I was intrigued with your recent article “Bring Back Our Boats” [The Works, July 15]. The article should have been titled “Show Me the Money.” As an advisory member for my local park, a parent of a Park District day camper, a taxpayer, and, as they stated, a private citizen, I would like to know how my park and I could get the same deals as these gentlemen. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On November 16 dog trainer Ami Moore, who advertises herself as Chicago’s Dog Whisperer, was acquitted in misdemeanor court of two counts of animal cruelty. She was arrested in July 2006, after witnesses told police they’d seen her using electronic collars on a bichon frise and a Newfoundland in ways that made the dogs pant, tremble, and yelp. . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trainers who practice positive-reinforcement methods, which are usually based on animal behavior science, reward the dog for good behavior rather than punishing it for bad....

“You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me”: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music There’s nothing like self-destruction and a premature exit to get a legend going. Sometimes it seems like the archivist class thinks it’s more interesting and honorable for an artist to succumb to his demons than overcome or at least survive them: Hank Williams may not be more revered than Johnny Cash, but he got his turn a lot sooner....

When Ricky Campbell and his wife, June, meet people in Lincoln Park, they tell people about back home. “When I make groceries or wherever we go, I tell them about New Orleans,” Ricky says. “I tell them I come from Katrina, but I don’t dwell on it. I want to tell them about before Katrina.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s why I joined up with other former New Orleanians to put together a Mardi Gras party here....

Mike Frost Project | Comin’ Straight at Ya’ (Blujazz) When the MIKE FROST PROJECT released their debut, Nothing Smooth About It, in 2004, it took listeners by surprise all over the country. Practically no one had heard of these guys, even here in town: their regular gig was on the Odyssey, the touristy floating restaurant that sails out of Navy Pier. But when jazz DJs discovered the album, lots of them played it–and its sure-footed 60s postbop, which shared the rough-edged attack of so much Chicago music, impressed plenty of reviewers too....

Trumpeter Dave Douglas organizes so many bands it’s almost irritating. I wish he’d spend more time with one of them–Nomad, Tiny Bell Trio, Charms of the Night Sky–to see where it might go. But his records are consistently good to great, and the new Keystone (Greenleaf) is no exception. Once again Douglas is experimenting with contemporary electronic sounds, as he did on albums like Freak In (2003) and Sanctuary (1997). Jamie Saft’s psychedelically coloristic Wurlitzer playing gives the tunes a tensile funkiness that can support Douglas’s typically protean soloing, and turntablist DJ Olive extends Saft’s keyboard patterns with samples that give the music a gorgeously warped sound; Olive’s time-stretching interplay with drummer Gene Lake fits right in....

Before getting swamped by overproduced CinemaScope features, Jean Negulesco was a skillful director of noirs and other small pictures, as evidenced by Road House (1948) and this neglected drama about a couple on the run (1947). Ida Lupino plays a poor, eccentric 22-year-old in rural California, traumatized by abusive and dysfunctional parents (Henry Hull and Faye Bainter), who falls for a sensitive but volatile escaped convict (Dane Clark). If you can get past the obtrusive Max Steiner score and a surfeit of dog reaction shots, this has a feeling for outcasts and strong, quirky performances that build to the kind of affecting and socially subversive romantic melodrama Nicholas Ray excelled at....

This San Francisco band is hardly the first to juxtapose sugary pop melodies and angular guitar rock, but with its latest album, Milk Man (Kill Rock Stars/5RC), Deerhoof has elevated the trick to an art form. Singer and bassist Satomi Matsuzaki delivers bubblegum hooks in a voice so mousy and naive it’s a wonder it holds up so well to the seesawing, grinding riffs and explosions behind her. In the past the band has played the contrast to humorous rather than tense effect, but on this record they use it to pull the rug out from under themselves–the title track revs up modestly until guitarists Chris Cohen and John Dieterich peel off a zigzagging unison line that erupts into a connect-the-dots rumble, only to quickly return to more gentle terrain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s supposed to be cute, I don’t do cute,” my partner for life (which, come to think of it, is how penguins pair off too: must be something in the ice water, the hole in the ozone layer …) insisted when I suggested we see Happy Feet, George Miller’s animated follow-up to Babe: Pig in the City, yet another animal-inflected marvel that’s also arguably his masterpiece....

FUN WHILE IT LASTED, Fillet of Solo Festival, Live Bait Theater. Death, according to monologuist Edward Thomas-Herrera, always trumps irony. It certainly has in his new show. Known for his sardonic, fantastical tours of an imaginary gin-soaked demimonde, Thomas-Herrera here spends an hour talking about his mother’s death from cancer and his own fumbling attempts to grieve. Which isn’t to say the writer-performer has put his abundant wit on hold. The piece is rich with humor, mostly pointed observations of his family’s behavior....

The Godfather arrived in style. Emerging from a white stretch limo in front of East of the Ryan on Sunday, March 19, the south-side scenester and aspiring R & B vocalist sauntered into the club draped in a luxurious car coat and clutching a bejeweled drinking cup. Inside, a group of matronly women sitting near the stage, sipping fruit juice and still dressed for church, barely glanced at him. But they took note of the many other musical figures who arrived for the show, a benefit for Clarence “Little Scotty” Scott: Otis Clay, Artie “Blues Boy” White, Bobby Jonz, Lee “Shot” Williams, and Little Smokey Smothers, among others....

Jeffrey Moore’s erudite novel The Memory Artists, newly out in paperback from St. Martin’s Griffin, uses an intriguing cast of characters to examine the peculiarities of the mind. Noel Burun is a hyperintelligent but emotionally addled thirtysomething synesthete–he experiences sounds as colors. He’s also hypermnesic, blessed (or afflicted) with near perfect recall. At the other extreme is his beloved mother, Stella, a history teacher suffering from Alzheimer’s. With a gift for chemistry that had been encouraged by his melancholic father (a suicide), Noel spends untold hours in his basement lab trying to discover a cure for her....

Born in Lithuania in 1974, violinist Julian Rachlin moved with his family to Vienna when he was four; ten years later he became the youngest soloist ever to play with the Vienna Philharmonic. After taking some time off in his 20s, he’s become well-known in Europe as a soloist and chamber musician, but he’s played with only a handful of American orchestras and made his CSO debut just last year. His most recent CD–with his well-matched partner for the past ten years, Itamar Golan–includes a very good Beethoven Sonata no....

Kanye West’s smash debut, The College Dropout (Roc-a-Fella), has a couple big shortcomings–the antieducation rhetoric is funny but wrongheaded, and the 12-minute monologue that closes the record is only charming once–but it’s still the smartest, most enjoyable pop album I’ve heard this year. Though the Chicago native is hardly flashy on the mike, he has a deadly sense of humor and the rare ability to confront hip-hop’s double standards from both sides without coming off as a toothless hypocrite....

In February 2004, when Teenage Fanclub arrived at John McEntire’s Soma Electronic Music Studios in Ukrainian Village, snow was piled in drifts and the wind was whipping, and singer Norman Blake looked up to see a street sign that said division. The Scottish quartet had never recorded outside the UK, and for a moment he wondered if this were a bad omen for the band. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On most of her new album, Manzanita (Plug Research), Mia Doi Todd is in retreat, pondering relationships with both desire and regret and never looking beyond her own backyard. Despite the insular feel of its moody folk pop, Manzanita is Todd’s most accessible record, and she made it without compromising the best part of her music: her bell-clear, immaculately mannered vocals, which borrow the precise articulation of British folksinging and trace the idiosyncratic melodic shapes of early Joni Mitchell....

This letter is in reference to Noah Berlatsky’s article entitled “Kill Bill’s Fatal Flaw” [May 14]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tarantino is not pulling his punches. He never has, he never will. When Tim Roth cries and begs Harvey Keitel’s forgiveness [in Reservoir Dogs] I don’t recall anyone saying that Tarantino was forcing audiences to identify with anyone. Thurman’s outburst in the coffin is simply what it is: a badass killer tasting her own terrifying medicine....

The visionary, transgressive art of director Kira Muratova might be described as bipolar, and these two eccentric comedies, both big successes in Russia, may be her lightest and her darkest. The Felliniesque Passions (1994, 112 min.) considers the wistful dreams of its characters, chiefly a nurse and a circus performer, while the episodes of Three Stories (1997, 109 min.) all deal with cold-blooded murders in postglasnost, posthumanist Russia. Both feature Renata Litvinova, an icy, statuesque blond with the beauty and power of a Hollywood icon; she was a screenwriter by profession, but Muratova turned her into a star (both women won Russian Oscars for their work on Passions)....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the owner has enough of what I call the proper Alphatude then I can show the owner how to mimic my techniques. If the owner has more Losertude than Alphatude, I show the owner how to to “train” the dog. Dog training consists of training the dog to respond to commands, such as “sit,” “down,” and “come,” as a means to increase appropriate dog behavior....

Syndicated Sylvia cartoonist Nicole Hollander turns semiconfessional monologuist in this hour-long Fillet of Solo Festival premiere. The premise is that she’s imagining scenes she’ll write for a memoir, which she insists will include stories about drugs and sex with musicians. Her longest story concerns preparing for her first sexual encounter in 14 years, which requires getting estrogen cream, a new vibrator, and a high sign from her gynecologist. Director Sharon Evans wisely keeps stage business to a minimum so Hollander can focus on storytelling....