“If ordinary people cannot enlist the aid of lawyers when they need to, if the judiciary becomes a tool available only to the wealthy and powerful, the courts will become a source of oppression,” warns Illinois Supreme Court chief justice Moses Harrison in a February 2 speech reprinted in the March issue of “CVLS News,” newsletter of the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation. To serve the 1.3 million Illinoisans in poverty, he notes, “There are fewer than 200 full time legal aid lawyers....

Purple Heart Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems to appear in the form of Purdy, a soft-spoken Vietnam vet who drops in one day to visit. Apparently a friend of Lars’s, Purdy is as maimed by the war physically as Carla is emotionally: his right hand was blown off by a land mine. Carla at first brushes him off as just one more well-wisher she’d just as soon do without, but gradually she finds herself drawn to the young man, whose polite demeanor masks a disdain for cant and convention as bitter as–and far more articulate than–her own....

George Rabiela, left, was photographed in February 2000 by Robert A. Davis as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. I interviewed him in September 2000 in his office above the Chicago Fire Department’s “Survive Alive” house. He worked in factories. I believe one of the companies he worked for was a box company. Then when my ma came, she worked in a knitting company, on the north side, Schuessler Knitting Mills....

Give ‘Em Some Incentives Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s what Brenda Sexton will have to do in her new position as managing director of the Illinois Film Office. Her predecessor, Ron Ver Kuilen, says that when he left, annual business had dropped from $125 million to $30 million in two years, and that the only way to turn it around would be to make it cheaper to operate here....

Can you really fault a band for being revivalist if its members aren’t old enough to remember what they’re reviving? Nostalgia for your own past is sad, but nostalgia for someone else’s can be a lot of fun. Sure, Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre are derivative of the postpunk death-disco scene of the early 80s, but they’re not just playing dress-up in Siouxsie Sioux’s and PiL’s closets–they give off such a don’t-give-a-flying-fuck vibe they’re beyond retro, maybe just plain unhinged....

It’s Money That Matters Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago Matters was launched in 1990, dreamed up by Bruce Newman, then executive director of the Chicago Community Trust, and Bill McCarter, then president of WTTW. At first it was on television only, as the trust’s high-profile signature program. As it moved into other media circa 1994, it continued to be funded exclusively by the trust, in recent years to the tune of about $1 million....

The titles on Welcome Home (Dreyfus), the 2002 album from Paris-born pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, may be familiar–Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary,” Ellington’s “I’ve Got It Bad,” Monk’s “Rhythm-a-Ning,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair”–but in many cases the arrangements are so drastic Pilc practically rewrites the songs. Sometimes he camouflages the tune to delay its recognition: in the first ten seconds of his introduction to “Giant Steps,” he lays the slinky strains of “The Pink Panther Theme” atop the asymmetrical bass line from “Mission: Impossible,” so that by the time he weaves in Coltrane’s famously jumpy melody, it comes almost as a relief....

We love this place. We’ve been coming here every month for the past three years for beer school with all of our favorite friends, and as a rule we always drink every last drop that they give us and we build beer towers out of our cups. Now we are very learned about beer. My friend Alex and I liked beer school so much we decided to try wine school. Everyone was paying attention and listening to the wine expert and we were like the bad kids in the back....

“At some point, everyone going through this is going to hate it,” Tina Fallon admits with a laugh. “They’re going to feel awful, they’re going to hate everyone. But that passes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two weeks ago Fallon and Susan Stahl, a friend in Chicago who’s coproducing the event, started making calls and sending E-mails in search of 50 people to participate....

Chicago’s 22nd annual lesbian and gay film festival runs Friday through Thursday, November 7 through 13. Unless otherwise noted, screenings are $9 at Landmark’s Century Centre, $7 at Chicago Filmmakers, and $6 for matinees at either venue (until 5 PM). Advance tickets can be purchased from 10 to 6 weekdays and noon to 5 Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, or anytime at www.chicagofilmmakers.org; same day tickets are available only at the venue box office 30 minutes prior to the first screening of the day....

AMISH ARMADA 5/30, FIRESIDE BOWL Tired of hokey faux satanism? Neo-Nordics no longer yank your crank? Even Sumerian-themed gore getting tiresome? The fresh face of sacrilege this month is this Wisconsin band, whose cranky, bangy, Misfits-meet-Mr. Bungle playing is almost as practiced as their bearded, hat-wearing rural hell-raiser shtick. They are inordinately proud of having fooled a village newspaper in Wisconsin into launching a protect-our-children-from-Satan crusade, a fish-in-a-barrel feat that pretty much exemplifies their sophomoric style....

TED SIROTA’S REBEL SOULS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his brand-new album, juggernaut Chicago drummer Ted Sirota leads his band, the Rebel Souls, through a tune that recalls Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (“Grendel”), two songs influenced by Herbie Hancock’s first compositions (“Tight Rope,” “Wonder”), another that could’ve come directly from Ornette Coleman’s bag (“Dig to China”), and a fifth (“Becky’s Bash”) that references the early work of AACM cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams....

The two members of the poetry collective SevenTenBishop stride up Milwaukee Avenue toward Myopic Books. Zebulun is sturdy and bespectacled and sports a bushy red goatee, a straw fedora, and a blue button-down shirt. Daniel Nagelberg is pale and thin, with dyed black hair and wearing a thrift-store T-shirt. When they stop outside the store, ready to improvise a block-long free-verse poem in bright pastel chalk on the sidewalk, a scowling manager emerges....

“He was a nerd,” recalled his cousin Irv Fine. Born in 1914, Jerry Siegel grew up in Cleveland, in the Jewish enclave of Glenville. A myopic daydreamer, he spent his free time watching Douglas Fairbanks movies and drawing pictures and seemed on track to go to college or art school. But in 1925 his father was murdered in a robbery that was never solved. The family fell on hard times, college was out of the question, and Siegel withdrew into the fantastic world of science fiction, or “scientifiction,” as he and his fellow fans called it....

In the fall of 1940, while the world was waging a mechanized war, a gray-headed poet sat down to write a book about his boyhood in the Sangamon Valley. Before her death in 1939, Skinner drew up a list of rivers the series would cover. The Hudson, the James, the Ohio, the Susquehanna, the Wabash, the Arkansas, the Columbia–the list rolled westward, but it rolled right past the Sangamon. The only mention Skinner made of it was at the bottom of a memo: “Illinois R....

Thrill Ride Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when Wilkerson decided it was time to preserve some of that music on wax, he found no takers. And though he was a second-generation member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians–a south-side organization founded in the 60s by experimentally minded players who couldn’t get gigs on the regular jazz circuit–he started his own label, Sessoms Records, with some reluctance....

To the editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Gradel and Helena Worthen are both people I have had friendly relations with for some time. Part of the job Tom has done for the needle-trades union UNITE has been doing public relations and organizing alliances with students, churches, and the community against “free trade.” Helena has worked not only in educating union members, but has been intimately involved in organizing around issues concerning many abused workers in our community....

W.C. Clark developed his guitar skills in an East Austin roadhouse in the early 60s, backing artists as diverse as Hank Ballard, Brook Benton, and Redd Foxx. He later toured with deep-soul legend Joe Tex, then returned to Austin and became a mentor to the Vaughan boys and others on the local blues-rock scene of the 70s. Clark’s latest, Deep in the Heart (Alligator), emphasizes his soul side, but there’s plenty of burn-down-the-juke-joint blues here as well....

Nearly every Yellow Man Group performance begins the same way: the four members storm the stage in blazing yellow outfits, excitedly introduce themselves with a highly choreographed dance routine, and proceed to take photographs of one another and the audience in candid poses. It’s a rare case in which repetition does not breed tedium; this manic opening sequence is so stylish and exuberant that it never gets old. But though the Tokyo-based troupe’s style can be kitschy, the performers are rock solid when it comes to improv fundamentals: classically trained actors, stand-up comics, and dancers, they learned their craft from deep thinker Keith Johnstone, and his seminal book Impro is their bible....

Elephant Gus Van Sant’s startling and brilliant Elephant–a film that follows the activities of several high school students before and during a massacre like the one at Columbine–has its flaws, yet its virtues so outshine them that the years he’s spent lost in the wilderness can be forgiven. His four previous features weren’t exactly dead on arrival, though his 1998 remake of Psycho came alarmingly close. But the filmmaker responsible for such fresh early shorts as The Discipline of DE (1978) and My New Friend (1987) and such exciting early features as Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1990) was almost nowhere in evidence in Good Will Hunting (1997), Psycho, or Finding Forrester (2000) and only faintly discernible in the experimental feature Gerry (2001)....