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I was the perfect sucker for this DV feature about the JFK assassination: writer-director Neil Burger, making his feature debut, presents his video as a docudrama about the late Walter Ohlinger, an elderly ex-marine who came forward in the late 90s claiming to have been the second gunman in Dealey Plaza, and while I was busy congratulating myself for not believing Ohlinger I swallowed Burger’s fiction hook, line, and sinker. Given the disinformation already swirling around the case, and the nation’s persistent need to understand who killed President Kennedy and why, Burger should probably be ashamed of himself for adding to the smoke....

Jere Van Syoc writes of her seven bizarre, sometimes goofy assemblages in the series “Death Toys” that they “both mock and ward off…domestic violence, road rage, gang warfare,” and they do have a totemic quality. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Made of junk found in alleys and at garage sales, they mix phallic aggression and its negation. The figure in The Patient lies on a gurney, one end of which juts out in zigzags that are echoed by pointy protrusions made of bicycle tires near its wheels; the head, arms, and legs are severed, and the penis is an elephant’s trunk....

Both James Fei and David Novak, together known as Maestros, have pretty highbrow musical pedigrees: they’ve each played saxophone with Anthony Braxton, and Fei has studied with contemporary composers like Alvin Lucier, Steve Mackey, and Paul Lansky. But these New Yorkers happily deflate the pretensions that often go hand in glove with such a background. On the recent double three-inch CD Precision Electro-Acoustics (Organized Sound Recordings) they make a virtue of their ad hoc technical setups, low-tech gear, blunt humor, and messy sound: the duo’s bio-cum-manifesto declares, “Maestro Music is all recorded live with no overdubbing, fancy laptop acrobatics, or studio bullshit....

Renee Stout Renee Stout and Emily Counts both convey a sense of unease, partly because of their work’s disturbing content, but mostly because the environments they create blur the boundaries between art and life. Some of Stout’s 31 pieces at DePaul University Art Gallery (a smaller version of a touring retrospective organized by the Belger Arts Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City) are grouped into installations inspired by characters she invented, based in part on African-American folklore....

On December 20, 1995, an American Airlines Boeing 757 took off from Miami for Cali, Colombia. The flight was uneventful, but as the crew prepared for descent one of the pilots made a mistake. Intending to orient the flight management computer by the navigational beacon at Alfonso B. Aragon Airport, he locked onto the signal of another nearby beacon transmitting on the same radio frequency, putting the plane off course. “What happened here?...

The greatest film to date by poet, critic, curator, and director Jonas Mekas, this highly personal 1971 feature chronicles his first trip back to Semeniskiai, Lithuania, the village where he was raised, after an absence of 25 years. It’s a moving act of memory and self-scrutiny, reflecting in some respects the diary films he’s made since the 60s but clearly standing apart from them. Narrated by Mekas, the film opens with footage of his first years in America and closes with contemporary visits to a Hamburg suburb (site of a labor camp where he and his brother Adolfas spent a year during World War II) and Vienna (where he enjoys the company of several friends, including filmmaker-curator Peter Kubelka and critic Annette Michelson)....

My boyfriend doesn’t like snowballing, which I’m fine with, however he won’t even kiss me after oral sex, even if I’ve already swallowed. I feel like he sees me as dirty or nasty when he refuses to kiss me after oral sex. He says he wouldn’t ask me to do something I don’t want to do, so I shouldn’t ask him to kiss me after I get him off with my mouth....

Whenever we are making love, my girlfriend begs me to say “sexy things” to her. I have no clue as to what she means or what to say. She tells me she’s turned on by “dirty” talk. Can you please give me some examples of sexy things to say? Or where can I get educated about dirty things to say to a woman when we’re making love? Yes, yes, yes: there are women out there who want nothing more than to be called whores and who love to piss on their boyfriends/husbands....

In late October, Republican state senator Chris Lauzen of Aurora took the train to the Loop to speak at a symposium sponsored by the libertarian/conservative Heartland Institute. The topic was bringing in low-priced prescription drugs from Canada, and the seven other speakers that day argued that reimporting drugs would be either useless or counterproductive–the same thing Heartland’s president, Joseph Bast, has since contended in an October 31 Tribune op-ed piece. Lauzen was the only one in favor of the idea....

Filling the sprawling lobby of the nine-story Chase Apartments in Rogers Park is the new Chase Cafe, a multipurpose facility that’s part coffee shop, part art gallery, part live-music venue, and part health club. Phil Tadros, who briefly owned Don’s Coffee Club on Jarvis, has converted this unusual web of rooms–the building was originally an elegant hotel–into a neighborhood hangout. There’s a lot going on: one room’s a computer lab/copy shop doubling as a cyber cafe; another contains a pool table and a gift shop, separated by beaded curtains; and the most spectacular is the octagonal ballroom, where the stage is already booked through the next several months with live music and improv theater....

The two-story house next door to Le Bouchon has been home to several eateries (most recently Gilgamesh), but New England-themed newcomer GLORY seems especially well suited to the space. Chef and owner Sharon Cohen has whitewashed the wooden benches, painted the walls a dusty blue, and trimmed the windows with crisp white paint but no curtains, letting the natural light stream in. The effect is that of an east-coast beach house, which is the perfect setting for menu items like whole belly Ipswich fried clams with homemade tartar sauce, for instance, or a lobster roll (a long bun filled with a mayonnaise-based lobster salad)....

When Kelly Richardson heard that 21 people had been crushed to death in the stairwell of the E2 nightclub, she wept. When she heard city officials trying to explain how the club had managed to stay open even though a judge had ordered it closed, she rolled her eyes. “I cried over those kids like they were mine,” she says. “But when I heard those city officials talking about how there was nothing they could do to keep that club closed–man, what a joke....

“Are you a labor puker?” Cassandra* asked Kimberly Krick. Cassandra, Kim, and Kim’s fiance, Steven McCarty, were sitting in Cassandra’s living room talking while quiet new age music seeped from the stereo. It was an unseasonably warm day in April 2002, and Cassandra was wearing a black sundress that revealed the tattoos on her arm and calf. At 11 weeks pregnant, this was Kim’s first prenatal appointment, and Cassandra needed to take her history....

Friday 3/23 – Thursday 3/29 Women’s impact on the global economy and their influence in religion and in the workplace will be put under the microscope at this weekend’s Women’s Ways of Leading conference. Guests will include Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, who heads Voices in the Wilderness, which campaigns to end economic sanctions against Iraq; Jeanne L. Nowaczewski of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest; Esther Nieves, executive director of Erie Neighborhood House; and Margaret Small and Mary Ann Pitcher, codirectors of the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School....

Friday 1/25 – Thursday 1/31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think the reason critics did not take her seriously is because she is too fashionable and therefore not ‘serious,’” Camille Paglia has written about Tippi Hedren. “The interplay between Hedren and [Suzanne] Pleshette in The Birds tells me more about women than any number of articles on feminist theory.” Decide for yourself at today’s Tippi Hedren extravaganza at the Gene Siskel Film Center....

If Mayor Daley really backed community policing, he could have saved the ACLU and CANS three years of effort to make it work right. Hank DeZutter writes in “Neighborhoods” (February), newsletter of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety: “If the word ‘community’ means anything in the phrase ‘community policing,’ Chicagoans should be able to see and read logs of public beat meetings, know how police officers are being dispatched, be informed how often the beat officer is available to the people on his or her beat, and read and analyze the long-term policing plan for their district…....

COUNTRY TEASERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Scottish quartet has never topped its mesmerizing 1994 debut, Country Teasers, on Crypt–but who gives a damn, when so many other bands have passed whole careers without making anything as good? A bio that’s traveled with the Country Teasers from Fat Possum to their new label, In the Red, claims they set out intending to play country music, honest to god–but wound up with a mean, oily, shambling, crackling garage growl capped by dazzling misogyny....

Over the years trumpeter Dave Douglas has recorded tributes to many of his musical heroes, among them trumpeter Booker Little, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Mary Lou Williams, and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. But we’re not talking about covers or even interpretations here–each of these albums has been dominated by original material designed to reflect the aesthetic and achievements of the honoree. Witness (Bluebird/RCA) is his latest tribute project, but this time he’s not saluting other musicians....

Ever since seeing the 1982 rap documentary Wild Style as a Tokyo teen, DJ Krush has been in love with hip-hop. But he was also an early exponent of acid jazz, and on Ki-Oku (Apollo), a late-90s collaboration with great Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, he even dabbles in some past-prime-Miles-style fusion. In some ways his latest album, Zen (Red Ink), does the best job yet of integrating his various interests: There’s a new slice of smooth-jazz twaddle with another trumpeter (Kazufumi Kodama), some soulful trip-hop grooving with former Brand New Heavies singer N’Dea Davenport, and a wigged-out turntable battle with former Invisibl Skratch Pikl Phonosycographdisk....

Gil Thorp Gets Benched “We don’t know that the Chicago Tribune dropped its Gil Thorp comic strip as a calculated insult to Christian fundamentalists. There is, we emphasize, no evidence that the ‘Left Behind’ books cowritten by Jerry Jenkins, the author of Gil Thorp, offended a coterie of proabortion atheists in the Tower who decided to show Jenkins what ‘end times’ are all about.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....