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Why I subscribe: Because Jonathan Rosenbaum is your film critic, and although Jean-Luc Godard may have been overstating it somewhat when he compared him favorably to James Agee, Rosenbaum is, nonetheless, one of the most learned and valuable film critics–one of the very few–now at work in this country. My proof: His tied choices for 2001’s best film, A.I. and Waking Life [January 4]. The former is, indeed, provocative and challenging, which is to say it makes you think–which may explain its utter failure at the box office (to see it a second time, I had to chase it down at a $1....

I love you, Dan, but you are so wrong about tighty whities! TWs are wrong? No, let me tell you what’s wrong: Thoroughly Modern Millie getting the Tony for best new musical over Urinetown is wrong. George W. Bush’s opposition to an independent commission to investigate the intelligence failures that laid out the welcome mat for the September 11 terrorists is wrong. But tighty whities on a boyish, slim, hairless man?...

Trips to the emergency room are a regular part of life for Gladys and Miguel Martinez, a young couple raising their family in Pilsen. Their three children–three-year-old Alexis, four-year-old Michael, and five-year-old Ariel–all have serious asthma, compounded by occasional bouts of pneumonia. For a time Michael was going to the ER twice a week, though since the family got a nebulizer at home their trips have grown a little less frequent....

Rock, Pop, etc. BIG HEAD TODD & THE MONSTERS 18 & over. Sat 1/25, 9 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine. 773-275-6800 or 312-559-1212. STEVE EDWARDS ORCHESTRA performs at the Groundhog Gala. Sat 2/1, 7 PM, Student Center, DePaul University, 2250 N. Sheffield. 773-327-1113. RUSS LONG Free piano concert. Fri 1/31, noon, Chicago Water Works Visitor Center, 163 E. Pearson. 877-244-2246. SPIES WHO SURF, DJ JUST JOEL perform at the Spy Ball....

Rock, Pop, Etc. SANDY ANDINA Free in-store performance. Fri 6/13, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1500 16th, Oak Brook. 630-574-0800. BODEANS Sat 6/7, 8 PM (sold-out), Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park. 847-266-5100. COLDPLAY Sold out. Mon 6/9, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion, 1150 W. Harrison. 312-413-5740 or 312-559-1212. FERRON, SONIA, SARAH DOUGHER, URBAN FOLK COLLECTIVE, BITCH & ANIMAL, DYLAN RICE, KITKO perform as part of Queer Is Folk III hosted by Scott Free....

A Song Time Ago!, ImprovOlympic. It’s difficult to be original in a spoof of Star Wars; after all, the first installment has been around since 1977. Yet writer-director Jason Chin in A Song Time Ago! makes us laugh, offering more than just the usual jokes about the Force, the relationship between C-3P0 and R2-D2, and the sexual tension between Han and Leia, Leia and Luke, and even Han and Chewbacca. We’re also treated to the comedy of Darth Vader dancing, asides about the Jeff awards, snippets from The Muppet Movie sound track, a Scooby-Doo-style chase scene, and mockery of DVD director commentaries....

Ralph Burlingham remembers clearly the day Silas Purnell strode into his office at Ada S. McKinley Community Services. “I think it was Christmas of ’66,” he says. “Someone had broken in and stolen our clock, our adding machine, and our typewriter. Our secretary said, ‘I know where we can get a clock,’ and she called Silas. So here he came up the sidewalk, and he had a Coca-Cola uniform on and a clock under his arm....

Friday 5/2 – Thursday 5/8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 3 SATURDAY As part of last year’s inaugural Free Comic Book Day, Chicago Comics gave away thousands of books, says manager Eric Thornton. The now-annual nationwide event is designed to bring new patrons into comic book stores–the majority of which are independently owned and operated–and expose them to the full range of the genre....

Friday 3/7 – Thursday 3/13 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Studs Terkel’s 1999 book American Dreams: Lost and Found examines the lives and aspirations of a wide range of Americans, from a Boston Brahmin to a disillusioned former Miss U.S.A. The NYC-based Acting Company will present a theatrical adaptation of the book tonight as part of its “American Century” series, which has also featured productions of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!...

Two of the ten most endangered railroad stations in the country are in Skokie and Gary, according to the Great American Station Foundation (www.stationfoundation.org). Skokie’s 76-year-old prairie-style station, at the north end of the Skokie Swift, is for sale for $1 and will be demolished if it’s not sold. Some money has been allocated to redevelop Gary’s 91-year-old reinforced-concrete Union Station–a “marriage of classical architecture and modern construction”–but, as the foundation says, “No concrete proposal has been put forward....

JANUARY 1 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago-based artist Jin Soo Kim has spent the past few weeks arranging a trail of broken furniture, a TV antenna, lightbulbs, an antique wooden ironing board, pieces of Styrofoam, copper-wrapped garden hose, and other found objects along one long wall of the Chicago Cultural Center’s Sidney R. Yates Gallery. The installation, Prepositions, “flows horizontally, like a river,” explains the Cultural Center’s Gregory Knight, who curated the retrospective it’s part of, Jin Soo Kim: Twenty Years, 1983-2003....

Previously produced by the Aardvark theater company, this third annual festival of women’s theater has been taken over by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with Prop Thtr. Running April 3-May 10, the festival features artists in the fields of theater, performance, poetry, dance, and music; scheduled participants include Karen Finley, Stephanie Shaw, Margi Cole, Laura McKenzie, Jessica Thebus, Susan Nussbaum, Tekki Lomnicki, Nana Shineflug, Teatro Luna, and Babes With Blades....

Inspired by human persistence and the science of aviation, Flight is an exciting new performance piece from one of the city’s pioneer physical-theater companies. Plasticene introduces aviator Amelia Earhart, balloonist William H. Donaldson, and helicopter inventor Igor Sikorsky to visitors at the Museum of Science and Industry. In often overlapping voices, Mark Comiskey, Sharon Gopfert, and Blake Montgomery tout their characters’ endeavors while explaining flight mechanics. Their cacophonous competition is exhilarating, and excitement builds with the show’s increasingly impressive stage effects and physical feats....

Half Smiles of the Decomposed (Matador), apparently the final Guided by Voices album, contains further evidence of front man Robert Pollard’s recent conversion to production values, and the three-minute “Window of My World” is about as close as he’s ever come to writing an epic song suite. Otherwise Pollard’s going out like he came in: same magnetic-poetry-kit titles (“Sing for Your Meat,” “Sleep Over Jack”), same earnest, off-key vocals, same utter reliance on jangle pop and the Who as songwriting models....

In the Humboldt Park studio of Gingarte Capoeira, instructor Marisa Cordeiro, five foot six and 133 pounds, squares off against a muscular male student who must outweigh her by 60 pounds. As the two rhythmically circle, weave, and feint, another six students stand close by. One man plays a berimbau, a twangy bow-shaped stringed instrument, another pounds on an atabaque, a tall congalike drum, while a woman rattles a pandiero, a Brazilian tambourine....

Kelly Link’s short stories are the wickedest gifts I’ve gotten so far from the genre-benders–writers who don’t cleave to pop or litfic conventions, read in a variety of genres, and aren’t content to borrow from any one formula. Link’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen (2001), feeds on horror, mystery, romance, comics, travel writing, fantasy, and sci-fi. While she dwells on details both realistic and fantastic with salacious precision, her fortes are myth and fairy tale....

Andrzej Strumillo’s abstract painting Mandala X is a bit like a dying star shooting flames–a reminder of the high modernist period, when artists believed that abstraction had the power to provide universal symbols. One of 33 recent paintings at the Society for Arts, showing with works on paper, it has a dark circle at the center surrounded by browns with a hint of red behind them. Flames seem to shoot out from all around the circle–not literal representations of fire but crusty, barklike streams that mix tan, yellow, and red....

Midnight Bible School: An Evening of Sit-Down Comedy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past 11 months, Second City alum Matt Dwyer has drawn local comedians and improvisers out of the woodwork with an opportunity to push the boundaries of stand-up comedy. Acting as both ringmaster and performer, the politically conscious Dwyer is the only constant in the rotating group of players–and when it comes to cool irony, he could give Letterman a run for his money....

On what turned out to be his final album, The Odyssey of Funk & Popular Music (1998), trumpeter Lester Bowie pulled off spirited interpretations of tunes by Puccini, Cole Porter, Harold Melvin, the Spice Girls, the Notorious B.I.G., and Marilyn Manson. It would’ve been audacious, if not downright ridiculous, for almost any other jazz musician to attempt such a mix, but to Bowie, who died of complications from liver cancer in November at age 58, it was as characteristic as the stogie he usually clamped between his middle finger and forefinger....

Lead Stories Among those running for sheriff in Kentucky counties are three sheriffs who were forced from office after being convicted of crimes: Roger Benton of Morgan County was convicted of accepting a bribe, Douglas Brandenburg of Lee County was convicted of obstructing justice, and Ray Clemons of Breathitt County was convicted of failing to report drug activity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also in December, a businessman in Jalan Beserah, Malaysia, told reporters he’d recently dismissed his maid because a hidden camera had caught her boiling her underwear in the soup she served him....