Don’t be daunted by the arcane-sounding title: several of these eight shorts (six of which are getting their Chicago premieres) are amazing. Jerzy Zarzycki and Tadeusz Kowalski’s There Is a Ball Tonight (1934) combines images of an annual ball for architects, a man donning a shirt, and feet climbing stairs, achieving an unhinged unpredictability. Made in exile in London, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson’s The Eye and the Ear (1945) is an unusually successful attempt at giving visual form to music; what’s fascinating about its elaborate geometrical patterns is the way they avoid reductive synchronization and establish their own space....

Polished form is both the subject and the medium of Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre’s new Impolite Society, a collaboration between artistic director Anna Simone Levin and artistic associate Jeffery Hancock. A piece featuring four women and three men (one of them a disapproving butler), it shows clearly how social rituals breed distance instead of intimacy, breaking down the problem by gender. The men’s “polite” gestures, like shaking hands, devolve into competitive physical hostilities (running a race, wrestling)....

Electric Wizard 3/30, Double Door I doubt even Black Sabbath could have gotten away with putting a bong-clenching demon lord on the cover of their album back in the day, but their direct descendants Electric Wizard can, and do, on their new Dopethrone, released in the U.S. by the Music Cartel. The third LP by these scary Brits has it all: cheesy sci-fi interpreted as scripture (the three-part epic “Weird Tales”), blind violence (“We Hate You”), black magic and sexual sadism in the church (“I, the Witchfinder”), and, of course, the ritual veneration of the ol’ sweet leaf: “Dopethrone in this land of sorcery / Dopethrone vision through THC / Dopethrone feedback will free / Dopethrone three wizards crowned with weed....

SONNY LANDRETH 2/14 & 15, FITZGERALD’S Mississippi-born and Louisiana-bred guitarist Sonny Landreth isn’t a songwriting genius or even a remarkable singer. On first listen, the barn burners on his ninth album, The Road We’re On (Sugar Hill), would sound like standard-issue jukebox romps but for a pinch of Cajun seasoning. Yet Landreth’s guitar playing, particularly his steel and slide work, has a piercing beauty that cuts through the blooze ooze, especially on slow-build beauties like “A World Away,” where he spirals into a solo that’s as cosmic as Pink Floyd yet as gritty as Stevie Ray Vaughan....

Seven years ago I wrote a cranky review of Stomp, criticizing the show for hypocrisy: despite its message that wage slaves can triumph over menial work through imagination, by then it had itself become an international corporate franchise whose hired-hand performers kept cranking out the showbiz equivalent of Big Macs. Today I’m wondering why I had such a bug up my butt. True, Stomp is big business, but it also offers a reasonable return on your entertainment dollar....

John Flansburgh and John Linnell, better known as They Might Be Giants, have made a career of writing bite-size, ridiculously catchy tunes, and a quick look through their songbook reveals a playful preoccupation with grade-school subjects: science (“Why Does the Sun Shine?”), American history (“James K. Polk”), art (“Meet James Ensor”), geography (Linnell’s solo album State Songs). So it’s almost surprising that they’ve waited nearly 20 years to record a children’s album....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. dance 60 classical 76 classical music, African music, salsa, and ethnic folk genres. FAIRS &...

By Ben Joravsky The office for which they’re running–commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago–is one of the most obscure in local politics. Yet it’s sort of the soul of the machine. For Water Reclamation and offices like it (and all of Cook County government for that matter) have always solidified the regular Democratic organization, giving it quiet, unnoticed venues for contracts, favors, and jobs. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When Davenport’s Piano Bar & Cabaret opened its doors in 1998, cabaret in Chicago seemed to be, if not dying, at least on life support, and I feared the club wouldn’t survive. I’m delighted to say I was wrong: Davenport’s is celebrating its fifth anniversary next week with an engagement by the superb singer-songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway. She’s a perfect choice for the occasion. Davenport’s success is due in large part to a canny booking strategy that alternates local artists with high-profile, high-priced national talent....

ATERCIOPELADOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their forthcoming album, Gozo poderoso (“Powerful Joy”), Colombia’s Aterciopelados have moved away from the heavy-lidded trip-hop of 1999’s terrific Caribe Atomico and toward a tropically tinged lounge pop–the rhythms are less fierce, and the soundscape is more subdued, devoid of much of the previous album’s spectral sampladelia. The one constant in the mix is the dynamic voice of Andrea Echeverri, who updates the passion of traditional Latin American bolero singing with a glossy international pop sensibility....

A pair of mute swans swam in slow circles in the stinking water of the Chicago River near the Diversey bridge. It was an incongruous scene–the majestic birds floating like huge white flowers in the gritty divide between a bowling alley and a public-housing project. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pair near the Diversey bridge, which I first spotted in January, were probably the only mute swans on the river this winter, says Doug Stotz, an ornithologist and conservation ecologist at the Field Museum....

9 FRIDAY Local dancer and choreographer Melissa Thodos is a twin, and in July she gave birth to her own set of twin girls. She’s incorporated their voices and fetal heartbeats into the soundscape for her new ensemble piece, Lossfound, “an exploration of the cycle of life.” It premieres at this weekend’s performances by Melissa Thodos & Dancers, tonight and tomorrow at 8 and Sunday at 2 at the Harold Washington Library Auditorium, 400 S....

Friday 8/1 – Thursday 8/7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lives of the leads in the two films that kick off the Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video tonight revolve around food, drink, and romance. Short on Sugar stars Lynn A. Henderson (who also wrote and produced the ten-minute short) as the shy owner of a cafe who’s out to hook the man of her dreams....

I had this epiphany a few years ago in London, Ontario, where I was covering the No Music Festival hosted by the Nihilist Spasm Band, then just 35 years into its career: the strength of any music community can be measured best by the number of grizzled veterans who’ve kept on doing what they have to do regardless of whether anyone’s listening. Not to question the marketing-savvy-to-sense-of-justice ratio behind the Empty Bottle/Wire fest, but Cheer-Accident oughta be headlining one of those shows....

MAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that Metropolis Performing Arts Centre has been reinvented as a nonprofit, it’s doing what it couldn’t do when it had moneymaking aspirations: throwing a fund-raiser. Encore 2003! is Metropolis’s first attempt at a gala. It starts at 6:30 tonight with cocktails, tours, a silent auction, and a gourmet dinner, followed by entertainment in the theater at 111 W....

When Sean Kelly opened his new store, Videogames Etc, this past June he kept the fanfare to a minimum. “Video game collectors can be a pretty critical lot, so I avoided doing the grand opening thing,” he says. “I just wanted to get it up and quietly running, then give myself some time to get the details right.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until he sold his franchise last January, Kelly was well on his way to becoming a lifer with White Hen....

You rarely find a jazz conga player at the helm of his own group: Poncho Sanchez and Mongo Santamaria are the only well-known modern examples, and a historical search turns up only a couple more, like the pioneering Chano Pozo, who occasionally fronted a band during the bebop era. Not that this scarcity should be surprising. Despite (or perhaps because of) their distinctive color, the congas usually fulfill a strictly secondary function in jazz, even within a rhythm section; it makes sense for a bandleader to play an instrument more essential to the genre, such as–well, just about anything else....

I’ve had some disconcerting experiences in the 12 years I’ve been taking photographs in Illinois prisons. I’ll never forget the day I was caught in the middle of a riot at Menard and got shoved into a cell for my own safety. Or the time I was threatened at Stateville by gang members. But I hadn’t remembered my strange encounter with Patrick Page until I heard about the closing of the Joliet Correctional Center, a pre-Civil War structure built by convicts, using massive limestone blocks cut from nearby quarries....

Gustavo Aguilar is a silent preacher. After work and on weekends, he dons a robe, grabs a large cross, and parades through the streets dressed as Jesus. Aguilar doesn’t proselytize unless he’s approached. This is partly out of respect for others–he realizes that not everyone he encounters will be in the mood for a sermon–and partly because he thinks a bullhorn is unnecessary. In his view, a Jesus costume–like the golden arches–is enough to lure people in....

“Chekhov always wrote about people gazing off into the middle distance,” says Martha Webster, a Chicago actress and director. “That’s what people did with radio. They gazed off into the middle distance and used their imaginations.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Webster missed working in the medium’s golden age–the 30s and 40s–by a few years, although early in her career she did a few radio commercials....