Here in Maine, the state legislature is taking up a bill to ban the use of the word squaw in place-names. Native Americans contend that it is a vulgarity, meaning prostitute or c*** rather than woman. Was this a general word that was used in many languages, or was it specific to one or two? Are there any old Native American songs or poems that might use this word in a more ordinary sense, revealing that it is not as degrading as they might contend, or is it absent from N....

The Way South Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1981 study of the third world, which takes us from Amsterdam down to the Nile, poses no overarching thesis–filmmaker Johan van der Keuken discards the colonial assumption that he understands the world, focusing as much on his own efforts to see as on his apparent subjects. The title refers to the economic split between the northern and southern hemispheres, yet van der Keuken also finds hints of the third world in some Dutch squatters being evicted from a vacant luxury building....

THOMAS BORGMANN TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to ignore the torrent of saxophonists heading the revival in postfreedom jazz–but it’s also getting hard to tell them apart. Something similar happened in bebop, then again in the 50s, in 70s fusion, and especially in the neoclassical 80s: a popular genre inspires more innovators, but also supports more imitators, and you end up with a lot of people pulling their tricks from the same bag....

WILCO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no moment on Wilco’s new Summerteeth (Reprise) more disconcerting than the end of the lovely ballad “She’s a Jar,” when Jeff Tweedy coos tenderly over an invitingly catchy melody, “She begs me not to hit her.” But the same tension between summery, feel-good hooks and dark lyrics pervades the entire album. There’s a grain or two of goodness in each of Tweedy’s characters, but they’re almost always sabotaged by uglier traits; only on the protective lullaby “My Darling” do the emotions seem pure....

“Shall We Go? Yes, Let’s Go.” Three Plays by Samuel Beckett Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Samuel Beckett cheers me up. There’s something very therapeutic about his dark, relentless, clear-eyed vision. While other playwrights dance around the truth, he revels in the inevitable: we age, our minds go, the good times fade but regrets last a lifetime. And the older Beckett got, the bleaker his vision became....

The Mary-Arrchie Theatre’s marathon showcase of emerging talent features a slew of fringe companies and solo artists. Hoping to honor the spirit of the late anarchist author of Woodstock Nation, “Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins” was founded to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Woodstock festival, and emulates that countercultural benchmark by offering an almost constant flow of acts while seeking to stimulate a communal spirit among performers and audience (which may be enhanced by sleep deprivation)....

Needed: a place where everyone knows your name. According to a new University of Chicago study of truancy and class cutting in Chicago public high schools, “More than 40 percent of the highest-achieving ninth graders missed two or more weeks of classes in at least one major subject in the second semester of 1996.” Study author and U. of C. professor Melissa Roderick says, “Cutting is easy in large high schools without adult monitoring, strong school cultures or orderly school environments....

Asian-American “is a weird term invented by the Census Bureau to group together people who don’t have all that much in common,” says Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer and monologuist best known for her wickedly funny commentaries on National Public Radio. “In some cases, we’re talking about Americans, say from India and Pakistan, whose old countries are at war with each other. And how does the label apply to someone like me, whose father came from China and mother from Germany?...

CSO I: A Glimpse of the Future? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the orchestra in residence at Ravinia, summer is usually a slow season for the CSO. Yet Gehret’s appointment to keep Fogel’s chair warm is considered a sign of his rising influence. Gehret arrived at the CSO almost five years ago from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, where he served as director of development....

Homegirls: New Work by Chicago Women and Girls Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three of the nine works on this program are by friends, so I’m glad I like them as much as I do. Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far From Home, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s highly personal tribute and invaluable introduction to the seminal filmmaker who worked in Iran and Germany and died last summer in Chicago, mixes clips, commentary, and interviews to create a poetic, bittersweet statement about loss and exile....

The Scarlet Letter Well, your philistinism has paid off: you’re the perfect audience member for Footsteps Theatre’s fascinating Scarlet Letter. Phyllis Nagy’s adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel plays like a murder mystery; it seems she’s hoping you won’t remember all the juicy details, since she delights in disclosing them with methodical care. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, she’s just following Hawthorne’s lead....

By Justin Hayford As the man in the blue tank top begins lifting a huge stack of weights, Richard (not his real name) begins his workout. He last injected himself with testosterone and Deca-Durabolin seven days ago, and he’s due for another shot when he gets home. Although he has the bulky upper body typical of someone on steroids, he’ll never achieve the size of the other guys in the gym....

Lead Stories The Litigious Society Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven Weisblat of New City, New York, filed a lawsuit in April against a recently married Armenian-American couple in Hackensack, New Jersey, for various injuries incurred while he was a guest at their wedding. According to the lawsuit, the groom was tossed into the air by inebriated guests performing a traditional dance and landed on Weisblat, who wasn’t even on the dance floor at the time....

My BF and I went to the gay pride celebrations in New York City last weekend. Toward the end of the pier dance a lot of people were turning the event into a “grope-a-nanza,” which was made easy by the jam-packed conditions. I was standing behind my BF and he was pressed tight against the butt of some boy. As the fireworks were going off, the guy that my BF was pushed up against reached around and started massaging my BF’s crotch....

By Ben Joravsky “You know that old song”–it’s a Jerry Butler tune–“that goes, ‘You’re gonna see a whole lotta trouble in your life’? Well, I never could have seen nothin’ like this.” Telling the story of how he moved from one job to another, he takes his time. He’s a big man with a deep voice, a hearty laugh, and an ear for language–“another one of my gifts.” When he starts a story he lets it flow....

I’ve always felt that I was much loved. People loved me. My mother loved me. My father loved me. And when he sat me on his knee and blew smoke in my ear I knew that he loved me. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s why I don’t exactly believe this thing about second-hand smoke. Of course I might still get cancer, but I’ve been around smokers all my life....

Kevin Coyne “I don’t think it’s a put-down to say that a white kid can’t sing black man’s music,” former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman recently told the Oxford American. “I don’t think it applies. You can usually see that, if you go to both shows, you prefer the black man’s version….But if you really love the music, you can get pretty close and you can do it your way–you don’t do it their way....

Begging for an Answer As I paced the corner, the wind picked up and gray skies dropped lower. A spit of rain splashed my face. I stood on Halsted Street, looking up through the telephone wires. Here comes the bodhisattva, as the Buddhists say, the clouds like a robe billowing round his head, a smile informing his almost insane and acrobatic function. “Uh-oh, I’m gonna get it!” I turn my shoulder to the slanting drizzle....

Acting was far from Tenzin Lodoe’s mind while he was growing up in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala. His parents had fled there from Tibet in 1954, when they were children. Lodoe’s father, Tenzin Choegyal, who is the Dalai Lama’s youngest brother, became the Tibetan leader’s assistant, and Rinchen Khando, Lodoe’s mother, served as the government-in-exile’s minister of education. One of the settlement’s proud achievements was continuing the Tibetan way of life....

Digging in the Underground Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With newer alt-rock entries stiffing left and right despite the industry’s best efforts, capitalizing on nostalgia for the progenitors is a logical move. But it’s certainly not as easy as slapping together another Billy Joel collection: fans of X and the ‘Mats tended to be obsessive about them–they bought all their records. So the compilers of each two-CD retrospective had to dig deep into the vaults to find stuff those listeners might be missing....