Since moving to New York in 1999 Cuban drummer Dafnis Prieto has worked with Latin jazz heavyweights like Eddie Palmieri and Bebo Valdes as well as vanguard modernists like Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman. It’s easy to hear why: he’s a prodigiously gifted technician who’s distilled a world of rhythms into a signature style that throbs with Cuba’s clave heartbeat. More frenetic than flashy, he’s nearly always spooling out two or three distinct lines at a time, and as a composer Prieto covers just as much turf....

Sports, like politics, is local. We can enjoy the skills of a Michael Jordan wherever we live, but it means something entirely different when Jordan plays in your town for your team. And in Chicago baseball is not merely local, in the sense of the hazy boundary line between the north and south sides, but tribal. It’s something at once deeply personal and intensely public, and I heard that something erupt as I never had before–no, not even during the Bulls’ six championships–with the final out of the World Series in the packed Bridgeport bar Cobblestones....

Documentary filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first won notice with his 15-minute short Sean (1969), a black-and-white portrait of a four-year-old ragamuffin who lived with his hippie parents in Haight-Ashbury. The little boy’s on-screen declaration that he smoked pot made him a notorious symbol of 60s excess, yet when Arlyck returned to the west coast in 1994 to track him down, he found neither a drug addict nor a stockbroker, as many people had predicted, but a responsible, philosophical young man working as an electrician and preparing to start his own family....

It’s difficult to tell people that a beer float is the best dessert they’ve never tried without them trying to intervene. For example: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, it’s difficult to tell people about beer floats at all. Put the word beer too close to ice cream and people will shiver. A beer float sounds like something you’d have to drink at a fraternity hazing, and as someone who’s had Miller High Life and ice cream together, I can tell you that it would fit....

THE ALMOST MOONAlice Sebold AN ARSONIST’S GUIDE TO WRITERS’ HOMES IN NEW ENGLANDBrock Clarke Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The supposedly righteous, unbelievably cold female characters are here in the persons of Pulsifer’s wife and mother; the distant, failed academic father is on hand too, along with a bevy of fiercely withheld yet guessable secrets. And Clarke makes fine use of a supreme genre device, whereby characters prove their verisimilitude by only ever answering a question with an epigrammatic dodge, an empty but telling echo, or another question....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September Dr. Paul De Sousa and a research team from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, told an audience of scientists that they had created human embryos from female eggs without using sperm. De Sousa’s team employed electrical shocks to “trick” 300 eggs into dividing as if fertilized, creating six blastocysts–embryos containing around 50 cells. De Sousa declared that his embryos would not be used to create fetuses, but said they could be used as stem cells to grow replacement tissue for the donor’s organs....

One Small, Illegal Woman/Una pequena mujer ilegal | M. Litwicki’s new two-hander is certainly passionate about illegal immigration, bristling with intertwined issues: drug trafficking, violence against poor women, assimilation into the dominant Anglo culture. What Litwicki hasn’t done is provide a convincing dramatic framework for the encounter between Charlie, a Mexican-American border guard in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and Ana, an undocumented immigrant. The former in particular remains a shadowy figure–we know he’s divorced and frustrated about not receiving a promotion, but not much else....

Autobahn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Profiles Theatre’s superlative 2004 production of Adam Rapp’s Blackbird showed it also has an affinity for the dark side of life, which would seem to make a good fit with LaBute’s uncompromising, unsentimental vision. But despite this midwest premiere’s altogether excellent execution, LaBute’s new play Autobahn gets the better of the company–its structure throws his flaws into stark relief....

If you’d asked me before I saw this show whether Bush-hate porn was played out, I might’ve said yes. But as it happens, there’s plenty more to say about G. Dub: He doesn’t have avian flu! He’s not exactly like Hitler! He’s an excellent passenger in cars. And, he can walk! Ladling blankly sarcastic praise on our 43rd president, the top-notch Annoyance ensemble–led by Josh Walker and Kyle Dolan of the late, lamented Teenage Sports Parade–devote Stepford-esque song-and-dance numbers to each of these verities and more....

Thomas Kellner: In America Ken Fandell: From Up and Down, and Still Somehow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The eye-catching color prints created by Kellner, Fogelson, and Fandell are more scenic than conceptual: the term “deconstruction” is too often used to describe the techniques of any artist who challenges perception by disassembling and reassembling imagery. But when there’s no ideological agenda to expose unnoticed forces working behind appearances, such art falls more under the rubric of decor....

4.48 Psychosis Is the contemporary view that depression is the result of a chemical imbalance any more accurate than the turn-of-the-century notion that “neurasthenia” was best treated by imposing silence, isolation, and bed rest on the mostly upper-class women it affected? Both courses of treatment reflect or reflected societal ideas of the “normal”; both are or were well-meaning attempts to relieve suffering. But it’s possible both are wrong. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The members of the Tallis Scholars, leading peformers of unaccompanied Renaissance sacred music, are honoring Mozart’s birthday with music by composers from cities he worked in, visited, or was influenced by. Among the works is the extraordinarily beautiful Miserere by Gregorio Allegri. The story goes that when the pope heard it he declared it could be sung only in the Sistine Chapel and only during Holy Week. The 14-year-old Mozart visited Rome to hear it, then went to his room and wrote it out from memory....

Two Trains Running Vachss is a lawyer specializing in–and devoted to–the rights of children; his books take him and his readers to the dark, murky places he can’t go to in court. They look long and hard at the damage done by child abuse, detail how it’s done, and then slowly, thoroughly, decimate the evildoers. They are satisfying and scary, touching some deep part that still believes in things like bloody retribution....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Laying off these staff writers, which editor Alison True did at the beginning of this week, was surely one of the hardest acts of her life and certainly a low point in the history of this newspaper. “Over the years,” True said Thursday in a message to the staff, ” John, Harold, Tori, and Steve have produced some of our most important and exciting stories....

What’s missing from Chicago’s cultural landscape? A Hollywood-style walk of fame, according to the Grant Park Advisory Council. It’s promoting the idea of putting stars on the beaux arts walkway that runs along the east side of the Metra tracks in Grant Park, from Balbo to 11th Street. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The idea came from Gene Martin and Ron Renke of the Motion Picture Hall of Fame Foundation, who told everyone at an October 24 advisory council meeting that they could create a promenade of three-foot-wide granite stars honoring Chicago’s most prominent citizens....

Bruce Baillie’s rarely screened Quixote (1965) stands alongside other synoptic 60s masterpieces such as Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision and Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise, which use dense collages of diverse images in an attempt to make sense of a troubling world. In Quixote wild horses and a basketball game are part of a cross-country trip that ends with an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan. Baillie says he’s depicting our culture as one of conquest, but his film’s greatness lies not in its social analysis, which can seem as simpleminded as equating businessmen with pigs....

Most Chicago baseball fans found ways to put last year behind them and revive their spirits for the new season. Some delighted in the destruction of the cursed “Bartman ball,” while others found solace in devices that were more personal and private–if not as medieval. I took the nonrefundable airline ticket I’d bought so I could see the Cubs in the World Series in New York–a reservation originally made the afternoon of October 14, before the sixth game of the National League Championship Series (yes, no matter what anyone else might think, it was I who put the whammy on them)–and rescheduled it in order to join the White Sox when they visited the Yankees the first weekend of this season....

THE MADELYN TRILOGY PROP THTR PRICE $15, $20 for the full trilogy WHERE Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston WHEN Through 10/7: Sun 5 PM (Then Sun 10/21 and 10/28 7 PM, Athenaeum Theatre) Over its 19 years Chicago’s chronically underfunded, understaffed, overstuffed Rhinoceros Theater Festival has lumbered from Wicker Park to West Lakeview to East Rogers Park, barely eluding gentrification, audience attrition, and artist exhaustion. Two years ago this showcase of original fringe performance settled in at the Prop Thtr, on Elston’s lonely industrial corridor....

Of the more than 125 portraits that Bruce Elliott has painted of regulars at the Old Town Ale House, one of his favorites is of a friend named Howie Grayck. It took Elliott a long time to get it right: he finishes most of his portraits in a few days, but Grayck’s took more than three weeks. “I almost threw it in the garbage,” Elliott says. “He’s a real sweet guy....

Both pianists on this bill play a rollicking mix of blues, boogie-woogie, and jazz-tinged standards, but there are big differences between their musical personalities. ERWIN HELFER was heavily influenced by 30s and 40s Chicago boogie masters like Cripple Clarence Lofton and Big Maceo. He also spent time in New Orleans, where he learned from Preservation Hall traditionalists and early R & B firebrands like Archibald (whose recording of “Stack-a-Lee” in 1950 set the stage for Lloyd Price’s famous 1959 version)....