Guitarist John Cephas and harpist Phil Wiggins hail from Washington, D.C., but they grew up immersed in rural traditions. Cephas learned the blues from a guitar-playing aunt, and his grandfather taught him the folklore of eastern Virginia, where his ancestors had toiled as slaves. Wiggins spent his childhood summers at his grandmother’s home in Alabama, where he listened to old-time hymns sung in church in the traditional call-and-response style. The two met in 1976 at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where Cephas was playing in the band of pianist Big Chief Ellis and Wiggins was accompanying gospel singer-guitarist Flora Melton....

The 19th annual Chicago Latino Film Festival, presented by the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, continues Friday through Thursday, April 11 through 17. Film and video screenings will be at Association House, 2150 W. North; Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St.; Biograph; Richard J. Daley College, 7500 S. Pulaski; Facets Cinematheque; I.C.E. Cinema, 2258 W. 62nd St.; Morton College, 3801 S. Central, Cicero; North Park University, 3225 W. Foster; Northwestern Univ....

JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last spring there was such a severe drought in southern India that a 12th-century Krishna temple that had more or less lain underwater since the KRS dam was built across the Kaveri River in the 1920s appeared aboveground, and priests were conducting services there. Unfortunately, the temple was all that remained of the 36 villages that were flooded to make way for the project....

Friday 11/2 – Thursday 11/8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 3 SATURDAY The term “affluenza” is defined by writer John de Graaf as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” In their new book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, de Graaf and coauthors Thomas Naylor and David Wann estimate that the average American spends $21,000 a year on consumer goods and saves nothing....

Filmmaker Bill Morrison spent two years foraging through the film archives of the University of South Carolina, the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York to assemble this 70-minute collage of hallucinatory images produced by the decomposition of nitrate film stocks. At times it threatens to contract into an artifact of academic obsession, but the more expansive passages connote an epic struggle between the human need to create history and the power of time and entropy to erase it....

Like Bill Irwin, his clowning cohort with San Francisco’s famed Pickle Family Circus, Geoff Hoyle has enjoyed success on Broadway (as the original Zazu the Hornbill in The Lion King) and in big-top behemoths like Cirque du Soleil. But where Irwin’s approach to clowning has struck me as overly cool, self-referential, and cerebral, Hoyle at his best is an old-school burlesque virtuoso. Over the years I have seen him take pratfalls in high-concept work, most notably The First Hundred Years, a slick but hollow examination of 20th-century comedy that premiered at Berkeley Rep in 1999....

Critic Robin Wood recently cited this stunning 1964 Russian version of Shakespeare’s tragedy as the only one that “could be claimed as having the stature, as film, that the play has as theatre,” and it’s easy to see what he means. Shot in black-and-white ‘Scope, in dank interiors and seaside exteriors every bit as atmospheric as those in Orson Welles’s Othello, this runs 140 minutes but feels more stripped-down for brisk action than such vanity productions as Laurence Olivier’s and Kenneth Branagh’s, and consequently may be more compelling as narrative....

Jesus speaks to Geoffrey Watts. Watts speaks to Jesus, too. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He took what he calls a “faith walk,” stepping off into the unknown to try the unheard-of–making a living as a poet. But for Watts it’s just another phase in an entrepreneurial life. Under the name Dr. Groove, Watts spent years on the south-side hip-hop circuit–he claims to have been the first rapper in Chicago....

Last year was a brutal one for dancer Matthew Hollis. In March his knee gave out during a Hedwig Dances children’s show at the Cultural Center. “I kneeled down and it locked and popped,” he says. When X rays didn’t show any bone damage, his doctor put his leg in a knee brace and told him to take Advil. Hollis worked briefly with a physical therapist and tried massage, but in April he was dancing at Hedwig’s spring concert when it happened again....

As the drummer for Dave Douglas’s Tiny Bell Trio, Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, Ellery Eskelin’s trio, and a slew of other groups, Jim Black disassembles the beat like a kid who gleefully wrecks a Lego castle to build new shapes with the blocks–and then, without a moment’s pause, snaps the original construction back together perfectly. Just as often he ditches pulse outright: on “He Has a Pair of Dice,” a tune from Swell Henry (Squealer), the new album from Chris Speed’s Yeah No, Black continually collapses the groove and stokes his bandmates’ solos with manic, splattery blurts of energy and color....

Les Orear has lived through much of the history of organized labor in Chicago. He was working at the meatpacking plant Armour & Company when the National Labor Relations Act gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively in 1935. He helped organize his plant and spent years documenting meatpacking and the labor movement in union publications. Then he watched as the entire local industry crumbled. Since then, as president of the Illinois Labor History Society, he’s been the primary custodian of the stories of all the city’s workers....

Mark Salzman, author of the memoir Iron & Silk, the novel Lying Awake, and three other books, visited a friend’s writing workshop at Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles for a purely selfish reason–to gain some insight into juvenile delinquents for a problematic novel in progress. He soon committed himself to teaching classes there twice a week, but not because he was noble, he’s quick to assure readers of True Notebooks, his chronicle of his first year on the job....

The 14th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Friday, November 22, through Saturday, November 30. Screenings are at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $7; passes, available for $40 (five screenings) and $80 (twelve screenings), are good for all programs. For more information call 773-486-9612. The schedule for November 22 through 28 follows; a complete schedule through November 30 is available on-line at www....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recently one of my dear friends has informed me of your change in policy regarding the acceptance of massage-service classified advertisements. According to your new policy, all massage advertisers must hold a city license to advertise in the new health-and-wellness section. My friend, who is fully certified by the Chicago School of Massage, has been advertising in good faith in the Reader for 25 years, and now, according to this new policy, she would be relegated to advertising at three times the rate in a section (adult services) that features nothing more than glorified prostitution....

Dave, who prefers to keep his surname to himself, is unhappily employed as an on-line marketer at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company downtown. “There’s no reason why people should congregate in a large organization and work together,” he complains, “because we’d all rather be doing something else.” He, for instance, would rather be painting or sculpting. But he’s in his 30s, with a wife, two kids, and a house on the northwest side, and right now he needs his job....

THE COUNTDOWN 12/27, EMPTY BOTTLE It’s always good to see musicians refuse to give up in a huff when their band falls apart. After all, maybe the second time’s the charm. Or the ninth. This duo rose from the ashes of Entertainment and Starball, two local groups that never quite got off the ground commercially or artistically. Stiff Starr and Roxy Starr, as Steven Denekas and Tamar Berk have dubbed themselves, have a definite taste for the dread electroclash, playing abrasive neo-new wave, at once sweaty and mechanical, trashy and precise....

BASEBALL FURIES 11/22, HIDEOUT Formed in Buffalo but now based in Chicago, this quartet keeps one foot firmly planted in rock ‘n’ roll’s alleged grave–its first full-length, Greater Than Ever (Big Neck), quaintly claims to have a side one and a side two. But as they rifle through five decades’ worth of rude, raw punk and protopunk, the Furies can be fiendishly precise one moment, serendipitously sloppy the next, and a certain excitement comes from not knowing which mood will strike when....

Three poet-performer tricksters–Rachel Kessler, Sierra Nelson, and Sarah Paul Ocampo–make up Seattle’s Typing Explosion. Dressed in prim 60s frocks and sporting pageboy hairdos, they set their electric typewriters in a row and ask audience members to choose one-line titles from old library catalog cards, using them to create poems on the spot. Trading pages back and forth to create a single poem, they signal one another when they’re through using only a percussive language of bells, whistles, and horns....

Rock, Pop, etc. ANCIENT GREEKS Free concert. Fri 7/20, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-7094. ALEXANDRA BILLINGS, SUZANNE PETRI Mon 7/16, 7 PM, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. 773-883-1090. AL CARVER Free outdoor concert. Fri 7/20, 11 AM-2 PM, at the park on York & Western, Blue Island. 708-388-5735. COULD IT BE MAGIC? THE BARRY MANILOW SONGBOOK Five cast members and a six-piece band perform a musical tribute to Barry Manilow....

Peaches is better known, but Viki, aka Vixxen Hott, has been doing a sexy weirdo shtick for just as long. There aren’t actually many similarities between the two: Peaches’s act is about control, and her songs are as accessible as X-rated lo-fi electronica can be; Viki goes with a confused demeanor and complex timing. Like her peers on the Detroit savant-garde scene, Wolf Eyes and Maximum Cloud (with whom she’s collaborated), she modifies synths and keyboards so that when triggered they spit out a series of panic-attack-inducing squeals....