Friday 4/4 – Thursday 4/10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first line of Britney Spears’s 2001 hit Oops!…I Did It Again is “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”–not exactly literature on a par with Eliot’s masterpiece. Nonetheless Spears too is serving as the jumping-off point for a group show, this one opening today at the School of the Art Institute’s 1926 Exhibition Studies Space....

An offshoot of the capitalist credo “Grow or die” is the strategy “Die, then grow.” Sacrifice whatever it was that earned a product the ardent loyalty of a few in order to extend its appeal to the multitudes. These people, Dees recognized, could become a community. What they needed was some sort of journal to connect them with one another and keep them on top of a galloping technology. “I became obsessed with the idea,” she told me, “and I wanted to do it as a Mac-only publication, because Macintosh and desktop publishing were what I loved and because I thought the professional graphic arts community was coming around to both Mac and DTP....

It’s too bad Blake Edwards used Ravel’s Bolero to such memorable effect in his 1979 comedy 10. I could never hear the music the same way again, forever after associating its accelerating rhythms with Bo Derek’s, um, romantic encounters. That’s a long time to feel like laughing whenever I hear a piece of music that’s masterful in its way. Composed for a ballet, it’s the score Dame Libby Komaiko chose for her 1993 dance Bolero, a piece for some 20 performers set against a backdrop of Picasso projections....

At the age of 25 and after three years in a classroom, Meghan Zefran thought she was heading into the prime of her teaching career. But now she’s out of a job. “I’m in limbo,” she says. “The board says there are jobs, but I can’t find them.” Then she met the boy’s mother. “She came to school,” she says. “She had him by the collar, and she was saying, ‘You’d better fucking apologize....

If George Orwell had been only slightly more prescient, the infamous “Two Minutes Hate” and assorted Newspeak indoctrinations in 1984 would have been delivered in the blue hues and bouncing slides of a PowerPoint presentation. This, anyway, is the idea behind Homage to George Orwell, a short PowerPoint movie by Brian Espel that will be screened this weekend at Chicago’s first-ever PowerPoint film festival. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Toronto film festival is traditionally held in early September, about a month before the festival here, and in the 20-odd years I’ve been attending I’ve never been so aware of the ideological gulf between Canada and the U.S. as I was this year. It was evident on-screen, in, for example, the pointed comparisons between the two countries in one of the best films there, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which takes up issues such as why people shoot one another, keep their doors locked or unlocked, and (more implicitly) do or don’t have national health care....

Keiko Hara was born to Japanese parents in Korea in 1942 but grew up in Japan and moved to the U.S. in 1971. Her 20 abstract paintings, prints, and drawings at Perimeter all have delicate surfaces that are vibrantly suggestive–less systematically than many abstract works, they evoke atmospheres or environments rather than objects, placing them in opposition to America’s possessive consumer culture. Several also combine contrasting patterns. Verse Imbuing in Red is a diptych, with the mottled, mostly red surface of the top half suggesting natural surfaces such as bark or lichen and the larger areas of white, yellow, and red of the bottom half resembling an open-air landscape....

Though H.M.S. Pinafore and Patience have their partisans, most Savoyards (myself included) place The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance above all else in the Gilbert and Sullivan canon. Both farces have operatic aspirations that can be realized when cast with the right voices and performed by an orchestra that can convey Arthur Sullivan’s elegant ratio of weight to buoyancy. Pirates is the equal of any Offenbach light opera; the tunes accent the blend of satire and pathos in W....

Tyehimba Jess’s 1992 poem “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” challenged Chicago fans to think about issues more substantive than their team’s NBA championships. If the promise of the poem’s title is fulfilled, he wrote, “We will know cia stats / fbi stats, / infant mortality stats, / police brutality stats, / and literacy training techniques like we know / paxson’s shoe size, / pippen’s rebounds, / grant’s salary, / and all the intimate details of michael’s last gambling spree....

Winner of the 2003 Christopher Wetzel Award for Independent Film Comedy, this madcap 2002 farce opens with corporate nebbish Martin (Ian Roberts) being released from the hospital after a suicide attempt (he cleans up the blood in his bathroom to a brassy rendition of “Put On a Happy Face”). His first therapy session is cut short when Dr. Orloff (Matt Walsh), his rip-roaring, cigar-chomping psychiatrist, realizes he’s late for a softball game....

The Moldy Peaches’ shtick is to mumble dejectedly but tunefully about sex and drugs over dragged-out, blatantly half-assed acoustic indie pop. On their first full-length, The Moldy Peaches (Rough Trade), Adam Green fumbles through incongruous metal-ish solos; Kimya Dawson laughs through her sappier lines; someone puffs apathetically on a flute or a trombone; the drumming’s always lackadaisical; and the poetry’s usually off by half a syllable. The second verse of the three-minute anthem “Who’s Got the Crack?...

Our Country’s Good, Strawdog Theatre Company. The redemptive power of the arts is the crux of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play (based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, itself based on a true story). In 1788 British authorities send 11 boatloads of petty criminals to what would become Sydney, Australia, hoping to prevent the kind of unrest that would shortly tear France apart. This leaves the new governor of the penal colony in a quandary: how can he make productive citizens out of convicts who would rather have been hanged than exiled for life?...

There are a couple surprises on the Pet Shop Boys’ new Release (Sanctuary), but the duo’s prominent use of electric guitar–after 16 years of relying almost exclusively on synthesizers–isn’t one of them. Though much has been made of former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr’s contributions to the album, the plangent riffs and adornments he adds to the bulk of its songs are polite enough that they register as variations on Chris Lowe’s synth leads....

On Fight Songs (Elektra), the 1999 album by the Old 97’s, front man Rhett Miller blossomed from an alt-country journeyman into a bona fide tunesmith. His melodic instincts were even more assured on the quartet’s 2001 follow-up, Satellite Rides, where his wry twists on the standard themes of lust and heartbreak were set snugly within the band’s tight arrangements, which bore hardly a trace of the generic twang of their early work....

For the second year in a row, the Jazz Showcase kicks off its annual Charlie Parker Month celebration with a band led by the apparently ageless drummer Roy Haynes. Haynes turned 77 this past spring, but both onstage and off his compact body exudes a coiled, leonine energy that threatens all conventional theories of geriatrics; at the awards ceremonies and tributes that fill an increasing portion of his schedule, he bounces around the room in snakeskin boots and cuts a visible wake through the crowd....

Jack Bivans’s voice was raw with anguish. “I slapped my wife…and my children. I drank…” As Bivans rasped the litany of sins, it was easy to forget that he was acting–that the torment he was struggling with was borrowed from the life of a stranger. For a half century Bivans has been a cast member of Unshackled!, a radio drama taped live before a studio audience every Saturday at the Pacific Garden Mission on South State Street....

The White Sox saved their best game of the season for their last night at home before the All-Star break. Coming off three straight two-to-one series victories–the home-and-home meetings with the Cubs sandwiched around a series in Minnesota–they were now trying to complete a three-game sweep of the Twins, their archrivals in the AL Central, at White Sox Park. The Twins scored two in the first on a home run by Torii Hunter–a foul-pole shot disputed by Sox manager Jerry Manuel, who got himself tossed out of the game–and added two more in the third off Sox starter Dan Wright....

Like so much of Chicago, the rehabbed Soldier Field puts its best face toward the lake. Seen from the east, the curved glass exterior of the stadium bowl is contained by the distinctive columns of the old stadium. The effect is jarring, but the separate parts almost unite, in the manner of an elegant new office building rising above the classic old library next door. Unfortunately, there’s nothing yet between the stadium and the lake but the torn-up runways of what used to be Meigs Field....

EQUAL FOOTING/EARING 1/26 & 27, HOTHOUSE This interdisciplinary festival, which pairs Chicago underground musicians with prominent local choreographers and dancers, makes the natural connection between music and dance seem a little more natural than usual–for as boldly as local musicians leap over musical boundaries to collaborate with each other, this sort of cross-pollination is oddly rare. On this program, the second of two two-night segments, Nathaniel Braddock’s experimental rock band the Ancient Greeks is matched up with choreographer Asimina Chremos, the artistic director of Link’s Hall and an instructor at the Lou Conte Dance Studio....

Josh Ferrazzano’s 1999 video has a fairly minimal plot: Gilgamesh Jones (apparently a conflation of the Mesopotamian and Spielbergian heroes) is a modern-day seeker who escapes from a chain gang and becomes obsessed with Starlett, a singer he sees on TV. As he journeys to New York in search of her, he encounters zombies and a government attack against the “reanimation of the recently deceased.” The story unfolds with minimal dialogue, an oceanic maze of music and sounds by M’lumbo, and even more dense layers of imagery: rapid editing, superimpositions, split screen, and fast motion....