Hey, everybody: A few months back I departed from the usual advice-column Q & A and, taking full advantage of E-mail technology, experimented with a new, genre-busting format: Question & Response & Response. The experiment was a success, and many of you wrote in and suggested that I switch Savage Love over to Q & R & R. I declined to do so, I wrote at the time, because Q & R & R is a lot more work than good ol’ Q & A....

BLUE DOGS 3/26, LAKEVIEW LINKS It’s hard to imagine these South Carolinians in a studio–every note on Blue Dogs, their debut album (which features new Freakwater steel guitarist Eric Heywood), has that warm-summer-night, outdoor-band-shell feel. Their laid-back blue-eyed R & B, their plaintive heartbreak tales put across painlessly, are pretty, tight, and completely untainted by originality. They make me think of how the most comfortable climate is the one you don’t notice....

Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life “Writing about music is like talking about fucking,” John Lennon told Playboy in 1980, and few writers have proven him wrong: to capture something as visceral as music, words seem not just inadequate but downright crude. Some writers skirt the challenge with dry theory, some indulge in flights of hyperbole, and some just throw in the towel and churn out industry PR. But in my book, biography is the sort of music writing with the greatest potential to enrich those indescribable sounds....

I have been a fan of Mr. Rosenbaum’s writing for more than a year now and treasure his contribution to film criticism greatly. It is so refreshing to find someone with such an informed and unique take on cinema, a viewpoint that doesn’t bow reverently to “classics” by virtue of their sacred-cow nature, but instead regards them soberly and intelligently. I was reading his piece on Welles’s Othello in his book, I think it was Movies as Politics, and his other Welles pieces in one of his other books, Placing Movies....

Before fame called, Ira Glass began a program for the old WBEZ show The Wild Room on this belligerent note: “I do not like the Chicago Tribune, the big daily newspaper where I live. They have a few good reporters, but overall it is a gutless, lifeless newspaper. They handle the serious news usually with the dull, stupid, unemotional tone of a junior high school civics textbook. Their feature stories have a sort of ‘gee whiz’ dunderheaded quality to them....

By Michael Miner At midday on Monday, September 11, storm systems from the north and northwest wrapped themselves around Chicago, paralyzing O’Hare and disrupting air operations across the country. Six thousand stranded passengers spent the night at O’Hare because they had no way to get where they were going. They were victims of what the Federal Aviation Administration might describe as a perfect storm–though if you weren’t flying you’ll remember it, if you remember it at all, as just a good hard rain....

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life Primary Colors By Jonathan Rosenbaum But such criticism is secondary. Part of my reflexive scoffing at Rand is intellectual and part is political; but a third part is emotional. I suspect that this part is closely allied with the reasons that many Americans scoff at Jerry Lewis: like Rand, he’s come to stand for a stage in our adolescence that we’d rather forget. Rand’s vibrant appeal to adolescents, including me when I was in high school, is profoundly sexual: she provokes a sense of exalted fantasy tied up with raging hormones and resolves the vexing need to reconcile self-interest with social and ethical duties....

Les bonnes femmes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Arguably the best as well as the most disturbing movie Claude Chabrol has made to date, this unjustly neglected 1960 feature, his fourth, focuses on the everyday lives and ultimate fates of four young women (Bernadette Lafont, Stephane Audran, Clotilde Joano, and Lucile Saint-Simon) working at an appliance store in Paris and longing for better things....

There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal, and that’s why Tom Grey is ready for mortal combat. Grey, a Methodist minister and Vietnam war veteran, has been tracking the beast since 1992 and he knows it’s bleeding. The “beast” is legalized gambling, which has grown for 20 years at a phenomenal rate in this country–most of the growth coming from a proliferation of casinos on riverboats and Native American reservations....

By Grant Pick Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The IGAP protesters contend that the tests are not what education should be about. “Learning to me means trying to analyze things and to write and express your thoughts in a convincing and creative way,” says Tanzman, an A student. He thinks that spending his grammar-school years at the private, progressive Francis W. Parker School may be one reason he’s not impressed with rote instruction and standardized tests, yet the protesters who went to public schools feel the same way....

Playing Catch-Up Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film’s dubious educational value must not faze museum administrators: as a tie-in they’ve unveiled the MSI’s first sports-themed exhibit, “Michael Jordan: Exhibiting Greatness.” The collection of Jordan memorabilia (or “artifacts,” as the museum’s publicity puts it) includes uniforms, collectibles, the Bulls’ six championship trophies, and replicas of Jordan’s championship rings. The largest of the exhibit’s three rooms re-creates the basketball court at the United Center, complete with such sound effects as the Bulls’ bombastic team introduction....

No More Mr. Nice Price Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Midlines are older titles whose sales have dropped off. By reducing a record’s list to the “nice price” of $11.98 or $10.98–which a large retailer can reduce further, to $8.98 or even $7.98–a label can keep its back catalog in stores even as more and more product competes for shelf space. Midlines are a boon to consumers (who can buy CDs for the price of old LPs), retailers (who can score impulse sales on inexpensive oldies), and artists (whose older albums might stay in print longer)....

STEVE LACY’S THE CRY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the last 45 years Steve Lacy has woven several threads through his forceful and startling music. One involves his instrument: few modern players have concentrated on the soprano sax, and Lacy was the first, predating John Coltrane by nearly a decade and achieving a blunt, boldly unornamented sound. His timbre and texture cross with another musical thread, his early championing and continued emphasis on the compositions of Thelonious Monk....

Give us 12 or 18 months, says executive producer Doug Berman. Then we’ll know what the public thinks of the news quiz Berman just brought to WBEZ. There are straws in the wind already, however–censure so sharp it could poke your eye out. “The premiere of ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ was the worst piece of radio I have ever heard, period.” “I understand that WBEZ is in large part responsible for the costs of ‘Wait Wait Don’t Torture Me....

This free 13-hour event, named after the street address of the new Dance Center of Columbia College, promises to be something of a seven-ring circus, with performances, workshops, and lecture-demonstrations in the theater, the lobby, five studios, and various classrooms and offices. Fifty or so Chicago groups and individuals are participating, ranging from scads of modern dancers (the Dance Center’s specialty) to ballet artists (Anna Paskevska teaches a class) to tap dancers (Rhythm I....

Shu Shubat’s family always belittled her dreams of becoming a performer. Years later she found out why: “My father had a cousin who was an acrobatic dancer in a strip club.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The family was so scandalized that to this day they don’t talk much about this relative. But when Shubat wanted to take dance lessons in the first grade, her father was clearly frightened, telling her that she was too old....

COWGIRLS, Northlight Theatre, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. Northlight’s past success with such country-flavored musicals as Always…Patsy Cline and Smoke on the Mountain makes the company’s choice of this 1994 comedy understandable. But despite director Gary Griffin’s solidly professional production, Cowgirls’ mediocre music and dumbed-down script demean the country culture and female solidarity the play purports to celebrate. Playwright Betsy Howie and songwriter Mary Murfitt’s substandard cross between Nunsense and Pump Boys and Dinettes focuses on an all-women classical chamber trio–a pregnant pianist, a lesbian bassist, and a sexually repressed violinist secretly yearning to fiddle around....

The Collector Pyewacket Fowles’s The Collector–adapted for the Stone Circle Theatre Ensemble by artistic director Jessica McCartney and directed by Jennifer Shook–is at heart a horror story despite allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and occasional critiques of the British class system. The 1965 film of the same name, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar and directed by William Wyler, was advertised with the tag line “You won’t dare open your mouth, but you’ll be screaming for her to escape!...

Alderman Ray Frias made his first speech on the floor of the Chicago City Council since being acquitted of accepting a bribe, attempted extortion, and lying to the FBI in the federal Silver Shovel probe. Frias, whose entrapment defense required him to admit taking a $500 bribe, didn’t apologize for bringing still more disrepute on the council. In fact, he later told reporters he plans to run for reelection. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MAIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Main’s Robert Hampson has come a long way since he led the Spacemen 3-derivative Loop back in the late 80s. (Hampson is Main’s only current member, but most of the project’s recordings also feature his former band mate Scott Dawson.) It’s not that he’s abandoned trancey minimalism, but rather that he’s spent the last seven years refining and streamlining it into increasingly spare guitar abstractions....