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EVERLAST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hip-hop has, in one way or another, fueled most of the good pop music made over the last several years–including some of the best roots rock, from Bruce Springsteen’s breakbeat-driven single “Streets of Philadelphia” to the two solo albums by former House of Pain rapper Erik Schrody, aka Everlast. On his 1998 debut, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues, Schrody sounded something like John Mellencamp or Bob Seger might have if they’d grown up on Run-DMC instead of Otis Redding, rapping and rasping over a blend of bluesy acoustic strumming, slow and midtempo rhythms that bumped if you paid attention, and dreamy, cinematic string arrangements that echo the alien/alienated violins of RZA’s Wu-Tang productions....

Anne-Sophie Birot’s psychologically acute first feature (2000), which explores the passionate but foundering friendship between two teenage girls, would have made a swell entry in the excellent mid-90s French TV series All the Boys and Girls in Their Time, for which Andre Techine, Chantal Akerman, and Claire Denis (among other filmmakers) dramatized stories set during the years they were teenagers. Though this film has a contemporary setting, it shares with the aforementioned directors’ entries a frankness about teenage sexuality that French filmmakers seem especially comfortable with....

By Ted Kleine Perhaps this will be Pinkhasik’s magic month. Three of his works will soon be on display in the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows, which is opening February 11 at Navy Pier. Two were inspired by fairy tales Pinkhasik heard from his grandmother growing up in the Soviet Union. One shows Father Frost “bringing snow and wind and all kinds of shit with his magic stick” while his granddaughter, the beautiful Snow Girl, gathers round her a fox and an owl, a wolf and a deer....

During the AACM’s late-60s heyday it was a given that musicians like Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton would look far outside the jazz continuum for ideas. But of all its vaunted alumni, reedist and composer Henry Threadgill has displayed the most voracious stylistic appetite and the most profound skills as a synthesist–nothing ever seems outside his reach. Since the early 90s the rigor and complexity of Threadgill’s writing has often been upstaged by his bands’ unusual instrumentation, and his latest project, Zooid, won’t likely change that: the group mixes tuba (a holdover from his Very Very Circus), cello (a key presence in his influential Sextett), nylon-stringed guitar, oud, drums, and his own astrigent alto saxophone and probing flute....

On November 12, 1992, an older man began drinking with two neo-Nazi youths in a bar in Wuppertal, Germany. The three got very drunk, the man spoke of “Nazi swine,” the racist bar owner erroneously called him a Jew, and the youths then stomped on him and set him on fire. Amos Gitai’s exquisitely nuanced 1993 video about this incident has distinct echoes of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Holocaust documentary, Shoah, in the way it circles around an event it never shows....

Susan Giles at Vedanta, through December 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Evening at the Renaissance Society in 1995, Stan Douglas simulated newscasts at three fictional Chicago stations on January 1, 1969, and January 1, 1970, in order to re-create the arrival of the happy talk format. Five years later at the Art Institute Douglas exhibited Le Detroit, suspending two screens 6 feet tall and 16 feet wide back-to-back and using synchronized 35-millimeter projectors to display a six-minute black-and-white film loop on either side, creating a shimmering effect....

In the first scene of Idris Goodwin’s new play, Idle Threats, Zodiac, an experimental filmmaker, is interviewed by Crit, a film critic who admires her work. When Zodiac dismisses the interview as a waste of her time, however, the critic turns on her and writes a bad review of her most recent film, which he hasn’t seen. In retaliation, Zodiac hires a friend to kidnap Crit and force him to watch her student films for a week....

Rafael Toral’s Wave Field (currently out of print) and Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (Touch) are two of the most gorgeous ambient guitar discs ever recorded, so you’d hardly blame the guy if he made a few more just like them. In fact the Lisbon-based sound artist’s latest stateside release, a one-sided vinyl picture disc called Harmonic Series 0 (Table of the Elements, 2003), weaves a similarly dense drone from electric guitar and analog instruments; the biggest change there is that he’s added a computer to his setup....

I am a 29-year-old gay male, and I have a problem. There’s a guy at my office who is absolutely gorgeous, but I don’t know if he’s gay. I don’t have very much contact with him because we are in different departments. He does gives off “gay” signals, though: He wears a pair of hoop earrings and dresses like an Abercrombie & Fitch model, and his hair is bleached. (I know that those things alone don’t mean he is gay, but we live in a very conservative area, so I’m hoping that tips the odds....

I share the pain and anger you feel in the wake of the heinous attacks of September 11. However, I’m writing to administer a gentle knock for your subsequent column. I’m not upset about your take on God. But while you may have sat down to write on September 12 in an emotionally shattered state, your readers are checking in a week later. We’re still reeling but trying to get on with life, and we’re looking for a diversion to lighten the oppressive mood, if only for a moment....

This two-month showcase of Chicago sketch comedy features more than 30 local ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints, with two to four groups sharing the bill at each performance. Participating troupes include Brick, ÁSalsation!, GayCo Productions, the WNEP Theater, and others; the festival is presented by Posin’ at the Bar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sketch Fest runs through March 2 at the Theatre Building, 1225 W....

Most talk shows are based on the undemocratic principle that people who aren’t celebrities or experts aren’t worth listening to. Even shows like Jerry Springer that supposedly deal with real people in real-life situations mostly traffic in those who live freakish lives. The beauty of The Mick Show, Mick Napier’s live talk show, is that he interviews regular people, asking them regular questions about their lives and opinions. A respected teacher, director, and mentor in the comedy business, Napier could pack the show every night with famous people he’s come to know over the years, folks like Andy Richter or Amy Sedaris (to drop two names)....

A while back I read an article about how sperm may be an antidepressant for people who ingest it in one way or another. But that’s not my question. What interests me is that a few months later, I read an article about the scientist who proposed that theory. He said what started him down that line of thinking was that he read a study about how cohabiting lesbians’ menstrual cycles don’t sync up....

By Ben Joravsky “There are discarded industrial sites like that all over the southeast side,” says Shepherd, who was born and raised in nearby Roseland. “You had hoboes and vagrants in there, and there were fly dumpers illegally dumping. It’s contaminated land–what the EPA calls a brown field–so it’s hard to develop something there, ’cause of all the oversight. I don’t think the city had any concrete plans for developing. People in Pullman didn’t really care....

In April Stephanie Sinclair donned an abaya, the black head scarf and cloak worn by women in Muslim regions, to take pictures of members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s al-Madhi forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City district for Time magazine. She told insurgents she was French–“You can’t tell them you’re American at this point,” she says–and didn’t have any major problems. Twenty-five of Sinclair’s photographs from Iraq’s front lines are featured in the Peace Museum exhibit “Occupation,” which opens tonight, Friday, October 22, and runs through the end of November....

Matching wine to cuisines it isn’t traditionally drunk with–Caribbean, Latin American, Asian–is the focus of this periodic feature, in which we pick a BYO restaurant, sample a few dishes, and recommend some wines. 773-878-8930 (white bean salad with tomatoes, peppers, and onions) 1, 2 Mucver $5.50 $10.75 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this family-run Turkish restaurant, you can watch as cooks carve lamb from a spit, grill marinated quails, and skewer tender chunks of lamb in an exposed kitchen....

“More than half of all U.S. container traffic now passes through the Chicago area, so much that our region has emerged as the world’s third busiest intermodal hub, surpassed only by the great Asian seaports of Hong Kong and Singapore” (“Critical Cargo,” an April 2002 report from the Business Leaders for Transportation and the Metropolitan Planning Council). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Banks now see the unbanked “as potential customers,” according to Doug Tillett and Liz Handlin of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, reporting on a November 14 conference the bank hosted (“Chicago Fed Letter,” January)....

Morbid Curiosity Part of the effect of Catacomb is a feeling of material excess. There aren’t just a few skeletons here, but 75 of them. (The piece was shipped to the gallery in over 140 separate parcels.) Dwarfing the viewer, the installation also denies entry: you can only walk around it, not between the skeletons or over the bones heaped in piles at their feet. And the viewer quickly realizes these are not human skeletons or human bones but an almost otherworldly accretion of industrial materials and animal bones gathered by an obsessive collector....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article states that our office has not prosecuted police. We have indicted three Cook County sheriff’s deputies for murdering a defendant in the Bridgeview lockup. We have charged three other sheriff’s deputies for shooting at a black couple in the southern suburbs. We have just charged a sheriff’s deputy with murder in the death of Michael Chambers....

The Films of Robert Beavers, praised by critics Ken Kelman and P. Adams Sitney for their “lapidary quality,” have been shown throughout North America and Europe, but never in Chicago–so this screening is not just welcome but overdue. Like his late companion, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Beavers is one of the great purists of cinema, building his scenes and sequences with the exactitude of a master artisan; every shot seems timed and composed the only possible way it could have been....