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The 21st annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, continues Friday through Sunday, March 22 through 24. Screenings are at Preston Bradley Center and WIDC Theater, both at 941 W. Lawrence, and Delilah’s, 2771 N. Lincoln. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair....

Rear Window Rating **** Masterpiece Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Written by John Michael Hayes With James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, and Irene Winston. Turning a radio knob is actually the first decisive act by anyone in Rear Window. The camera briefly scans the courtyard that will remain the movie’s only location, showing the hero–L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), better known as Jeff–fast asleep in the 92-degree morning heat....

Friday 3/1 – Thursday 3/7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When local filmmaker Allen Ross disappeared in 1995, it was anyone’s guess where he’d gone. His life had taken some odd turns, including a sudden move to Oklahoma and a subsequent marriage to the founder of a fringe religious group. Lacking solid information, friends and family speculated: he could have run away; he could have amnesia; he could be dead....

Captured at www.richardlloyd.com/studies.htm Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How is one to treat the inevitable mistakes and muscular and cognitive errors which visit upon a learning discipline? Often, when I see my students make mistakes, I see them make value judgments on their own abilities to perform, or to learn material. As a result, I asked myself, what happens within myself when I make mistakes, especially in performance, in public, and what might be different in my own approach at these moments from the approach of my students?...

Ears of Experience Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rice had no intention of making a name in music when he moved to Chicago in the summer of 1988. “I came here to do visual art, not music,” he says. “I sold all of my records.” He’d studied political science and art off and on for several years at Ohio State University, but spent some of his most gratifying time there playing guitar in a primitive punk-rock band called Control and the Swans-like art-punk outfit IDF, which also featured future Nerves drummer Elliot Dicks, future Atavistic Records owner Kurt Kellison, and Kellison’s wife, filmmaker Paula Froehle....

The recent City Council debate has concentrated on the plight of poor people whose cars get towed. But the two wards where cars get towed the most are the 42nd and the 2nd–two wealthy districts that run along the lakefront, from the Gold Coast to the near south side. I know this because Merlin Tripp, the computer expert who helped me with my recent property-tax stories, did a computer analysis of the latest raw data on towing the city keeps on its Web site....

It doesn’t get much respect in the land where Lawrence Welk was once a superstar, but the accordion is the cornerstone of a surprisingly wide variety of styles around the world: zydeco, tango, chanson, conjunto, and so on. Accordion master Guy Klucevsek has for years been dedicated to exploring these traditions and the overlaps between them while working constantly to extend the instrument’s already broad repertoire. He’s performed music by key figures in the New York downtown scene–including John Zorn, Fred Frith, Anthony Coleman, and Dave Douglas–and by contemporary classical composers like Alvin Lucier and William Duckworth....

One nice detail from A.D. Nauman’s Scorch, a dystopian novel leavened with black comedy, would be pedantic if it weren’t rendered trivial by her ocean of wordplay: in the future, Chicagoans spell “cell phone” as “sellphone.” When the thing rings it usually means you’re getting an ad, not a call from a friend, but since sellphones have pictures and advertising’s considered an art form, you probably won’t mind. In fact if you grumbled you’d sound stupid....

Georgina Valverde Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Little Pussy Cat, Come ‘ere, hanging from the ceiling on a piece of yarn, contrasts two elements, one kitschy and the other more nuanced. At one end of a piece of foam in the shape of a fat crescent moon is a cartoonish orange flower cut from felt. Hanging beside the foam is a cluster of crocheted yarn interwoven with twine in pale yellow, blue, and tan; with no identifiable function, this object jokes a bit on Valverde’s use of the craft idiom (she does all the crocheting herself)....

The film and video component of this multidisciplinary arts festival Thursday through Saturday, August 16 through 18, at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-348-2143; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-278-1500; Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee, 773-509-5050; Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee, 773-342-4597; and Local Grind, 1585 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-3490. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings will be video projection. Tickets are $7, available at the venue one hour before the show; admission is free with a festival pass....

Back in the 70s, Tom Ulick was helping demolish a warehouse in the Loop when an old man wandered up. In the 1800s, said the old man, the building had been a produce depot where he’d worked on an icing crew, packing 300 cars daily to be shipped out of the city by rail. “This whole region was once an agricultural mecca,” says Ulick, now an organic farmer living near Madison, Wisconsin....

Christine L. Craig is a woman with a mission: she wants to see her father, harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey, granted his rightful place in the pantheon of country music greats. Bailey, who died in 1982 at the age of 82, is the only major figure from the early days of the Grand Ole Opry who hasn’t been inducted into Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame. It’s Craig’s opinion, and that of many others, that Bailey’s exclusion from the hall would count as a glaring historical omission even if he hadn’t also been the first black star of a musical idiom generally understood to be a white thing....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In July the Manitoba Court of Appeal upheld a sentence issued last year by Winnipeg judge Ronald Meyers. The high court ruled that under the Youth Criminal Justice Act of 2002, deterrence should not be a factor in the sentencing of underage offenders, and so Meyers was correct in awarding a jail term of one day (plus supervision) to a 15-year-old boy who beat a man to death with a billiard ball in a sock....

I am sunk into a depression over the election results. I started out Anyone But Bush but actually came to like John Kerry, which makes his defeat even harder. I feel like I’m looking at four years of prison and share this country with a pack of baboons. Everywhere I look I see that smug bastard’s picture, and I am filled with grief. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twenty-four hours later we were wishing we’d never found that fucking place....

Your column about the origin of the name Milk Duds brings to mind another unusual name. In my work in retailing I frequently see checks and credit cards issued by an institution known as Fifth Third Bank. What kind of name is Fifth Third Bank? Sure, not everyone can be first, and Avis did all right with its we’re-number-two-we-try-harder shtick. But third? And not just third, but fifth third? (The Car Talk guys refer to the “third half” of their show, but they’re not asking me to entrust them with my money....

I’ve seen a lot of contrasting information about this all over the Web, but that doesn’t tell me anything, except that the druggies at school aren’t the only guys in on the concept: getting high off of banana joints. Is there really a chemical called “bananadine”? If so, can you really get high from smoking dried-out banana skins? –LeperNaaman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I’ll say one thing: I’d never heard the term bananadine before....

Few hip-hop artists have been able to make it on pure charisma for as long as Busta Rhymes, whose fluorescent fashion sense, wild hairdos, herky-jerky dance moves, and dancehall-inflected bellow have disguised his utter lack of substance since he left Leaders of the New School for a solo career in 1996. Hits like “Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check” and “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” laid out the basic template: gruff, heavily syncopated shouting over stuttery beats....

Friday 5/17 – Thursday 5/23 18 SATURDAY Five years ago the words “west of Western” struck fear into the hearts of some real estate speculators, but now it appears to be official: Humboldt Park is hot. This weekend the Division Street Market–60-odd vendors selling vintage clothing, handmade textiles, used books, collectible ceramics, and avocado green glassware, brought together by the folks who run the Bucktown Arts Fest–makes its inaugural appearance in and around the 206-acre park’s stables at 3015 W....

After the painful breakup of his first serious band in the fall of 1997, Adam Busch was sure about one thing: he didn’t want to start another one. His new project, Manishevitz, would be a name for him to perform and record under, backed by whatever other players he could get to help him out. But despite his best efforts, the group that will join Busch onstage at the Hideout Saturday to celebrate the release of the third Manishevitz record has evolved into something more than a collection of old friends and hired hands....

CHUCK PROPHET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When this indie-rock veteran played Schubas in July, I wrote a Critic’s Choice for his opening act, Columbia Records discovery Paddy Casey, speculating that the newcomer might give Prophet “a run for [his] money.” I have no idea whether either of them read it, but after Casey finished his workmanlike set–and the packed room emptied out considerably–Prophet and his combo delivered one of the most galvanic shows I’d seen in months....