Super Percy sang gospel in his native Shelby, Mississippi, as a young man; after arriving in Chicago about 25 years ago he crossed over to secular music, and since then he’s been a mainstay at south- and west-side clubs. His usual set is heavy on soul-blues standards like Tyrone Davis’s “It’s a Miracle” and Joe Simon’s “Chokin’ Kind,” but instead of crooning like a soul singer he slightly softens the hard, leathery attack of a bluesman with a supple vibrato and by dipping into a breathy tone that hints at a vulnerable side....

By Linda Lutton “Essentially they were forcing people to make a donation,” says Juan Andres Mora, a member of the International Coalition of Mexicans Abroad, a group formed last month by 128 organizations from the U.S., Canada, and Europe to improve the way Mexicans living abroad are treated by the Mexican government. “The consulate was not operating in a clear manner. Lots of people didn’t even know they had just made a donation....

I believe the “pacemaker danger” signs people put up around microwave ovens are silly and baseless. Surely they spring from some lawyer worried about a suit. Please tell us the real deal. –Nukem All, Houston 90s. Kids these days. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you rightly suspect, current medical opinion is that concerns about microwave ovens frying your pacemaker are, if not silly and baseless, certainly exaggerated given the precautions currently taken in manufacturing these devices....

Cecil, just what the heck does the Latin phrase that starts lorem ipsum mean? I have seen this used as “filler text” for years and have always wondered what it meant. Today I had finally had enough, so I cranked up my favorite search engine and fed it this phrase. You can imagine what I got back–thousands of Web pages in various stages of construction. And so I turn to you....

For the past decade Chicago’s Tossers have followed in the weaving footsteps of Celt-rock pioneers the Pogues and the ur-oi outfit Cocksparrer–an excellent path for any quality band that wants to get ignored. The simple message of street punk–“I’m poor and I’m pissed and I’m political, so watch it!”–is pretty much a turn-off without perfect songwriting or an unstoppable singer to put it across. On the Tossers’ Purgatory (their second full-length on Thick) they don’t quite attain the former, but they’ve got the latter in Tony Duggins, who also plays a mean mandolin....

Rock, Pop, etc. BURD EARLY, NATE DENVER’S NECK Free in-store performance. Fri 11/29, 5:30 PM, Reckless Records, 1532 N. Milwaukee. 773-235-3727. CHICAGO KINGS, DR. KILLBOT, JUGGLERS AGAINST WAR, ENVIRONMENTAL ENCROACHMENT perform at the Movieside Film Festival. Sun 12/8, 8 PM, Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln. 312-444-3456, ext. 520. STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES, GARRISON STARR See Critic’s Choice. Sat 11/30, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine. 773-275-6800 or 312-559-1212. KELLI ANN GLASER Holiday cabaret concert....

TWO SISTERS AND A PIANO | Nilo Cruz’s poetic but ultimately unsatisfying play is steeped in longing: for an active life, for a husband, for revolutionary change. Writer Maria Celia and pianist Sofia are sisters living under house arrest in 1991 Cuba. It was Maria Celia’s work on perestroika that forced their imprisonment; Sofia’s playing keeps them entertained during the long, lonely days and nights. They’re visited by Lieutenant Portuondo (Sammy A....

We’re number five! Nationwide, just 3 percent of us commute to work on foot. But according to Mark Alan Hughes (Philadelphia Daily News, May 20), there are sections of cities where over half the population walks to work: 1.9 square miles in downtown Philadelphia that’s home to 38,000 people, 1.5 square miles in Boston and Cambridge (33,000 people), 0.8 square miles in San Francisco (8,000), 0.2 square miles in midtown Manhattan (3,000), and 0....

Roommates Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks were eating breakfast in their loft one Monday in January, discussing a deep frustration with feeling powerless. Though it would be another month before George Bush would liken the millions of protesters around the world to a “focus group,” the futility of appealing to a president bent on war was already becoming apparent. “Decisions were being made, and it didn’t really matter what an individual was saying or a group of individuals was saying,” recalls Palmer....

Shaun of the Dead With Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Morgan, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, and Peter Serafinowicz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The scene embodies two principles that would become standard in horror movies: it’s vaguely postmodern, calling attention to the movie itself as part of a cinematic tradition, and it shows how quickly laughter can be overtaken by terror....

Trisha Brown Dance Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These works make clear how postmodern dance reflects the beliefs and conventions of modern literature. (Apparently the dance world is one step behind the literary: it took a second world war to convey to dancers what writers had grasped decades earlier.) European literature of the early 20th century seeks to convey all faces of the loss of meaning–absence, atomization, alienation–with linguistic tools ranging from harsh clarity to dense obscurantism....

Hamlet Dreams, Bailiwick Repertory. In director David Zak’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, only patriarchs Claudius and Polonius can hear and speak. Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Laertes communicate through sign language while alter egos speak their words. Zak and cast manage this unusual staging’s flow very well, and the physical interactions–between Hamlet and Ophelia (Robert Schleifer and Candace Hart), for example–are surprisingly moving. This is not to slight Aaron Preusse, who gives Hamlet an intelligent, sensitive voice....

The Israel Film Festival continues through November 14 with an impressive flowering of talent–seven narrative features, eight documentaries, and nine television entries that cover an ambitious range of subjects, from the intimate to the global. All movies are primarily in Hebrew with subtitles and screen at Pipers Alley; tickets are $9.25, $6.50 for students, seniors, and children under 12. For more information call 877-966-5566 or visit www.israelfilmfestival.com/iff04, which has a full festival schedule....

John Podmajersky III is “probably the only guy who grew up in his ward who sails,” says Mark Kastel, a farm policy analyst who has known him for about 20 years. As a child Podmajersky Jr. helped his dad deliver milk, but later he worked as a structural engineer for the city. In the mid-1960s he started buying buildings, mainly condemned and abandoned properties that he could get for cheap, and encouraging artists to move in....

This brilliant artist is mime, musician, clown, and athlete–a stage illusionist whose magic is based entirely on his own physical skill. Just as Cirque du Soleil (for whom Moschen has staged routines) transformed the circus tradition into performance art, Moschen has reclaimed juggling from vaudeville corniness, reinventing it as exquisite visual theater. He doesn’t simply balance his spheres, illuminated hoops, and flaming torches; he imbues them with a life of their own, partnering them balletically or guiding them as if by telekinesis and focusing our attention on the geometric images and rhythmic sounds these objects generate in motion....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the strangest election result this year came from Orange County, California, where a school board seat went not to the favorite, a county park ranger and local PTA president, but to the almost literally unknown Steve Rocco, who identified himself on the ballot as a teacher and writer. Rocco got 54 percent of the vote although he never campaigned or even appeared in public....

Neil Young Well, OK, I don’t know about you or your mom. But Neil Young once would have, and did. On May 4, 1970, students at Kent State University in Ohio mounted a protest against the Vietnam war. The national guard was called in, and in a chaotic standoff 13 unarmed young people were cut down by the guardsmen at close range in what was later legally designated self-defense. Four died....

The subject of a weeklong retrospective at Facets Multimedia Center, Italian director Valerio Zurlini (1926-1982) is lesser known outside his homeland than the neorealists of the 1940s and the activist filmmakers of the 1960s. But between 1950 and 1976 he created a distinguished body of work dealing with thwarted love, class differences, postwar hedonism, and the inevitability of death. With this 1960 coming-of-age drama he helped turn Claudia Cardinale (The Leopard, Once Upon a Time in the West) into a bawdy, voluptuous icon: as Aida, an impressionable lounge singer who’s been seduced and abandoned, she’s a free spirit who responds to kindness but also stands her ground, and while she’s flattered by the attentions of an aristocratic teenager (Jacques Perrin), she comes to realize the futility of their relationship....

One encouraging trend in jazz and improvised music is a turn toward neglected but useful oddball instruments. (Locally, Aram Shelton’s steaming on the baby E-flat clarinet is a good example.) England’s Tony Bevan started out on soprano saxophone, then added tenor; in the early 90s he took on the huge bass saxophone, a relic of 1920s jazz, when the bull fiddle had yet to assert its dominance over air-bass rivals like the tuba, and bass sax king Adrian Rollini ripped off lines like fast tuned farts....

When Chicago’s turn came for National Geographic’s “ZipUSA” feature, covering a neighborhood nominated by readers, the magazine sent its correspondent to the steaming jungles of 60614–Lincoln Park to you and me. Years ago there was a neighborhood bar I would see on the ride home to Ravenswood. It was somewhere along that east-west stretch of track between the Belmont and Paulina stops. In the early winter darkness, its homey entrance cupped in the glow of street lamps, it seemed a nest of light and warmth....