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MORENO VELOSO + 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » South American music remains so captivating and rich decade after decade–particularly in Cuba and Brazil–mainly because traditions are deeply ingrained and respected, even when musicians have revolution in mind. When Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Ze, and Gal Costa launched the musical wing of the pomo tropicalia movement in late-60s Brazil, they retained a fierce pride in native forms like samba and bossa nova, bending them to meet their artistic visions without decimating them....

NED ROTHENBERG’S SYNC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York-based reedist Ned Rothenberg has made his reputation as a master of extended technique, filling his improvised sound sculptures with clicks and growls, multiphonic spurts, and hypnotic interlocking patterns fueled by circular breathing. It’s a style inspired by Evan Parker–with whom Rothenberg has performed and recorded–and it makes his current project, a tuneful bass-and-drums trio called Sync, seem surprisingly conventional....

La Justicia looks like any other taco joint in Pilsen or Little Village. It has a gaudy pink facade, and the windows are covered with Corona stickers and little Mexican flags. But show up at 26th and Springfield on a Friday night and you’ll stumble into a miniature Aragon Ballroom, a sea of jeans and black T-shirts, corduroys and leather jackets. Three or four Latino rock bands perform here each week, and if a metal act comes on, a small mosh pit inevitably develops in front of the makeshift stage....

I just read your response to Disabled Dilemma, the man who was trying to find a girlfriend for his disabled friend. You told DD that his disabled friend should “reconcile himself to being alone.” I’m not sure how to react. Part of me wants to call you a cold, mean-spirited fuck. The other part of me wants to commend you for refusing to sugarcoat the truth. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The walk-up window at Scooter’s Frozen Custard–where dog walkers and moms with strollers order treats to go–is a far cry from the world of software sales. Yet if it weren’t for the dot-com bust of the late 90s, Chicago’s only custard stand wouldn’t exist at all. Just two years ago, Scooter’s owners Denny Moore and his wife, Mardi, were both out-of-work telecom sales executives who shared a taste for the frozen treat....

“Cartooning is an incredibly isolating thing on top of existing in what I think is a very isolated society,” says Paul Hornschemeier, who broke into the field with the self-published comic Sequential in 1999. “When I started off, Sequential was primarily just gag strips,” he says, “but after spending that much time by yourself over and over again, you really start to gravitate toward very sad stuff, which is not good....

Pascal Arbez–best known as International Deejay Gigolos artist Vitalic–was born into a family of fur trappers in a small Ukrainian town. In his early teens he moved to Germany, accompanied only by his dog, and barely scraped by, playing a traditional Ukrainian instrument called a trubka for change and sometimes turning tricks. Or so his press bio claims–Gigolos artists are notoriously fond of embellishing their life histories. But the sound track to that supposed life, Vitalic’s Pony EP, released last June, lives up to the tale....

The first settlers in the wilderness that became Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka bought their land for a dollar an acre in the 1820s. Then they started cutting down the trees, clearing space to farm and making money at the same time. They could sell a cord of oak firewood for 75 cents in Chicago. And they could stack stumps ten feet high, let them burn for weeks, and sell the resulting charcoal for five cents a bushel....

For a year now, the light green clothes-recycling boxes have been popping up on the edges of parking lots in Chicago and the suburbs. A statement on the front of the metal boxes announces that money made from the donated clothes will be used by the sponsoring organization, Gaia-Movement Living Earth Green World Action USA, to help save the planet. “With the proceeds we–on the behalf of you–instigate the ideas and some of the many practices of the protection of the living earth,” it says....

In a warm, dimly lit room sits a woman in an overstuffed chair. Though dressed in simple denim, she wears a scarf wrapped around her head like a sultan. Queen Hayes, who’s 38, has taken years to acquire this sense of peace and dignity. The fifth of eight children, Hayes says her mother played favorites. She was constantly berated while her older sister was praised. But seeking her mother’s approval only opened her up to further ridicule....

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m trying to describe the first two and a half minutes of Martin Arnold’s creepy 15-minute experimental film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), but I can’t be confident that my account is either complete or entirely accurate. For one thing, the somewhat stocky, stolid older woman Andy Hardy kisses may not be his mother; theoretically it could be his Aunt Milly, another character in the series....

In May 1998, Famous Door Theatre Company presented the U.S. premiere of this 1993 comedy-drama by Liverpool-bred playwright Jonathan Harvey, about two working-class schoolboys who fall in love right under their parents’ noses. Slated for a two-month run, the production was an unexpected hit, striking a chord with audiences of all persuasions as it tenderly depicted how a gay teen romance affects the lovers’ already anxious relationships with parents and peers....

ILLINOIS This annual American Revolution reenactment was scheduled for June because for the last two years it’s just been too hot in July. The site overlooks Lake Shelbyville and features re-created battles as well as British, colonial, and Indian encampments. There will also be a parade, a dance, weapons displays, and a demonstration of “soldier rolling”–a form of looting in which, according to a spokesperson, women following the troops would “roll the dead ones over to strip them of everything they could because supplies were so scarce....

Friday 8/29 – Thursday 9/4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In one much remarked-upon scene from Sam Jones’s 2002 Wilco documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett (who’s later kicked out of the band) argue about a transition between songs; when it’s over, Tweedy goes into the bathroom and throws up. In Joe Losurdo and Jake Austen’s new mockumentary, I Am Trying to Take Your Cash, the bass player and songwriter for local masked band the Goblins, Dom Nation, gets into it with guitarist Buh Zombie (who’s later kicked out of the band)....

Theater Oobleck has a habit of tackling weighty subjects: corporate politics, capitalism, the Iraq war, Faust, Freud, fractal geometry. But Oobleck cofounders Jeff Dorchen and David Isaacson spend an evening just playing during the freewheeling Rhinoceros Theater Festival. Their fully improvised “failed talk show” is called “On the Surface”–which is where skittish, know-nothing host Marty Grossbeck (Isaacson) tries to keep his interviews. He’s largely successful thanks to the series of guests Dorchen plays, none of whom seem particularly interested in talking about anything, all of whom get up and leave at random moments....

Lily Lau’s fortune for the Chinese New Year could have promised a pound of cocktail peanuts and many happy returns. Her schedule called for her to fly to Chicago from her home in San Francisco, then on to Puerto Rico to dance the Chinese lion dance for the Chinese consulate, after which she would fly back to Chicago, drive to a kung fu school in Michigan, then return to Chicago for the Chinatown parade on the 17th, in which she’ll lead approximately 100 kicking and screaming (if not leaping and twirling) students, all of whom attend the Lily Lau Eagle Claw Kung Fu school on Peterson....

Year in, year out, Greg Osby leads one of the best quartets in jazz–namely himself, pianist Jason Moran, and whatever two other guys they bring along. It can’t be the easiest gig for a rhythm section to step into: the saxophonist glides between stressing downbeats and upbeats, sometimes in the same phrase, giving his momentum a curious surging instability, and he’ll skitter sideways through a chord progression like a car across six lanes of traffic....

High on Fire We do not yet know what makes metal heavy. The music itself was invented by accident, by people who demonstrably did not know what they were doing and had no idea what it would turn into. The classic rock bio Hammer of the Gods reveals that Led Zeppelin thought they were playing folk music. They compared themselves to delicate eccentrics like Dr. Strangely Strange, but they’re remembered today as a rampant sonic phallus....

Bjork She’s juxtaposed pretty trad stuff and abrasive electronics in the past, on beat-driven efforts like Post and Homogenic, but only on Vespertine does the marriage seem perfect. Set against Vince Mendoza’s sweeping, elegant orchestral arrangements and a heavenly choir, each pluck of Zeena Parkins’s harp and each spiky note of the delicate melodies Bjork wrote specifically for music box sparkles like a gem. Layers of electronics–contributed by imaginative collaborators like the San Francisco duo Matmos, British producer Matthew Herbert, and Danish producer Thomas Knak–throb, slither, crunch, and spark rather than beat, beat, beat....

There are so many curves and anomalies in this unpredictable and at times cryptic low-budget independent feature, made by Chicago actor Michael Gilio, that I’m tempted to call it an experimental film masquerading as something more conventional. If it’s a comedy–and I’m not sure it is–there are far too many close-ups, though this is very much an actors’ film (and a showcase for the four leads). If it’s a road film–and I’m not sure it is–it never gets very far on any given route, though that’s surely deliberate....