Late one Friday afternoon in early January I was standing in line for the pharmacy at Stroger County Hospital when the man in front of me turned and asked if I’d heard what the pharmacy tech at the window had just said, that prescriptions couldn’t be picked up until Sunday. The man, who was Hispanic and in his 60s, looked alarmed and in slightly stiff English explained that his doctor had told him he had an infection deep in his ear, that he was lucky it hadn’t reached his brain, that it was important to start taking his medicine that night....

In February 2005 actor Ian Belknap got a Valentine’s Day card from his mother. Inside was what he calls a “Freudian goulash of items”: a check for $200 and a copy of his father’s death certificate. It was the first specific information he’d ever gotten about his father’s suicide 20 years earlier at the age of 40. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “He used to run out into traffic,” Gordon says....

Mathieu Dufour, who was appointed the CSO’s principal flutist in 1999 at the age of 25, raised the bar on orchestral flute playing. He can both blend with other instruments and project to the back rows of an auditorium, producing an astonishing variety of sounds with perfect intonation and impeccable musicianship, and his tone has clarity and depth that never diminish, even in pianissimo. He regularly performs in concerti and recitals, often as a member of the Chicago Chamber Musicians–13 members of the CSO, Lyric, and local university faculties....

Perhaps someday Stereolab and P.O.D. will sound at home on the same hip-hop album, but I suspect the voice you’ll hear rapping over them will not belong to Common. Some artists are born to blaze trails, and others are born to regroup after adventurous miscues like Electric Circus. Since that 2002 album, Kanye West has redefined the role of the socially conscious, morally conflicted rapper that Common all but patented in the 90s, and on the new Be (Geffen) West’s production creates a needed context for Common’s ultimately trad sensibility: the neosoul mood, born of airy electric pianos and the inevitable chipmunked vocal samples, gives the Chicago-bred MC a bridge to the past grounded not in nostalgia but in a sense of history....

Don’t Worry, She’s Not Quitting Her Day Job Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A North Shore native, Tshilds graduated with a BFA in painting from Bard College in 1990, then returned to Chicago. In 1994 she began working at the Logan Beach Cafe, the restaurant she’d reopen five years later as Lula. “I was just living across the street and needed a job,” she says....

Portuguese singer Dulce Pontes (pronounced “doolz pontch”) got her start fronting a rock band at 16, and by her early 20s she was a poofy-haired singer chasing pop stardom. She placed eighth in the 1991 Eurovision song contest and followed that modest success with a solo debut, Lusitana (1992), that was brimming with enough treacle and bombast to shame Celine Dion. Luckily, she then started using her spectacular voice–crystalline, agile, powerful, and pitch-perfect–to sing fado, the emotionally rich music of her homeland....

Jeff Morris isn’t a novice when it comes to film festivals: the LA-based writer, producer, and director has participated in around 20 of them since completing his first feature, You Did What?, last year. That’s enough experience to give him some perspective on Chicago’s fourth annual Indiefest, held at the Village Theatre at North and Clark and the Seneca Hotel earlier this month. “I can speak candidly, because I’ve already sold my movie,” he says....

Kevin Brennan grew up in Chicago and Philadelphia in an Irish-Catholic family with ten kids, but since 1987 he’s been a New Yorker. And it shows–his lazy swagger and “Yeah, I get it” insolence echo New Yorkers like Dave Attell, who tops Brennan’s funniest-comedians list. “All right, all right, I got some jokes,” his set sometimes begins. And a typical joke? “You shouldn’t fake orgasms, ladies, ‘cuz we don’t care if you have them....

In one of Andy Warhol’s finest films, a 1965 drama of narcissism and its opposite, Edie Sedgwick “plays” movie actress Lupe Velez–sleeping, eating a meal, having her hair cut, and lolling around in a fancy apartment with Warhol’s trademark mix of stylish camp and languorous anomie. A color scheme that seems to echo Sedgwick’s skin and hair yields to a moving depiction of Velez’s death–she was found with her head in her toilet bowl....

Paradise Ahmadi, who’s 48, picked up a paintbrush for the first time in 1998, back when he was still running an auto shop in the building. “I stopped by a garage sale and I could tell the woman selling the stuff was pissed off,” he says. “I asked her, ‘What’s wrong?’” She told him her Cadillac wouldn’t start and that she’d just learned it would cost her around $1,800 to fix it....

This 2005 documentary vividly chronicles the career of actor-writer Charles Busch, the cross-dressing star of such camp hits as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, and The Lady in Question. Video makers John Catania and Charles Ignacio follow Busch from his raggedy East Village beginnings to his mainstream success on Broadway and later forays into film, interviewing him and others (actor B.D. Wong, screenwriter Paul Rudnick) and including clips of his hilarious performances and the Hollywood icons that inspired him (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, and…Tippi Hedren?...

Revolution With Avakian. With Marlon Brando, Evaristo Marquez, Norman Hill, and Renato Salvatori. With John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole, Ruocheng Ying, and Victor Wong. It’s a tribute to the skill and charisma of Avakian as a lecturer that I wound up watching nearly all 11 hours and 15 minutes of Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About. I found his critical analysis of contemporary America interesting even when he turned to unconvincing Maoist imperatives and strategies, and I found it remarkable that he still believes in the possibility of revolution in this country today....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hype: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by professional denialists Fred Singer and Denis Avery. The facts: from computational ocean chemist David Archer of the University of Chicago, who attended a lunch talk Avery gave last week that was sponsored by the Heartland Institute. The gist, from Archer’s post at RealClimate: “Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades can only be explained as a result of human-released greenhouse gases....

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, at ComedySportz. Taking the Summer of Love as her inspiration, adapter-director Steph DeWaegeneer has created a goofy flashback version of Shakespeare’s sunniest comedy. In this family-oriented offering, tie-dyed fairy folk bestow literal flower power on mortal lovers, rubbing pansy juice on their slumbering eyelids. And by making Lysander an aimless lad competing with tennis-playing square Demetrius for the hand of Hermia, DeWaegeneer sets up a 60s-era conflict between countercultural and establishment values....

On the new No Earthly Man (Drag City), Glaswegian singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts completes a years-long metamorphosis: British Isles folk has rippled through his work ever since he formed the group Appendix Out in the mid-90s, but now he’s wholly submerged in the role of Brit-folk archaeologist, historian, and synthesist. None of the new songs–nearly all of which are lurid murder ballads–are original per se, but like others before him he’s felt free to alter traditionals with his own words and melodies and create composites of tunes culled from songbooks and classic recordings....

Friday 3/19 – Thursday 3/25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Waiting to go onstage at last year’s PAC/edge Performance Festival, actor and former Neo-Futurist Connor Kalista read a lot of pulp detective novels. The noir world is now one of the elements in The Usual Haunts, the interactive installation that’s his contribution to this year’s festival. A series of short audio pieces that you listen to on headphones, the work makes bits of the environment–such as the stairs at the Athenaeum Theatre, where the fest’s held–the starting points for an unusual walking tour led by unreliable narrators....

The latest CARIBOU album is called The Milk of Human Kindness (Domino), and most of its songs are named after animals (“Hello Hammerheads,” “Lord Leopard,” and so on), but I still like to imagine that the title’s a sarcastic dig at old New York punk Handsome Dick Manitoba: Caribou mastermind Dan Snaith, who used to record under the name Manitoba, had to pick a new alias last year after the former Dictators front man threatened to sue....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two days into two weeks on Washington Island I went out charter fishing with a crew of three other passengers, plus captain Mike Stults and his able teenage assistant, Zach. I hadn’t been fishing since I was maybe 13, and it must be that growing up on the west coast left me spoiled by an ample supply of fresh sockeye–I was surprised to discover we were going trolling for salmon....

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to create a theatrical meditation on the life and work of shy American collagist Joseph Cornell. The intimacy, delicacy, and stillness of his famous boxes seem at odds with playwright Charles L. Mee’s love of brassy pop-cultural pastiche and director Anne Bogart’s highly physicalized stagings for her SITI Company. Their last collaboration, Bobrauschenbergamerica, boasted at least a brash celebratory tone. But despite some gorgeous stage pictures evoking Cornell’s work and a poignant turn from Barney O’Hanlon as the artist, this piece doesn’t find a sinewy narrative or aesthetic thread....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a January article in which a Florida supreme court justice criticized the performance of private defense lawyers hired by the state to handle death-row appeals, the Tampa Tribune reported that death-row inmate Curtis Beasley had been abandoned by state-hired attorney Michael Giordano. This was discovered only by chance months later when a storage facility to which Giordano owed back rent found some of Beasley’s case files and called the attorney general’s office phone number listed on them....