The Visa Limbo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Enhanced security measures prompted by the September 11 attacks have made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for many international artists to visit the U.S. Over the past few months Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, Buena Vista Social Club spin-off the Afro-Cuban All-Stars, renowned Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, and Syria’s great Arabic classical group Ensemble Al-Kindi have had to cancel performances and appearances in this country for the same reason Ghobadi did....

Finnish producer Vladislav Delay has emerged as one of the more interesting figures in electronic dance music. Early on the former jazz percussionist put hard but minimal beats through subtle workouts, transforming them by introducing digital errors and gentle dubby effects; on recordings from a couple years ago, like Sistol (Phthalo) and Entain (Mille Plateaux), the music twitched danceably but there was something appealingly off about the rhythmic accents. He was an early proponent of what’s sometimes called glitchwerks–the creative application of the clicks, pops, and other noises that normally tell you your CD player is on the fritz....

Ms. Brody, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your glowing review of this “film” propelled me to get myself over to the Music Box to see Tarnation [Section 2, October 22]. As a mental health counselor working in the foster-care system, the subject matter is of great interest to me. In fact, based on your review, I mistakenly recommended this film to several of my colleagues, a mistake I have learned from....

Passersby may mistake the stylish Market District storefront FOLLIA, owned by Hype Model Management honcho Bruno Abate, for a boutique or gallery: the mannequins perched in the front windows are all wearing haute couture, and the waitstaff is made up mostly of models. But the servers are only part of the eye candy. Tiny, iridescent celery green tiles are inlaid around the center bar, while similar royal blue tiles cover the back wall....

This late-night clown show claims to be about “friendship, war, and cheating death” but is actually less violent than 500 Clown Frankenstein, which it follows. Certainly the story of two foolish friends who exhume their deceased companion only to watch in horror as he proceeds to inflict terrible injustice on the innocent could well be a metaphor for war’s indiscriminate destruction. (“Every time! Every time!” laments one of the hapless resurrectionists....

This poetic masterpiece (1988) is the crowning work of Joris Ivens, the great Dutch documentarian and leftist, who made it in collaboration with his companion, Marceline Loridan, shortly before his death at age 90. (In fact there’s reason to believe the film was mainly written by Loridan, though this makes it no less Ivens’s own testament.) Neither a documentary nor a fantasy but a sublime fusion of the two, it deals in multiple ways with the wind, with Ivens’s asthma, with China, with the 20th century (and, more implicitly, the 19th and the 21st), with magic, and with the cinema....

Age has treated Lenny LaCour better than the record business ever did. The 70-year-old musician-promoter wears a pressed gray suit, accented by a maroon tie, as he sips coffee in a booth at a pancake house near his Melrose Park home, and a full head of jet-black hair complements a thin W. Clement Stone mustache. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In Chicago, Lenny was one of the early pioneers of pushing and creating rock ‘n’ roll,” says local soul historian Robert Pruter, who has written about LaCour for the British magazine Now Dig This....

It was apparent when she appeared in State Fair at the Shubert Theatre in 1995 that legendary dancer Donna McKechnie no longer had the dazzling moves that made her a Broadway favorite in the 60s and 70s. But she still embodies the musical-theater “triple threat” ideal: she can belt and warble with the best of them, her acting is precise and appealing, and her dancing remains expressive and beautifully shaped. Most important now, she’s history on the hoof....

HAIKU #1 GIG Fuh… What a dandy ultimate USE of the subject/object self: as a touchstone of Decline and Fall . . . mammal . . . human . . . universal! What sort of writer would I be to decline the invitation? Of all the cheesy stories I’ve wanted no part of, this would appear to have my name–well, one of ’em–all over it. The No-Insulation Kid at your service!...

St. Germain Solid Ether By Kevin Whitehead Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The America Nicholson describes sounds stuck in 1990, when Wynton Marsalis was riding high and major labels were signing as many retro bop bands as they had pens to go around. But the bottom fell out of the neoconservative boom by mid-decade, and overnight sensations got bumped from major labels to minors....

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but economists are almost always wrong when predicting the future. Confounded by the severity of the current recession, most economists continued to believe that better times were just around the corner. Last spring the experts at Credit Suisse First Boston said the economy appeared to be in a V-shaped cycle in which a “stomach-churning downturn” would be followed by a “rapid recovery....

No matter how many flourishes and gadgets the Flying Karamazov Brothers add to their repertoire, no one will ever mistake them for Blue Man Group–a blessing for those who prefer their clowning analog rather than digital. The Brothers’ latest offering in their 30-plus years of juggling with jokes is Life: A Guide for the Perplexed, which takes its title and loose inspiration from 12th-century philosopher Moses Maimonides’s book of the same name....

The Liquid Moon The only other work I’ve seen by Green was the mid-80s hit comedy Hamburger Twins, an amusing but not particularly perceptive work about a serious actor thrown into an identity crisis when he strikes it rich playing a talking hamburger in fast-food commercials. Yet here Green provides enough psychological meat to feed an audience for a week. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ryan’s love interest adds another perspective through oblique comments early on and in a late scene when she insists on speaking her mind and analyzing her relationship with him....

The cholesterol study ended and the next day he was hungry again, glaring at the diners through restaurant windows on Halsted, yanking at the collar of his thin, incompetent coat. Only October and already too cold; just the next day and hungry again. The human body–a bad design–always about to die, and nothing in the sky but cracked slate. “I thought you’d like to know,” she said. “There’s a new study starting–no meals but you get 150 bucks....

The Netherlands’ mighty ICP (Instant Composers Pool) Orchestra mixes freewheeling improvisation and composed material like no other, with every member given the latitude to try to alter the direction of a piece or improvisation. An ICP performance is one of the most exciting experiences in jazz, and it’s also one of the messiest–the music really can be the “sound of surprise” that some call it. Last year leader Misha Mengelberg enlarged the group to a tentet by adding tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius....

As the Neptunes, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo have been the hottest producers in hip-hop, pop, and R & B for several years now: Jay-Z, Mystikal, Mary J. Blige, Janet Jackson, Busta Rhymes, No Doubt, and Britney Spears are among the dozens of artists that have hired the Virginia Beach duo to craft them a hit. Their stuttery, dry rhythms and minimal beeps, rings, and liquid tones put them in league with Timbaland, but their trademark is the combo of that hardness and smooth vocal hooks–Williams himself sang the catchy falsetto bit on Jay-Z’s “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)....

Lonesome West Born and raised in London by Irish expats who returned to their native Galway when he was a teenager, leaving him to fend for himself in England, McDonagh reeks of ambivalence about his roots, both ethnic and literary. Despite his English upbringing, all his plays so far have been set on the west coast of Ireland, near where his parents were born–the same picturesque world of bogs and tiny villages and lonely cottages found in William Butler Yeats’s poetry and John Millington Synge’s plays....

A diverse program of videos, some perversely erotic, others strong and austere. Siebren Versteeg’s wonderfully minimal Line and Sci-Fi (1999) comment on how we’ve converted nature into culture. In the first, the word LINE appears upper right on a solid blue screen; one wonders if there’s something wrong with the VCR hookup until a bird suddenly flies by, transforming the video blue into a twilit sky. The second opens on a bluish white haze; as we gradually pull back, it’s revealed as the earth seen from space–then as an image on a Bic lighter....

For 28 years Marsha Huddleston was a librarian in the children’s division of the downtown public library. According to her colleagues, she helped build the collection and knew it as well as, if not better than, anyone else in the system. Many observers outside the system have lauded Dempsey’s efforts. Her program “One Book, One Chicago”–which encourages residents across the city to read and discuss such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird and My Antonia–has been imitated in several other cities....

There’s an added spark this year to the core material in the Noble Fools’ holiday revue spoofing star-driven specials. At the show’s center is Patricia Musker as smarmy big shot Gina Oswald: whenever the indefatigable Gina sings, Musker’s mugging and tics milk every note for hilarity. The chorus–the eight Zeitgeist Family Singers–now have well-developed individual personalities, and their dancing is sillier than ever (kudos to choreographer Mark Goldwebber). The return of Anti-Clause and his cigar-chomping elf Chico is comically crass, and Mick Houlahan’s bang-on ode to the Grinch should make anyone’s Christmas....