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Friday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seventh season of the Experimental Film Coalition begins tonight with eight films, ranging in length from two minutes to just over half an hour, in format from animation to stop action to slow motion, and in source from School of the Art Institute film instructor Laurie Dunphy to cartoonist Heather McAdams. Dunphy’s Journalism Conducts a Tour sounds like one of the more interesting; it’s “a serious look at technology and the media, including the cinematic “journagestures’ mass media use to bowl over consumers....

JELLY BELLY at Blind Parrot Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Jelly’s code of conduct, murder is a moral imperative when one’s honor is at stake. The play takes place on the day he is released from jail–after serving six months for killing his brother-in-law. “I didn’t want to kill the dude,” Jelly admits. “I used to like him. He was my boy....

Every composer should have a son like Maxim Shostakovich; since 1971 the younger Shostakovich has zealously championed his father Dmitry’s musical legacy, first in the Soviet Union, then in the west after emigrating here in 1981. At these Grant Park concerts, he will guide the orchestra in a performance of the 12th Symphony, a fine specimen from his father’s final resurgence of creativity after a long hiatus. Expect him to stress the music’s mordant wit and emotional highs and lows....

Henry Kisor’s Pain in the Ass “I honestly don’t think I’ve missed out on banter any more than I’ve missed out on any other form of oral communication,” Kisor wrote back. “My children and I exchange japes, pointed or otherwise, every day. Jack Schnedler and Marvin Weinstein and I indulge frequently in the sort of amiable abuse you hear in a newspaper office every day . . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On Saturday night O’Hare is more like a ghost town than the world’s busiest airport, so it’s easier to spot the homeless who, like death and taxes, will not go away. They doze here and there on lounge seats, huddle in corners and bathroom stalls, or wander around aimlessly. Not many are here this evening–only 29 according to the nine o’clock count by staff members from Haymarket House: 17 in Terminal Two, 12 in Terminal Three....

EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY With Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Julie Brown, Michael McKean, and Charles Rocket. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tashlin, the satiric poet of plastic and Day-Glo colors, was responsible for some of the best Jerry Lewis pictures and at least three other major comedies (Son of Paleface, The Girl Can’t Help It, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?...

If you’ve ever disembarked from an airplane in Jamaica, you may remember having been greeted by a raw, wonderfully rhythmic acoustic trio or quartet playing dirty songs on guitar and banjo, with one guy keeping time on an enormous bass kalimba. This music, called mento, was quite popular on the island in the 1940s and 50s, and it neatly represents the link between the traditional African music brought to Jamaica by escaped slaves and more recent styles like calypso, ska, bluebeat, rock steady, and reggae....

LAST RITES Paired with Horton Foote’s The One-Armed Man, Talk to Me Like the Rain starts off an evening titled “Last Rites,” which explores death, desire, personal deception, and public hypocrisy. At first glance the two one- acts don’t seem compatible–the Williams piece is lyrical and moody, the Foote piece jaunty and violent. But both stories concern lost, tortured souls who yearn to confess their sins but dread accepting responsibility for their actions....

Lois Weisberg Throws a Party Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weisberg and her minions have done quite a job preparing for this confab. In addition to the PR firms’ free labor, they have amassed more than $300,000 in corporate underwriting and untold thousands more in noncash contributions; United Airlines, for example, is donating a large number of airline tickets. Deputy commissioner Pat Matsumoto rang up her friend photographer Archie Lieberman and chose for the official conference poster his cluttered photograph of an Oak Street Beach crowd....

The recorder is one of those instruments that couldn’t find a place in the modern orchestra. Already in existence in the 12th century, it enjoyed widespread popularity during the Renaissance. But slowly the flute and the piccolo–both equipped with reeded mouthpieces–gained wider acceptance, and by the late 1700s the recorder had fallen into disfavor. With this century’s early-music revival it’s made something of a comeback. Dutch virtuosos like Frans Brueggen and Marion Verbruggen, among others, have revived the instrument’s easy enchantment....

“Clothes make the man,” Mark Twain wrote. “Naked people have little or no influence in society.” In this one-man show drawn from little-known stories and unpublished anecdotes by and about the great humorist, Richard Henzel shuffles and struts in a dapper white suit, which he calls “the uniform of the American Association of Purity and Perfection,” a facade of white Christian righteousness worn to mask the worst in human nature–greed, envy, intolerance, and the ability to ignore the sufferings of others....

Lead Story Daniel Johnson, serving a life sentence in Texas’s Huntsville prison for a 1977 rape, filed a $50,000 lawsuit against the prison in August to force officials to curb excessive noise from late-night TV in prison lounges. Johnson claimed “deprivations of needed rest and sleep, nervous tension, severe anxiety, feelings of depression, dejection, fatigue, emotional pain and torment, [and] headaches.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among the name-change proceedings taking place in Santa Clara, California, in July was the petition by a young boy, originally named Pitbull Shotgun Collier, to change his name to Peter Collier....

It’s the delicate veil of hair on her leg that draws comments now, but when Edward Weston took the pristine nude of his lover, Charis Wilson, in 1936, it was the pubic hair that was troublesome. Wilson, now 75, has written that she remembers Weston poring over the print with a magnifying glass, trying to determine whether he could send it through the U.S. mail. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Cradle: Three Stations, Six Platforms It’s a few minutes before noon on the first humid spring day. At the Madison el station a handful of weary-looking souls are spread out across the northbound and southbound platforms, immobile, practically inert, making every effort to ignore one another. Trains that are mostly empty dawdle by. Four CTA workers in blue uniforms and orange reflective vests squeegee the panels of the warming booth....

THE PRAYING MANTIS But their own self-portraits are a different story. One of Spain’s great dramatic exports, Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, conjures up a hothouse of repressed sexuality that seethes and finally explodes with its carnal contradictions. Likewise in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude: the pious wife’s vow of chastity wreaks endless misery. And in Chilean playwright Alejandro Sieveking’s dark comedy The Praying Mantis, virtue creates its own vicious reward when a family’s false purity turns rancid....

Susan Hendrix didn’t think her boss would be overjoyed when she took off a few days because of morning sickness. But she never expected the reaction she got. Not surprisingly, many business groups take a different point of view. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today about 73 percent of women of childbearing age are working–more than double the percentage from three decades ago. A majority of U....

The Bears’ Central Division dynasty has ended. Their hopes of dominating the National Football League, or even just the National Football Conference, for several years, for a football generation, never came to pass. Instead, the Bears settled for control over their little fiefdom, taxing their neighboring teams but failing to extend their regional boundaries, and now even that small-scale dynasty is history. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There were moments last Sunday when the Bears actually appeared to be reapproaching respectability....

In this bicentennial of the death of one great composer, another great composer seems vying for equal time–good old J.S. Bach. In one weekend-to-weekend stretch, the local Bach-analia–an annual tradition called Bach Week conceived by the folks at Saint Luke’s Church in Evanston–will offer a choice selection of the Baroque master’s choral, orchestral, and chamber works. Some of his lower-profiled contemporaries are showcased as well; in fact, not a single Bach piece is slated for the opening concert....

There were times, Harold Washington admitted to friends, when he wished he had remained a congressman. He had put his 60-year-old body through a grueling around-the-clock campaign for a job no sane human being would want. The Council Wars didn’t surprise him, as they did many of his supporters. What else would you expect, he asked, “when you grab the tiger by the tail?” It was the 40,000-employee bureaucracy that seemed overwhelming....

You can tell a lot about someone by the company he keeps–or in the case of this concert, by those willing to come to his assistance. Saxophonist Henry Huff (aka Light) was a potent and energizing force in the original version of the acclaimed Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and since then he’s found other avenues for the spirituality he brought to those performances such as studying holistic healing and conducting Sunday lakeside concerts at dawn....