Stark, mysterious, and often weirdly funny, this magical realist tale by Mark and Michael Polish (Jackpot, Twin Falls Idaho) follows a handful of federal agents in charcoal black overcoats as they tour the godforsaken town of Northfork, Montana, trying to evacuate the last few diehards before a hydroelectric project submerges them under tons of water. At the same time a delirious young boy, left in the care of a grizzled preacher by his feckless foster parents, dreams of visiting a strange family who believe him to be one of God’s own angels....

NYCKELHARPA ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nyckelharpa–a Swedish folk instrument with a 600-year history–is an unwieldy keyed fiddle related to the hurdy-gurdy. Played with a short bow, the standard version has up to 16 strings–three for melody, one for drone, and the rest for resonance–and 37 wooden keys that, when pressed, hit the strings and act as frets. Sounds like there’s a lot of potential there, doesn’t it?...

On her current CD, Red-Luck (Vanguard), pop singer-songwriter Patty Larkin sometimes allows her cleverness to get the better of her: “Inside Your Painting,” for instance, is tripped up by its feverishly kaleidoscopic imagery and Summer of Love clearance-sale folkadelic arrangement. At other times she plays it too safe: “Children” is sabotaged by cliches like “I remember being happy just paying our dues” and a stiffly formulaic folk-rock arrangement. But more often Larkin puts her verbal and musical skills to better use....

Long before becoming a TV producer, Peter Rudman was a star basketball player at Highland Park High School in the mid-1980s. Last fall Rudman and his partner, Rashid Ghazi, approached the cable channel Fox Sports Network to propose a reality program that would follow the lives of three high school basketball stars, from Chicago, New York, and LA, through an entire season. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their local hero would be Eddy Curry from Calumet City....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a fan of Harold Henderson’s epic Reader articles of the past, it seems his editors may have severely chopped “Blue Bags, Red Flags” (6/15/01). Unless Mr. Henderson happens to be in full agreement with the unbalanced view of recycling espoused by the book he reviewed (Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development), the article completely neglects all challenges....

The home opener was snowed out, but the Cubs got off to a hot start. They were 7-5 when I saw them play their first home night game two Mondays ago, and though they lost that game badly they followed it with five straight wins, all of them impressive, to seize first place in the National League’s Central Division. They were crunching the ball on offense and playing well enough to get by on defense, while the pitching excelled, even when the wind blew out at Wrigley Field....

I was slow to appreciate the multifaceted greatness of the late Stan Brakhage, this country’s major experimental filmmaker, in part because he and some of his supporters originally presented his work in terms so grand they seemed to split his audience into believers and atheists. This memorial screening of ten Brakhage films, the prints of which were all loaned by local enthusiasts, extends from Desistfilm (1954) to Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999), and though it omits two of my favorites from his middle period–The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971) and Scenes From Under Childhood (1970)–it offers a useful 75-minute survey for people unacquainted with his work....

It’s just past kimjang right now–the time when many traditional Korean households bury a supply of spiced cabbage in the backyard to help sustain them through the winter. Kwang and Yang Lee, owners of Ravenswood’s Chicago Kimchee, aka Korea Kimchee (and briefly the Kimchi Museum), are supervising their two employees as they plunge their rubber-gloved arms elbow deep into a lavalike mixture of powdered red pepper, ginger, garlic, sugar, shrimp paste, fish sauce, and MSG....

You won’t see Betty Jeffries dressed like this on the street much longer, but indoors she shows a lot of skin year-round. She has “two sleeves, a full leg piece, a stomach piece, and a chest piece,” which means there are swallows poking out above her neckline and “flowers and fairies and dragonflies” peeking out the top and bottom of her low-rise pants. Jeffries, who works at Uptown’s Tattoo Factory, has been decorating other people’s bodies since she was 17, but she started on her own more than a decade ago, at age 15, with the dainty purple rose on her right hand....

They knew the cops wouldn’t come when called. So starting in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the tenant leaders at Robert Taylor Homes came up with alternatives. “Police ain’t interested in coming here for every little thing that was going on,” Lucille Rick told sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh. “So me and Edith and Caroline and [other elected Local Advisory Council officers], we just tried to, you know, make sure that they came when really bad stuff happened....

Friday 6/27 – Thursday 7/3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 28 SATURDAY Modernist painter Helen Torr saw her work shown only twice during her lifetime, and she had to share one of those exhibits–in 1933, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place–with her husband, the better-known Arthur Dove. During the Depression the pair of struggling artists lived on a sailboat, at a yacht club, and in a former roller rink before landing in a tiny Long Island cottage....

When a snowstorm struck the city one December in the early 1970s, the rank and file showed up to work at the Richardson Company chemical factory on time. The plant manager, supervisors, and line foremen–who all lived in the suburbs–didn’t arrive until late afternoon. At the end of the day, the plant manager shook hands with the workers in the packaging unit and thanked them. Afterward one worker, Carlos Cortez, remarked to his foreman that the plant would be better off without managers....

CHICAGO A CAPPELLA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since its debut in 1993, the nine-member Chicago a Cappella has earned a reputation as a versatile, knowledgeable interpreter of music for unaccompanied chorus, with a repertoire ranging from sacred music of the Renaissance to a 1995 commission called “Birth of Soul, Part I.” The ensemble’s intellectually curious artistic director (and bass), Jonathan Miller, has been the catalyst behind some of its more daring programs, including an evening devoted to 16th-century Italian composer Giovanni Palestrina and another inspired by the life of Frank Lloyd Wright....

By Stefan Vilcins “Utter shock was the first reaction,” Clement says of the backlash the city experienced when it was announced as the pageant site last March. “People were amazed that Gary would even have the audacity to compete for the honor of hosting the pageant.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the specifics of the bid that he assembled are still confidential, he says that other than the promise of hotel accommodations, food, and transportation for the Miss USA delegates and staff–“no-brainer stuff,” as Clement puts it–there were few contractual guarantees made by the city....

Of the $50 million in political contributions from business, labor, professional, and issue interests to state candidates in 1999- 2000, $11 million came from the 20 largest contributors, according to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform’s “Sunshine Database” (http://ilcampaign.org/top20). The Illinois Education Association ($1.4 million) and the Illinois State Medical Society ($1 million) were the only seven-figure donors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Great moments in public service....

DAT Politics, a coed glitchcore group from France, are maximalists with a minimalist sense of timing. Doling out beats sparingly, they carve rhythm out of blank space but then pile on rich, detuned Casio trumpets and other sappy but heraldic sounds and top it all off with little chirps, plinks, and flutters. Though each song starts as twee as a twitterpated Furby, eventually samples get scrambled beyond recognition and what started as a sound track for ribbon dancing and blowing bubbles has turned into background music more appropriate for writing a crazed manifesto....

Some of the tracks on Dave Gordon’s new album, Faux Real (Southport), are recent, others date back to the early 90s, but musically they’re all true to the ideas that informed the Chicago pianist and composer’s first recordings in the early 80s–though opinions may differ as to whether this shows admirable consistency or arrested development. The acoustic opener, “X20,” recorded in 2001, draws equally on Weather Report’s “Birdland” and Herb Alpert’s 007 theme “Never Say Never Again....

Billy Chaka’s in another pickle. The wiseass Cleveland-based reporter for popular teen mag Youth in Asia has been ordered by his editor to take some unwanted R and R after slapping the director of Wildman for Geisha! during the Chicago Film Festival. But he’s no sooner packed off to Japan than the cryptic night porter at Hokkaido’s Hotel Kitty keels over in his room. When Billy tries to inform the hotel staff of the porter’s demise, he learns of the almost simultaneous death of 27-year-old rock star Yoshimura Fukuzatsu....

Jeffrey A. Wolin’s Temple of Augustus and Livia, Vienne, one of 22 photos of Provence at the Catherine Edelman gallery, shows a Roman temple in a town square amid the chairs of a sidewalk cafe. The photographer is clearly having fun with incongruities between the ancient and the modern, but he also conveys the tremendous power of old stone buildings. Le Pont Flavien, St. Chamas is an image of the two archways of a Roman bridge, one inside the other, rising from irregular terrain with a solidity that suggests the eternal....

“What we don’t know / Could fill a truck / What we don’t know / Cannot hurt us,” declares Tim Harrington at the start of Les Savy Fav’s new Go Forth (Frenchkiss). Well, actually it can, as the Brooklyn quartet and the rest of country have discovered in recent months. But the song was recorded before September 11, and those lines deserve to be taken in the spirit in which they’re delivered: as an invitation to shed our inhibitions and go nuts along with Harrington, a wall climber of a front man who once spent most of a Valentine’s Day set playing spin the bottle with the audience....