Built to Spill I first encountered Built to Spill not through their records but live, sandwiched between Sleater-Kinney and Sonic Youth at the 1997 Bumbershoot festival in Seattle. I expected them to be good–after all, they’d been bequeathed second place in that pinch-me lineup by Thurston Moore himself. But I sure as hell didn’t expect them to blow both the deafeningly hyped openers and the veteran headliners off the stage....

The Cubs have put together a comfortable ball club, and in this turbulent sports age comfort is an underappreciated quality. Others have called general manager Ed Lynch cynical for assembling a patchwork team last year that was just good enough to reach the postseason without really threatening to go on to the World Series–and for making only minor alterations this season. It’s hard to argue with cynical, especially with Lynch standing pat though Kerry Wood is out with a reconstructed elbow and the other Cubs pitchers have suffered a D day rate of casualties–no fewer than seven have been on the disabled list in this young season....

By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also lacking is a sense of spirituality and passion–fatally so in a work that reenacts the Passion of Jesus through the sacrificial figure of Claude. While Hair doesn’t wear its faith on its sleeve in the manner of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar (both of which it strongly influenced), it’s every bit as religious. Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot’s script and score are steeped in Catholic symbols, some of which are obvious....

Being a member of the Servotron Robot Allegiance and being part of the robotic revolution to take over the human race, I have very little time to compute such inane human concerns as beauty and fashion. Nonethe-less, being a robot without flaw or imperfection, I can easily see how human females may wish to pattern themselves after my construct. I, being the female make of the Servotron pop unit, am intended to attract humans of the opposite sex, although the Servotron male-structured droids do fine in this endeavor as well....

CANNANES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like anything that’s been left out too long, indie rock has gotten pretty stale: the seven-inch bins are clogged with enough dreary, inept, and unambitious records (is anyone holding his breath for the next Vehicle Flips disc?) to make me wish the pressing plants would double their prices. It takes a visit from a band like Australia’s Cannanes to remind me why I listened to the stuff in the first place....

“One of the more interesting effects of gay rights laws is that while fewer gays may be fired, fewer may be hired in the first place,” argues Paul Varnell in Windy City Times (April 8). “It is much easier for an employee to make out a claim of discrimination after he has been on the job for a while than to prove discrimination in the hiring process. Employers know this. So they may feel concern that if they ever had to dismiss a gay employee, the employee might file a discrimination suit that could result in costly litigation, even if the firing was not motivated by bias....

First Person Plural Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This isn’t the first film about an Americanized Korean orphan returning to her native land to reconcile the past and the present–and it may not be the last. But Deann Borshay Liem’s hour-long 1999 documentary is unusually vivid, partly because she knows how to generate suspense and partly because she successfully addresses the larger issues of filial allegiance and self-identity....

Dear Pat Arden: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am the founder of CUPP, Citizens United Against Poverty Pimps. CUPP, and Larry Ligas personally, advocate affordable, quality housing with responsible management for the law-abiding low-income residents, and safe parks and quality education for all residents of Chicago. In one sentence, Mr. Kleine sent an extremely harsh, powerful message, artfully crafted, posing me as a campaign strategist who is coldhearted and against assisting the less fortunate....

IDA/WARREN DEFEVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ida–a band, not a woman–is quiet, quiet as a first confession of love or the first whisper of betrayal. Singer-songwriters Daniel Littleton, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Karla Schickele harmonize like wounded angels, mostly about momentary, bittersweet emotional states, sort of like a bedroom version of Fleetwood Mac. (They’re not always weeping softly into their Rolling Rock, though: onstage a couple Halloweens ago, they covered Prince’s Dirty Mind in its entirety....

The funniest show in a Chicago theater this weekend may well be playing not on a stage but on a screen–this rarely shown videotape of a live performance at Second City’s original space (1842 N. Wells) just a couple of years after the troupe’s founding. Under the meticulous direction of pioneering off-Loop theater genius Paul Sills, the show features a crack crew of young comers–Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Severn Darden, Eugene Troobnick, Mina Kolb, Andrew Duncan, company cofounder Howard Alk, and musical director Bill Mathieu....

Headline Schmeadline Finally, in a quiet corner on the third floor, I find a sign on a door that says, “Jeopardy! tryouts. Doors open promptly at 10:00 a.m.” Milling around are other people like me–well scrubbed and reasonably well dressed and a little embarrassed to be here. I hunker down on the floor to wait. I ask her what the author’s most important advice for tryouts was. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the Vatican’s request, Brazil’s leading religious artist, Claudio Pastro, is giving the image of Jesus Christ a makeover for the third millennium. According to an October report from Knight-Ridder, the new look will be one of serenity and victory, rather than suffering, and Jesus will have traces of Asian, black, and Indian features. The Litigious Society...

Phyllis Bramson: Cosmic Disorder By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first Bramson’s works seem truly a vision of “cosmic disorder,” to quote her title for the show. Yet most have discernible themes and sly hints of narrative. Backward Looking Thoughts includes images of six women or girls, mostly looking away from us into the picture’s ambiguous blue background. Bramson suggests that these women have inner lives and seem to see things we can’t, even as she denies the voyeur’s wish to see much of the women themselves, since their backs are to us....

muhammad.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reader is a news publication that many people in the jazz world refer to and depend on for information. In the Reader’s guide to the 1997 Chicago Jazz Festival [August 22], Peter Margasak refers to me as “the clown prince of Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble,” which has caused much controversy. I have received many calls asking if I have seen this item, and it has caused a great deal of humiliation and insult....

SAINT ETIENNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been four years since this British trio released Tiger Bay (Warner Brothers), its third and still its frothiest fusion of thumping house beats, swinging-60s sex-kittenisms, and bleached Motown soul. In some ways the group was a precursor to airbrushed trip-hop acts like Morcheeba and Mono, but the simple rhythm programs and cheesy keyboards of Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley undercut the music’s syrupy pleasures with irony, intentional or not....

By Ben Joravsky According to Passage, he’s sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the building he bought in 1979, repairing the elevators and remodeling almost every floor. “We have our photo studio here, we have classrooms, we have our designers–this is where we produce catalogs and books,” says Corrine Passage, Leo’s daughter and chief aide. “We believe in Rogers Park. My dad raised our family here. We want to stay here because we like the neighborhood, and many of our employees live here....

By Ted Shen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I love the musical, and I love Yul Brynner as the king,” says Irene Cualoping, who produced the coalition’s show. “I thought it would’ve been nice for kids to gather onstage to sing that chorus, because I wanted to appeal to all ages. But I understood Suci’s point of the inaccuracies in the portrayal, so we agreed to delete the song....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have a few things to say about your article “Cat Fight” [August 27]. First, has no one considered the fact that responsible pet owners keep their pets indoors? This is the city of Chicago, not the middle-of-nowhere farmland. In this city, a loose cat or dog is a danger to itself and to other animals. Every time a person lets their pet run loose through the city they are risking that pet’s life....

THE ORIGINAL LAST WISH BABY, Frump Tucker Theatre Company, at Bailiwick Repertory. This play and production deserve each other: in a marriage made in theater hell, Ohio comic book writer William Seebring’s tedious script is yoked with Errol McClendon’s nitwit staging. Seebring means to mock the media but mistakes the silly and stupid for the satirical. Assorted caricatures of the press indulge in a feeding frenzy over the tawdry “miracle” of a Cleveland baby born without a heart....

Susan Shie learned how to sew in home ec and 4-H classes, as well as at her mother’s knee. She grew up making perfect little Barbie-doll clothes and graduated to pleated drapes and tailored leather coats. Then she became an art student, dreamed up the Lucky School of Quilting Techniques, and broke out of the box. The Lucky School is based on slapping together sandwiches of to-die-for fabric (with batting in the middle); stitching their edges with chunky, 12-strand ropes of multicolored embroidery floss; embellishing them with beads, paint, and found objects; and then piecing them into quilts....