Filmmaker Shuli Eshel first saw Maxwell Street in 1990, as she drove through to interview some south-side artists. A recent transplant to Chicago, she hadn’t been aware of the neighborhood’s past as a port of entry for immigrants and a center for blues culture. Her curiosity piqued, she checked out several exhibits on the street’s history. As she learned more about the area’s past, she also discovered that the waves of Jewish immigrants who’d settled in it were from eastern Europe and Russia, where her own ancestors had lived before leaving for Palestine in the 1820s....

For most of his life Bill Lavicka paid little attention to the parking needs of the handicapped. Then one day in January his wife, Alys, who has Parkinson’s disease, fell in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago and broke her nose. That’s when he launched a crusade to force the university to set aside affordable, accessible parking spaces close to its main classrooms. “The way they treat disabled students like my wife, they’re saying, ‘Don’t come–we don’t want you,’” he says....

Watching the subjects of Fiona Tan’s video installation–prison inmates and guards–I realized that I had to forget received notions of guilt and punishment. All those thoughts about remorse, innocence, and discipline were preventing me from perceiving Tan’s restrained project (among her influences are documentary photographers August Sander and Danny Lyon) for what it is: portraits of very ordinary people whose crimes or jobs have left no visible mark on them. The artist filmed 300 prisoners and guards in Illinois and California, but the images (transferred to video) are basically still because her subjects barely move; their blinking and breathing and the ambient noise, however, make them all the more human....

Gregory Jacobsen: Potatoland The centerpiece of Gregory Jacobsen’s show of 37 panel paintings at Zg is Teratoma Tower, which recalls Hieronymus Bosch: among its grotesque small creatures in a surreal landscape are a peanut-shaped blob with an erection and a tiny figure pulling a man’s intestines out through a slit in his stomach. But where Bosch’s paintings are suffused with the hard-edged certitude of early Renaissance art, Jacobsen’s are unabashedly sensual, subjective, and even celebratory: the painter obviously likes this stuff....

Hattula Moholy-Nagy didn’t really get to know her father–Hungarian-born designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the man who brought the Bauhaus movement to Chicago–until she was almost 40. He’d died in 1946, when she was barely a teenager. In 1956, when she came to the University of Chicago to pursue a master’s in anthropology, she remembers visiting the buildings on Ontario and State and Rush where her father’s school had been and the family’s apartment on Astor Street....

A woman sings the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” softly to herself. Another woman who might be auditioning for a part or looking for love says loudly, “I can sing. I can play guitar. I can type 60 words a minute. I don’t bruise, so you can hit me and it won’t show.” A man with his hair hanging in his eyes lets his mouth gape open and, oblivious to the snot flowing from his runny nose, twitches, makes faces, laughs, crosses his wrists at his heart, and flaps his hands....

In naming her restaurant Flo, Renee Carswell declared her intentions with a play on words. On one level the name alludes to Brasserie Flo, the famous Parisian eatery effervescing with bons vivants. Then there’s “flow” as explored by author and University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: the state of total involvement and joy achieved during inner-directed experiences. And the conversation at this neighborhood hangout flows, too. “I wanted something short and memorable, like the Gap,” says Carswell....

I’ve gone salsa dancing at different clubs around town for three to four years. 720 is really good right now. Tropicana was another one. I’ve been to El Cielo, Inta’s–you could go salsa dancing at a different club every night. They all have someone that teaches salsa, cha-cha, merengue; some teach lambada, cumbia. I’ve come with the same friends all this time. There are about six of us in the group, women and men....

Jazz musicals about famous killers are an odd American staple, but they generally sell tickets. Composer Douglas J. Cohen aims to capitalize on the genre in his pop-pastiche adaptation of the quirky 1968 film No Way to Treat a Lady, but whether or not he succeeds can’t possibly be determined from William Pullinsi’s chintzy, cardboard production for Light Opera Works. A quartet of game actors give it their all, but the story–a down-on-his-luck actor turns to serial murder as a way to get into the New York Times–has neither the steely glamour nor the grizzly reality that complement each other so well in Chicago and Little Shop of Horrors....

Kid606, who runs the three-year-old Tigerbeat6 label, has a well-known fondness for strange and often obnoxious collisions of genre and style. But while the aesthetic certainly applies to his roster as a whole, it doesn’t permeate every release. For instance, the San Francisco trio Numbers–one of three bands on the label’s Paws Across America package tour–is fairly conventional in its devotion to stripped-down no wave. In the mid-90s Dave Broekema and Eric Landmark played brittle chicken-scratch guitar and gurgling analog synths in the spastic Madison outfit Xerobot....

For most of the 90s Greg Cartwright was hailed as garage rock royalty, fronting raw Memphis combos like the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers. So Time Bomb High School (In the Red), the new album from his latest band, Reigning Sound, caught me off guard. Cartwright seems to pointedly turn down the volume and broaden the range of styles to include Merseybeat, blue-eyed soul, and rickety country twang. But listening back to those other bands reveals that Cartwright’s always had catholic tastes....

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. What’s Currie doing there? “That’s a complicated question,” he told me during a trip home for Christmas. “There’s a certain amount of pride and ego involved in it.” Currie is 59, and the Free Press is his dashing response to a familiar quandary journalists face: that of getting older and steadily less suited for a profession that favors youth....

I’m a 25-year-old student living with my wife at my dad’s place. My parents got divorced a couple of years ago (dad had an affair), and my wife lost her job about four months ago. My dad graciously offered to let us stay with him for a few months. The problem is this: this whole thing has really freaked me out. When I try to get intimate with my wife, I think of that goddamn tape, the hidden cameras, and my father getting off on all of this....

The activity room at WilPower, a mental health center in Northfield, is so close to the Edens Expressway you can see traffic speeding past the window. There’s a map on the wall for the world cultures class, a painting of a windblown tree, and a handwritten poster headlined “What to do when your symptoms increase.” O’Reilly, looking like a high school reporter quizzing the principal, gingerly asks Bush, “According to a poll, only 5 percent of the Iraqi people see the United States as liberators....

An Israeli rabbi advises his horny yeshiva student (Oren Rehany) to visit a prostitute so he won’t be further distracted, but the youth winds up falling for a 19-year-old Russian hooker (Tchelet Semel) and working at a multicultural bar in Jerusalem that’s run by one of her clients (Saul Stein). For his first feature writer-director Eitan Golan has adapted his semiautobiographical novella “Mike’s Place, a Jerusalem Diary,” and though I anticipated a cutesy comedy, this is something more interesting: a fresh look at contemporary Israeli life, with good performances by all three leads and touching psychological nuances....

Prelude: The Life and Work of Katherine Mansfield In a journal entry near the end of her brief life, Katherine Mansfield wrote, “Take the case of K.M. She has led, ever since she can remember, a very typically false life. Yet, through it all, there have been moments, instants, gleams, when she felt the possibility of something quite other.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crawford’s script does suffer from excess, however....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and LIZ ARMSTRONG, and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, including a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. Concerts JIMMY BUFFETT & THE CORAL REEFER BAND Sat 6/28, 8 PM, Alpine Valley Music Theatre, Highway D and Highway 120, East Troy, Wisconsin....

Mr. Kolpert On Saturday, February 15, millions of people all over the world engaged in what might be called preemptive demonstrations against war with Iraq. The photos in the next day’s New York Times were stunning: vast crowds in Rome, London, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Manhattan jamming the streets and squares. Comparisons to the Vietnam- war era were as inadequate as they were common. This wasn’t like the testosterone-fed student riots of 1968....

The sun hadn’t quite begun to set outside the tour bus window when Juanna Rumbel lost her train of thought, leaned out of the backseat, and sank her teeth into Broken Cherry’s ass. The women talked a little more shit, then got back to the subject of track dimensions. “I understand the big picture,” said Rumbel. “But I also have to say that what we really need to focus on in the next year is, How do we get Chicago fans to be here?...

A genuine rarity: a sex comedy with brains. Even rarer, one with smart politics–so unobtrusive you may not notice–and wonderful acting. Writer-director Alfonso Cuaron–best known here for two Hollywood efforts, the enchanting A Little Princess and the less enchanting Great Expectations–went back to his native Mexico to put together this road movie about two 17-year-old boys from Mexico City, one privileged, the other working-class. On an impulse, they take off for a remote coastal beach with a 28-year-old married woman....