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Chicago and me, we’ve got a good thing going. It’s a marriage of comfort and convenience, not of passion, and I am not faithful, but Chicago doesn’t seem to care. Chicago is perfectly aware that whenever I come up with a little extra money or some airline has a sale, there I go, winging off into the wild blue to see my first and still true love among cities, with my heart pounding all through the plane’s long descent as I gaze down on that island of steep regulated canyons gleaming below....

If it was good enough for Jane Austen, it’s good enough for me. In an 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice, which had just been published, Austen said that “the work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling.” One might say the same of the monthlong Dance Chicago festival–the “Opening Weekend” program (see listing) in particular offers the best of some very accessible companies. Many of these bright lights are also involved in the fest’s new Choreography Project, which has commissioned works by five choreographers to be set on three top-notch companies, most premiering on the “New Dances” programs....

At first this Portland-based quartet was content to toy with the rudiments of Brit shoegazer pop while front man Courtney Taylor skimmed his record shelves; he’d toss out a quip for each item in his collection (“Just want a girl / As cool as Kim Deal”), and the excitement was in waiting to see which he’d run out of first, snark or LPs. Before it came to that, however, Taylor developed into an ace observer of hipster mores; on singles such as “Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth” and “Bohemian Like You” the band supported his fringe-dweller disses (“I never thought you’d be a junkie because heroin is so passe,” from the former) with pilfered hooks tweaked just artfully enough (that’s not quite the riff from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on the latter)....

ERYKAH BADU Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fat, hard-hitting groove that opens “Penitentiary Philosophy,” the first track on Erykah Badu’s new Mama’s Gun (Motown), might be explained by something called the D’Angelo Effect. It was laid down by musicians like Pino Palladino, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, and James Poyser–all crucial players on D’Angelo’s paradigm-setting Voodoo–and both records were cut at Electric Lady Studios. But it’s not long before Badu makes it clear that she’s still doing her own thing....

Kenny Barron & Regina Carter Inside Out For some jazz fogies, improvising without any predetermined material is still, to borrow Robert Frost’s put-down of free verse, like playing tennis without a net: a fringe activity with a suspicious lack of discipline, a lazy rejection of skill and order. This quaintly reactionary position helps some free-jazz players and fans pretend they’re cutting edge, outlaws under siege. The subtitle of the documentary Continuum, showing at the Siskel Film Center as part of its music-movie series this month, is “Why the Jazz Establishment Can’t Hold Down Matthew Shipp”–as if the establishment weren’t busy marketing his many CDs and pitching magazine articles using his outsider pose as a hook....

Holly Golightly first made a splash in the early 90s with Thee Headcoatees, a raucous ladies’ auxiliary to Billy Childish’s most famous combo. The gehls tried gamely to look like they were being teensploited by the garage guru, playing punk covers and Childish’s tunes. But since ’94 Golightly has also had a for-real solo career, and these days her original songs–crude, playful blues stompers, wicked and embittered country dirges, 60s girl-group punk ditties–outnumber the covers three to one....

In “Moving,” from Silkworm’s new album, Italian Platinum, bassist Tim Midgett sounds none too choked up about leaving town. “I never thought I’d leave this place / It has all kinds of storage space,” he sings right off the bat. The lyrics would seem to be autobiographical: in October, Silkworm drummer Michael Dahlquist moved to Chicago from the band’s longtime home base of Seattle, joining Midgett and guitarist Andy Cohen, who started the slow migration when he enrolled at the University of Chicago’s law school in 1998....

Claire Denis’ first-rate documentary (1990) about filmmaker Jacques Rivette, produced for French television, has many things to recommend it. The main interviewer is the great critic Serge Daney, who, two years before his death, converses with Rivette while relaxing in a cafe and strolling around Paris (Denis interjects a few questions toward the end); since both men were former editors of Cahiers du Cinema, not to mention groundbreaking and highly articulate critics, they have a lot to discuss apart from Rivette’s filmmaking....

Me and Francis, Rogue Theater Company, at the Playground Theater. It’s hard to be a saint, but it’s even harder to love one. That’s the simple message playwright-director Nate White puts forth in his earnest but awkward contemporary version of the story of Saint Francis of Assisi. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike Franco Zeffirelli in the 1973 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which captured the essence of 60s antimaterialism while keeping Francis’s story in its 13th-century context, White puts the saint in the unforgiving environs of contemporary Uptown....

Friday, December 14, 200 block of South Columbus, 2 PM. Assault. 21-year-old female Art Institute student exiting rest room was confronted by unidentified janitor, who grabbed victim by the arms and shouted, “Get the hell out of here. You are ignorant people. You guys are ignorant people!” Student fled and reported incident to security, but janitor remains at large. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wednesday, January 2, 3400 block of South King, 11:15 AM....

Now 75, Ray Brown just keeps doing what he’s done for the past 50 years, ever since he helped create the modern sound of jazz bass on recordings by Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and the Milt Jackson group that would become the Modern Jazz Quartet. I can’t decide what I find most remarkable about Brown. He has an ebony-wood tone and suede-smooth attack, and rhythmically he gooses a rock-solid pulse with an almost indiscernible bop kick; his innovations, which have already provided a stylistic architecture for two generations of bassists, will serve as a benchmark for generations to come; and thanks to a lucky combination of genes and environment, his steady musical heartbeat still sounds pretty much the way it did a half century ago....

You’ve got to hand it to Dubya. By reviving class war in America, the president and his coterie of plutocrats have also revived a whole vein of great Marxist literature. Who thought twice about George Orwell or Bertolt Brecht when Bill Clinton was president? A few antiglobalization agitpunks maybe, and that’s about it. But now the poor are subsidizing Halliburton with their lives, medical care is a bourgeois luxury, and if no child gets left behind it’s only because he’s being tried as an adult....

Drummer Scott Amendola graduated from Berklee in the early 90s and moved to San Francisco, where he soon made a name for himself playing in guitarist Charlie Hunter’s group. His skill at maintaining a pulse in wide-open terrain and stoking imperturbable grooves has landed him plenty of work since then: he’s flourished in projects with broad appeal (Hunter, the quartet called T.J. Kirk, Oranj Symphonette) as well as in more rigorous settings (Paul Plimley Trio, Jenny Scheinman’s group, with Pat Martino)....

The second Select Media Festival, “an exploration of international movements in the digital underground of electronic media,” runs Friday through Wednesday, November 21 through 26, at the Gene Siskel Film Center and at High School, 1542 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $8, $4 for Film Center members; a $50 pass is good for all screenings. For more information call 312-846-2800 or 773-837-0145. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22...

He’s been a small-town boy all his life, but Ernie Edwards is no square. Between 1937 and 1991 he ran the most happening joint in Broadwell, Illinois, pop. 200: the Pig Hip restaurant on Route 66, where he served his famous Pig Hip sandwich, told corny jokes, ran illegal slot machines, and even performed quickie marriages. Edwards’s family came to central Illinois in 1932, in the depths of the Depression. His father, Ernie Sr....

On the third floor of the Arlington Park grandstand M. Scott McMannis, the dean of Chicago handicappers, is teaching Warren Weaver, former hunch bettor, how to play the races like a pro. But McMannis, who’d also taught business administration, still considered himself a teacher, and handicapping seemed like a natural adult-education subject, since you have to be 17 to make a bet. He organized seminars at a Howard Johnson’s across the street from Arlington, charging ten bucks a head....

Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (1) It’s a Japanese film–beginning and ending with and frequently accompanied by Japanese pop songs, all by Kiyoshura Imawano. (None of the songs are subtitled, though English words pop up in the lyrics intermittently.) Junkerman–an American filmmaker based in Tokyo and working with a Japanese producer and mainly Japanese crew–has focused on Japanese subjects in four of his previous half-dozen documentaries. Here the most obvious Japanese angle is an emphasis on Chomsky’s critique of the imperialist excesses of Japan, principally its cruel treatment of the Chinese....

Titus Andronicus, Defiant Theatre, at the Viaduct Theater, and Titus Andronicus, Theatre o’ th’ Absurd, at the Performance Loft. Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy is a catalog of cruelty: much-wronged Roman general Titus takes his revenge against the effete Emperor Saturnius and his vicious spouse, Tamora. The ensuing atrocities–amputations, decapitations, mutilation, rape, infanticide, cannibalism–recall a Hollywood pukefest. Watching Titus Andronicus is like swimming through a sewer. Nor does the poetry save the night....

Ying Chen likes to see himself as a trailblazer for east Asian cuisine. In 1980, before he opened his first place, he and a business partner drove around Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio looking for a city without a Mandarin restaurant. In Fort Wayne they found three Chinese eateries, all Cantonese; that’s where Chen staked his claim. Now, after two decades of building an empire based largely on Chinese fast food, he’s testing a new concept: an 80-seat establishment in the South Loop called Oysy....

This septet, engineered to pivot around Chicago keyboardist Dan Trudell’s sturdy Hammond B-3 organ, cranks out a whole lotta funk and just as much fun. Trudell is probably best known for his Sunday-morning services at the Green Mill: from midnight till 4:30 AM he anchors the Sabertooth Organ Quartet, spreading motile comp work behind the band’s dual saxophone front men and bubbling up into swirling, expansive solos of his own. (At times he reminds me of Larry Young, and I can think of no higher compliment for an organist....