Like most well-made documentaries, this 2004 film presents its subject from a variety of angles: birders in New York’s Central Park together with telephoto close-ups of their quarry, stuffed birds seen alone and in museum dioramas, a search for the presumedly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, an affecting text about a woodpecker’s nearly successful attempt at pecking out of captivity. What makes Michael Gitlin’s film extraordinary is the way it represents birding as a special way of seeing....

With its plodding pace and amateurish acting, Chicago Jewish Theatre’s local premiere of Israel Horovitz’s play is reminiscent of a beginning pianist plinking his way through “Chopsticks.” The third installment in Horovitz’s trilogy about Jewish boys coming of age is ostensibly a comedy, but directors Elayne and Brian LeTraunik give us little cause to laugh as teen neighbors compete in a piano contest and for the heart of a non-Jewish girl....

Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RHYMEFEST If Rhymefest’s Blue Collar and Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor finally get released when they’re supposed to, it’ll be a banner summer for Chicago hip-hop. Rhymefest’s major-label debut was originally scheduled to drop in mid-2005, but every few months the folks at Allido Records issue a press release with a new date–back in December they were saying March, and this month they pushed it back to July 11....

For their previous releases, THESE ARMS ARE SNAKES devised a uniquely enervating combo of bratty, straining, deliberately abrasive vocals and twitchy, self-indulgent mathcore. This Seattle band’s second full-length, the new Easter (Jade Tree), is even grimmer than those records–it’s full of nasty surprises to keep you feeling ill at ease, and its rhythms and structures feel put together sideways, so that even the stop-start build-and-crash dynamics seem to be rising and falling in loops and tangles rather than straight lines....

PAC/edge Performance Festival L’air Lair Live Action Cartoonists Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t expect work to be easy–I understand the necessity of countering the pabulum that passes as popular entertainment. Nor do I think it’s easy to judge an audience’s needs and meet them. The artists’ panel, which focused on verbal versus nonverbal approaches to performance, was instructive on this subject: of the six participants only one, writer-director Beau O’Reilly, expressed a desire to communicate to the audience....

On her new Getting Somewhere (Sugar Hill) Allison Moorer expresses an optimism that was absent on previous albums, where she transformed personal misery into stinging poetry. On songs like “Work to Do” and “Fairweather,” her narrators triumphantly shake off bad relationships–which may or may not say anything about her divorce from Doyle Primm, who cowrote and produced her previous records. The change in tone extends beyond the lyric sheet: producer (and Moorer’s new husband) Steve Earle does away with the brooding Crazy Horse-style dirges of her last album in favor of a shinier, thinner country-rock sound....

CHICAGO DOESN’T LACK for great bars, from world-renowned jazz venues like the Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552) to ancient neighborhood watering holes like Hyde Park’s Woodlawn Tap (1172 E. 55th St., 773-643-5516), which has catered to U. of C. students since 1948. Some places, however, hang beneath the radar, an Old Style or Schlitz sign their only calling card. These, too, are neighborhood treasures, serving up booze and bonhomie to a clientele that, from day to day, might only vary by a face or two....

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Cubs fans, but I’m diagnosing manager Dusty Baker with a terminal affliction. Call it Bayloritis for its symptoms–abject resignation and the acceptance of one’s accursed fate. Former manager Don Baylor came to town a no-nonsense leader who’d guided the expansion Colorado Rockies to the playoffs and promised to do the same for the Cubs. A product of the vaunted Baltimore Orioles system, he was expected to instill the Cubs with discipline and an appreciation of fundamentals, but he left two and a half seasons later a beaten man....

Meeting a girl in a coffee shop causes a bartending Lothario to mature, while his female friend plans a wedding to a guy who’s getting cold feet. Phalanx Theater’s 90-minute site-specific true-to-life play, conceived by Jenny Connell and developed by Joe Tracz and the ensemble, is both funny and dramatically rich. Its twentysomething characters struggle to balance love, intellectual challenges, and infatuation in overlapping interactions in the coffee shop. But in Ellie Heyman’s stylized production, they also enact fantasy sequences illustrating erotic possibilities, ecstasy, and other hidden feelings....

For the past week the Pilgrim Virgin has stood on a table in the basement of the Cannones’ bungalow on the western edge of the city, framed by an arc of tiny white lights and flanked by candles and vases full of flowers. Now it’s someone else’s turn to have the statue for a week, and an honor guard from the Ambassadors of Mary has come to take it away....

Presented by the Consulate General of Israel, this daylong program of Israeli features takes place Sunday, November 20, at the Highland Park Theatre, 445 Central, Highland Park. Tickets are $9, $45 for a package of six; all films are in Hebrew with subtitles. For more information call 312-297-4808 or 312-297-4803. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reviewing Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (2003, 94 min.), Andrea Gronvall wrote, “Writer-director Shemi Zarhin seems to understand how a gifted and sensitive child might neglect his own needs to hold together a dysfunctional family; his title character, a brilliant Tel Aviv teen, is mistakenly classified as mentally challenged because his parents are too busy fighting to get him tested....

Director Sidney Lumet has always been inspired in his handling of courtroom dramas and New York crime stories, especially when they involve racial antagonism and ethnic loyalty. This mix turns up in all his theatrical screenplays: Prince of the City, Q & A, Night Falls on Manhattan, and now this audacious account of one of the longest criminal trials in U.S. history (1987-’88), of New Jersey mobster Giacomo DiNorscio, who grandstands while acting as his own attorney....

As part of the Flashback Weekend nostalgia convention, which runs through Sunday, the west parking lot of the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare in Rosemont will be converted into an open-air theater. Patrons are invited to bring blankets and lawn chairs (the “drive-in” part is purely sentimental). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friday night’s program features a screening of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1983, NC-17, 85 min....

Folks who’ve dismissed Kimya Dawson’s steady stream of self-made recordings as lo-fi kindergarten-recess sing-alongs might cluck that she and the infantile anti-quality-control crew at K Records deserve each other. But when an album leads with four songs where someone is either dead or dying, can it fairly be dismissed as twee? Documentation may be hard to come by, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that Dawson’s Hidden Vagenda has the highest body count of anything the Olympia label has ever released....

The Lost Sounds provide proof, in case anybody still needs more, that interbreeding is the way of the future. Formed in Memphis in March ’99 as a trio–with Jay Reatard and Rich Crook, formerly of ultraprimitive garage howlers the Reatards, and Alicja Trout, who’d collected a pile of analog synths during her stint in the Clears–the band mixes trashy, nervous rock with melodramatic metal and in the process tosses together two classes of spooky keyboard noise: the frantic sci-fi swoops and flutters of new wave and the towering, funereal organ double-stops of a Bach fugue....

This multidisciplinary event, presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs weekends through 4/10. The avant-garde showcase, now in its third year, features established and emerging artists (including a number of SAIC students and alumni) working in theater, performance, circus arts, puppetry, storytelling, dance, music, video, and sound and installation art. The shows range from family-oriented to adults-only. Participants include Goat Island, the Curious Theatre Branch, Free Street, Theater Oobleck, the Hypocrites, the Neo-Futurists, Plasticene, Teatro Luna, Mathew Wilson, Mad Shak Dance Company, and many more....

Just out of curiosity, are you married yourself? Because if you are not, where do you get off telling married people how married sex should/could be? –Amy K. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To get back to your question, Amy K., here’s where I get off: I’ve been with one person long enough to know what it takes to keep the sex interesting over the long haul (the Finnish men’s swim team, as it turns out), as well as how to fight about Visa bills and family visits and child rearing without giving in to the urge to strangle your partner with your bare hands....

Chicago soundman and musician Gary “Elvis” Schepers, profiled in the Meter on January 6, is currently in an assisted living center after several weeks of hospitalization to fight a flesh-eating bacterial infection. Schepers is uninsured, and his medical expenses have already topped six figures. The organizers of this benefit series have also established a Gary Schepers trust, and donations can be made in person at any National City bank or mailed to the branch at 1520 N....

Brazil’s Os Mutantes made its long-anticipated Chicago debut at the Pitchfork Music Festival last night, and I can’t honestly say it was worth the wait. I’m very happy to say I’ve seen them—which is to say all ten of them, though only three original members were on hand. But as my companion Michelle pointed out, if I didn’t know the band’s old recordings or its colorful backstory I would’ve been utterly perplexed that this group was playing an indie-rock festival....

The Newspaper You Have Dialed Is No Longer In Service “Please enter the first four letters of your party’s last name.” I heard the same message again. While I wondered what to do, the recorded voice broke in again. “Please enter the remaining digits of your party’s last name, followed by the pound sign.” So I did that. I hung up. I pictured someone at a pay phone trying to reach the only Sun-Times reporter he trusted with a tip on a big story but getting nowhere and just about out of change....