A competitive Scottish dancer in childhood, LA artist Ashley Macomber installed her show of animal drawings and paintings at Kavi Gupta in imitation of a performance. Facing an entrance framed by black curtains, the creatures in five drawings represent “audience members watching,” she says; the whale even holds spectacles. In the larger room five animal paintings are propped against the wall, “coming into the space, interacting with the viewer”; the effect is menacing, in part because the images can be bloody and mysterious, like the beasts in scary children’s stories....

Put to Rest by the River The new memorial replaces another one, a white granite fountain that used to stand near Lorado Taft’s statue of George Washington and two other Revolutionary War heroes in Heald Square, a small plaza in the middle of Wacker Drive between State and Wabash. Unveiled on Veterans Day in 1982, it was one of the first memorials of its kind in the nation. According to a Tribune account from November 12, 1982, Mayor Byrne dedicated it while hundreds of vets and their families stood in a driving rain....

The most exciting performance at the Flamenco 2006 festival may very well come from the least-known group on the schedule. The Seville quintet Son de la Frontera plays a stunningly aggressive brand of traditional flamenco on its self-titled debut, recently released on World Village. Furiously spitting guitars are interlaced with rhythms from South American countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia; leader Raul Rodriguez helped build this bridge across the Atlantic by adapting flamenco for the tres, a Cuban guitar whose strings are tuned in pairs to deliver a more astringent, twangy sound than a traditional acoustic guitar....

Once unsuccessfully and incorrectly marketed as a sort of Australian R.E.M., the Church have spent more than two decades honing a very particular sound: unabashedly romantic, semipretentiously mystical, rhapsodic guitar rock, with whiffs of hookahs and old libraries. When they miss, their songs just lie there, a la every other college-rock band that put out a pretty but unmemorable record in the last quarter century. But when they hit, the interlaced guitars of Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes transform Steve Kilbey’s delicate tunes into rapturous hymns from the church of Saint Syd....

Mayor Daley’s annual budget hearings are designed to deceive more than enlighten, but even by Chicago standards, the mayor’s August 23 performance at the South Shore Cultural Center was a masterwork of dissimulation. The most telling part of last Thursday’s hearing–the first of three–was what the mayor didn’t say. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s true our reliance on property taxes to fund education leads to atrocious inequities, as wealthier towns (like Winnetka, Lake Forest, or Oak Brook) get to spend more money on their children than poorer ones (like Chicago, Dolton, or Maywood)....

Saturday 17 MIXEL PIXEL Mixel Pixel’s Web site requests, “if you are of the ‘critical rock press’ or here to ‘analyze us’ or make us ‘fit in’ to your pile of rock and roll lies please save us the trouble.” Note to band: if you do not want your work judged or analyzed, stop making it publicly available–or at least don’t hire a publicist. Contact Kid (Kanine), the third album by the coed Brooklyn trio, sounds like the Unicorns covering lesser Guided by Voices songs: the music’s lo-fi and quick with the hooks, with bedroom-vibe noodling and goofy-ironic singsong vocals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Illinois, Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax Blog and its cousin Illinoize–a metablog incorporating many points of view–are the best. This morning Miller drew on Tribune reporting to make clear the fact that Gov. Blagojevich’s administration is setting up the same defense that Mayor Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich tried. Sorich claimed he only made “recommendations.” That defense didn’t save him, and Miller thinks it’s unlikely to work for Blago....

The press is forever telling major institutions–city hall, big business, the church–to clean up their acts. What about the press’s own act? Last month Medill’s journalism school issued a report that concluded the level of self-criticism in the nation’s newsrooms is too low, though it didn’t say what the right level is. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Medill report strains to support the proposition that what’s going on in American newsrooms needs to change....

The second annual African Diaspora Film Festival, which debuted in Chicago last year after more than a decade in New York City, runs Friday through Thursday, June 11 through 17, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114 or consult www.facets.org. Films marked with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended. The Journey of the Lion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the top of this 1992 travelogue, Jamaican sculptor Howard Anthony Trott ruminates on the meaning of his English “slave name,” phonetically translating it into “How hard and stony I trod”; it’s an appropriate beginning for the story of a man searching for himself through language....

This annual event, running September 9-12, showcases the work of emerging artists in Chicago’s Wicker Park/Bucktown area. Theater, performance, spoken word, dance, music, film and video, and visual art are all represented in the 15th annual edition of this festival. The festival kicks off with a party featuring performance artist Lisa Buscani and “human beatbox” Yuri Lane, plus a silent auction, food, drink, and DJs. 19351/2 W. North. 8 PM-midnight, $20....

At Chicago Writers & Readers Weekend at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore, 20 local mystery and history writers will talk about their craft in five panels, for an audience of 30 people. It’s hard to imagine even C & S owner Augie Aleksy, the Chicago area’s most intrepid bookseller, going to so much trouble for the pleasure of so few. “It’s really more of an author’s salon,” Aleksy explains. He issued 60 invitations to prospective panelists and got 40 positive replies, mostly from writers who want to hang around and listen to each other....

For the theater year in review, 11 critics describe the most memorable theatrical event of 2006 for them. It might have been a performance, an image, an ad hoc line, or a five-minute bit, but it had to have made a lasting and positive impression. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jennifer Mathews improved on Laurie Metcalf’s performance in a role created for her by Alexandra Gersten in 1992’s My Thing of Love, about marital infidelity....

Derek Bailey and Evan Parker pioneered free improvisation in the 60s by doing away with idiomatic trappings, but since then the free-improv vocabulary has become just as restrictive as the conventions of mainstream jazz. The members of north European quartet the Electrics represent an emerging international community of musicians who reject all fixed notions of genre. Recorded in Stockholm last year, the group’s excellent new Live at Glenn Miller Cafe (Ayler) was improvised on the spot, but the players aren’t afraid to swing, deliver straight-ahead melodies, or bump up against one another to explore extreme harmonies....

PEDAGOGICAL FACTORY: EXPLORING STRATEGIES FOR AN EDUCATED CITY HYDE PARK ART CENTER INFO 773-324-5520 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I must admit I had high expectations when I first visited “Pedagogical Factory” in early August, and was somewhat taken aback when I saw how much the space resembled a surreal exaggeration of a typical school. A giant chalkboard 15 or 20 feet tall listed upcoming events–a bit like the authoritarian instructions of a giant absent teacher, it evoked the power dynamics that make school unpleasant for many students....

MACHOS TEATRO LUNA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most female drag shows seem to combine feel-good entertainment with heavy-duty gender pondering, a la the defunct Chicago Kings. Machos is a more straightforward theater piece, resembling Eve Merriam’s The Club, set in a posh 1890s British club and incorporating raunchy songs of the period that highlighted the men’s sexism. The Teatro Luna women started out pissed—at boyfriends, brothers, bosses....

The intersection of Polk and Clark is just a few blocks from el stops, commuter rail lines, bus stops, stores, restaurants, Grant Park, and the Loop. “I don’t use a car around here–you don’t need a car,” says Steve Fors, who lives on Polk just west of the intersection. “People don’t even come here thinking they’re going to need cars.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the city’s ignoring its plan....

With all the cross-pollination going on between Western styles of dance–ballet, modern, and jazz borrow liberally from one another–it can be hard to define what makes a form unique. But it’s safe to say that if jazz dance were a punctuation mark, it would be the exclamation point. Consider the Koresh Dance Company from Philadelphia, one of 15 companies appearing in the four-day international festival of performance that caps the Jazz Dance World Congress....

There are plenty of reasons not to expect much from Jolie Holland. She’s a refugee from a vastly overrated twang-folk outfit (the Be Good Tanyas), lacks the standout pipes and come-hither charm of fellow roots-pop sirens Jenny Lewis and Neko Case, and her stage presence can best be summed up as aloof. Yet the three albums she’s made for Anti- are surprisingly powerful mergers of prewar country, postwar jazz, and timeless mountain music....

Over the last half century composers like Helmut Lachenmann and Mauricio Kagel have helped knock down the walls between European art music and improvisation, but this doesn’t mean just anyone can pass freely from one territory to the other. Last week I saw the Kairos Quartet, a German string quartet, perform an improvised piece with the Korean komungo player Jin Hi Kim, and it couldn’t have been stiffer or more forced; the string players trotted out various extended techniques seemingly without any intuition or sense of purpose....

While most of his classmates were learning songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” John Forbes was getting his first taste of the hard stuff. “My best friend had this whacked-out older brother who would play us Captain Beefheart when we were in kindergarten,” he says. “What did we know? We thought we were listening to party records. He’d play that and some Zappa stuff–when you’re that age and you hear ‘Titties & Beer,’ it’s like, whoa!...