Rock, Pop, etc. KEN BURNSTEIN Free in-store performance. Fri 11/9, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1500 W. 16th, Oak Brook. 630-574-0800. CELIA CRUZ, MICHAEL FEINSTEIN Fri 11/16, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-902-1500. FIVE BY DESIGN Sun 11/11, 7 PM, Dorothy Menker Theater, Fine and Performing Arts Center, Moraine Valley Community College, 10900 S. 88th, Palos Hills. 708-974-5500. ISLEY BROTHERS, KENNY LATTIMORE See Critic’s Choice. Fri 11/9, 8 PM, Arie Crown Theater, McCormick Place, 2301 S....

Rock, Pop, etc. KEN ARLEN ORCHESTRA Free concert. Tue 8/13, 7:30 PM, Dawes Park, Church & Sheridan, Evanston. 847-448-8058 or 847-866-2910. CREED, JERRY CANTRELL, 12 STONES Fri 8/9, 7:15 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park. 708-614-1616 or 312-559-1212. Sat 8/10, 7:15 PM, Alpine Valley Music Theatre, Highway D and Highway 120, East Troy, Wisconsin. 262-642-4400 or 312-559-1212. JOHN ESKOLA, PATRICIA RUSK Fri 8/9 and Sat 8/10, 8 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N....

Upon enrolling at Ball State University in 1994, Christine Dominick immediately joined the school’s fencing club. Growing up in Edison Park, she had drawn, painted, and played the piano, but by the time she got to college she was tired of “boring girlie stuff….All I knew is that I wanted to fence. It just seemed very natural for me to do.” She tried two of the three fencing blades: the foil, a thin, flexible sword, and the epee, a stiff, heavy weapon with a triangular crosspiece and a bell guard to protect the hand....

Anotherkorearevisited, Black Forest Theater Company, at Peter Jones Gallery. It’s not a good sign when a company draws only a handful of people on opening night. If most of the performers’ friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, dog walkers, and cleaning ladies don’t come, how good can a show be? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Only six people showed up for this opening–and only three bothered to arrive before the show began....

Gangs of New York With Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson, Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, Henry Thomas, Brendan Gleeson, and David Hemmings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scorsese once described his concept of the film as a western set on Mars, which adds two more playgrounds to the above list and helps explain the kind of historical fantasy he had in mind....

Since giving birth to house in the 80s Chicago has pumped out a steady stream of high-caliber dance DJs. But they haven’t always gotten to stretch out creatively–most crowds are unreceptive to experimentation, and club owners demand a packed dance floor at all times, which often means aiming for the lowest common denominator. Joe Bryl knows this as well as anyone. He’s been a DJ for 20 years, struggling for the past 10 or so to play the music he loves at places like the China Club, Vinyl, and the Funky Buddha Lounge....

DECEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 28 SATURDAY How much of a toll has West Nile virus taken on the local bird population? Today’s 41st annual Chicago North Shore Bird Count, part of the annual Audubon Christmas Count, will help determine the damage. Among the birds that might be spotted are red-breasted nuthatches (scarce this year), American robins (coming from Canada), and–along the lakeshore–the ducks of winter: bufflehead and common goldeneye....

Friday 5/24 – Thursday 5/30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 25 SATURDAY The city’s official Memorial Day parade honoring war veterans starts at noon today at Columbus and Balbo and will include more than 10,000 participants and 286 marching units; significantly smaller will be the concurrent Peace & Happiness Parade organized by the Zen Buddhist Temple in celebration of the Buddha’s 2,546th birthday. The parade starts and ends outside the temple at 1710 W....

For last year’s performance of City/Escape, the members of Marianne Kim’s butoh-inspired dance workshop alternately crept and sprinted east down Randolph Street from the Chicago Cultural Center to Daley Bicentennial Plaza. Wearing red thrift-store costumes and white body paint and twisting themselves into contorted shapes, the dancers were accompanied by Kim, who carried a boom box. “One homeless guy danced with us,” says one of the performers, “while people were screaming from cars and wondering what we were doing....

SEPTEMBER “Everyone in the league agreed that the Chicago Hustle had the best fans,” says Women’s Professional Basketball League historian Karra Porter. The team never won a championship during the league’s brief tenure, from 1978 to 1981. But they did play the first pro women’s basketball game–against the Milwaukee Does some 25 years ago. The opening tip-off will be recreated today at 10 AM with original players, coaches, and a referee from the first game as part of an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the WBL, after which fans will be invited to shoot some hoops with the players....

Of all the kingpins of New York’s once-thriving downtown/Brooklyn improvising scene, Dave Douglas is the only one who’s become a bona fide jazz star. Fame sometimes falls to the undeserving, of course, but Douglas came by his honestly, via sure swing and his versatile and oh-so-virtuosic trumpet technique. Whether playing heraldic open horn or musing quietly with a mute, nailing concert pitch or shying away from it, Douglas will keep shading his tone, which can sound thin as a pie tin or ring like a gong....

When Patrick Woodtor went home to Liberia in 1979–with a new American wife and stepson and a master’s degree from Northwestern University in transportation planning–he thought he was leaving the Chicago area for good. But the next year the West African nation was rocked by a violent military coup; the family waited two years for things to stabilize and then decided they couldn’t wait any longer. In 1982 the Woodtors reluctantly packed their bags and returned to Evanston....

Last year’s Sheer Hellish Miasma (Mego) didn’t sound much like anything sound manipulator Kevin Drumm had done before. His early recordings on tabletop guitar had been sparse and spacious in a three-dimensional way, and this was dense and gut-rumbling, a suffocating wash of twitchy low-end brutality. Yet it was marked by the same sort of attention to detail and gesture that had distinguished Drumm’s previous work: listening to it was like being pinned beneath a boulder and noticing the beautifully varied lines and fissures on its surface....

MAD Money Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moffatt kept quiet about the gift until it was signed and sealed, then sat on her news over the weekend so it wouldn’t be “buried” in a Saturday paper. In the four and a half months since, a little over $1 million of the $18 million MADTC still needed to raise has come in, and Moffatt has begun booking the first season, scheduled to start in November 2003....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In July a California court of appeals overruled an arbitration panel that awarded $88.5 million in taxpayer funds–about $8,800 an hour–to attorneys who successfully challenged the constitutionality of a state law….And that same month David L. Brite of California told the St. Petersburg Times that the Florida lawyer he engaged to find his stepgrandmother’s will did only a few hours’ work but claimed 25 percent of the estate, which is valued at $1....

On Tuesday morning, there were two funerals on 79th Street between State and Wabash. On the north side, at Carter Temple C.M.E. Church, the Reverend Charles Shyne and his wife, Verlena, lay in state. They were famous all over the south side, so when they were killed by a drunk driver they were eulogized with TV news reports and hymns on the radio. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Even though he was a grown man, he had a kid’s heart, he loved to play video games, watched wrestling with us,” said Chris Miller, a teenager from across the courtyard....

When it comes to the Boredoms, it’s best to expect the unexpected. After a drought of new material spawned rumors that the long-running Japanese band had broken up (or at least changed its name to Vredoms), in September it suddenly released Seadrum/House of Sun (Warner Music Japan), its first album in four years. The band’s members can be similarly mercurial when it comes to side projects. On earlier albums OOIOO–led by Boredoms drummer Yoshimi–experimented with catchy Krautrock grooves, but on the new Kila Kila Kila (Thrill Jockey) it opts for a more amorphous and dreamy approach....

I’m Going Home It seems entirely fitting that I’m Going Home–a beautiful feature by Manoel de Oliveira, who turns 94 this December and is still going strong–should open in Chicago, at the Music Box, just after September 11. This 2001 French film by a Portuguese master who occasionally makes films in France is the kind of quiet masterpiece that fully registers only after you’ve seen it–a profound meditation on bereavement and other kinds of loss (including losing one’s way) as well as on everyday life and things right under our noses that we accept as “other,” including old age and art and different cultures....

Arnold Mesches By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Visitors to Mesches’s Los Angeles studio used to call him “a New York painter,” he says, but there’s an oddly European feel to The Gate, informed by Mesches’s first memory of death: a child at the bottom center is dwarfed by three adult figures, a hearse, and an ornate entranceway. The scene is covered with snow, which outlines the tree branches; together the lines of the branches, the gate, and the hearse form an almost impenetrable network, a world the child cannot hope to understand....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility to Chicago’s downtown theater district. The Casual Family...