Dirty Little World, Aha! Productions, at Viaduct Theatre. They don’t call it a punch line for nothing: the cardinal condition for comedy is that something snaps the tension between the apparent and the actual. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The five comics in Aha!’s eighth revue display wizard timing, interact cunningly, and maintain complete control over their rubber faces. What’s missing from the show’s 16 sketches in Rob Mello’s unambiguous staging are the ironic twists that reverse our expectations and, not incidentally, skewer stereotypes....

Nicolas Floc’h: Epicerie and the Portable Store Ivy Crest Garden at NFA Space, through October 3 Again and again I’ve been confronted as a critic with ill-conceived or poorly executed presentations that undermine the art being shown. Especially when it comes to conceptual work, where there isn’t all that much to look at sometimes, many artists don’t seem to realize the importance of the details of design and display. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

LOUD FAMILY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 80s Scott Miller’s band Game Theory threatened to surface in the mainstream with its dreamy Big Star-inspired pop, but personnel instability and Miller’s penchant for throwing songs out of whack with blasts of noise kept it underground. Game Theory made its last album in 1988, and Miller didn’t show up again until 1993, leading the Loud Family, which despite different players and new songs sounds an awful lot like its predecessor....

NADJA SALERNO-SONNENBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Through much of the 80s and early 90s Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg rode the novelty of her punk posturing and aggressive, exhibitionist style–traits female violinists weren’t supposed to display. But lately she’s toned down her act and added some emotional subtlety, though her playing still has a brawny feel–when she digs into a piece she still does so with wholehearted abandon....

NICK LOWE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although he’s changed styles about as often as Dennis Rodman’s changed hair color, through every one of them Nick Lowe has remained the consummate pop craftsman, a sly humorist with a knack for the hook. His latest transformation, documented on the recent Dig My Mood (Upstart), finds him veering away from rock and dipping into adult balladry–which isn’t as scary as it sounds....

Ronit Bezalel decided to come to Chicago to do her graduate work in film after reading Directing the Documentary by Columbia College professor Michael Rabiger. Soon the seeds of her own documentary were planted. “People would say, ‘Avoid the projects, avoid Cabrini.’ And that was very strange for me that there were these areas that you had to avoid, and I didn’t understand why,” she says. “I saw Cabrini when I took the train to school every day on the Ravenswood line, and when I saw that they were tearing it down I wanted to learn more about it....

By Mark Gauvreau Judge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But then I suppose I’m not fit to judge. I came to jazz only about five years ago, just before the erstwhile swing boom. I liked some of the new swing music, which makes me a pariah in the eyes of “real” jazz fans, many of whom hated it the way punks hate the Backstreet Boys....

SAM RIVERS TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the great jazz saxophonists to emerge in the turbulent 60s, none has been ignored more criminally or perpetually than Sam Rivers. He discovered drummer Tony Williams, preceded Wayne Shorter in the Miles Davis Quintet, recorded a diverse string of edgy albums for Blue Note in the mid-to-late 60s, and became a prime mover in the early 70s loft jazz scene in New York–and that’s just the first decade of his career....

THE EX 6/12, EMPTY BOTTLE The days when anyone could safely assume that real rock ‘n’ roll was American or British are long gone: in the last couple decades, wave after wave of noise from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and continental Europe has left us with our ears ringing, thinking, “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.” Amsterdam’s hardest-working anarchist collective, the Ex, have touched on these shores often enough to be legendary but rarely enough that we’ll never get tired of seeing them....

TAKACS QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lately several renowned string quartets have undergone key personnel changes: the Juilliard, famed for its periodic metamorphoses, is doing just fine; the Tokyo has yet to find the right blend; and the Takacs, amazingly, has reinvented itself for the better. Founded in 1975 in Budapest, the quartet made a splash a decade later with a landmark recording of the six quartets of its countryman Bela Bartok, proffering a less austere and abrasive reading than the Juilliard, which presented him as a paragon of modernism....

The People, Yes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What better time than an election year to remind us what “American” values truly are? And how better than in Carl Sandburg’s panoramic 1936 poem (“The People move in a fine, thin smoke / The People, yes”) celebrating what Alexander Hamilton called a “great beast,” splendidly cruel, compassionate, and contradictory? After a succesful run in an Evanston basement last summer, followed by extensive touring, Theo Ubique Theatre’s 90-minute adaptation of this literary opus comes home, this time to a readily accessible venue downtown....

Hi, i have been wondering for the longest time how dinosaurs had sex?!?! Ive asked just about everybody, but i havent gotten an answer. They seam too large to have sex like humans, and their tails would get in the way for doggy-style…PLEASE ANSWER MY QUESTION!!!!!!! –Lianna Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, you can have too much of a good thing. Early in the cited chapter we read, “The gonads…of both birds and reptiles are confined within the body so it is safe to assume the same was true of dinosaurs....

Trinity Irish Dance Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forget the green beer. Forget standing out in the snow to watch a parade. Forget the corned beef and cabbage. Go see the best Irish dancers in the country–perhaps the universe. At the world championships of Irish dance last year in Ennis, Ireland, Chicago’s own Trinity Academy of Irish Dance (from which the professional company originated) won two gold medals for dancing and one for choreography for The Dawn, choreographed by artistic director Mark Howard and Richard Griffin....

Twenty feet above the Medinah Temple’s main stage, a worker on a scaffold removes the tacks holding up Gustav Brand’s 80-foot rendering of a pilgrimage to Mecca. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once the Shriners decided to let go of the building, it was Smiewec’s job to drag out the storage crates, which hadn’t been touched for decades. “Some of these items probably haven’t been used since they were bought,” he says....

BARBARA BRUSSELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some cabaret singers whisper you slowly into their intimate musical microcosms; Barbara Brussell might whisper at the start of her show, but she goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat, pinning her listeners to their seats with a stage presence only slightly scaled down from a Broadway opening. She has a big voice and a brassy, classy delivery, and her interpretations leave few dramatic stones unturned....

BERN NIX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like his mentor and former employer Ornette Coleman, guitarist Bern Nix cares about few things more than melody. This is most palpable on his lone recording as a leader, Alarms and Excursions (New World), a 1993 trio date with Fred Hopkins on bass and Newman Baker on drums. But once you’ve picked his beautifully clear tone out of the recordings Coleman’s Prime Time made during his 12 years in the band, it’s obvious there as well....

Friday 6/16 – Thursday 6/22 The Pine Valley Cosmonauts lead interpretations of riding the lightning during The Executioner’s Last Songs, an evening of gallows laments by the likes of Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Led Zeppelin. The benefit for the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project features vocal turns by Sally Timms, Rebecca Gates, Janet Bean, Brett Sparks, and others. They’ll sing you back home before you die, tonight at 8 at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N....

Let’s see, there’s a war on drugs and a big campaign against guns . . . Number of vehicles city police report impounding during 1996 as part of weapons arrests: 1,200. As part of narcotics arrests: 1,250. As part of prostitution arrests: 1,500. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sloshed. According to a recent Woodstock Institute report, the number of liquor stores per 100,000 residents in Cook County zip code areas with median incomes under $30,000 a year: 16....

DAVE HOLLAND QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bassists have trouble attracting the spotlight: even Dave Holland, the best jazz bassist of the last 30 years, rarely gets the credit he deserves. That’s him on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew; he’s also played in Circle with Chick Corea and Anthony Braxton, served as the vital center of Sam Rivers’s trio, and appeared on acclaimed albums by Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, and Joe Henderson....

EVAN PARKER & NED ROTHENBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In most of the situations he plays in, British saxophone giant Evan Parker stands out like a nickel in a pile of pennies. His approach is practically a name brand, his circular breathing technique almost a genre unto itself–and a slew of recent recordings show his range: On Foxes Fox (Emanem) he locks minds with pianist Steve Beresford, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Louis Moholo in swift, muscular on-the-fly interactions; on After Appleby (Leo), in a group with the same instrumentation (played by Marilyn Crispell, Barry Guy, and Paul Lytton) our bearded hero gets gorgeously rhapsodic, if no less kinetic....