JUNGLE FEVER Trusting to luck means listening to voices. Third plot: Before he leaves his wife and daughter, Flipper asks his white bosses to make him a partner in their firm. He resigns when they refuse and announces that he’ll start a company of his own. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most irritating of all, Lee has shamelessly echoed the symmetrical framing devices used in Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues to begin and end this movie–with matching crane shots to establish a neighborhood, and matching lines and behavior to establish the situation of the characters–which brings a false sense of unity and closure to a movie that actively resists both....

I fear I might burn out on African music if I don’t give it a little rest pretty soon. So I will. But not until after this weekend’s appearance by the Kanda Bongo Man, who’s absolutely too cool to miss. In a form–soukous–that for all its vibrancy has been criticized by some for not having changed much over the past several decades, Kanda is an upstart innovator. Where, for instance, other Congolese groups tend to start with a ballad and then shift into a long dance break, Kanda usually dispenses with the slow stuff, kick-starting his songs straight into high gear....

Little Jimmy King is the latest of the high-energy young bluesmen who have stepped forward recently to bring the blues screaming into the post-1970s rock era. King toured for two years with his adopted grandfather Albert King (thus his stage nane; Little Jimmy’s real name is Manuel Gales) before going solo a little over a year ago. Now on his own, he still plays with the steely ferocity of his mentor, but he hits levels of high-voltage mania that Albert never dreamed of, and he’s liable to throw in an unexpected dash of jazzy sophistication when you least expect it....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is no small achievement. We hear a lot of rhetoric about the importance of racial and class integration. Kenwood, south of 47th Street, is one of a handful of communities which has actually accomplished it. In contrast, North Kenwood-Oakland, KOCO’s turf, has lost over half its population during the last 20 years, the years of KOCO’s leadership, and is today one of America’s most impoverished communities....

MANIACAL NORMALITY That the script is being produced seems to have more to do with Voltaire’s populist politics than its artistic sense. It tends to program the unusual, the odd, the rough. That Maniacal Normality was written and put together by a group of young, relatively inexperienced women, that it has a lesbian theme, and that it aims for a certain kind of hipness probably appealed to Voltaire’s programmers. Or maybe they simply didn’t have anything else to program....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A comment on Steve Bogira’s response to Elizabeth Jones’ letter [March 31], which criticizes Bogira’s use of stereotypical black speech and racist/sexist images in his February 17 article, “The Press: Beautiful Women”: as another black woman living in Evanston I, too, was offended by Bogira’s article, and I was further offended by Bogira’s flippant response, which does not address the criticism at all, but chooses rather to dismiss Jones’ complaints as mere black bourgeois righteousness....

Afghanistan leopard. Panthera pardus saxicolor. Less than 50 in captivity. Survival in nature in doubt. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because the 75-year-old lion house is being remodeled, 13 tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, and cougars have to be moved to temporary quarters in the primate house. While the big cats are in their cooperative, drugged state they will be given general physicals. Siberian tiger....

Friedrich Pettrich had an unpleasant stay in Washington, D.C., back in the 1840s. The German-born artist had traveled there from his adopted home of Philadelphia because President Tyler had given him a plum job: a commission to design four sculptures to adorn the base of the Washington Monument. While Congress was deciding whether to appropriate the funds for the project, an Italian rival tried to kill Pettrich. He was shot, but he survived....

Stage magicians are routinely billed in hyperbolic terms: the Amazing So-and-So, Such-and-Such the Great. Penn & Teller, in keeping with their wryly understated style of humor, describe themselves as “eccentric guys who know how to do a few cool things.” In fact, this pair of postmodernist prestidigitators, transform the well-worn craft of illusionism into highly theatrical performance art. In their current “Refrigerator Tour,” which features a set by the masterful Broadway designer John Lee Beatty, they put a conceptual spin on such classic devices as the Sword of Damocles (here updated to a 450-pound refrigerator), handcuffs, card tricks, psychic power, sawing bodies in half (in a clear plastic box yet), Indian fakir feats, and animal routines (among the new bits on this year’s tour is an ancient Buddhist “duck trick”)....

This 60s and 70s pop throwback stuff is beginning to get out of hand. Don’t get me wrong: I like nasty nostalgists like Redd Kross and still carry a torch for the unfairly disenfranchised 70s; I love them for the pop, the punk. The Posies, new sensations from Seattle, have that frothy 70s pop sound down. But you get the feeling they love the 70s for the pomp, the preciousness. The band’s mainstays, songwriters-guitarists-singers Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, seem to be recalling a mythical period of pop-rock grandeur, a post-Abbey Road utopia of Anglophiliac reediness and prog-rock writerliness....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The prochoice activists interviewed in Florence Hamlish Levinsohn’s September 15 article seemingly assume that all abortion opponents are maliciously unconcerned about the possible consequences of a legal ban. But certain prolife groups have developed model legislation which calls this supposition into question. Consider the Women’s Right to Redress Act promoted by Feminists for Life. Instead of criminalizing women who receive abortions (a course which FFL utterly rejects), the Act empowers them to effectively prosecute unscrupulous and incompetent providers....

“If I’d gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward,” writes Ronald Reagan in the first chapter of his autobiography, “I suppose I would never have left Illinois.” “That night over dinner at Buckingham Palace,” writes Reagan of the first night of the London economic summit, “Pierre [Trudeau] mentioned that he had read someplace that I could recite by heart ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ . . . I’m not sure he really believed I could do it....

Of all instruments it’s the saxophone that most closely resembles the human voice–with a potential only hinted at in the wailings of jazz players stuck in four-four time. Given this, it’s odd that the possibilities of the all-saxophone choir went relatively uninvestigated for so long. That a saxophone quartet like Rova can be so constantly adventuresome without ever actually sounding all that esoteric only suggests how much territory lies unexplored. After 15 years Rova still gets compared a lot to the World Saxophone Quartet, but distinguishes itself from that foursome partly by its more “European” or “classical” sense of time and dynamics....

THE ROTHSCHILDS That said, it must be acknowledged that the musical The Rothschilds is strangely undramatic. But it makes up for that with heart and intelligence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story of the Rothschilds would be astounding no matter what the family’s ethnic heritage. But their rise occurred at a time of intense anti-Semitism–the late 18th and early 19th centuries–and their pride in their roots makes it a story worth listening to....

As kids we were taught in art class that the primary colors were red, blue, and yellow. By mixing these primary colors, we were told, we could come up with any color of the rainbow. A bit of experimenting seemed to bear this out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I was a little sprite this bugged me too, so I asked Mr. Grayson the science teacher about it....

Enclosed is an article extolling the virtues of colonic irrigation. After reading it we are convinced that removing our primal fecal matter will cure all that ails us, although we’re a little apprehensive about the “lighted viewing tube” that seems to figure in the process. Can you tell us more? –The Sluggish Colons, Baltimore, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The world is getting too weird....

“Cook County is a whorehouse,” says Cook County commissioner Maria Pappas. “But I’m one of the most disgustingly tenacious people you’ll ever meet.” Pappas drives the traditional politicians absolutely nuts, and it’s easy to see why. For one thing, she’s a psychologist (as well as a lawyer), and she talks like one, in great looping swirls of rhetoric that meander into lanes and alleys that may not always seem relevant to the topic at hand....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Pro-Choice Alliance [PCA] mistakenly believes that demonstrators should not confront the antiabortionists at clinics. Indeed, according to the article by Nolan, they should remain silent with their hands in their pockets. This strategy is absolutely wrong and disastrous to building the numbers, morale, and confidence of pro-choice forces. Our purpose in being at the clinics should be to defend the clinic from closure and to confront the Right-to-Life....

CAN I GET AN AMEN! It’s also a showcase for the talents of Leon Brown, a triple-threat dancer, singer, and actor in such Ensemble shows as Muddy Waters (The Hoochie Coochie Man), Anna Lucasta, and The Other Cinderella. Exuding a contagious confidence, Brown is a smooth artist with a cunning smile and piercing eyes. As cool as Brown plays things onstage, he can also turn up the heat on a poem or song....

Two accomplices to great vocal music tend to go unsung. One, the accompanist, may at least be seen and heard, and astute audience members appreciate the pianist’s contribution to the singer’s performance. The other, the repetiteur, is entirely invisible–but without his or her knowledge of how languages are to be sung (which often differs from the way they’re spoken), of musical styles and phrasing, and of the whole history of vocal music and its performance, the singer would not sound nearly so impressive....