A few years back poet Albert Goldbarth heard that Wichita State University was scrapping its card catalog. He pleaded with the librarian to save it. “I said, ‘Look, 200 years from now you’re going to have some kind of exhibit here about the library 200 years ago, and you’re going to pay somebody to make a mock-up of a card catalog,’” he says. “But it was already on the books to go to the state dump, and nothing would change his mind....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the three works on the program, Ms. Kleiman only enjoyed Geometry of Quiet, the middle piece on the program, which she describes in fond words. I found this piece to be pretty, but innocuous, and certainly the fluffiest concoction on the program. Unfortunately, fluffy seems to describe Ms. Kleiman’s aesthetic all too well. Similarly, Ms. Kleiman hates Dave Douglas’s score to Rapture to Leon James for not being what she wants it to be and characterizes it as “ultramodern....

Shel Silverstein may have been a well-regarded cartoonist and children’s author, but he was a very limited dramatist. Many of the ten one-acts in this “best of” show, put together by Silverstein’s friends after his death in 1999, are little more than bloated comedy sketches. The folks at Second City could have made their point and gotten more laughs in half the time it takes Silverstein to lay out the story in “One Tennis Shoe,” about a woman who can’t help picking through the garbage for knickknacks....

Chelsea Kalberloh’s seventh-grade teacher misread her name on the attendance list and called out “Cheesy? Cheesy Kalberloh?” The nickname stuck, and now Kalberloh’s moniker matches her job: cheesemonger at the Wicker Park cheese and wine boutique Taste. At her cheese counter in the back of the shop–opened April 12 by veteran restaurateur and wine sales rep Rodney Alex–Kalberloh educates and encourages shoppers to try unfamiliar things. One recent afternoon she implored a hesitant taster to sample an aged provolone from Wisconsin....

Last year, when Arista released Even in Darkness, the first album by the Atlanta hip-hop crew Dungeon Family, the main selling point was the involvement of Outkast. But perhaps the most distinctive voice on the album belonged to Thomas “Cee-Lo” Callaway, who as the son of a Baptist minister and a founding member of Goodie Mob is both a rapper and a rafter-raising soul singer. While his charismatic rasp naturally stands out in any context, Cee-Lo has generally seemed content to keep a low profile, but it turns out that even in the spotlight he’s a modest guy....

Road to Perdition With Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Tyler Hoechlin, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dylan Baker, and Liam Aiken. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most, maybe even all of these attributes can constitute virtues if they’re handled with enough skill. And I won’t deny that they’re handled with a great deal of skill here; Mendes is as resourceful and inventive with these materials as he was with the equally salable goods of American Beauty–which I prefer in some ways, but only because I’m more of a sucker for the equally dubious New Age mysticism and middle-aged angst of that film than I am for redemptive bloodbaths and childish revenge stories, even if they’re also populated by middle-aged characters....

In 1997 Eyvind Kang told a writer from the British magazine the Wire: “I don’t have a good destination point. I just do whatever.” The rapid expansion of the violinist’s discography since then leaves little doubt that this is true in a sense–but Kang’s not by any means an aimless player. Of Korean descent but raised in Iceland and Canada, he began playing the violin at age six using the Suzuki method, but after studying European classical music for a decade and a half he discovered jazz....

Kalapriya Dance Tradition has an internal logic that resists disruption, and transcending it requires more than mere rebellion, as recent concerts by Kalapriya Dance and Luna Negra Dance Theater demonstrated. The Kalapriya program suggested that anyone wishing to overthrow tradition must, like a martial artist, exploit her opponent’s strength. It also suggested, tantalizingly, that those most devoted to showing the way into an art form are best equipped to identify pathways out of it....

Like most teenagers who were into jazz in the 40s and 50s, Hank Crawford heard Charlie Parker. But Crawford, born in Memphis, heard something in Parker’s tone and concept that many didn’t: a bluesy, southern-steamed alto sound that went back past Parker to Earl Bostic and Louis Jordan. In the end, those artists left an even greater mark on him. By the time Crawford finished college, in Nashville in the late 50s, he might have easily gotten lost in the wake of Parker’s three great disciples, Cannonball Adderley, Jackie McLean, and Phil Woods; instead he met the young Ray Charles, who hired him to play saxophone and eventually to compose and arrange for his fledgling big band....

Every Tuesday night, as he has for the past year and a half, Stephen Elliott gets together with a group of friends and plays poker into the wee hours. Bets hover around $20, but money isn’t really the point, Elliott says. It’s what you can learn about people–including yourself–while pushing chips across a beer-stained table. Players come and go, but ten of the regulars and their wins, losses, and notable bursts of shit talking have been immortalized in the Poker Report, a semiregular poetic bulletin the Chicago-bred novelist E-mails to about 100 subscribers from San Francisco, where he lives now as a fellow at Stanford University’s creative writing program....

Chicago Moving Company The first piece is the evening’s most emotional. Duplicate, choreographed to New Age icon Moby by Cindy Brandle and danced by Brandle, Elizabeth Lentz, and Mindy Meyers, features a stage bathed in blue light and dancers moving as if underwater–or, more likely, afloat in amniotic fluid. They turn in slow motion, they lie in the fetal position, they partner as if wrapping one another in swaddling clothes. The effect is wonderfully moving, and yet I kept wondering why a return to the womb should be so profoundly appealing....

The Ann Arbor trio Midwest Product puts an electronic twist on the standard-issue three-piece rock band. It’s a familiar enough gesture on paper, and in the air it gets even more familiar. On “Still Love in the Midwest,” which opens Specifics, the group’s 2002 debut for Ghostly International, the insistent synth programming, busy bass line, electronic hand claps, and plangent guitar suggest that what there’s still love for in this midwest is mid-80s New Order....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Deanna and her editors determine the tone. A transcript of my interview, for instance, would include a sequence where I described five kids beating up an adult. Deanna asks, “Were they black, black kids?” I answer, “Yes.” Deanna, perhaps for good news reasons, thought it important to include that fact. When I stated that the pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers had moved onto our corner from their former spots under the Morse el one block over, I suggested that the police had pushed them off the Morse corner in response to years of complaints....

OOIOO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s strange to think that the Boredoms behind the hypnotic and patient new Vision Creation Newsun are more or less the same weirdos who belched out herky-jerky, scatological punk noise like Soul Discharge in late-80s Tokyo. The furious energy of their music hasn’t disappeared, though–it’s just taken a more expansive form, swirling like a hurricane instead of detonating in strangled bursts....

Out-of-Towners Out of Touch So I called Smith and asked him to go on. “In a way the Sun-Times could become more trashy,” he mused. “But they should become many other things too. Bolder, taking more risks. Not dumbing down, but respecting where readers are and what readers’ concerns are.” Smith wants Cooke and Cruickshank to take the paper back to its roots. “I believe that the Sun-Times would best be served by creating a paper for and about people who love Chicago,” he said....

Pinetop Perkins with the John Primer Band Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Intergenerational blues summits are all too rare these days, especially between such well-matched musicians: pianist Pinetop Perkins, who’s 87, and guitarist John Primer, a relative youngster at 56, are both masters of the straight-ahead postwar Chicago style. His age notwithstanding, Perkins can still light fires: last year he released Live at Antone’s, Vol....

Last month Windy City Times theater critic Rick Reed logged on to the Internet to do some background reading on Black Comedy, a play he’d soon be reviewing. Among the sites he visited was nytheatre.com, where he read that “Black Comedy takes more than an hour to tell its standard-issue story of a young artist.” A week or so later, after he’d filed his review of the local Speaking Ring Theatre Company production, Reed logged on again to take a look at what his fellow Chicago critics had said about the show....

The warmly charismatic David Pompeii has a wit that can cut political fallacies and dopey politicians into shreds. An excellent stand-up comedian, he makes you laugh–and think. Unfortunately there’s little stand-up material in this 45-minute show. Instead Pompeii’s “one-man cabaret” is an unsuccessful melange of quirky videos from the Internet, a DJ mix of dance and hip-hop beats, and wandering comedy sketches that quickly grow tiresome. But maybe the show would be better with a more raucous audience....

Opening Day at Wrigley Field has become a sort of ritual that mimics Easter: a time of rebirth as tangible as spring itself (if not more tangible here in Chicago, where the season tends to lag behind the calendar). This year former third baseman, current radio announcer, and future Hall of Famer (it will be so) Ron Santo embodied that rebirth. Having survived the amputation of his lower right leg and a near-death experience over the winter, Santo threw out the ceremonial first pitch in a moment that stirred the emotions of anyone who calls him or herself a Cubs fan....

Produced by Darryl Zanuck for the fledgling 20th Century studios, this inspired wisp of Hollywood candyfloss (1934, 80 min.) opens with the absurd spectacle of dithering Frank Morgan–the wonderful Wizard of Oz–playing Alessandro de’ Medici, tyrannical duke of Renaissance Florence. The duke’s cousin (an impeccably droll Louis Calhern) urges him to do away with roguish master goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (Fredric March), who himself is not averse to killing those who annoy him....