Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There wasn’t much doing at baseball’s winter meetings in Nashville, Tennessee, this week, especially where the Cubs and White Sox were concerned. Only one major free agent signed: Andruw Jones, who’s going to the Los Angeles Dodgers for $36.2 million for two years. (Where did LA general manager Ned Colletti learn to spend that kind of money? Not doing media relations for the Cubs in the early years of the Tribune era, that’s for sure....

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the early 1800s, Sandage argues, the buying and selling of goods on a large scale offered Americans unprecedented opportunities to go broke. And for the first time, large numbers of people were failing spectacularly, all at once. The panic of 1819, the first such crisis precipitated not by war or crop failure but by fears of inflation inside the economy itself, ushered in a national depression and instilled in many a profound fear of failure....

The Chicago Jazz Festival features live performances at Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington), at Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center (220 S. Michigan), and on three stages in Grant Park: the Jazz on Jackson Stage (Jackson and Lake Shore Drive), the Jazz & Heritage Stage (Columbus and Congress), and the Petrillo Music Shell. Tickets for Thursday’s Orchestra Hall program range from $13 to $45; admission to the rest of the festival is free....

“Most people in the Chicago area have no idea where their river is located,” writes Laurene von Klan, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, in the group’s newsletter, “River Reporter” (Spring). “They don’t know that the little ‘ditch’ next to highway 94 up north near Deerfield is a branch of the river. Who would? Or that the lagoons that are at the Botanic Garden are, in a hydrological sense, part of the river....

Romeo’s Escape, the title of Dave Alvin’s 1987 solo debut, neatly encapsulated the persona he’s used ever since he left the Blasters in 1986: the wounded romantic searching for freedom and sanctuary in a soul-killing world. That’s a timeworn rock ‘n’ roll pose, of course, and on Ashgrove (Yep Roc), released last year, Alvin sometimes fuses it to doomy minor-key power chords and slogging blues motifs reminiscent of Morrison Hotel-era Doors....

Tenor sax player Eric Alexander generated a fair amount of hoopla when he came out of nowhere (i.e., Chicago before the current jazz revival) to place second in the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition. Since then he’s clearly outstripped the winner, the facile but generally underwhelming Joshua Redman, but I get the feeling that the jazz world now takes Alexander for granted. That’s a shame but also a backhanded compliment: from the beginning Alexander played with authority beyond his years, and now that he’s in his prime he sounds like a postbop veteran....

Daniel Barrow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daniel Barrow’s lush illustrations at ThreeWalls, a brand-new gallery at 119 N. Peoria, provide a similar experience and add sardonic wit, surreal mystery, and formal elegance. His work is showcased in various formats: framed drawings, balsa airplanes, and, most striking, 30-minute “performed animations” using an overhead projector. Barrow reads aloud from a script he’s written and, with the aid of assistants, accompanies the narrative visually, moving the layers in a stack of images by hand....

Dancer Germaine Acogny takes her time in Sophiatou Kossoko’s hour-long solo Tchourai, the piece she’s performing to open the AfroContempo Festival. But the movement isn’t slow in the way that Eiko & Koma’s butoh-influenced works are. Instead of moving glacially, almost imperceptibly, Acogny often just sits, perhaps smoking a pipe, or lies curled, then explodes into laughter, speech (text by Martinican poet Xavier Orville), or frenzied motion, swinging her arms or running back and forth in hairpin turns....

Pho Hoa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With all the pho joints around Argyle, there’s always the nagging thought that no matter which one you choose there’s another serving a subtler, more aromatic bowl of the Vietnamese beef noodle soup. Among phoficionados such places rise and fall in favor continuously, but for almost a year now Pho Hoa, tucked inside a Broadway strip mall along a tight parking lot in perpetual gridlock, has been dishing out one of my favorites....

Hooded figures in hats and oversize coats enact mysterious ceremonies in The Sublime Beauty of Hands, part of “Infinitesimals,” a monthlong series at Link’s Hall curated by Meghan Strell. Though Michael Montenegro is known for his mask making and puppetry, here his ingenuity is expressed mainly in whimsical handmade prosthetic devices and a carefully wrought moving model of the bones in a hand that reveals what an intricate gift it is....

Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (1960; his only film) features Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Eric Dolphy, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O’Day, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, and many others. Shot in gorgeous color, it’s probably the best feature-length jazz concert movie ever made. Despite some distracting cutaways to boats in the opening sections, it eventually buckles down to an intense concentration on the music and the audience’s rapport with it as afternoon turns into evening....

Cousin’s Incredible Vitality For eight months after his conversion Ak continued to run Cousin’s, but he felt increasingly guilty. “Why should I try to make money on something that is not healthy?” he says he asked himself. Plus his heart just wasn’t in working with meat any longer: “I lost my passion to go behind the grill and make the kebabs,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This wasn’t the first time Ak’s life dramatically changed course....

Peter Shaffer’s charming tribute to British eccentricity and the power of the imagination is fueled by opposites who attract–both each other and us. Irrepressibly theatrical rebel Lettice Douffet (Patricia Hodges), a flamboyant fantasist, forms an unlikely alliance with repressed civil servant Lotte (Linda Reiter). Director Lucy Smith Conroy clearly loves every minute of the supple script, especially the many obstacles these reflexive contrarians must overcome to find common cause (re-creating historical executions, mocking London’s ugly modern architecture)....

Director Sam Peckinpah went over budget during production of this 1965 epic western and was fired, so this restoration, based on a scholarly assessment of his intentions, can’t really be considered a director’s cut. But it’s 12 minutes longer, its story is easier to follow, and its score is closer to what Peckinpah had in mind. Still as flawed as its title hero and a bit out of control, it’s a powerful and provocative account of a disgraced Union officer (Charlton Heston) reluctantly joining forces with Confederate prisoners (including Richard Harris) to kill or capture an Apache who led a massacre in New Mexico....

With the possible exception of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, this 1937 drama by Leo McCarey is the greatest movie ever made about the plight of the elderly. (It flopped at the box office, but when McCarey accepted an Oscar for The Awful Truth, released the same year, he rightly pointed out that he was getting it for the wrong picture.) Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play a devoted old couple who find they can’t stay together because of financial difficulties; their interactions with their grown children are only part of what makes this movie so subtle and well observed....

If the gravelly Chicago voice on the far right end of your AM radio dial suddenly sounds a lot louder, it’s only because the station’s signal just got stronger. Joe Gentile’s delivery, which ranges from a near whisper to not quite a scream, hasn’t changed, but on April 2, WJJG 1530 doubled its power from 760 watts to approximately 1,500. Four days later, the host of the Joe Gentile Morning Show and the owner of the station (the call letters are his initials) has done his usual: spun a little Frank Sinatra, called Dan Rather “a bit pink” (and, worse, bald), and asked for calls on the topics of hazing and education: “Are you pleased with the way your kids are being taught?...

Dear editor: To make sure that the article reached the largest possible audience, we decided to release “A Questionable Connection” to the Sun-Times, WMAQ TV, and WBEZ FM public radio on the same day that we started distributing the issue of Residents’ Journal, which is delivered free of charge and door-to-door to 35,000 low-income households around the city. Like the other mainstream media news outlets which covered “A Questionable Connection,” the Sun-Times credited our work in their front-page story that day....

Don’t go bashing trendy bands just for the sake of bashing trendy bands [“Nu Age,” November 11]. You [Jessica Hopper] write for the Reader, not the Wire. If you had read just the slightest bit of material from [Animal Collective]’s own mouths you would realize that they don’t even stand for the new “freak-folk” tag that they’ve been pushed into. And you writing a full page accusing them of exactly that only perpetuates this ignorance and puts you in the same wagon as everyone else....

I am a 26-year-old female, and I’ve been with my boyfriend for almost five years. Our relationship is pretty good for the most part, but I’m having a few reservations. I don’t really know how to broach this subject, because I feel like I may just be being a bratty little princess. But here goes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I’m stranded out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and call him crying (this actually happened), he’ll tell me to try my other friends first; if none of them can come I can call him back and he’ll come get me–but I’m paying for gas....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seventeen research participants aged 18-26 “were trained to learn six one-syllable sounds (pesh, dree, ner, vece, nuck and fute). …The participants were repeatedly shown the 18 ‘pseudo’ words and a black-and-white picture representing each word’s meaning. Pesh, for example, at one pitch meant ‘glass,’ at another pitch meant ‘pencil’ and at a third meant ‘table.’ Dree, depending upon pitch, meant ‘arm,’ ‘cow’ or ‘telephone....