PAL JOEY It’s a case study in sexual and class exploitation–except that the dancer is a man and the society figure a woman. In this tale of sexual perversity in Chicago, every typical role is reversed. Joey Evans, the dancer with dreams of glory and an ego ill suited to his modest talents, is a “dumb broad” who happens to be male. Vera Simpson, the bread tycoon’s wife who discovers Joey in a crummy south side joint and sets him up in his own swanky nightclub, is not just a bored matron but a dominant, sexually aggressive wielder of considerable, and traditionally masculine, power....

JON JOST RETROSPECTIVE Born in Chicago in 1943, Jost was raised in a military family that lived in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Virginia. He started making films after he was expelled from college in 1963, and two years later was imprisoned by the federal government for burning his draft card and refusing to serve in Vietnam, a term that lasted two years and three months. (Ironically, this may have been the longest period since his teens that he lived at a fixed address; when I first met him in 1977 he was living mainly out of his car....

Here’s an opportunity to see a blues guitarist known as one of the progenitors of the fiery, arpeggio-laden post-50s style in a rare acoustic setting. Like many who made their reputations playing electric Chicago blues, Guy retains his affection for the earlier acoustic styles with which he grew up. There’s a difference, though, and it’s a tantalizing one: unlike most Chicago bluesmen, Guy’s musical roots are in his native Louisiana. Despite the hard-driving energy that became his Chicago trademark, he originally came up listening to the easy-rolling Louisiana blues of traditionalists like Guitar Slim....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Get ready for this three-hour marathon: Sixties Underground: Be-In, a retrospective of underground films from that decade. Sponsored by the Experimental Film Coalition, the celluloid orgy includes Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a psychedelic light show featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico in a 1968 Chicago club appearance; Robert Frank’s Life-Raft Earth, about an enviromentalists’ demonstration; and Oh Dem Watermelons, a funky antiracist protest film....

Friday 3 The Manhattan Transfer will be dressing up for a show at the Chicago Theatre tonight. The Transfer was founded in 1972, performing a jazzy, quasi-nostalgic act (their first LP featured “Tuxedo Junction” and a host of oldies-sounding offerings). Since then, they have established themselves as a premier vocal pop group. Their latest LP, Brasil, continues their tradition of experimenting with popular sounds. Show time is 8 PM at 175 N....

Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At tonight’s simulated four-car drunk driving accident, the North Lake County Emergency Medical Services System, Victory Memorial Hospital, and the Newport Volunteer Fire Department hope to scare anybody who’s ever thought about drinking and driving. The organizers have hired actors to reenact a violent accident on a rural road in Wadsworth, Illinois. They’ve scripted in multiple casualties and near-death injuries....

Most people think of the 24th Ward on the west side as the birthplace of Jewish politics and patronage, as the springboard of old-timers like federal judge Abe Marovitz and the late political kingmaker Jake Arvey. But Harry Heller sees it as a place where old-time Jewish sports legends like welterweight champion Barney Ross and outfielder Milt Galatzer were born; to Heller, Arvey will always be a baseball fan first, a party boss second, and Marovitz will always be a boxer–even though he traded his boxing gloves for jurist’s robes a long time ago....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Fatherhood and Mental Illness: Mother wants what’s best for her kids; Daddy only wants what’s best for Daddy, that is peace and quiet, pandering to his delusion of dignity (‘respect’), a good reflection on himself (status) and the opportunity to control and manipulate, or, if he’s an “enlightened’ father, to ‘give guidance’. . . . Daddy doesn’t love his kids; he approves of them–if they’re ‘good,’ that is, if they’re nice, ‘respectful,’ obedient, subservient to his will, quiet and not given to unseemly displays of temper that would be upsetting to Daddy’s easily disturbed male nervous system–in other words, if they’re passive vegetables....

Eric Schneider might be labeled a traditionalist–except that he’s got his ears open to newer sounds than those of the bebop masters who shaped his concept of the saxophone. But you can’t just call him a bebopper and be done with it either, because his comprehension of the swing saxophone giants is sure and prevalent. He’s that grand contradiction–a young veteran; he’s also a no-argument bitch-of-a-player. His two gigs this week find him with different bands, and I imagine that two distinct aspects of Schneider’s musical personality will emerge....

EYE OF THE GULL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Domestic drama” might be a less pejorative-sounding term–but Chambers, who died in 1983 of a brain tumor, had no qualms about the soap-opera label. She was well established as a writer for TV shows like Search for Tomorrow and Somerset–until the success of her lesbian-themed play A Late Snow led the TV industry to blackball her, according to her lover and literary executor Beth Allen....

What’s at a circus? Excitement, exotica, daring exploits, color, humor, a variety of events all happening at one time. Since those are the very qualities of Henry Threadgill’s new band, he’s named it Very Very Circus. Surely it’s the only jazz septet in History with two, count ’em two, tubas; the other players are two guitarists (including the promising Brandon Ross), a drummer, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, and composer Threadgill, with his collection of woodwinds....

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged by Mike Royko A lawyer by profession, Virginia Martinez is also a once-a-week commentator on Channel Five. A couple of weeks ago she spoke up on behalf of a juvenile court judge Mike Royko had savaged in print. She called the judge “a capable and committed jurist.” She said Royko had presented a “distorted and slanted version of the facts” of a recent case....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently had the privilege to attend the Woodlawn Organization’s 1991 Advocacy Awards event. Mr. Sprayregen was the only non-Black and non-Hispanic to receive an award from TWO, a noted Black civil rights organization, for his contributions to human rights during the course of his work over many years in the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today’s art-music is being composed by a greater diversity of people than ever before, many of whom are not operating in a structured, collective environment. This music, which is the result of numerous cross influences and stylistic splintering on behalf of serious composers, is often experimental, it sometimes leans toward free-jazz, it can be heard on unfamiliar instruments, and it almost always blithely eludes definition....

If you were one of those kids who dreaded an errand into a dim, dank basement and who ran back out three steps at a time, sure there was something horrid hiding in the gloom–you were right. Scoffers should take in the “Microspace” show at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, an exhibit of photographs taken through a scanning electron microscope, or SEM. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s true that the horridness of these basement creatures may not be apparent to the naked eye....

Back in the American dream days of 1955, a young Swiss immigrant named Robert Frank took a used Ford and a Leica and the proceeds of a Guggenheim fellowship and set off on a two-year trip down the wild highways of this country. He took a lot of photographs and made a book out of them which was published in 1959 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. The book was called The American and a lot of people didn’t like it....

In the barroom, a jazz trio wails. In the restaurant–a sleek modern space with parquet floors, marble tables, comfortable blue banquettes, and a snazzy spotlit food bar–handsome young servers are delivering appetizers, entrees, and “tastings” (grazing-size portions) ranging from Hung Tao Dragon Noodles to chicken flautas with avocado relish to insalata di calimari. Stodgy Evanston has rarely seen the likes of Bodega Bay, the wildly eclectic restaurant that Leslee Reis and chef David Dugo are running in the bottom floor of a boringly modern downtown office building at Grove and Sherman....

A lovely autobiographical feature by Boat People’s Ann Hui, set in 1973. A young Chinese woman (Maggie Cheung) studying in London is summoned back to Hong Kong to attend her younger sister’s wedding, and finds herself in frequent conflict with her Japanese mother (Chang Shwu-Fen) until she accompanies her mother on her first trip back to Japan since being married. In Japan the daughter experiences much of the same cultural estrangement her mother went through when she came to China, and gradually the bond between mother and daughter becomes closer....

The “multimedia spectacular of lavish sets and exotic costumes” promised by the Pet Shop Boys turned out to be that and more. Some might argue that the almost two hours’ worth of elaborate production numbers was more theater than rock concert, and a case in point for the creeping decadence implicit in the band’s languid, computer-based music. But that would only be half-right. The show did have little to do with your average rock concert, but that’s because the Pet Shop Boys designed it that way–to be a frontal attack on the degeneracy and excess they see in most rock concerts in particular and most rock ‘n’ roll and popular music generally....

Essential viewing. Anna Magnani plays the head of a commedia dell’arte troupe touring colonial Peru in the early 18th century who dallies with her three lovers (Paul Campbell, Ricardo Rioli, and Duncan Lamont) in this pungent, gorgeous color masterpiece by Jean Renoir, shot in breathtaking images by his brother Claude. In fact, this filmic play-within-a-play, based on a play by Prosper Merimee, is a celebration of theatricality and a meditation on the beauties and mysteries of acting–it’s both a key text and pleasurable filmmaking at its near best....