By Todd Savage Dedicated bicycle lanes are a key element of the city’s comprehensive plan to promote bicycling. Over the last decade, with Mayor Daley’s support, the city has been building an infrastructure, including a citywide bicycling advisory council, a full-time bicycle planner, and 5,000 new bike racks, to encourage Chicagoans to help cut pollution and traffic congestion by riding bikes to work or to do errands. The blueprint calls for a 300-mile network of bicycle ways on city streets, including five-foot-wide lanes set apart from car traffic, and signs identifying bike-friendly routes....

About five years ago I had sex with this guy I met at a party. In the bathroom of his apartment I noticed a dozen bottles of pills–all familiar AIDS meds. The fact that he had AIDS wasn’t an issue and didn’t cause me anxiety, as we didn’t do anything unsafe. The sex was fine, but the events before and after were weird, and we didn’t speak to each other again....

FAUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though German experimentalists Faust put a song called “Krautrock” on their 1973 album Faust IV–a pulsing, keyboard-driven song, even–they’ve never been bound by that genre’s conventions. In fact, in those days Faust didn’t seem bound by any conventions at all: on its first three records, the band collaged distorted Beatles and Rolling Stones samples, classical piano etudes, propulsive drum breaks, searing electronic noise, disorienting tape-speed experiments, jaunty brass-band interludes, and an occasional folky acoustic-guitar ballad into sprawling, nonnarrative sonic patchworks....

Thank you for printing Patrick Z. McGavin’s article about the School of the Art Institute’s decision to name its Film Center after Gene Siskel (July 14). McGavin is polite and evenhanded, but he breaks the conspiracy of silence about Siskel, who did essentially nothing to advance movies, or movie criticism, as an art form. McGavin writes that “Siskel’s reputation among aficionados suffered because he was more accomplished on television than he was in print....

THE SECRET LIFE OF KUNG-FU CHARLIE, STIR-FRIDAY NIGHT!, at the Chopin Theatre. Though the city is overflowing with comedy troupes, discovering one that actually makes you laugh through the better part of the show is all too rare. But such was my experience last weekend at Stir-Friday Night!’s latest endeavor. Stir-Friday Night! is a mostly Asian-American group of performers who challenge our perceptions and stereotypes about Asian culture through satirical revues....

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Such an approach would have its drawbacks, no doubt. No matter how you twisted the narrative, it would be tough to justify the lobotomy that Ratched orders for McMurphy near the close of the story. But this new tack would help resolve the key problem with Dale Wasserman’s 1963 adaptation of Kesey’s 1962 novel, which anticipated the coming countercultural revolution but was still mired in the sexual politics of the 1950s....

WACO BROTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their recently released fifth album, Electric Waco Chair (Bloodshot), the Waco Brothers haven’t quite captured the drunken energy that fuels their live shows, but they come a lot closer than they did on last year’s glossy-sounding Wacoworld. They’re still moving steadily away from the Clash-meets-Cash aesthetic of their earliest work, sounding more than anything like a bar band with their deep repertoire of rootsy originals....

A View From the Bridge “Look at this,” Joe says disgustedly, catching a pair of underpants with the toe of his hiking boot. “We didn’t have shit like this. We had it bagged up.” Joe and his camp mate–a bearded 59-year-old street veteran who goes by the handle “Old Dude”–first saw trouble coming last fall, when the police gave Old Dude a ticket for rooting through garbage cans. Old Dude earned what little money he needed by cruising the alleys of Lincoln Park, collecting aluminum cans and copper discards from the homes of the prosperous....

There’s something theatrical, something oversize and sensuous about Wilfredo Rivera’s choreography no matter what the subject. In Black Country he uses a ballet bar to represent intractable diseases like cancer and AIDS, but the movement is sultry and luscious: dancers hang from the bars like ripe fruit ready to fall. Set to Joe Cerqua’s bluesy instrumental ballad, this sinuous work gives an impression of pleasurable agony. Tom and Jerry, a piece for the whole company, has a much lighter subject–the connections made during social dancing–but again the movement is bigger than life: the performers mug at one another and at us, they wiggle their heads Fosse-style, they take big, exotic steps, they playfully dangle their hands or upper bodies....

CHEMICAL BROTHERS/FATBOY SLIM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the Chemical Brothers hadn’t hit on their patented combination of rawk guitar and crash-and-pound hip-hop-derived big beats, someone else would’ve. But even though the sound was a sure thing waiting to happen, the Brothers have damn near perfected it–and I’m not talking about the monumentally overrated “Block Rockin’ Beats,” either. Their finest moments seem calculated to puzzle pop audiences: the gargantuan acid-riffing “Three Little Birdies Down Beats” from Exit Planet Dust, for instance, or the subwoofer crusher a-go-go “It Doesn’t Matter” from Dig Your Own Hole....

If anyone can bring anthropologized history out of the dust of display cases and into the present, it’s Spiderwoman Theater, one of the best-known avant-garde women’s performance troupes in the United States. Company members Muriel and Gloria Miguel were impressive in Lifeline Theatre’s 1998 adaptation of Louise Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine, but the three-member troupe’s upcoming performance, marking the closing weekend of “The Art of Being Kuna” exhibit at the Field Museum, will give Chicago a glimpse of the whole company’s brilliance....

I think I’ve found the moment when the self-consciously personal voice of New Journalism finally entered film criticism. It happened in the pages of the Village Voice, which during the 1960s had been one of the best places to learn about film. The paper’s coverage was remarkably broad, running Jonas Mekas’s inspired coverage of the avant-garde scene alongside Andrew Sarris’s reevaluation of narrative cinema from an auteurist perspective. Two new books provide excellent examples of the kind of relationship between the confessional and the professional, the personal and the political, that Sarris and Corliss were so ineptly grasping at....

LEON PARKER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jazz drummer Leon Parker has made a trademark of the stripped-down kit–usually just a snare, cymbal, and bass drum and sometimes less. (When he played with pianist Kenny Barron in the early 90s he used only a cymbal.) While his setup on Alive (Blue Note), the most recent album by pianist Jacky Terrasson’s unique trio, is relatively beefy–snare, cymbal, bass, and tom–Parker’s playing is as spare and mind-bendingly resourceful as anything he’s done....

By her own tally actress Lauren Tom has sought counsel from over 50 psychics in the last 20 years. “My father believed strongly in certain people’s ability to see the future, so he used to drag me to some of his visits,” she explains. “I thought the whole thing was kind of weird. But then my father died–at a relatively young age–and I began to wonder where he went, what had happened....

There is a common (I hesitate to say “popular”) salt substitute called NoSalt that consists of the compound potassium chloride (which is indeed a salt, but not a sodium-based one). This compound is used in other salt substitutes as well. Curiously, this very same compound has been used on several occasions by Dr. Jack Kevorkian for euthanasia (including, if I am not mistaken, his most recent, televised one) and also in executions....

I just read your answer in the Straight Dope archive concerning the five ways to get to first base without hitting the ball. I realize you’re up to six now, but I think the two ways you mentioned are extensions of the interference rule. The true fifth way to reach first without hitting the ball is to be a pinch runner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Any knowledgeable baseball fan can come up with four ways right off the bat (so to speak): base on balls, hit by pitch, dropped third strike, and catcher’s interference....

In Michael Martin’s estimation, America is witnessing the “bedridden stage of privacy’s decline.” But that’s all right with him if it means that the most embarrassing demons of the powerful and pretentious come to light. Always one to revel in popular culture’s more contemptible impulses, he’s now put together “Verbatim Verboten,” a monthly cabaret series based on transcripts acquired secretly and/or illegally. For the debut episode Martin starts at the top: he plays President Nixon discussing some of the messier aspects of Watergate with various members of his administration–played by the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, a local activists’ group (I’ve died and gone to heaven)....

By David Moberg Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hercules and Orenstein decided to collaborate on the film, though they soon discovered that they had different visions for it. Hercules wanted to focus on Alinsky’s life, while Orenstein wanted to examine his political legacy. Orenstein wanted the film to convey something about how organizing succeeds, yet Hercules insisted that the documentary had to tell a story or nobody would watch....

BROKEBACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except for Eleventh Dream Day, every major project Douglas McCombs has participated in has had its genesis in exploring new contexts for the bass. Nearly a decade ago, inspired by Dos–the bass duo of former Minuteman Mike Watt and his wife, Kira–McCombs and drummer John Herndon founded Mosquito, a bass and drum duo that quickly grew into the much more complicated quintet Tortoise....

Revenge of the raccoons. Nearly half of Illinois raccoons tested in a recent three-year study had been exposed to a Leptospira bacteria that can cause disease in humans. Now, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, “Leptospirosis was diagnosed recently in a group of Illinois teenagers, who contracted it while swimming in a woodland pond. Most commonly, the disease is spread through contact with infected urine.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....