To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “pop” album is a product ready-made for consumption. No member of the industry is going to market something new or challenging if s/he knows there is no money to be made. Unfortunately, it’s simple economics that keep talented bands relegated to independent labels and Wednesday night shows. I don’t receive free records every day and I am not put on the guest list of every show in town, yet I have made the effort to find music that is interesting and challenging (not surprisingly, it also would be considered “underground”)....

AIN’T THAT LOVIN’ YOU BABY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No musical genre ever linked itself so closely to special sorrows; the torch song or blues ballad glows with pain. And since it all goes right into the notes, you can’t fake it. Jimmy Reed knew that. Called the “Big Boss Man” of the blues, he was a Chicago legend, launching hit record after hit record (12 between 1955 and 1961) and inspiring the use of blues traditions in soul, rock ‘n’ roll, and country and western....

The tenth edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues from Friday, August 2, through Sunday, August 18, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson; the DuSable Museum of African American History, 56th Place and Cottage Grove; and Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $5, with discounts available to Blacklight and Film Center members. For more information call 509-2981. SATURDAY, AUGUST 3 Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CHEKHOV IN YALTA This left me wondering whether Driver and Haddow are worshipers of Chekhov or assassins. They profess to adore the writer, and they certainly attribute saintlike qualities to him. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their play opens with Chekhov, a doctor, returning home from an all-night vigil at the bedside of Leo Tolstoy’s wife, who, it turns out, had merely a stomachache....

Psychological ambiguity has always been a feature of the unusual music of Peter Maxwell Davies, who today arguably stands as Britain’s greatest living composer. With his famous Eight Songs for a Mad King, Maxwell Davies left his audiences wondering whether the king was mad or a madman was imagining himself to be king. With the Chicago premiere of his chamber opera The Lighthouse, set in turn-of-the-century northern Scotland, a similar ambiguity develops: is the lighthouse haunted in fact, or only in the fertile imaginations of three isolated lighthouse keepers?...

“I feel like this is the beginning of the new MoMing,” says Chicago choreographer Jan Erkert, who has called the MoMing Dance & Arts Center her artistic home for the past ten years. “It’s very exciting.” Amy Osgood, another Chicago choreographer who has performed and taught at MoMing for many years, adds: “There is so much nurturing of creativity in that building right now. I just want to be there.”...

Even now, after a lifetime of such experiences, the incidents still bother her. “Making our collection accessible to the blind and visually impaired is a great idea that has no downsides,” says Kathi Lieb, education curator of the Spertus Museum of Judaica. “It’s also a nice way to work with senior citizens or other visually impaired people who are not completely blind.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Those who can see may not think about it, but there are hundreds of things we use our eyes to depend on every day,” Caffarelli says....

You may not have noticed it lurking behind the snowbanks, but spring is definitely creeping in. The birds are sure it is coming, even if you and I still have our doubts. The usual early-spring migrants–redwings, grackles, killdeer, robins–are flowing through in substantial numbers. Fox sparrows, the largest species of sparrow in North America, first showed up a couple of weeks ago, and of course song sparrows are already common....

At least 110 species of birds nested in Cook County in 1990. Five of them were exotics: pigeons, starlings, house sparrows, mute swans, and monk parakeets. The other 105 were natives. Observers are supposed to place what they see in any of four categories. “Observed” is the most trivial. It just means that you saw a bird of a particular species during the nesting season. The hierarchy rises through “possible nester,” to “probable nester” to “confirmed nester....

I saw my first harlequin ducks on a backpacking trip in Olympic National Park in Washington. We were an afternoon’s walk from the trail head, settled into a campsite in a shady grove along the Elwha River. I was reclining on the bank, staring seriously at the river, when I noticed a small dark duck standing in the shallows about 50 yards downstream on the opposite bank. The patches of white on the sides of her head identified her as a female harlequin....

The marketing people at Game Theory’s label, Enigma, will need their entire families to pray them out of Purgatory for failing to make Game Theory huge by now. Blathering on about “left-of-center pop” when they’ve got the freshest, most inventive, affecting high-energy rock-and-roll band in the nation to promote–well, that’s why the Meat Puppets get raves in Rolling Stone while Game Theory is lucky to get into the college radio tip sheets....

It has not been a particularly remunerative time for some of the city’s countercultural vortexes. Leigh Jones, the proprietor and co-owner of the Wrigleyville performance space Club Lower Links, recently had to cut three days a week from the club’s programming. What appears to be a static overall audience, slower liquor sales, and new taxes have put the club in a precarious cash-flow position, one that doesn’t allow for much in the way of routine upkeep; this weekend, it has arranged a variety-show benefit to raise money to replace some dilapidated furnishings and broken equipment....

Irma Thomas’s trademark standards–“Don’t Mess With My Man,” “Wish Someone Would Care,” the original “Time Is on My Side”–helped define R & B, but they only touch on the surface: Thomas’s reputation as a soul and blues immortal is based largely on numbers like “It’s Raining” that never became hits outside Louisiana and Mississippi but that are now acknowledged as some of the most affecting works in the entire R & B canon....

The name Kahil El’Zabar–percussionist, bandleader, film scorer, vocalist, and teacher–has attained a certain stature in Chicago music circles in the last 15 years. But it may have been more recognizable to more people on just one night last November in the small German city of Leverkusen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It comes as no surprise that the Leverkusen producers asked El’Zabar–in many ways a spiritual and musical leader of this contingent–to help assemble this package....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This point of view fails to recognize the chief benefits of choice. Giving families the choice of which school to send their children to will change the incentives under which schools operate and make them more responsive and effective in meeting the needs of their students. Not only will the teachers and administrators be motivated to perform better and therefore enhance enrollment, but the system will be more efficient and cost effective as the best schools’ revenues expand and the poorly run schools are put out of business....

“We don’t turn nobody away,” declares the Reverend Freddie Henderson. “I always tell people they shouldn’t be ashamed of being on aid. At least they have something. There have been times when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from. I’ve been hungry myself. I don’t forget.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The people in the community are Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Arab, Puerto Rican, and black....

The Skeletons play a benign, deeply pleasurable form of what can only be called good old rock ‘n’ roll: a dreamy mixture of R & B and pop that calls up the ghosts of everyone from the Swingin’ Medallions (“Double Shot of My Baby’s Love”) and Elvis to the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas. Of course, they’re not kids; to make that they do relevant, they painstakingly plumb a distorted nostalgia that at once celebrates the past even while briskly acknowledging its passing....

Cooperstown on the lake. Museum of Broadcast Communications founder and president Bruce DuMont on its inclusion of the Radio Hall of Fame: “What Cooperstown is to baseball and what Nashville is to country music, Chicago will be to radio.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever wondered why Des Plaines is lily-white? The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities found out when it sent four black and four white “testers” to the moderate-rent Colonial Park apartment complex there....

The flair of screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) for old-fashioned, Hollywood-style characters and dialogue is put to the test in this enjoyable, ludicrous Manhattan cop thriller about tracking down a serial murderer. The situations are consistently cliche-ridden and outlandish, but somehow the stylish writing keeps things spinning. Kevin Kline is the antiestablishment former detective who’s reinstated to solve the case; Harvey Keitel is his establishment brother; Susan Sarandon plays Keitel’s wife and Kline’s former lover; Rod Steiger is the mayor; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is the mayor’s daughter; and Danny Aiello plays the police captain....

THE MEETING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From time to time, King’s and Malcolm X’s words transcend the play, and it’s hard not to be stirred by the sight of them among us once again. It is even possible, for a few seconds, to forget you are watching a play, and believe instead you are watching a film clip, an effect that in itself can be quite moving....