SEBI TRAMONTANA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a recent interview for allaboutjazz.com, Sicilian trombonist Sebi Tramontana opined that he must have been a singer in a previous life–and added that he wouldn’t mind being one again the next time around. Tramontana played guitar and soprano saxophone in his teens but settled on trombone at age 21, a choice that might’ve been influenced by this affinity for singers: whinnies, wahs, hoots, and growls, often produced by vocalizing through the horn, have been a staple of the trombone’s vocabulary ever since Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton showcased his uncannily expressive plunger-mute style with Duke Ellington’s band in the 20s and 30s....

While I don’t often troll Web auctions looking for useless hooey, I occasionally binge as an act of expensive procrastination. The allure of auction browsing is that it’s never the thing you should be doing. After learning that a used jockstrap from Cincinnati Bengal running back Corey Dillon sold recently on eBay for $80, I logged on, curious about similar buying opportunities. At any given moment, eBay lists no fewer than 1,500 items described as “game used” or “game worn,” and they seem to have a clear geographic bias toward Chicago: Quentin Dailey’s size 12 Pony low-tops, Don Zimmer’s dusty cap, Alfrederick Hughes’s jersey, worn during his brief stint with the San Antonio Spurs....

In my high school biology class we were studying biogeochemical cycles, including the carbon cycle. One paragraph detailed how humans, by burning fossil fuels, are putting more carbon dioxide into the air than is being removed, causing global warming, etc. According to my textbook, transportation accounts for most of the carbon dioxide being added to the air since our cars use petroleum-based fuels. The book also notes that trees and other green plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere....

I have read that turtles can breathe through their bums. Is this true, and if so, why did they evolve such a talent and what are the mechanics of this trick? When turtles put their heads in their shells, what happens to their spines? Do they buckle or contract? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “With an ancestry going back more than 200 million years to the late Triassic, the 200 or so species of turtles are the most ancient surviving lineage of land vertebrates....

There’s no question Bill Buford is an exquisite writer and trenchant observer. Among the Thugs, his harrowing 1991 account of his own rapid descent into the raucous, violent subculture of British football hooliganism, stands as one of the finest recent works of sports sociology. But Buford is a rotten journalist: not only are his man-on-the-scene accounts marred by his substance abuse, willingly admitted, but the book ultimately wallows in the same sort of sensationalism Buford and his subjects find so appalling in the British press....

No one is saying that the Israeli troupe Sheketak is completely original: its inventiveness with props recalls Stomp, its macho posturing Tap Dogs, its playing of implements strung overhead Chicago’s own Jellyeye, and its mad onstage drumming and comic antics Blue Man Group. Still, the company’s three dancers and two musicians open up new vistas, broadening the palette of percussive dance by tapping while lying on their backs or beating out rhythms with drumsticks in counterpoint to their stamping....

Public schools not ready for reform. “The ink on President Bush’s signature was barely dry [on the No Child Left Behind act] when Illinois and Chicago school officials began working to ensure that droves of parents would not move their children” from bad public schools to better ones, writes Alexander Russo in Catalyst Chicago (September). “As enacted, the choice requirement created the possibility that low-performing students could push their way into popular and selective schools or even bump higher-achieving students out of line....

There are lots of ways to minimize the significance of the Chicago heat wave of July 14-20, 1995, and none of them work.We’d like to believe that the death toll wasn’t really in the hundreds, but it was. Depending on how you count, between 485 and 739 people died of the heat, making it the second deadliest week in city history. That’s a one-sentence summary of his slim, fact-packed book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago....

Jazz has had some great brother acts over the years, including the Adderleys, the Heaths, and the Joneses (Hank, Thad, and Elvin); these days twins Marcus and E.J. Strickland are playing together in New York, and various Marsalises reunite from time to time. Based in LA, the Clayton brothers may not get a lot of attention from the east-coast-centric jazz press, but they do lead one sparkling, high-powered quintet. Out in front, reedist Jeff Clayton combines a potent, throaty alto style–most familiar to Chicago listeners from his playing on Kurt Elling’s 2001 album Flirting With Twilight–with a gentler but equally expansive spirit when he switches to flute....

It’s been around for 26 years, but under the direction of Dame Libby Komaiko, Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater is still making a joyful noise. I thought my heart would fly out of my chest when the six dancers in Ritmos del Flamenco began beating on the cajones–the hollow boxes or “drawers” on which flamenco dancers and musicians sometimes sit–to play rattling rhythms with their hands while stamping out different cadences on the floor with their feet....

One improviser’s atonality is another’s pantonality. If you’re a musician coming from a classical background, you might hear a leaping, all-pitches-available melody line as free from all notions of key, thereby demanding improvising strategies divorced from traditional harmony: rearranging tone rows or focusing on particular textures or rhythm strategies. If your ears are jazz trained, you might hear a rangy chord progression under the same line and try to flesh out the material laterally....

In his native Uruguay, Elbio Rodriguez Barilari is known as a columnist for the Montevideo edition of El Pais; in Chicago, where he now lives, he’s known as the editor of the Spanish-language weekly La Raza. But his career as a journalist grew out of his appetite for music. In 1977, jazz bassist Charles Mingus was booked for a concert in Montevideo, and Barilari, a 23-year-old composition student, was just scraping by at an auto parts store....

The film and video component of this multidisciplinary arts festival continues Friday and Saturday, August 17 and 18, at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-348-2143; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-278-1500; Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee, 773-509-5050; Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee, 773-342-4597; and Local Grind, 1585 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-3490. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings will be video projection. Tickets are $7, available at the venue one hour before showtime; admission is free with a festival pass....

The pseudonymous Jane Martin’s breezy political satire is less biting than it is silly, but an energetic ensemble makes it a lot of fun. The perky Dody Dotson is a “radical liberal Pentecostal prelesbian librarian” who’s figured out that Laura Bush is signaling “help me” in Morse code during her television appearances. Dody and Desiree, a prostitute, then rescue Laura and learn of a nefarious plot that involves Saddam Hussein’s body double, Hillary Clinton, the Bush administration, and Wal-Mart....

For DIY musicians, it often seems the only way to leap from cliquish cult status to household-name stardom is to retool for the lowest common denominator. But Concetta Kirschner (better known as platinum blond, bumpin’-bodied Princess Superstar) has managed to make herself famous the hard way–without selling out, or even earning enough money to quit her day job. In 1994 she circulated a self-produced cassette, and a year later 5th Beetle, a tiny label in Windsor, Canada, put out her first CD, Strictly Platinum; in ’97 she founded her own imprint, A Big Rich Major Label (later renamed the Corrupt Conglomerate), and released two more discs....

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE 10/10 & 11, METRO Seattle cult band Death Cab for Cutie have never been bad, but they’ve never made it over the remarkability threshold either–until now, with Transatlanticism (Barsuk). There’s a new sense of focus here, as if they’ve decided to make their lush-lite, tastefully boisterous guitar pop as good as it can be: making sure the melodies are there and the lyrics are pared down to mordantly vulnerable efficiency before piling on the flourishes (or letting them go out almost naked, as in “Passenger Seat”)....

The day before Thanksgiving, and more than six months after they went on strike, it finally looked as if the workers at V&V Supremo Foods Inc. would all be heading back to their jobs. About a quarter of them–some 30 drivers and warehouse employees–now had a contract in hand, and V&V, a Pilsen-based manufacturer of Mexican cheeses and sausage, had announced that it would no longer oppose union representation for any of its workers....

The Priesthood’s Open Secret Berry is waiting. “I’ve yet to see anybody explore it in depth in recent weeks,” he says. “It’s a very tough issue to confront, and it’s a minefield of political correctness.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In other words,” Bowman continued, “in the RC Church we have mostly homosexual and pederastic abuse. But neither church authorities nor media want to call it that, the former because it calls attention to its gay-priest and gay-seminarian problem, the latter because media in general go easy on gay-originating criminality....

I ask this question in total sincerity. A gentleman with whom I (also male) have a mutual interest in companionship told me that he becomes sexually aroused when an attractive man sneezes. He said it makes no difference whether the sneeze is authentic or simulated. (He has never asked me to “fake” one for him; I told you, he’s a gentleman. And no, as fate would have it, my allergies have remained in check during the times we’ve been together, so I’ve not had occasion to observe his reaction firsthand....

For years Laurie Palmer rode her bicycle to the School of the Art Institute, passing along the way a vacant, overgrown meadow on the lakefront just south of Navy Pier. Last summer she finally stopped to inspect it up close. Bordered by Ogden Slip to the north, Lake Michigan to the east, the Chicago River to the south, and Lake Shore Drive to the west, the three and a half acres of fenced-in landfill were covered with trees, thistles, bladder campion, Shasta daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, and other wildflowers....