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Friday 5/3 – Thursday 5/9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who’s that girl? Between acts at the seventh annual benefit for the Howard Brown Health Center–which bills itself as “an outrageously seductive evening with Chicago’s most innovative and talented female impersonators”–organizers will auction off a drag makeover; the lucky winner will be whisked backstage to get dolled up by the pros, then appear with the rest of the girls in the final production number....

Though DanceLoop Chicago is offering its first full-length concert in the city this weekend, its artistic directors have been around the block. Paula Frasz performed with the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble, which disbanded in 1992, and with Mordine & Company Dance Theatre for eight years before setting out on her own. She received a Ruth Page award for choreography in 1999. And three years ago she and fellow artistic director Dmitri Peskov–once her student at Northern Illinois University, where she still teaches–began producing Spectrum Dances, a showcase for themselves and other independent choreographers....

The Bay Area collective Hieroglyphics–Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Casual, Pep Love, Domino, and the four members of Souls of Mischief–is as resilient a crew as ever to have been battered by the commercial and aesthetic vagaries of hip-hop in the 90s. Del, Casual, and Souls of Mischief broke into the majors the early part of the decade with separate deals, but as Dre’s Chronic clouded up the air, mainstream hip-hop became less welcoming to oddballs, and the artists soon parted ways with their labels....

Elizabeth Crane describes her first attempt at a novel as the loosely autobiographical story of a woman for whom “everything that could possibly go wrong at one time goes wrong and she goes on a road trip with this horrible guy–just the totally wrong boyfriend–but kind of gets something out of it anyway.” The novel was never published, for which Crane is glad, but a few years ago it did land her an agent....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two professors recently resigned from West Virginia University to protest its Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, an organization devoted to anxiety reduction and named after a welder whose epiphany “catapulted him from a routine life of stress and insecurity into a state of deep peace, hopefulness, security and clarity.” According to one professor, a speaker at a recent Banks conference in Seattle presented photographs of “ice crystals formed in the presence of positive thoughts and…in the presence of negative thoughts,” noting that the negative ones “weren’t as pretty” and remarking, “I’m not a scientist myself, but this looks like evidence to me....

The 16th annual Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival continues through Sunday, September 26, at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, and Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee. For more information call 773-293-1447 or visit www.chicagofilmmakers.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five of the remaining six programs are strong enough to recommend. Most don’t have an overriding theme, though several of the best videos in Program Three (Friday, 9 PM, Chicago Filmmakers, 120 min....

There are few practitioners of electronic music more challenging than the Austrian group Farmers Manual. Their music draws on the vocabulary of club music–pulsating bass lines, frantic drum ‘n’ bass and techno beats, modem handshakes and digital glitches–but embeds these elements in a new and alien grammar. Their long, apparently improvised streams of digitalia are at times grating and self-indulgent, but at its best their work is densely layered with arresting details and packed with abrupt and exciting shifts in texture and rhythm....

Juan Logan: Whose Song Shall I Sing? at Chicago Cultural Center, through April 21 Gary Simmons at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through May 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By connecting “benign” mass-culture images with more obvious signs of subjugation, Logan argues that sweet stereotypes can be destructive too. The broad grin can be seen as a sign of oppression and opposition at once: Logan says he’s seen “old black men” act “as humble as they needed to be to get by…....

Mike Miner’s excellent column “A First Amendment Showdown” [Hot Type, September 12] skillfully captured all the major issues in our court case seeking to save the reporter’s privilege in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Two additional points I’d like to make: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) In his opinion striking down the privilege, federal appellate judge Richard Posner failed to cite a source for his assertion that my fellow reporters/writers Robert C....

Punjabi director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding)–who appears Saturday at the First United Methodist Church as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival–made her debut with this 1988 feature, and it shows a filmmaker less indebted to Bollywood melodrama than to Italian neorealism. An illiterate boy, banished from his home because he can’t get along with his older brother, winds up fending for himself in a sooty Bombay ghetto, where he tries to rescue another kid from drugs and a coveted virgin from the whorehouse that dominates the block....

After performing together for a decade and releasing six albums, these Canadians have become the granddads of 90s power pop, followed not only by their friends and neighbors (Super Friendz, the Flashing Lights) but by bands in the midwest (Frisbie, the Waxwings) and on the west coast (the Orange Peels) as well. Any other outfit with this much talent would have split up into several bands long ago, but somehow they’ve managed to keep it together, divvying up the albums among the four songwriters and playing musical chairs onstage....

FIREWATER 11/7, EMPTY BOTTLE Firewater’s upcoming covers album, Songs We Should Have Written (Jetset)–featuring obvious calls like “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Paint It Black,” and Tom Waits’s “Diamonds and Gold” as well as pleasant surprises like Robyn Hitchcock’s melancholy, nostalgic “I Often Dream of Trains”–is entertaining enough, but these New Yorkers never dig into the standards with the itchy irreverence they display on songs they did write. On last summer’s The Man on a Burning Tightrope their multiculti trash rock sounds like Peter Gunn getting his ass whupped in a dark alley by some Russian thugs....

A heroic effort by critic Richard Schickel to reconstruct Samuel Fuller’s most ambitious feature–a semiautobiographical account of his own fighting unit during World War II, severely truncated by distributors when first released (in 1980). This isn’t a director’s cut, but it’s 50 minutes longer than the original release, with 15 previously missing scenes and 23 extensions of existing scenes supplied from surviving footage, with Fuller’s script and notes used as guidelines....

Theater of Pain Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the meeting was over, McCann and a few other residents lingered to talk about what they could do to save the 75-year-old building. Besides McCann, an arts administrator, the group included nonprofit developer Dan Alexander, teacher Kevin Richards, and accountant Tom Rosenfeld. Faster than you can say urban blight, they morphed into a board of directors for the nonprofit group now known as the Wisdom Bridge Arts Project....

Five teenagers slouch on the furniture in the Pulaski Park field house, gossiping, joking, and talking about getting some junk food to ease the late afternoon munchies. Kelley Minneci shares her news: she just found out she’s been accepted into the acting pro-gram at NYU. Congratulations are offered all around. And then it’s down to the business of show business. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Magnus, who’s worked with Jellyeye, Curious Theatre Branch, and other alternative performance ventures for over a decade, is intimately familiar with the challenges of shoestring production....

Every few years Damon Locks finds his sartorial inclinations undergoing a shift. Locks, the front man for the band the Eternals, can narrate the evolution of his style in detail, from his punk days (when “unbeknownst to me, I became fashion conscious”) to the utilitarian worker’s uniforms favored by his band Trenchmouth in the 90s to a monochromatic look influenced by the black power movement. Just a couple of months ago he flashed on a new inspiration: the 1978 movie Rockers, in which the cast of reggae musicians, including Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace and Winston “Burning Spear” Rodney, are dressed to the nines....

A.R.E. Weapons have been alternately hyped as saviors of New York rock (alongside the Strokes) and key players in the electroclash “movement” (they played DJ Larry Tee’s festival last fall). But two of the three members have been making sweaty lo-fi war-obsessed music since at least 1996: frontman Brain McPeck and bassist Matt McAuley played together in Ayler’s Angels (later called Army of Ghosts), a sloppy trio known for yelling beat-style poetry about Vietnam over free-jazz sax blurts and machine-gun sound effects....

This is the most accessible film to date by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, though some people have been mistakenly scared away by its subject matter: the enormous number of Ugandan children orphaned by the AIDS crisis. In fact, much of this 2001 digital-video documentary focuses on the kids singing and dancing–at times it resembles a musical–which has led some critics to fault Kiarostami for failing to address the crisis adequately. But the video is only superficially superficial, and it grows in meaning and resonance as it progresses....

Uptown is a poor man’s world tour. You might not be able to afford a plane ticket to Nigeria, but if you sit on the curb in front of the Riviera Theatre long enough, someone will walk by in a crazy-quilt kufi and robe. Wait a little longer and he’ll open a restaurant. Whenever there’s an upheaval–a revolution, a civil war, an urban renewal project–you can be sure its victims will end up on Lawrence Avenue, in studio apartments above grocery stores that sell malt liquor and phone cards....

Though it’s tempting to claim that L’Avventura (Jetset), the first album credited to Luna bassist Britta Phillips and guitarist/front man Dean Wareham, is a Luna album in all but name, there are some differences. The last couple of Luna discs–the full-length Romantica and the EP Close Cover Before Striking, both from 2002–were the band’s leanest and most rocking in years. The chamber pop of L’Avventura, on the other hand, is just about the sleepiest thing Wareham has ever put his name on–and when you’re talking about a former member of Galaxie 500 (or, for that matter, a current member of Luna) that’s saying something....