Anyone who’s been to a high school football game will recognize Blast! immediately. The brass-and-percussion band, the routines with flags and batons, the rendition of “Malaguena”–this is is a halftime show. An evening-length halftime show, without a game to justify it. The concept seems perverse. The halftime show rates right up there with ice ballet as one of the strangest forms devised–a weird little cul-de-sac of idiosyncratic skills and odd aesthetics....

Thank you, 20th century. “The latter part of the 19th century was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, child death, horses, horse manure, candles, 12-hour work days, Jim Crow laws, tenements, slaughterhouses, and outhouses,” write Stephen Moore and Julian Simon in a Cato Institute report, “The Greatest Century That Ever Was” (December 15). “Lynchings–not just of blacks–were common. (In the South 11 Italians were lynched in one month.) To live to 50 was to count one’s blessings....

DJ Cheb i Sabbah’s new album, Krishna Lila (Six Degrees), may well be the first collection of bhajans, or Hindi devotional tunes, constructed in Pro Tools. It was recorded over a two-year period on several continents, with accomplished Indian classical musicians like bansuri (bamboo flute) player Deepak Ram and violinist K. Shivakumar, as well as New York bassist Bill Laswell and percussionist Karsh Kale. The Algerian-born, San Francisco-based producer and DJ himself is a phantom presence: he’ll bathe a specific vocal or instrumental bit in haunting echoes or stretch it toward infinity, and on “Raja Vedalu” there’s a fierce shuffle of programmed beats beneath the Vedic chanting, but for the most part his role seems to have been to assemble the talent....

In the mid-80s, Ellis Paul went to college in Boston on a track scholarship, then blew out his knee and embarked on a career as a singer-songwriter; by 1990 he was a rising star on the city’s folk scene, with two well-loved cassette releases making the rounds. Four albums later Paul still hadn’t reached the national audience many critics seemed to think he deserved, but then a pair of unlikely patrons, directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, came to his rescue: in 2000 they used “The World Ain’t Slowing Down” (from Paul’s 1998 Philo CD, Translucent Soul) on the sound track of Me, Myself & Irene, and “Sweet Mistakes” (the title track of Paul’s latest, on Co-op Pop) appeared in last year’s Shallow Hal....

Ten years after the Rwandan genocide that took nearly a million lives, writer-director Terry George tells the story of real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who took advantage of the UN forces guarding his four-star hotel to grant refuge to 1,268 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. George has said that Rusesabagina and his wife “shame us all by their decency and bravery,” but of course moviegoers aren’t in the habit of lining up at the box office to be shamed....

IRVIN MAYFIELD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just from the opening notes of New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield’s new disc, How Passion Falls (Basin Street Records), you can tell that one of the Marsalises had a hand in it: unison horns scurry through a busy, flawlessly precise introductory phrase; a shift in tempo leads to the main theme; then another shift, this time in meter, leads to the solos....

Whoever said you have to watch out for the quiet ones must have had Low in mind. When the trio from Duluth, Minnesota, started playing, at the height of the grunge craze ten years ago, they raised the bar for audience baiting by playing extremely slow, morose songs at the threshold of inaudibility. They can still sound pretty melancholy, and they haven’t outgrown their penchant for perverse gestures: after making their fourth and fifth albums with producer Steve Albini, they turned around and enlisted Gerry Beckley of soft rockers America to do backing vocals on 2002’s Trust (Kranky), their sixth and latest....

I’ve been here for seven years. I’ve owned the business for four–which was about the time that we started running the special Friends night. We watch the Thursday night lineup and we encourage people to bring in food and beverage while they paint. Most people do plates, bowls, and mugs, because even if you don’t like your artwork you can still use it. We were seeing a lot of everything–some first dates, groups of single women, groups of single men....

Last December, when Alon Margalit called Jonathan Pitts, the cofounder and executive producer of the Chicago Improv Festival, he casually mentioned that earlier that day a suicide bomber had killed 15 passengers on a public bus in Haifa. The day before, said Margalit, who’s a member of a Tel Aviv improv ensemble called Lo Roim M’Meter, two bombers had killed ten people in a Jerusalem pedestrian mall. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Though Barbara Reimers grew up an hour’s drive from the Spoon River valley, she didn’t read the book that made Edgar Lee Masters and his fictional central Illinois town famous until college, when she tried out for a theatrical adaptation of Spoon River Anthology. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I read those epitaph poems–really character studies–that make up the anthology,” she says. “And I saw my family, neighbors, and Ottawa in them....

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 Nomenil theater group performs Allen Conkle, Courtney Evans, and Christopher Powers’s musical spoof....

Shut Out, but Not Up “When a few more journalists were let in, Ebert yelled again to the front: ‘Who are those people? Why are they getting in?’ It wasn’t much of a shot, based on the evidence in Knelman’s own story. Without a hint of belligerence, McCarthy simply observed that Toronto had been a “can’t-miss stop” for American critics, but many were thinking twice because “they have been finding it difficult to do their jobs....

This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century Bad rock biographies are so commonplace that they’re hard to get angry about. Few people expect to find great writing when they pick up straight-to-paperback volumes like Martin James’s Moby: Replay or the pocket-size sketches of Beck, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello in the “Kill Your Idols Series.” Pop fans buy books about their favorite musicians to immerse themselves in the artist’s glow; all they ask is a decent spread of facts, presented in the correct chronological order and spiced with a little backstage intrigue....

This chamber-theater docudrama depicts the harrowing and transformative experiences of six people sentenced to death for murders they didn’t commit–men and women who lost years on death row before new evidence (DNA, a confession from the real killer) set them free. Given the intense nature of the material–tales of psychological and physical brutalization at the hands of police, prosecutors, prison guards, and other inmates–The Exonerated is notably understated. The text, assembled by playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen from interviews and court documents, presents a damning indictment of a law-enforcement system that, as former Illinois governor George Ryan recently observed, is “broken....

Are guinea pigs ever REALLY used as…guinea pigs? You hear about lab rats and mice, but I can’t recall ever seeing pictures of guinea pigs running mazes, being made to smoke cigarettes through a rubber tube, and so on, while guys in white coats take notes. All I know is nobody’s coming near MY guinea pig with any experimental substances. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Plus....

It’s been almost a year since Rolf de Heer’s 2002 western was screened as the opening-night attraction at the Melbourne film festival, but it’s lodged in my memory as the best Australian feature I’ve seen in years. Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil (Walkabout, Rabbit-Proof Fence) gives the performance of a lifetime as a tracker helping three mounted police find a murder suspect in 1922, and though the film recalls Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man in its grim tale of pursuit, its poetic feeling for both history and landscape, and its contemporary score (by aboriginal singer-songwriter Archie Roach), it has an identity all its own....

By Jack Clark “Oh yeah,” Dori says. “I love that place. I’ve been going since high school. Yeah, everybody had their say on what was happening with Biasetti’s. You know how that goes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Oh Jesus, Jack, it was in the 40s. No it wasn’t, but almost. Early 50s. Early, early 50s.” “Was Biasetti’s there?” Bob gets on. “The diner was always busy, and Mother’s and the Walgreens were always jamming....

Jody Williams It was his second “Lucky Lou” of the evening. The earlier version had sounded playful–spiraling ascents, cackling single-note spurts laid over the tune’s dark minor-key chord structure–but this time, as he guided the song from a rumbalike lurch into a 4/4 shuffle and back again, his attack became increasingly harsh. By the end his chords had taken on a clanging metallic timbre. He was smiling, but his brow was furrowed and his eyes were squeezed nearly shut....

Friday 8/22 – Thursday 8/28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this summer, while on a 12-city tour of Europe, Free Street’s Madjoy Theatrics youth ensemble passed time on Vienna’s U-Bahn by singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” To their surprise, they made it through the entire song. The spontaneous performance gave them the idea for tonight’s Hit It rock ‘n’ roll karaoke fund-raiser. Intended to help bankroll a September trip to Germany–during which the group will collaborate with German and West African teens in Hamburg–the event will feature original music by three bands, who’ll also play covers the audience can sing along with....

“Landlords don’t want teenage girls, because teenage girls bring teenage boys,” says Latricia Mosley, a former public-housing resident now living in a Section 8 house (“Near West/South Gazette,” June 1). “They don’t want teenage boys, because they’re worried about gangs. And believe it or not, some landlords don’t want married couples. So there’s a lot of discrimination where there’s supposed to be equal-opportunity housing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....