Bell Orchestre Feels Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bell Orchestre, the all-instrumental chamber orchestra side project of Arcade Fire members Richard Reed Parry and Sarah Neufeld, will likely sell a gazillion copies of their debut, Recording a Tape the Color of Light (Rough Trade), based on association alone. It’s the sort of thing that might appeal to anyone looking for a more “sophisticated” variation on the irresistible pop drama we’ve come to expect from their other band....

This “convergence of Chicago artists,” presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs weekends March 12-April 18. The avant-garde showcase features more than 200 presentations by some of the city’s most adventurous artists working in the disciplines of theater, performance, circus arts, storytelling, dance, music, video, and sound and installation art–including Plasticene, Local Infinities, A Red Orchid Theatre, Asimina Chremos, Sheldon B. Smith, 500 Clown, Mathew Wilson, Lucky Pierre, Goat Island, David Kodeski, Mad Shak Dance Company, Connor Kalista, the Walkabout Theater Company, Carol Genetti, the Bumblinni Brothers, and the Curious Theatre Branch....

Adapter Eve Friedman stretches Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ten-page fable into three hours, an approach perfectly suited to making the audience feel it’s trapped in a Marc Chagall painting. It’s a shame that the European Repertory Company, directed by Zeljko Djukich, expends so much intelligence and energy on this uninteresting piece of folklore. Shtetl Poland comes to life in everything from music (by Robert Steel) and costuming to mannerisms, with exceptional performances by Dado as Teibele and artistic director Kirk Anderson as the schlemiel who woos her in the guise of a demon....

The entire Indymedia editorial board wrote in [Letters, September 2] to protest my mention [Letters, August 26] of their role in the attacks against my group and others [But Can He Hack Prison, August 19], claiming, as they do to their own users, that IMC provides an “open” newswire and asserting that they protect their readers from the threat of a balanced dialogue by quarantining content rather than through outright deletion....

Are titanium batteries really better than alkaline? Or is this some sort of new marketing ploy? –Beth Hanes, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a few years since I wrote about batteries, during which time the technology has made great strides and the hype has advanced even faster. Titanium batteries, for example, aren’t a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage, just an improvement in both disposable and rechargeable batteries....

On September 26 Bill Wirtz–beer baron, Blackhawks owner, and real estate magnate–died of cancer, and the papers were filled with glowing tributes from his fellow millionaires and big shots. “He was a man of great principle and he could be firm in wanting you to live up to those principles,” Bulls owner and United Center co-owner Jerry Reinsdorf told the Tribune. “Illinois has lost a true sports and business icon,” said Governor Rod Blagojevich....

Lots of indie-pop acts can come up with good hooks, so the reasons for preferring one band over another are often matters of stuff like presentation, delivery, sensibility, and style. It’s a game of fine lines, and all I can tell you is that the Washington Social Club’s songs repeatedly land on my side of the fence. Between Martin Royle’s enthusiastic vocal gulps and Olivia Mancini’s friendly bass melodies, the sound of the band’s debut, Catching Looks (Badman), is a tribute to K Records’ vision of punk as a playground for energetic naifs....

Just as digital video is threatening to render celluloid obsolete, artists such as Bruce McClure have started creating performance pieces that have to be seen on film. McClure is bringing four custom projectors to Chicago for two shows of several works, and the three that I’ve seen live are wonders. He mixes a clear structure (one basic design remains on the screen throughout) with randomness (flickering splotchy patterns) to create elegant and meditative works that reflect the mix of order and chaos in the universe....

Lots of noise music lingers at the white end, where the dominant sounds are high-pitched and unfocused, like a swarm of evil insects in the near distance. But Michigan’s Chris Pottinger, aka Cotton Museum, uses a much broader and more palatable range of frequencies, and instead of hovering insistently his tones bounce and ricochet–they go past off-kilter to a kind of discomfiting perviness that’s as insidious as ebola. On Beautiful Golden Fur (released by Tasty Soil in a CD-R edition of 100), wobbly globs of squeal lurch and lunge as what might be a giant vacuum outfitted with helicopter blades sucks them in and chops them up....

Larry Sultan’s much praised photo series “The Valley” captures actors in between takes at X-rated-film shoots. The centerpiece of the collection is a stark portrait of porn star Sharon Wild: wearing stilettos and a bra and panties, she perches at the end of a stripped bed with a mussed throw, cradling herself and staring into the distance. Something about the expression on her face, neither defiant nor despairing, resonated with Sally Timms....

By the time City Hall tour coordinator August Sallas got the six Iraqi law professors–five Arabs from Baghdad and Basra and a Kurd from Sulaimaniyah–to the empty City Council chambers and settled them into the seats of Ed Burke, William Beavers, and other aldermen, they were worn out. They were slumping, squirming, and leaning forward with their heads on their hands, trying to digest Sallas’s civics lesson. For two weeks this month, as part of a DePaul law school program paid for by the United States Agency for International Development, the Iraqis had been traipsing in and out of the Club Quarters hotel on Adams with a translator to visit law offices, courtrooms, police labs, the American Bar Association, and the state’s attorney’s office, observing how we practice law here so that they could go back and figure out how to teach law in the new Iraq....

Dear sir or madam: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s nice to see a left-wing newspaper reembracing its historical roots by championing a decent “common man” [“The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker,” August 5]. Back in the 1930s workingmen and -women weren’t treated with the condescension and contempt with which they are today. Broadway playwrights like Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller saw simple truths in the lives of simple people....

Most bands would feel pigeonholed by a tag like “gay folk church music,” but singer and guitarist Joel Gibb, the leader of this Toronto collective, came up with that description himself. Raised a Baptist, he brings the buoyant tent-revival spirit of church sing-alongs to the band’s lush arrangements, which sound a little like upbeat Belle & Sebastian–Gibb’s clear, strong vocals rest atop strings, horns, hand claps, timpani, harp, glockenspiel, and sometimes even a pipe organ or a small choir....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the fall of the 2005 White Sox entered its grim endgame, a four-alarm Ozzie meltdown was inevitable, but the full-team tongue-lashing he delivered following yesterday’s loss–their eighth straight on the road and their 15th in their last 18 tries–was by all acounts scorched-earth Lee Elia-level stuff. Color me child-on-Christmas-Eve breathless with anticipation for the triumphant Mariotti column presumably being composed at this moment (though I’ll bet Jay is kicking himself for having wasted so many bullets on this greatest hits piece he phoned in a couple weeks back)....

Early in his career this guitarist was pigeonholed as a bluesman in the mold of Albert King, but these days he’s definitely his own man: his sound is more bombastic and rock influenced, with explosively virtuosic speed-demon solos. Burks never sacrifices taste for pyrotechnics, though; even his most fiery and flamboyant leads follow an impeccable logic. On the ballad “Time I Came in Out of the Rain,” a highlight of his 2003 disc I Smell Smoke (Alligator), he communicates both desolation and hope, his sandpaper–and-smoke vocals expressive and unforced; on up-tempo tracks like “All Your Affection Is Gone” and “Hard Love,” which are no less uncompromising lyrically, he opens the throttle and takes to the bluesosphere with the kind of abandon only a master craftsman can pull off without losing control....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April Laura and Edmund Gerstein of Boca Raton, Florida, attempted to save their beloved backyard grapefruit tree from the state’s citrus canker eradication program by filing a motion invoking an article of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that prohibits governments from destroying civilians’ food sources during wartime. “As I understand it, we’re in a state of war,” Edmund told reporters; a state agriculture department spokesman responded, “That tree will be coming down....

This is now a doctor’s office–a podiatrist’s, I think. During my crazy bachelor days and nights I used to hang out here with the guys from the western-wear store where I worked at the time. It had cheap beers, a pool table, and a buzzer on the door–if the owner didn’t know you, you didn’t get in. We made it into our own little private club, especially during the playoffs. We’d watch the games, drink, play pool, and often the night would degrade into weird male-bonding rituals–a drunken-pirate night, a smack-each-other-in-the-chest night....

Entertaining angels unawares–or, more often nowadays, intergalactic explorers–is a frequent literary theme. Playwright Stuart Spencer creates a variation on it with this innocuous domestic comedy about a lower-echelon alien who jumps spaceship and lands in rural northern Wisconsin, where he becomes embroiled in his hosts’ marital problems. Under Brea Hayes’s direction for Shabam! Productions, a youthful ensemble–led by Behzad Dabu as the charming green-skinned bachelor hero–does what it can with the sitcom-ish material....

A comprehensive notion of what turned American soldiers against the Vietnam war has taken some time to reach us, and this affecting documentary by David Zieger collects many potent testimonies evoking veterans’ activism from 1966 to ’71 (a period when the Pentagon recorded 503,926 “incidents of desertion”). Zieger interviews about a dozen vets from all branches of the service and finds that the war’s injustice, particularly the systematic killing of innocent civilians, was a galvanizing factor....

CYRO BAPTISTA & BEAT THE DONKEY 5/27, manifest; 5/28, HOTHOUSE Cyro Baptista’s list of credits as a sideman starts with Geri Allen and ends with John Zorn, with stops at Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Herbie Hancock, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon, and Caetano Veloso, to name a few. But I’m even more impressed by what the master Brazilian percussionist can do with his own ten-piece outfit, Beat the Donkey. On a self-titled Tzadik release from 2002, the merry mob easily matches its ringleader’s musical range: shameless Led Zeppelin rips come tearing out of avant-garde Carnaval street-parade beats; ambient trance is shot through with funk guitar and brief choral eruptions....