History will likely remember pianist and educator Barry Harris as the foremost follower of the preternaturally brilliant Bud Powell, who all but invented bebop piano, proving himself the equal of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie before he’d turned 21. The fact that Harris has spent a career honing his idol’s unreconstructed vision of bop speaks volumes about the Herculean magnitude of the task, as well as the singularity of his accomplishment–more than any of the myriad pianists Powell influenced, Harris “sounds like Bud,” conjuring the master’s jackhammer attack, unexpected harmonic pastels, and superhuman ability to sculpt even the fastest, most complex passages by varying the weight of practically every note....

This festival of film and video by black artists from around the world continues Friday through Thursday, August 9 through 15, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for film center members, and $3 for SAIC students. For further information, call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended; unless otherwise noted, all films will be projected from 35-millimeter prints. Biggie & Tupac Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Burlesque reminds us that a woman in lingerie peeling off a single glove can be devastatingly erotic. So it is with Femme TV, the Lavender Cabaret’s sexy wink of a variety show, which supposedly appears on cable channel KTNA, whose motto is “Redefining the Boob Tube.” Each act gently mocks a cable-television standby: cooking and interior design shows, “you are there” documentaries. One video, from the “Uncovery Channel,” searches backstage for the dangerous North American Sugarbaby only to be followed by the actual Sugarbabies: Lavender Cabaret cofounder Michelle “Toots” L’amour, Amy Brown, Andrea Cerniglia, Tanya Chmelewski, Sarah Keating, and Rachel Northway....

Fight for the High Ground NABJ even had a rule that associate members couldn’t be the top officers of its local affiliates. CABJ bent that rule. “I stood up at many a meeting and explained the situation to them,” says Anderson, “but it was not a fight I wanted to have. These people had put in sweat equity to make the convention the most successful one to date.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Johann Strauss was upset when his operetta Die Fledermaus was first produced as grand opera in the 1890s. He didn’t think this music-theater confection of sexual shenanigans and mistaken identity could withstand the heavy-handed treatment that was standard procedure in opera houses. On that score, this weekend’s production by Opera Theatre Highland Park might be OK with him: the two-and-a-half-hour English-language version is costumed and staged, but the chorus and ballet parts have been edited out and the accompaniment is string quartet and piano....

Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash were strummers; their lead guitarists, Scotty Moore and Luther Perkins, were pickers. But Link Wray was rock ‘n’ roll’s first thrasher. His archetypal instrumental “Rumble,” which peaked at number 16 on the national charts in 1958, opened the door for every guitarist since who’s put raw attitude and a coarse sound ahead of tidy execution: to dirty up his tone, Wray says, he jabbed holes in his amplifier’s speaker cones with a pen....

Lost in the Chaos A survivor said, “They blocked the door for three or four minutes. We tried to turn around, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t move at all.” Another survivor, one of the first ones out, said when she got to the street she “turned around and saw a security guard block and apparently bolt the door.” This survivor claimed she heard “the victims pounding on the door to get out....

MARK TURNER-KURT ROSENWINKEL QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel have been regularly playing in each other’s groups since they attended the Berklee College of Music back in the 80s, and they’ve developed an unspoken musical empathy that’s impossible to miss. They’re both superb melodists, making tricky stretches seem effortlessly graceful, particularly in the beguiling precision of their unison lines, and perpetually shifting between a myriad of harmonic possibilities....

Marta Ptaszynska came to the revolution late. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For much of the first half of the 20th century, music in Poland had been about nationalism, and folk-inspired work was all the rage. Still, despite the anti-German sentiment strongly expressed in that era’s poetry, many composers borrowed from the orchestration of Wagner and Richard Strauss. But “no Schoenberg–none of the atonal music from the Second Viennese School,” Ptaszynska points out....

Remember when cosmopolitans were the “it” drink? Back then my friend Melissa and I, we went to Espial every Wednesday night. A normal evening there would have been four to six cosmos–we were so young and got so ripped. They were like butter. You never tasted the vodka in their cosmos. They had this secret recipe. Anyway, we were happily drinking away when all of a sudden the bartender stops, excuses herself, and says, “I’ll be right back,” and she leaves the bar and goes into the bathroom....

I am a female university student with an etiquette question. There’s a girl I’ve seen around campus who I recognize from a few years ago, when “Jane” was a guy. I’m positive it’s the same person–she still has the same face, and I’ve heard that this person had a sex change. I’m wondering how I should talk to her now. Should I just go up and say hi and mention where I know her from?...

I wanted to respond to the advice you gave Tried Not to Fall, the closeted gay guy who was in love with his straight roommate. You advised TNTF to tell his straight roommate how he felt. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a general rule, NOTGAY, I agree that gay men shouldn’t make passes at straight ones…buuuuuuut…not all gay guys are out, NOTGAY, and that complicates matters....

Women so pervade the dance world that at times their preeminence fades from view–especially when male choreographers and dancers garner more than their share of attention. Inaugurating a new series at Link’s Hall on women mentors, this program features the abundant talents and energy of four Chicago women: Shirley Mordine and her former students Ann Boyd, Colleen Halloran, and Atalee Judy. Each has come up with a new dance-theater solo, to be linked with the others by T....

Perhaps Fritz Lang’s most neglected major work, this stunning silent German thriller (1928) both summarizes and refines his first Dr. Mabuse film while introducing some of the principles of editing continuity found in M. Scripted by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s second wife), it pits a government agent (Willy Fritsch) against a wheelchair-bound international banker (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) whose spy ring is stealing classified documents, and its fanciful and imaginative approach to the thriller form clearly inspired both Alfred Hitchcock and Thomas Pynchon....

Bookended by Marina City to the south and the glittering American Medical Association tower to the north, the sidewalks along State Street between the river and Illinois see their share of well-heeled traffic. But the stretch is also close to several construction sites, this newspaper’s office, a few corner-bar-type establishments that still water a regular clientele, and the urine-stained dungeons under the elevated sections of Wabash and Michigan. In the evening, hustlers still mill around the AMA park on the northeast corner of State and Illinois, and panhandlers, some seated in wheelchairs, untiringly guard the doors of the White Hen on the southeast corner....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harold Henderson’s fine article about recent archaeological findings in Peoria (May 31) describes what must have been Louis Chatellereau’s farm. This prominent French-Canadian, who also lived at Cahokia, had an Indian slave, Pointe Sable, whom he mortgaged to the trader Gabriel Cerre, along with his other property, in 1792. This slave became the mythical Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, the black farmer at Peoria who tilled an imaginary farm he was “granted” in 1773 under a “deed” nobody has ever seen....

What is the Straight Dope on Martin Luther King Jr.? Did he plagiarize most of his writing, including his PhD thesis? Was he a communist? Did he really use donated money for prostitutes? These allegations are brought up at www.treykorte.com/politics/MLKJR.html, “[not] to bring down MLK, Jr.” but to “subject him to the same sort of dirt-digging that leaders such as George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and other dead white guys have suffered....

Trib vs Tribe, Part II: Shooting Blanks? “I wouldn’t want to evaluate that,” he says. “They reviewed it. They’ve taken it into account.” Wycliff stood his ground. “The greatest gap is in our perceptions of what a newspaper is supposed to be and do,” he wrote. “The ideal to which a paper ought to aspire is to give an account of the news that an unbiased observer would recognize as true and honest if thrust into the situation himself or herself....

David Gordon Green follows up his impressive if awkward first feature, George Washington, with something similar yet somewhat better. Again the setting is a North Carolina mill town, the milieu mainly working-class, and the period contemporary only in the broadest sense. (Perhaps the surest sign we’re in the present is the heroine’s telling the hero not to smoke in her bedroom.) But this time the cast includes veteran actors as well as talented first-timers, and the plot is more focused: an offbeat love story between a 22-year-old ladies’ man who’s never left town (cowriter Paul Schneider) and an 18-year-old virgin and recent boarding-school graduate (Zooey Deschanel)....

It’s easy to see tap dance as monochromatic–yet variety is what makes Mark Yonally’s new company, which consists of him and nine women, appealing. It’s not surprising that in his choreography Yonally uses such musical principles as canon, unison, and syncopation. But add the visual interest of the dancers’ arrangements onstage and their interactions, whether they’re looking over their shoulders at a solitary figure or leaning together in a companionable group, and you get a satisfying mix of aural pleasures and the emotional pull of dance theater....