Ka-fai, Sandra Ng, Roy Cheung, Chan Fai-hung, Eason Chan, Anthony Wong, Lee San-san, and Eric Tsang. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Woo’s Hong Kong films are a good example. Americans frequently interpreted their sentiment and over-the-top violence as facetious, yet as film theorist David Bordwell wrote, “Hardcore Hong Kong fans do not come to mock. Rather than reveling in the irony that postmodernists claim is our universal fate, [these fans recognize] a naive, nonconformist honesty missing from the mass-marketed product....

Most hip-hop parodies fall flat because the would-be jokers don’t seem to understand the culture. Insider Mike Ladd–who’s worked with El-P, members of the Anti-Pop Consortium, and other underground notables–doesn’t have that problem, and his latest project, the Majesticons, makes some pointed observations about commercial hip-hop’s conspicuous consumption. Much of Ladd’s new album, Beauty Parlor (Big Dada), sounds an awful lot like NER*D, the band project of reigning bling-bling knob twirlers the Neptunes, and his lyrics describe a mythical world where the jiggified Majesticons are battling with the keepin’-it-real Infesticons, though it’s hardly necessary to follow the convoluted story line to get what he’s putting down....

“I want a lot of come on his face. I want to see come dripping everywhere,” gay porn director Tony Alizzi is saying to the men in leather chaps standing before him. On a late-May afternoon on the third floor of Steamworks, a gay bathhouse on North Halsted, filming for this scene for Prowl 3 has been going on for almost two hours, and it’s time for the money shots. All four performers can come on command, and they’re ready to accommodate....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scientists based at the University of Southern California will soon begin animal testing of the world’s first brain prosthesis–basically a mathematical model of the hippocampus mapped onto a silicon chip. The prosthesis may eventually help people whose brains have been damaged and cannot form new long-term memories. A potential problem with such an application, according to a March story in New Scientist: subjects might not remember consenting to receive the implant....

The mbira–a set of tuned metal keys affixed to a wooden board and housed in a resonator made from a halved calabash–is a cornerstone of Zimbabwe’s Shona culture. But though it’s been part of ritual life for a thousand years, musicians started to use it for entertainment purposes only as recently as the 1970s. Stella Chiweshe, one of the first to expand its role, was well equipped to handle the controversy this stirred up: a decade earlier, when she first expressed interest in the instrument, it was considered scandalous for a woman to play it....

“Italians know fashion and food,” says Donatella De Vette, a case in point. When she moved to Chicago from Rome in the mid-90s, she was an expert in both. Her first business here was an haute couture outlet store, Donatella Boutique, in Old Town. “My friends at home told me Chicago was the Milano of America–lots of industry, hardworking people, and lots of money,” she says. That all turned out to be true enough, but what she didn’t realize was how informally Chicagoans tend to dress....

The Romance Cycle, Court Theatre. This two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s late romances Cymbeline and Pericles achieves an engaging informality and intimacy thanks to the warmhearted energy of the fine cast and to director Charles Newell’s concept, executed by set designer John Culbert, of eliminating the fourth wall between actors and audience. The auditorium and stage floors are covered by wall-to-wall white carpeting, turning the space into an oversize living room where we watch the cast enact their parts like parents viewing the make-believe games of their kids....

I’m sure I remember hearing from a reliable source, i.e., a science program, that certain species of trees (or shrubs) will spontaneously combust in order to ensure the survival of the species. I’m being mercilessly teased about this, so I’d appreciate any information you can dig up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No offense, Donna, but this is a pretty dull way of putting it....

Adapted from a novel by Witi Ihimaera, this magic-realist film from New Zealand updates an ancient Maori legend about a coastal village whose founder arrived on the back of a whale. The current village chieftain is worried because he has no male successor: his son has immigrated to Germany and his grandson has died at birth. His granddaughter is a clear leader, but he won’t even consider her. The miraculous outcome is predictable, yet this 2002 film, written and confidently directed by Niki Caro, is utterly fresh and beguiling....

By Ben Joravsky No matter how much he’d like to, he can’t go back to bed, he can’t miss this Sunday matinee. He’s the star of Black Ensemble Theater’s Jackie Wilson Story (My Heart Is Crying, Crying…). It’s been on an open-ended, sold-out run at the Uptown Center Hull House since last February–and the audience, mainly black women young and old, is coming to scream, cheer, and cry over him....

The South Africa-based Handspring Puppet Company, directed by William Kentridge, has an international reputation for highly stylized theatrical adaptations of modern literary classics, realized onstage using puppets, live actors, and Kentridge’s own animated films. The company’s first production was based on Woyzeck, Georg Buchner’s fragmentary play about a soldier driven mad by army life; Woyzeck on the Highveld offered searing commentary on the effects of European colonialism on Africa. Similarly, Ubu and the Truth Commission used Alfred Jarry’s satirical play Ubu Roi as the framework for a story about a white South African forced to acknowledge his complicity in the brutal apartheid era....