I’M NOT THERE sss Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To call the film biographical is misleading. If anything, it’s a speculative essay that uses Dylan to comment on his audience and the 60s in general. Haynes, a graduate of the semiotics department at Brown University, isn’t really concerned with Dylan as an individual; rather he presents him as a cluster of signs and texts, spread across six characters embodying phases or distinct aspects of his early career....

The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lilith appears to Oppenheimer after he’s noticed that his theoretical physics killed quite a few actual people. If she were a figure of evil, as she’s often been represented, this would make sense: the creation of a destructive power puts him in touch with another destructive power. But Kreitzer seems determined to redeem Lilith, and so she makes this mythic figure ambiguous if not sympathetic....

In the early 1990s, Northeastern Illinois University history professor Patrick B. Miller and George Mason University sport studies professor David K. Wiggins began collecting essays, interviews, and other articles by African-American athletes, scholars, and sportswriters. The voices of black athletes were missing from scholarly treatments of sports, they felt, and writing produced by black writers about the relevance of sports to the community had been marginalized. Last year the pair published the results of their research as The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (University of Illinois Press)....

The fun part of this deceptively named New York band–only one member is female, and none are Brazilian–is centerpiece Sabina Sciubba, who plays up her femme fatale image by dressing like a runway model and singing with a Euro-toned sangfroid that’s particularly hard and frosty. On its second album, Talk to La Bomb (Verve Forecast), the group downplays its easy way with hooks by adding new-wave rhythmic jitters and anxious synths, offsetting moments of dreamy ethereality and soft dub by yanking the songs into more tense environments....

“Estrogen Fest 2005: Changing the Rules!” runs through 6/5 at the Storefront Theater in Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, 66 E. Randolph. Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with Prop Thtr, this annual showcase of women’s performance features artists in the fields of theater, spoken word, poetry, dance, and music. The festival consists of two alternating programs of short works. Program A, “History, Fantasy, and Myth,” opens Fri 5/13, and runs through 6/4: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 5 PM....

Murder by Death Satan’s had traffic with such bands before. I mean, I love Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds–but who do you think would let those guys sign a “record” contract? Satan and satanic figures have gotten interesting treatment in Cave’s oeuvre, and Cave even went so far as to write a country-goth novel. But the Bad Seeds were never country enough to keep their devil appropriately ugly: by the end of “Loverman” he’s even getting laid....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At Provenance Food and Wine’s Beer and Bacon Bonanza Thursday at 6:30 PM, hosted by Vella Cafe, each of the four courses features pork and a beer pairing. The meal starts with minicrepes with Gruyere de Comte, lardons, cider syrup, and apple butter, paired with the 2005 Eric Bordelet Sydre Doux, and ends with a chocolate stout float with chocolate-almond ice cream and shortbread filled with brown sugar-bacon buttercream, paired with Hitachino Sweet Stout....

Sixteen-inch softball is more than a game to guys like Tony Reibel. It’s how they spent their childhoods, it’s what Chicago was like when they were kids, it’s where they met their best friends. One learns, for example, that Bill “Eggs” Bromley was known for both clutch hitting and being “Mr. Chatterbox.” John “Wimpy” O’Connor was never a power hitter, but “his defensive skills spoke volumes during the 50s and 60s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend the International Society for Improvised Music holds its second annual conference at Northwestern University. It’s an academic event, but the sprawling array of performances and papers, by both academics and important musicians, offers something of interest for laymen. I’ve already mentioned the performances by Lebanon’s Mazen Kerbaj with Chicago percussionist Michael Zerang, but among the other participants are reedists Vinny Golia, Oliver Lake, Jane Ira Bloom, Douglas Ewart, Paul Scea, and Joe Giardullo, flutist Nicole Mitchell, pianists Art Lande, Denman Marooney, and Greg Burk, bassist Mark Dresser, composer Pauline Oliveros, and guitarist Dom Minasi....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The metropolis was a place with readily discernible edges, its lifestyle sharply distinguished from that of the rural ‘rubes’ and ‘hicks,’ many of whom had obtained the benefits of electricity only a decade before. Cities were in the nation’s vanguard, enjoying the latest technology and defining the cutting edge in fashion and culture. . . . Manhattan and Chicago were magnets attracting the ambitious and adventurous, those who sought to get ahead and enjoy the best in life....

Last Friday evening two dozen kids between the ages of 7 and 15 milled around nervously in front of the stage in the auditorium at Oswego East High School. They were VIPs, hanging out in a reserved section that had been roped off with actual rope, while 350 other kids filled up the stadium seating. They’d all come to see Black Wire, an up-and-coming postpunk trio from Leeds, England, and for most of them this was their first show....

Good artists borrow and great artists steal, but only a legend can get away with inviting the thieves who ripped him off to open a tour. Much as the Velvet Underground and Television references got tossed around early on, it was TOM PETTY who was responsible for many of the Strokes’ better ideas–check out his killer late-70s performance of “American Girl” on The Old Grey Whistle Test for definitive proof. And if you’re looking for a nice pocket to pick, by the way, Petty’s a great target....

Editors’ note: this story also contains “The Mysterious Third Device“, which ran as a sidebar to the cover story on February 4, 2005. Wilson had shot two officers dead in February 1982, and Burge worked five days straight to track him down, never going home. When Wilson was finally located, hiding in a west-side apartment, Burge was first at the door, attacking it with lock picks, tools rarely held by policemen....

Even intelligent, well-intentioned people can fail utterly. Goat Island’s new 125-minute piece, created over three years, is an impenetrable monolith that numbs the mind and butt. Drawing from at least 17 sources ranging from Preston Sturges’s Palm Beach Story to Paul Celan’s poetry and Simone Weil’s essays, the piece uses Fibonacci numbers for its structure and aims to comment on the war in Iraq, torture, and loss. The audience is encouraged to see both of its two alternate versions....

Fela Kuti never exhausted the possibilities of Afrobeat as a music–never even came close. Maybe that’s because his re-Africanization of funk was often primarily a vehicle for exhausting the possibilities of being Fela. So the lack of a charismatic front man is kind of a lucky break for this New York outfit–Fela himself may be a hard act to follow (as his son Femi proves with each new recording), but his sidemen sketched an outline that left plenty of space for future disciples to color in....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow at 12:15 PM in Room II of the University of Chicago Law School, three local law professors — Eric Posner of the U. of C., Jide Nzelibe of Northwestern, and Matthew Lippman of the University of Illinois at Chicago — will discuss the merits of U.S. involvement there. According to his online bio, Lippman is the “leading legal expert on the Nazi holocaust....

Psychedelic folk has never caught on in a big way in the United States, where woodsy pagan mysticism just can’t compete with the self-conscious urban/suburban modernity of rock ‘n’ roll. Drag City’s one of the few American labels with a decent track record for marketing the stuff, and having done OK with the likes of Damon & Naomi and Ghost, they’ve recently released the third album by Faun Fables–the alter ego of west-coast singer-songwriter Dawn McCarthy....

As part of the Flashback Weekend horror convention, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare in Rosemont, the hotel’s west parking lot will be converted into an open-air theater. Patrons are invited to bring blankets and lawn chairs (the “drive-in” part is purely sentimental). Tickets are $15, $5 for children 12 and under; for more information call 847-478-0119 or visit www.flashbackweekend.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Drummers rarely lead their own bands, but Jack DeJohnette has been a virtual coleader in groups helmed by some of the strongest personalities in jazz–most notably Keith Jarrett, whose Standards trio has starred DeJohnette for more than 20 years. The Chicago native started out as a pianist, even cutting an album on the instrument, and has a well-deserved reputation as a composer–no jazz drummer is better qualified to sit in the captain’s chair....

This month’s issue of Saveur features an article on tamarind by the grand dame of Indian cookery, Madhur Jaffrey. Like anything in the glossy, it’s a combination of hard research (tamarind has more sugar and acid than any other fruit), folklore (sleeping under tamarind trees causes fever), food porn (she sticks her hands in a bowl of gooey pulp), and whimsy (she waxes nostalgic about whacking seed pods off the giant tree in her family’s Delhi compound)....