The tenth annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, runs Friday, March 31, through Thursday, April 13, with screenings at the Film Center. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2600. Following are works screening through Thursday, April 6; for a full festival schedule visit www.chicagoreader.com. SATURDAY 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Red Light Winter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the play Adam Rapp should have written instead of Red Light Winter. What’s necessary to a plot is there: a concise action with powerful consequences. It’s the kind of play often found on American stages a half century ago but seldom written now. It’s a play that shows how people react to pivotal, irrevocable moments....

Most every scene in Edward Thomas-Herrera’s astonishing one-man show, first performed at the 2004 Fillet of Solo Festival, is “unsettling, repulsive, improper, surreal, grotesque, tender, and hilarious all at once.” Those are his words for his experience in a Texas funeral home when, choking back sobs, he tried to pretend his dead mother’s makeup wasn’t horrendous. Lurid red lipstick “seems to have been applied with a trowel,” and ocher skin suggests her embalmer was “running short on shades of Latino, so he decided to go for light-skinned mulatto instead....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in 2000 some band — I think it was Wolfie — played in my basement, and they closed their set with a cover of Nirvana’s “Aneurysm.” We all thought it sounded rad, so the next day my friend Kurt and I, confident that our reaction to it reflected a general zeitgeist-wide readiness for a grunge revival, announced our intention to grow our hair long and start wearing jeans with more holes in them....

Regarding the review by J.R. Jones of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe [“Good Is Good,” December 16]: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What is at issue here, right now in the U.S., is not whether the film or Lewis’s original stories (or for that matter Christianity) present valid “conventional morality” from which everyone could learn. Forgiveness, redemption, and other themes in Lewis’s tales are certainly nothing from which to run....

Maybe it was the rubber masks or the flowerpot hats or the plastic hair, but to this day Devo can’t quite shake their reputation as a novelty act. To the faithful, though, Devo were more than a joke and even more than a band: they were a multimedia collective intent on exposing the artificiality of modern life and the way it degraded human existence, a process they called de-evolution. And their goofy props and pioneering music videos and sophomoric album art were as crucial to this mission as their songs....

A dozen years ago composer and saxophonist John Zorn set out to create his own songbook–a cohesive, self-contained body of work akin to the output of great jazz writers like Thelonious Monk or Benny Golson. He went on to write 205 tunes, many of which were recorded by this excellent quartet–Zorn, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen, and drummer Joey Baron–over the course of nine albums and one EP. The group’s crackerjack renditions mixed postbop swing, dynamic improvised interplay, and forlorn melodies in Middle Eastern scales, earning it the somewhat glib thumbnail description “Ornette Coleman + klezmer....

Writer-performers Chris Lee and Ben Seeder, aka the Leeder Company, take a risk with this hour-long sketch-comedy show focused on awkward situations and twisted humor. A fey father, driving alone with his daughter’s unsuspecting boyfriend, asks, “Aren’t you going to sing me ‘Happy Birthday’ like Kennedy and Monroe?” A military officer in Iraq tries to boost his troop’s morale with “Children will get caught in the tank tracks.” Like confident stand-ups, Lee and Seeder aren’t afraid of silence, patiently unfolding their odd characters....

When she arrived at Stax Records in 1974, Shirley Brown had a voice that “could challenge Aretha Franklin,” as label historian Robert Bowman put it. She came of age on the competitive R & B circuit around Saint Louis, working alongside luminaries like Oliver Sain and Little Milton. Blues guitarist Albert King, an early booster, brought her to Stax; her first single, the infidelity classic “Woman to Woman,” topped the R & B charts and sold more than a million copies, but the label folded the following year and her career never regained momentum....

The last time Warren Wimmer tried to take a picture of Cloud Gate, better known as the Bean, a couple security guards rushed over on their Segways and tried to shoo him away. The exchange that followed is one of the wackier tales told by local photographers who can’t understand why the city wants to stop them from snapping pictures in Millennium Park–which is, after all, a public space. Wimmer, a freelance photographer who sells photos of local landmarks to tourist shops, had his encounter with what he calls the “Bean police” at around 8 PM on Saturday, November 13, as he was about to shoot the Bean....

Since the first reports of Chicago police torture surfaced a quarter century ago the list has swelled to nearly 200 cases involving dozens of public employees—and still no one has been prosecuted. Now, with the results of a four-year, multimillion dollar investigation due any day, here’s a guide by staff reporter John Conroy to the key figures in the scandal. Some of them may look familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Alexandra Loewe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Contemporary conceptual art too often follows a formula in which the artist presents works in a variety of media that float around some topic but make no real statement. Alexandra Loewe’s mixed-media show at Flatfile, “While Dreaming,” doesn’t present a cogent view of dreams, but she adds an exciting spatial-performative element: it’s as if her imagined body were filling the gallery....

LOVE AND BLOOD: AT THE WORLD CUP WITH THE FOOTBALLERS, FANS, AND FREAKS the U.S., and his columns on the Fox Sports Web site, where he’s a senior writer, routinely inspire angry rebuttals on soccer blogs and bulletin boards: “Jamie Trecker can kiss my hairy white butt,” for instance, or “Jamie Trecker: Exposed for the Pompous Ass He is to the Entire World.” “I’ve been criticized over the years for being opinionated, forthright and, you know, argumentative,” he admits....

Some people have lawyers on retainer. Others have lawyers thrust upon them. Al Brandtner was in the latter category until the Secret Service visited “Axis of Evil,” an exhibit at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, on Thursday, April 7. By the next day, when the Secret Service wanted to contact the artist who’d created the mock stamp portraying George W. Bush with a gun pointed at his head over the slogan “Patriot Act,” they couldn’t....

Logan Square may be the only Chicago neighborhood with its own Statue of Liberty: for decades she’s been greeting the clients of Liberty Bank for Savings (2392 N. Milwaukee), standing guard over the steel-framed glass and mosaic-tile entrance. The building itself is an anomaly, a 60s design in a neighborhood that, as a general rule, doesn’t do modern. Take a walk down the street, east of California, and you’ll see what I mean....

The standout line on Cedar Walton’s resume covers his years with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers–1961 to ’64 and again in the early 70s–during which he added some marvelous pages to the Messengers book (“Mosaic,” “Ugetsu,” “The Promised Land”). But read on and you’ll find the pianist backing John Coltrane on the first takes of “Giant Steps” and leading Eastern Rebellion, his splendid quartet of the 70s and 80s. Beyond the dozens of albums under his own name, Walton’s playing–characterized by meaty timbre, rapidly unfurling melodies, and archetypal hard-bop phrasing–has elevated hundreds of sessions with leaders such as Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, and Eddie Harris....

THIS HAS HAPPENED to every Chicagoan who’s ever left town: you tell someone where you’re from and they bring up the pizza. Or the winter. Or Al Capone—still with the Al Capone! Come on, you want to say, Chicago’s so much more than that. Sure it’s the Sox and the Sears Tower, but it’s also rattlesnake hot dogs and Del Close’s skull. It’s the Mayors Daley and the Jesses Jackson and, hello, future president Barack Obama....

I didn’t expect a coherent plot or emotional development. But since the all-female Babes With Blades has devoted itself to stage combat for the last nine years, I did expect visceral excitement. I didn’t get it. First, there wasn’t much fighting (though there were piercing screams in abundance). Second, what there was of it was flat, unconvincing, and unimaginative. And the “interactive” gimmick–the audience makes suggestions at crucial points a la the “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books–seemed bogus: no matter what we picked, we got silly stories that went nowhere....

Loads of punk bands walk the line between brilliant and stoopid, but Gravy Train!!!! is the only one I can think of that throws itself down and humps it. The skittering sound of this Oakland band-cum-dirty dance troupe is created by two squeaky-voiced, potty-mouthed girls, a gay guy with a voice like Boo Boo bear, a rattletrap drum machine, and a spare but tight mix of garage-sale synth and Rickenbacker guitar....

Some say the key to appreciating avant-garde music is education, but I’m not so sure about that. If we have to learn anything it may be simply how to listen, as closely and intently as possible, in a way we’re so rarely encouraged to do in this multitasking world. For most of his career, violinist and composer Malcolm Goldstein has worked to do for his instrument what John Cage did for silence and Thoreau did for the woods: treating every sound, meticulously arranged and gloriously magnified, as a source for meditation....