Os Mutantes (Omplatten) Tropicalia was for the most part a sort of easy listening with fangs: mainstream bossa nova that incorporated flippant social commentary, the studio trickery of psychedelic rockers like Jimi Hendrix, and lush, weird arrangements inspired by Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. The music scandalized both the Brazilian pop establishment, which didn’t take kindly to being mocked, and the right-wing military government, which rewarded Gil and Veloso’s politically charged public stances first by imprisoning them and then by forcing them into exile....

Friday 9/29 – Thursday 10/5 30 SATURDAY Poet, novelist, and diplomat Miguel Angel Asturias’s first novel, El senor presidente, was a scathing condemnation of the regime of Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. He went on to write several more novels marked by his signature fusion of Mayan mysticism and passionate social protest, including 1949’s Hombres de maiz, a depiction of the plight of Mayan peasants that’s widely considered to be his masterpiece....

“Gay organizing is far from achieving its potential in some surprising areas of the country,” writes Doug Ireland in the Nation (July 12), describing Chicago as a “paradigm” for this failure. “The Second City’s mayor, Richie Daley, has managed to co-opt much of the gay community with a shrewd combination of patronage and symbolic gestures: The city has provided domestic partnership benefits to its employees since 1997, and as part of his citywide gentrification and urban renewal program, Daley spruced up Halsted Street, adorning it with gay rainbow markers....

Want to live in the country? Pay for it. In a new report on “scatter development” near three Chicago suburbs, A. Ann Sorensen and J. Dixon Esseks find that “the annual per home costs of busing, street maintenance and new infrastructure facilities not financed by existing taxes are relatively modest. These deficits could be covered by increases in tax rates or in special development impact fees that would not drive out the middle-to-upscale families locating in the sites we studied....

Friday 11/13 – Thursday 11/19 14 SATURDAY When I tell people I’m a vegetarian, they usually either go on the attack (“Plants feel pain. Why don’t you stop eating plants?”) or say they’re vegetarian too–except for eating fish. The people at today’s Lifestyles of the Healthy and Human conference on vegetarianism will back me up: Fish are animals, so people who eat fish are not vegetarians. The guest panelists at the conference include Gene Bauston, author of Battered Birds, Crated Herds: How We Treat the Animals We Eat; Oprah mad-cow trial codefendant Howard Lyman; and Animal’s Agenda magazine founder Jim Mason, who will explain how meat consumption impacts the environment and the world economy....

DIANE DELIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The classical associations of the violin only go so far in explaining its rarity in jazz. The instrument is widely considered the hardest to learn–at least, the hardest to learn well enough to play in public–and in a music dependent on improvisation, which in turn depends on virtuosity, the winnowing process becomes accordingly harsher than it would be for, say, saxophonists....

EXPERIMENTAL TOKYO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The culture of technology in Japan has produced a deeply subversive counterculture that expresses itself best in sound. Pushing gadgetry to the hilt, a well-established underground of sonic extremists is hard at work recording electroacoustic music–taking turntable manipulation beyond its beat-bound hip-hop phase, discovering unplanned ways to use computer programs, and generally mixing up a tasty dead-tech hash....

FRIGG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » See what Charles Ives hath wrought: fallout from the eclecticist tradition can be found in post-60s Dutch jazz, the downtown New York scene, Italian intergeneric free music, French Canadian musique actuell, and now Berlin’s Frigg. On its 1995 debut, Doenerfressing Woman (99 Records), the German quintet revels in improbable stylistic leaps, a la John Zorn–grunge guitar chords cut to sweet chamber music cut to marching band cut to swinging jazz like images cranked through a View-Master....

IAN PACE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although he’s only 30, pianist Ian Pace has become one of England’s most acclaimed exponents of new music, having given more than 80 world premieres of solo pieces by contemporary composers like Howard Skempton, Gerhard StŠbler, and Michael Finnissy. His performance here, a local debut, will feature technically demanding, rigorously cerebral works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Helmut Lachenmann, Luigi Nono, Brian Ferneyhough, StŠbler, and Iannis Xenakis....

Landscape Artist Soon more houses were built, and the airport began to grow, intruding on Kowalski’s idyllic neighborhood. Midway serviced armed-forces aircraft during World War II. “We had a runway parallel to our house. I’d stand in the prairie there and throw rocks at the planes. I don’t know what I was thinking. I remember a B-17 was coming in, and the nose gunner shook his finger at me when he saw me winding up....

Lead Stories A June Wall Street Journal dispatch from Tokyo described the trend of “serial divorce”: young married women desiring to keep their maiden names on official documents circumvent Japanese law by getting a divorce when a government document is needed and then usually remarrying their husbands immediately afterward. And according to a March New York Times report, cosmetics firms are doing a brisk business in products that reduce or mask the odor of noneal, a chemical released in greater quantity as people age....

Dear Ms. True, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last two decades that I have been involved in selling art in Chicago, there has been no end to speculation about creating the ideal gallery district to emulate the exciting areas in New York City. I think it’s a bit insulting to the quality of work sold there to think that the inept buyers are more motivated by a fashionable neighborhood than by the art they hang on their walls....

By Ben Joravsky But the tide of criticism has been rising lately, flooding community groups and congressional aides. It’s a new variation on the common lament about the mindlessness and meaninglessness of standardized testing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The N-400 is supposed to weed out criminals, subversives, and deviants. The section labeled “additional eligibility factors” asks applicants: “Have you ever: a. been a habitual drunkard?...

Chicago’s Next Dance Festival Cindy Brandle wants to address transformation in Awakening. Midway through the dance–a premiere for the fifth annual Next Dance Festival, which continues with two additional programs through February 6–we hear her text over the loudspeakers: “It was a struggle. It always is. I slept, only for the awakening….When will the arms that hold me melt?…I am stillness, bathed in trust; even within sleep, I am finding awakening....

RIVERDANCE–THE SHOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However gigglesome its pretensions, Riverdance–The Show is a hell of a good time. Despite its glitzy lighting and smoke, overloud music, and supposed cataclysmic events (the “official programme” ludicrously describes “massed dancers and orchestra in full flight”), the show’s heart is dance, and I’m convinced that’s why people flock to see it. There’s nothing like three dozen Irish dancers in hard shoes striking sparks with the floor in unison–and miked, yet–to produce a thunderous response in an audience....

Last year the Film Center screened Last Dance, the 69-minute film directed by Tsai Ming-liang for the French TV anthology “2000 Seen By”; this 95-minute version is the one Tsai prefers, though the film is well worth seeing in any form. An SF story set in the present, wryly postapocalyptic and gorgeously shot and framed, it charts the effects of an epidemic on a Taipei man and the woman who lives in the apartment directly below his....

Like all good parents, I mindlessly pass on cultural traditions to my kids and usually don’t have a clue where they came from. We decorate a tree in December, hide colored eggs on Easter, and in October we dress up and carve pumpkins, and my kids tape up pictures of witches on broomsticks on the window. I’ve heard theories about some of these other things, but where did the “witches flying on broomsticks” thing come from?...

THIEVERY CORPORATION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On last year’s Sounds From a Thievery Hi-Fi (Eighteenth Street Lounge), the D.C. DJ duo of Eric Hilton and Rob Garza delivered an overlong sampladelic sound track for a millennial bachelor pad, floating bits of bossa nova, Latin jazz, dub, trip-hop, and jazz fusion over imperturbable grooves. It was a tasty cocktail, but close listening reveals that the good taste isn’t necessarily their own....

mendels.qxd A word about my credentials. I’m a supporter of the current IVI-IPO officers. I serve on the near south chapter board and the state board of directors. I’ve been a member for 35 years, and served as state chair at the time of Harold Washington’s election as mayor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the beginning of the article Felshman quotes from Meites’s Reader ad to the effect that 25 to 50 percent of IVI-IPO-endorsed judicial candidates in the 1996 primary were found unqualified by both the Chicago Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers....

By Carlos Hernández Gómez Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rodgers, whose father was a musician, grew up in Greenwich Village, where in his early teens he started hanging around with a group of young anarchists called the Resistance. “I was disillusioned with the way the peace and civil rights movement was going,” he says. “Becoming a Panther was a natural progression.” But though he’d heard about the Oakland-based organization on the national news, he wasn’t sure where to find the Panthers in New York....