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Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I find this mentality to be incredibly irresponsible and deluded. Apparently, despite all of his research and experience, Taft has turned a blind eye to the glaringly obvious fact that life in a cage, albeit an enclosure with natural habitat, cannot compare to the miles of territory these big cats would normally roam, the social interactions they normally experience, and the experiences of life in the wild, that while we as humans may view as hardships, big cats are none-the-less genetically hardwired to experience....

Choreographer Winifred Haun says she told dancer Erika Gilfether years ago that she was dying to give her a certain role: Cathy from John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. “She’s evil!” Haun explained. Petite, fragile-looking Gilfether was a little surprised but embraces the part in the aerial duet Haun created. She nails Cathy’s attack on her passive lover (Andrew Adams), turning on him in a single taut motion, climbing swiftly up and over him, and flattening him....

As a hotbed of incestuous rock collaboration Louisville is second only to Chicago: the new metal band Dead Child has a pedigree so complicated that the chart on their Web site explaining it resembles a benzene molecule. Guitarist David Pajo, of course, practically constitutes a one-man genre, having played in Slint, Zwan, Tortoise, Palace, and his solo joint M/Aerial M/Papa M, among many others. Drummer Tony Bailey was in M as well as the Anomoanon, Lords, and Crain–the last featuring Dead Child bassist Todd Cook, another sometime M member and a touring member of Slint for their 2005 reunion....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chico returned to practicing law with several high-powered firms; he was the chairman of Altheimer & Gray when the firm strangely and abruptly dissolved in 2003. In 2004, Chico ran a thoughtful campaign for U.S. Senate but was soundly defeated by Democratic machine support for Dan Hynes, oodles of cash at the disposal of multimillionaire Blair Hull, and the groundswell of passion for Barack Obama....

All morning Jack was wringing his hands over the ashes. When would she bring the ashes? Was she coming with the ashes? Would she be crying or cursing the ashes? On and on. My brother-in-law Mike was a big Scot from Colorado with chestnut hair and a red face rough as a gravel pit. When we were all kidding around we called him Ha Ha because when the fish started biting all he did was laugh–at least in the early years....

When the tsunami slammed into Phuket, it did more than kill tens of thousands of people. Creatures from miles beneath the sea were washed ashore, many of them like something out of an extraterrestrial zoo. The premise of director James Cameron’s new Imax documentary, Aliens of the Deep 3D, is that learning about these strange beings, which thrive in a place once thought incapable of supporting life, gives us the next best thing to an encounter with life-forms from another planet....

My favorite Roberto Rossellini film is perhaps the hardest one to see–the restored French version of this 1959 masterpiece about India, which survives in only one unsubtitled print. (The more accessible Italian version is considerably shorter, and inferior in other respects as well.) Fortunately, the French version has been privately subtitled on video by Rossellini biographer Tag Gallagher, and Chicago Cinema Forum will project it twice this weekend. A sublime symbiosis of fable and nonfiction, India Matri Bhumi simply and poetically interrelates humans and animals, city and village, and society and nature over four separate stories....

Pelican guitarist Laurent Lebec knows there’s a disconnect between the way he looks and the music he plays. “We’ve rolled up to festivals and people will be waiting there for us like, ‘We heard you didn’t look like metalheads. We heard you guys look like total emo nerds.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two guitarists met in 1995, when de Brauw was a high school senior in Evanston and Lebec had just arrived from Paris to attend Northwestern....

Our Lady of 121st Street Until now. Now there’s Our Lady of 121st Street. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play about a mad funeral in Harlem is the ultimate Steppenwolf show, at least insofar as the critics’ favorite criticism is concerned: it’s absolutely pointless except as a series of great set pieces for actors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And what a marvelous, cussed feast he gives them....

All movies are free and will be screened at dusk by video projection, as part of the Chicago Park District’s “Movies in the Parks” series. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This hokey growing-up story (2000) set in segregated Mississippi during World War II is based on a memoir by Willie Morris, who apparently never got over the death of his childhood pet. A bookish boy (Frankie Muniz) is picked on by several bullies: a fat kid, an unwashed kid, a wide-eyed kid, some nasty bootleggers, and even his own father, whose tough loving apparently stems from the loss of his leg....

Nowadays it seems that every band feels compelled to teach indie kids how to dance, but the members of Out Hud were doing it back when it seemed like a worthy project: armed with drum machines and possessed of a weakness for interminable song titles, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Sacramento collective began edutaining scenesters in the late 90s. But their big national break came in 2002 with the all-instrumental album S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D., which carefully interlocked guitar chatter and synth bloopery with funky bass-popping and cymbal-heavy disco beats....

In my 26 years I’ve had my fair share of relationships. I’m usually the one spooning up advice to friends hungry for wisdom. Sadly, I’m helpless to aid myself in my current situation. I met this girl four months ago, and she’s the woman of my dreams. If you met her you would know that angels exist on earth. The problem is that she’s married and has four kids. Her cheating husband is abusive to her (verbally, physically, etc)....

Redmoon’s ambitious first musical features live music, dance, a cash bar, and a tasting menu of high-end chocolates. It promises to be a self-indulgent consumer experience, and it is. What makes it a cut above your usual dinner (or dessert) and a show is its thoughtfulness about consumption, competition, and Americans’ relentless pursuit of happiness. The show’s conceit is that it’s a contest between five egotistical performers for the Golden Truffle award....

There’s more comedy than menace in Dado’s staging of Harold Pinter’s 1958 play (which he shelved without explanation for 22 years). Set in an English mental hospital on Christmas, it traces what happens as staff members lose their tenuous grip on reality, not to mention common standards of decency, when one patient dies and another gives birth. Fans of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil will find much to admire in the precisely calibrated over-the-top performances and in Grant Sabin’s claptrap institutional setting, with its goony network of wires and ducts woven through a grimy-green space....

The Mousetrap | Humming “Three Blind Mice,” someone begins killing off a group of six–four tourists, one uninvited guest, and a detective–visiting Monkswell Manor during a snowstorm, which traps them all there. Even when you know the identity of the murderer in Agatha Christie’s unkillable 1952 mystery, you can admire how artfully the mistress of mayhem misdirects suspicion. Especially in her depiction of newlyweds struggling to run a guesthouse, Christie suggests that a loved one can become a threatening stranger: she hooks us not with special effects but with sheer psychology....

It’s a Saturday afternoon in early November and 15 men in red-and-black jerseys with rubber buttons are huddled at one end of a vast grassy expanse at the Schiller Woods Forest Preserve. This spot is the home field, or paddock, of the Chicago Griffins Rugby Football Club. Murray “Muzza” Roeske, a six-foot-two, 210-pound New Zealander with the visage of a Viking, is in the middle, offering a few encouraging phrases to his teammates....

Dear Mike, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By granting you an interview, the toddler’s mother was doing you a favor, and your reference to “the two-year-old screaming in the background” was a disservice to the mother and to the overall story, by giving the impression that the toddler is an incessant screamer who was rightfully expelled from the coffeehouse. The “screaming child” line was a cheap shot and probably a breach of tacit confidence with your interviewee....

The London-based avant-garde monthly the Wire, which has increased steadily in gloss and sales over the years while remaining committed to very unglossy music, recognizes how much Chicago has given it in terms of material. It’s hosted a three- or four-day blowout at the Empty Bottle every year since 2003; this fall’s it’s the magazine’s 25th-anniversary bash. One of the things I particularly like about this festival is the way sonic flavors are juggled on the bill so that no matter what act drew you in you’ll probably have to stand through some artist you wouldn’t have otherwise thought to check out–though sometimes this backfires, like last year, when quiet Jana Hunter took the stage in the wake of Rhys Chatham’s Essentialist....

Swan Lake is that rare bird, a 19th-century story ballet for grown-ups. True, an evil sorcerer turns a princess into a wildfowl. But Tchaikovsky’s music, though familiar, is rich and stirring. And the tale enmeshes us in issues of freedom and responsibility, pulling us into a world where nature and civilization are at odds, where logic and order battle emotion and magic. Prince Siegfried is the fulcrum of this conflict, intensely Romantic though the battleground is bourgeois: whom should he marry?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greenleaf Music is the indie label run by trumpeter (and now cornetist) Dave Douglas, one of the most important jazz improvisers, composers, and bandleaders of the last decade. Since the 90s he’s released dozens of recordings with a slew of original projects and as a member of John Zorn’s Masada. But the guy doing much of the work behind Greenleaf is a Chicagoan named Michael Friedman, who also runs his own label, Premonition....