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THE FLYING DUTCHMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wagnerian singers are a special breed: with powerful voices that can soar into the upper reaches of an opera house, they can bring life to their superhuman characters, heroes and heroines who strive for romantic ecstasy and nobly weather its tumults. Ever since the Lyric Opera recruited a cast of Wagnerians for its Ring cycle in the mid-90s, it has slowly transformed itself into a sort of Bayreuth on Lake Michigan, offering notable productions of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tristan und Isolde....

UTAH PHILLIPS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bruce “Utah” Phillips has a lot of material–his repertoire includes folk songs and union anthems, recycled vaudeville, and early-20th-century pop tunes as well as his own creations–but it’s the way he weaves it all together that, in his words, “gaffs” his listeners and reels them in. His most recent CD, the two-year-old The Moscow Hold (Red House), is a leisurely, often riotously funny run through some of his most beloved routines, and it provides a revealing glimpse of the nuances of his craft....

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on Thursday, April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. The next night there were riots in over 100 cities. Dr. King, the apostle of nonviolence, by far the most respected figure in the black community, had been gunned down by a white man. Madison Street from the old Chicago Stadium to Garfield Park was in turmoil as the two newsmen slowly drove into the heat of the riot....

It was one of those freak things that never should have happened. We had just had lunch at the Workingman’s Club, and while I was backing out of the parking space, a wino wandered up to the truck to tell us that he’d been a furniture mover back in the old days. But the wino surprised us. He actually said something almost interesting. “I used to work out of your Madison Street warehouse,” he mumbled....

Friday 7/19 – Thursday 7/25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Each fall, thousands of activists from the School of the Americas Watch go to Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the existence of the SOA, a 56-year-old military school that has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in combat and counterinsurgency tactics. Recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the SOA is, say its opponents, directly linked to decades of human rights violations perpetrated by such notorious graduates as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega....

A self-described pothead dropout, Ron De Jesus got into dance by hanging out with his girlfriend–a dance student–some 20 years ago at Northeastern Illinois University. Previously he’d partnered her in a few “Hispanic events” at Roberto Clemente High School, in numbers where “she’d carry a basket of peanuts and wear her little Copacabana outfit,” as he puts it. But at NIU Dame Libby Komaiko, artistic director of the school’s resident Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater, took him under her wing and insisted he get his GED and enroll in college....

Twelfth Night, or What You Will Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre doesn’t. Its Twelfth Night, reportedly the most successful show in this acclaimed company’s eight-year history, has received enthusiastic reviews during its U.S. tour, but its popularity seems akin to that of a network news anchor: it’s so handsome, poised, and well-spoken that it’s hard to imagine any argument with it. Tim Carroll’s meticulous, overly deliberate staging effectively transforms the play’s frenetic revelry into muted, well-behaved pleasantry....

AUGUST 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)....

Since the 13th century Antwerp has vacillated between booming seaport and provincial town, depending on who was in charge and whether there’d been a flood recently. But in 1981, when six fashion design graduates from the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts showed their mod, mangled work together at the London Designer Show, the city suddenly became a world-famous hub for avant-garde design. It’s the sort of thing that gives independent artists hope that big things can happen in overlooked cities....

“The city today is more a soldier’s than an artist’s town,” Nelson Algren wrote 50 years ago in Chicago: City on the Make. Stuart McCarrell, who died last month, was both. Few have done more to keep Algren on the literary map, at least in Wicker Park, than McCarrell. He was a pal of Algren’s from 1967 to ’75, when the author fled Chicago to live briefly in New Jersey and then on Long Island, where he died in 1981....

HOLMES BROTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though gospel, soul, and blues share deep roots, surprisingly few artists can simultaneously occupy all three genres without sounding strained or insincere in at least one. But guitarist and keyboardist Wendell Holmes, bassist Sherman Holmes, and drummer Willie “Popsy” Dixon are among those few, making music that combines the simple dignity of a whitewashed country church with the abandon of a smoky, neon-lit sweatbox....

Local filmmaker Scott Taradash tells the engrossing story of Chicago bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards, who was born in 1915 in the Mississippi Delta, jammed with Robert Johnson as a young man, came to Chicago in 1953, and still remembers the earliest days of the blues. “He never inflates his importance,” notes Alligator Records president Bruce Iglauer. “Honeyboy understands that his role [in the history of the blues] was secondary, but his knowledge and his being there make him primary....

Chicago label Drag City had been putting out records for six years when one of its artists, Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux, proposed a new project. Drag City had already collaborated with Hagerty on several offbeat ventures–What Is Royal Trux?, a tour film cum sci-fi epic released on videotape in 1992 (and slated for reissue on DVD next year), as well as scripts for The Drag City Hour, a radio program with music and comedy sketches....

Singer Josephine Foster has sought out a wide range of musical settings over the last two years, from the polished lyricism of the Children’s Hour to the raw austerity of Born Heller; most recently she’s formed her own backing group, a full-on rock band called the Supposed, which made its debut on this summer’s All the Leaves Are Gone (Locust). Tying all this work together, though, is Foster’s arresting voice–a piercing, deeply mannered warble, indebted equally to Joan Baez and British folk legend Shirley Collins, that she controls with a precision honed by opera training....

LEROY JENKINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leroy Jenkins has played the violin for 60 years, and in his music–particularly his unaccompanied performances, such as the one this Wednesday–you can hear that lifetime of practice. His utter absorption of the rules of his instrument allows him to break them with authority, augmenting classical techniques with creaks, scratches, sobs, and squeals. When he pulls a hollow, lanky tone from the G string, it expresses deep wisdom and emotion–which more than justifies any unorthodox method of drawing horsehair over catgut....

Danny Orozco seems dressed for a date. He has on a blue checked button-down shirt, a black tie, black sweatpants, a black leather jacket, a new pair of white Reeboks, and a baseball cap that says “I’m All Good.” Hidden by his clothes are the tattoos–the blue and red signature of his life in a Pilsen street gang and his years in prison. Orozco, who’s 45, carries around a small photo album containing several dozen snapshots of him with various female nursing aides, therapists, and caregivers at Sheridan Shores....

Melancholy Play, Piven Theatre. This long one-act has nothing interesting to say about the social construction of depression. Though Sarah Ruhl is credited (or debited) as the playwright, the script seems the outcome of a weird theater game–“Hey, what if someone who’s crazy turns into an almond?” Ruhl strings together epigrams masquerading as dialogue to tell the tale of Tilly, whose anomie enchants everyone around her and whose ultimate happiness alienates them....

When he was 17, Ben-Hur Uribe blacked out at an Aerosmith concert. He had been tripping on acid and was getting paranoid. “I felt fantastic,” he recalls, “so I yelled that I’d buy soda for everyone in the stadium. Then all these vendors began to converge on me. I thought they were going to hit me with stones.” He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again he was staring at the white walls of a mental ward....

Locke Bowman has seen people convicted on some pretty weak evidence. He helped win the freedom of Ronald Jones, one of Illinois’ 13 exonerated death row inmates, who was convicted on the strength of a dubious confession he always insisted police beat out of him. Two years ago Bowman helped free an inmate who’d been convicted of a rape that DNA evidence proved he couldn’t have committed. It’s an irony that’s seemed all the more painful to Curtis in recent weeks....

Now in its 16th year, the Polish Film Festival in America will run November 6 through 21 and present more than 40 films, ranging from grim drama to broad comedy, from animated family films to sexually frank art films. Screenings will be at the Copernicus Center (5216 W. Lawrence) and the Society for Arts (1112 N. Milwaukee); tickets are $9, $8 for seniors and students. For more information call 773-486-9612 or visit www....