Escape From the Matrix Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enjoyed the review of The Matrix by Bill Stamets [April 16], and I’d like to add some comments about the movie’s divided neo-Marxist politics. The Matrix can be seen as an allegory of cinema: when Neo and the rest enter the Matrix, with their “ideal body projection” (no scars or acne) and really big guns, they become action-movie stars in a cinematic reality....

By Grant Pick Yet on the eve of his departure, a measure of Maloof’s true influence on his city is the blowout planned for him at the Peoria Civic Center. When Peoria elected him 12 years ago it was reeling from the collapse of Caterpillar Inc., the tractor maker that was–and is–the city’s largest employer. Maloof’s cheerleading helped revive the local economy. Then Caterpillar ran into problems. “Up until the early 80s Caterpillar virtually dictated the life of Peoria, and the company was fat and happy,” recalls Tucker Kennedy, marketing vice president of the Economic Development Council for the Peoria Area....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The #146 bus begins at Berwyn and Broadway and travels south down Marine Drive, inner Lake Shore Drive, and Sheridan, eventually heading out onto the Outer Drive at Belmont. However, since January, callers phoning the RTA information line to check the 146’s schedule have been told that the bus’s northern starting point is at Grace and Lake Shore Drive....

By Shula Neuman Maria Valdes took cello and piano lessons at the school from the time she was 9 until she was 18. She now works for the International Music Foundation, an organization that arranges musical performances in public schools. “I thought it was odd with Rita,” says Valdes, who’s 26. “Everybody was really scared of her, but it was really challenging. Everybody was trying to be the best. When it came time to perform, the performances weren’t nearly as nerve-racking as it was to hear Rita’s comments....

Elliott Smith If you were watching last Saturday, if you hadn’t left your chair to order pizza for the Utah-North Carolina game, you saw that shot go up and then fall harmlessly to the floor. I couldn’t help but wonder if this man’s big opportunity wasn’t likely to haunt him forever after. How many hours’ sleep would he sacrifice replaying the shot in his head? What if he’d bounced the ball six times instead of five?...

KALI Z. FASTEAU Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most blends of jazz and world music fail because the diverse elements are polished to a glossy finish; multi-instrumentalist Kali Z. Fasteau successfully weds free jazz to Eastern traditional styles without sanding down the edges of either. Since the late 60s Fasteau, a resident of Monroe, New York, has immersed herself in the music of other cultures, living and studying in India, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East....

MACHA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hardly unheard-of to layer guitar, bass, and drums over pulsing world-music rhythms; Westerners were doing it even before Paul Simon discovered the Boyoyo Boys. But Macha’s hybrid–whip up a gamelan storm, then play rock on top of it–is so obviously a gold mine you almost want to slap yourself upside the head for not thinking of it first....

POLWECHSEL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In free improvisation at its best, musicians engage in an alchemical conversation that predicts musical gestures as much as it reacts to them. The Austrian quartet Polwechsel–trombonist Radu Malfatti, guitarist Burkhard Stangl, cellist Michael Moser, and bassist Werner Dafeldecker–are not only masters of the sensitive give-and-take, but they apply their sublime skills in a fascinating exploration of sound....

pierrehu.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not long ago, the John Buck Company came with its begging bowl to the city of Chicago, demanding $14 million for road improvements to go along with its massive Nordstrom-anchored project on North Michigan. Chicago wisely said no. Now Buck and his begging bowl are back, this time before Evanston. On a project a tenth the size in Evanston’s Research Park, they are demanding fully $16 million in public money, not even counting a grab bag of costs for other items on Buck’s wish list which haven’t been quantified....

DONNAS 7/30, METRO I don’t envy teenagers today–of course people my age had our every vice and rebellious impulse scrutinized too, to a certain degree, but it was nothing like what 90s kids have to put up with, especially since recent tragedies have made it harder than ever to dress funny or engage in the perfectly natural fantasy of blowing up one’s high school. Remember “School’s Out”? Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll High School?...

Voice of Good Hope Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much ink has been spilled chronicling Jordan’s life. Several biographies have been published as well as her own 1979 memoir, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait. Her determined rise from obscurity in Houston’s impoverished fifth ward to national renown as one of the country’s most conspicuous, respected defenders of constitutional rights seems ready-made for sentimentalization. On the other hand, Jordan’s backroom politicking wouldn’t play well in soft focus....

Even though (or perhaps because) some of its 205 minutes seem repetitive or predictable, this 1973 exploitation of SF and hardboiled-detective cliches is so deeply affecting it could induce an existential crisis in the viewer. Written by Fritz Müller-Scherz and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and based on a novel by Daniel Galouye, this tale of an artificial-intelligence expert investigating the death of a colleague with whom he developed some cutting-edge technology makes Blade Runner seem redundant....

Black God, White Devil Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A key figure in Brazil’s leftist Cinema Novo movement of the 60s, Glauber Rocha became a balladeer for the downtrodden with this 1964 allegory about blind faith among peasants in Brazil’s poor, barren northeast. Manuel, a cowhand who’s killed a rancher in a rage, seeks salvation with a Christlike mystic, then with the last of the bandits fighting the landowning gentry....

Captured at www.envirolink.org/orgs/coe/coefaq.html What is the Church of Euthanasia? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Human population is increasing by one million every four days. This is a net increase of 95 million per year, the current population of Mexico. Even major wars or epidemics hardly dent this rate of growth, and modern wars also have tremendous environmental consequences. It is for these practical reasons, as well as moral ones, that we support only voluntary forms of population reduction....

DENNY ZEITLIN & DAVID FRIESEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Denny Zeitlin leads a Jekyll-and-Hyde life–psychiatrist by day, jazz pianist and composer by night–and when it comes to noting the parallels between personae, I’m powerless to resist. Zeitlin’s music is mentally agile, makes subtle suggestions, and succeeds through analysis; the ideas almost always arise from and reflect upon earlier statements. In the 70s, these qualities achieved actualization on the now-out-of-print albums Zeitgeist and Expansion–the latter an especially cogent fusion record that echoed the visions of a more famous shrink, Timothy Leary–and still supply the matrix for Dr....

KAREN MASON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last time I wrote about Karen Mason–before a show at Lake Point Tower’s penthouse supper club, Cite, in 1997–I said that this Chicago-bred Broadway chanteuse was well on her way to a spot alongside the likes of Barbara Cook in the modern cabaret pantheon. Now, in time for her return to the Wicker Park nightspot Davenport’s (whose grand opening she headlined this fall), Mason seems to have reached that artistic pinnacle....

I knew the city had turned some kind of corner when I realized we would actually make money on our house. For years I thought this was about as likely as my wife, Mary, cashing in on one of the lottery tickets she was always buying. It tells you something about our economic situation that Mary, a bank vice president, thought lottery tickets needed to be a major part of our financial plan....

Various Artists The Philly Sound: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff & the Story of Brotherly Love (1966-1976) (Epic/Legacy) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gamble and Huff rose from freelance songwriters to record-industry heavies in the early 70s. As a teenager in Philadelphia in the mid-50s, Gamble would visit the home of jazz arranger Bobby Martin because he was fascinated by his ability to design tricky countermelodies; ten years later, he and pianist Huff were trying to do the same....

In some ways I was glad to see a front page article in the Reader on the Second World War [March 7]. In other ways I wasn’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first thing that caused me to blink a few times was the claim that “World War II came to America like an epidemic from overseas” and the accompanying paragraphs, which describe the American entry into the war as “war fever” and contrast it with the months of debate that occurred before the gulf war....

Katherine Shaughnessy: Doegirl–and Other Adventures in Bioengineering Helen Mirra The excess of Shaughnessy’s exhibit–the multiple animals and flowers and the painted forest backdrops–gives it an immediate visual appeal. And the combination of Disney-esque images with the caged mutants suggests a world that maintains perfection by imprisoning every being that’s different, even those as innocuous as her charming mutants–a fawn with two heads, a squirrel with a baby-boy head. Even the lamb with baby legs for horns reads more like a collage of toys than a real creature....