Margi Cole’s new work, Hues, tumbles its seven performers together in rapidly shifting combinations like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Reflecting with her young dancers on words like human, humanity, and humility, Cole came up with a vocabulary of movement for the work aided by videotapes of their kinetic speculations. The result, set to percolating music, moves the performers all over the stage in scenarios that obliquely suggest support, affection, confrontation, or self-absorption....

JUNE Today is opening day for the 16th annual Bristol Renaissance Faire, held in a 30-acre woods just over the Wisconsin border in Kenosha County. Re-creating a day in 1574 when Queen Elizabeth visited the English city of Bristol, the fair offers more than 1,000 costumed performers engaging in sword fights, fire juggling, processionals, and mud shows. This year Robin Hood and his band of merry men will also be hanging out, making mischief for the villainous Lord High Sheriff and his crew....

Rock criticism might still be a viable organism, but it’s hard to tell: how do you know if something is moving on its own when people keep dragging it around and kicking it? Neal Pollack has devoted a whole novel to the proposition that writing about music is a pathetic waste of time (although writing a novel about writing about music apparently isn’t). In Jonathan Lethem’s new tome, The Fortress of Solitude, the unbearably self-loathing protagonist grows up to be a rock critic....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » May I offer a few thoughts inspired by John Greenfield’s profile of bike messenger-turned-author Travis Hugh Culley [March 30]? I haven’t read his book yet, but I can already tell the guy is a budding literary genius, maybe the next Jim Thompson. Consider, for example, the chilling economy with which Culley, using the passive voice to startling effect, evokes the solipsistic interior world of the true sociopath: “We [messengers]…can penetrate a crowd like it was a puff of smoke....

“You see I live a life filled with chicken and malt liquor / And women that are real-life scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers,” brags Atlanta rapper Ludacris on the title track of his third album, Word of Mouf (Def Jam South). Humor has mostly disappeared from hip-hop, supplanted by pathological violence and conspicuous consumption, but Luda (aka Chris Bridges), originally a radio personality, understands that entertainers are supposed to be entertaining. (“My rap career goes back further than your father’s hairline / It’s Ludacris, I pack more nuts than Delta Airlines,” he asserts on “Coming 2 America....

Reedist Jeff Newell, founder of the New-Trad Octet, left Chicago for Brooklyn in the mid-90s, and has since put together a second, entirely different lineup that performs under the same name in New York–but the NTO remains essentially a Chicago creation, and it never sounds better than in the city of its birth. In part this is a matter of timing: without fail, the band plays here right around Mardi Gras, the better to invoke the New Orleans textures and rhythms that first inspired Newell in the mid-80s–and unlike in Louisiana, hereabouts mid-February is still snowdrift season, when folks most need the warmth the octet can generate....

Lead Stories In November Welsh entrepreneur Ben Holst formed the TitPillow Company, which sells pillows shaped like breasts, after receiving a grant of about $1,500 from the Prince’s Trust, headed by Prince Charles. In Puppetry of the Penis, which closed in January after three months at London’s 600-seat Whitehall Theatre, nude actors artistically twisted their private parts into shapes resembling, for example, the Olympic torch and a hamburger. And a November conference at Penn State University featured workshops and exhibits organized around regaining control of a word the feminist organizers regard as empowering but which is generally regarded as vulgar....

This is just up the street from Ribfest, where I once had this really embarrassing celebrity encounter. I was there with my friend Judy and we were sitting at one of the picnic tables when I looked over at one of the lines for ribs and said, “Oh my God, I think that’s David Schwimmer–DS!” and she exclaimed, “Oh my God, it is DS!” He was surrounded by all these girls fawning and giggling over him–“Oh, aren’t you the guy from Friends?...

Eva Watson Schutze, a portraitist in league with Alfred Stieglitz and his photo secessionist movement, exemplified late-19th-century ideals of the “new woman” as well as the era’s “new photography.” A dedicated pictorialist, she embraced an artistic style of subjective, soft-focus lyricism, derided as “fuzzography” by mainstream photographers of the time, who espoused sharp-focus realism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in New Jersey, she originally studied painting with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but found her “imaginative impulses all paralyzed....

In the first week of the New Year, a little over a month before the mayoral election, the city quietly let it be known that the firefighters were about to get their contract–almost three and a half years after the last one expired. Word was leaked through the Chicago Tribune: a January 7 article by Gary Washburn quoted various sources to the effect that the money end of the deal had been negotiated and firefighters were set to get a 4 percent raise....

LOU BEGA 2/11, ALLSTATE ARENA The sunny party music of “admitted admirer of women” Lou Bega is as infectious as the flu. The half-Ugandan, half-Sicilian David Lubega, who was raised in Munich, has reanimated the corpse of the swing revival with campy Latin-lovair-isms–and his breakthrough album, A Little Bit of Mambo (RCA), with its synthy hip-hop touches, is even more crudely effective and egregiously fluffy than the 50s and 60s exotica it evokes....

For four years public high school teachers have been saying that the twice-a-year standardized tests the Board of Education requires freshmen and sophomores to take are a waste of time and money. And for four years the board has essentially told the teachers to pipe down and keep giving the test. For a few years McGreal taught at a southwest-side elementary school. In 1998 he came to Curie, where he discovered the CASE....

The first of City Lit Theater Company’s short pieces by Moliere falls flat, despite Page Hearn’s brisk direction, because only Michael Schroeck as the young lover seems to understand the over-the-top nature of farce: when he smiles, his teeth sparkle like Dudley Do-Right’s. Playing the title character, Thomas M. Shea isn’t venal enough to make his impersonation of a doctor persuasive or amusing, and his victim seems just a normal guy instead of someone begging to be shown up....

Charles Martin Smith, who played writer Farley Mowat in the 1983 wilderness drama Never Cry Wolf, returns to the frozen north as writer and director of this engrossing 2003 Canadian feature based on Mowat’s story “Walk Well, My Brother.” A callous World War II veteran (Barry Pepper) working as a bush pilot in the Northwest Territories cuts a deal with some Inuit natives to fly a tubercular young woman (Annabella Piugattuk) to a hospital, but after their plane goes down, in a particularly hair-raising sequence, he finds himself at the mercy of the land and her knowledge of it....

Fortinbras Hypocrites Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first blush Fortinbras seems like Blessing’s version of a Stoppard play–“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern… Lite,” a jokey sequel to Hamlet in which a marginal character takes center stage and battles with his betters for control of the story. But it blossoms into a thoughtful consideration of whether truth is worth the trouble. Fortinbras thinks not, and it takes the combined efforts of most of Hamlet’s characters, living and dead, to bring him around....

Rock, Pop, etc. CATHY BRAATEN Free concert. Fri 5/11, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-7094. E3 with Spacebrewer, Paul Fox & Kurt Morgan. Fri 5/11, 7:30 PM, Quimby’s, 1854 W. North. 773-342-0910. HIGH & MIGHTYS performs at the museum’s “First Fridays” reception. Fri MARK KNOPFLER, PAUL THORN Sat 5/5, 8 PM, Rosemont Theatre, 5400 N. River Rd., Rosemont. 847-671-5100 or 312-559-1212. LUCKY BOYS CONFUSION Free in-store performance....

In reference to a recent interview with disenfranchised librarians [“Reading Is Incidental,” November 15] and recent editorial reply [Letters, November 22]: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve had numerous commissioners over the past 20-plus years that I have been a librarian for CPL. Mary Dempsey, though not without political ambition, has at least pursued her job with gusto, and Mayor Daley has likewise provided support for libraries....

Friday 3/14 – Thursday 3/20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York-based experimental filmmaker Su Friedrich has suffered more than her fair share of medical problems–over the last several years she’s had a 13-pound cyst on her spleen, an abscessed ovary, polyps on her uterus, a torn ligament in her knee, and an intractable hormone imbalance that clogged her breast ducts. Her struggle with illness is the centerpiece of her latest film, The Odds of Recovery (2002), which combines first-person narration with documentary-style footage to explore aging, mortality, and Western medicine....

Ensemble Noamnesia, a collective formed in 1987 by local impresario of the avant-garde Gene Coleman, is as hard to pin down as the music it performs: Coleman, who doubles as conductor and bass clarinetist, is the only constant in its lineup, drawn from the city’s classical and improvised music scenes. For his second annual Sound Field festival, which runs through the end of the month, Coleman has assembled a Noamnesia roster featuring oboist Kyle Bruckmann, flutist Lisa Goethe, violinist Nell Flanders, cellist Marina Peterson, and percussionist Steve Butters, among others–rigorously trained, open-minded performers with the flexibility to handle unconventional notation and extended techniques alongside more customary displays of virtuosity....

James Moeller’s new play for the Black Forest Theater Company is a sloppy oddball collage featuring Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, Guantanamo Bay political prisoners, and enough druggy ruminations on the nature of the mind and memory to make Carlos Castaneda weep. But embedded in its incoherent excesses are nuggets of sheer brilliance, particularly when Moeller draws parallels between the American culture wars of the Vietnam era (obviously still haunting us today) and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, fueled by opposition to American pop culture....