By Don De Grazia I first noticed him about a dozen years ago, on my morning rides downtown to school. I’d be holding on to the silver bar, standing with a jam-packed trainful of bleary-eyed commuters. At every stop his voice would come over the mike and he’d make some happy comment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Gentlemen, if you see a lady standing, please give her your seat....

ROYAL CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA OF AMSTERDAM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all the exceptional symphonic ensembles in the world, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is most like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in history and sound. Both were formed during the late-19th-century industrial boom by proud burghers eager to promote high culture in their provincial towns. Both benefited from the long-term tenure of visionary leaders (Willem Mengelberg for the Concertgebouw, Frederick Stock for the CSO)....

Sears Theater Fever Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the second year in a row, the League of Chicago Theatres has teamed up with Sears, Roebuck and Company to promote Chicago-area theater with a week of activities. Though all the free tickets set aside by various theaters for the week of March 1 have been snapped up, Saturday’s kickoff “Sampler Day” has plenty to whet the appetites of current and potential theater lovers–and to showcase the diversity of local entertainment, from the splashy mainstream to the gritty fringes....

The funk that has oppressed the White Sox since the 1994 players’ strike seemed to lift a little when they opened the second half of the season with a 13-game home stand. Albert Belle, the epitome of funk, started clubbing the ball, with ten home runs in the first ten of those games, giving him 28 on the season and an even 300 in his turbulent career. The team’s two other big guns, Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura, both won games with homers in the bottom of the ninth....

FLYING LUTTENBACHERS 11/28, LOUNGE AX Too persistent to be a joke, too arrogant to be serious, Weasel Walter’s excessively excessive sonic-sabotage project just keeps picking up steam. At their best–which their new Gods of Chaos (Skin Graft) arguably is–the Luttenbachers sound like a high-speed tour-van wreck between Naked City and Fushitsusha while both bands just happen to be listening to a crappy live tape of Fear playing “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones....

By Ted Kleine In 1980, political agitator Pat Quinn collected over 477,000 signatures to put his “Cutback Amendment” on the ballot. It proposed to replace the 177-member house with 118 representatives elected from single-member districts. The assembly had just given itself a big pay increase, so voters loved the idea of firing 59 legislators at one stroke. The amendment passed by a two-thirds majority. The “Big House,” as the old legislature was nicknamed, was dead....

devise.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jordan Marsh’s cover story “Targeted for Removal?” (October 23) rightly ponders the reasons behind the settlement, and nontrial, of the Addison lawsuit, characterized by Marsh as the “largest and most contentious housing-discrimination case in recent history.” But Marsh wrongly implies a conspiracy of silence between the Department of Justice and the Addison defendants. A more likely explanation, only hinted at in Marsh’s one-sided account, is that Addison had a solid defense of implementing an antiblight and anticrowding program in the six-county area’s most overcrowded suburban neighborhood....

By Ben Joravsky The project, targeted for undeveloped city-owned land along Halsted just south of North Avenue, is part of a larger effort Mayor Daley calls his Near North Redevelopment Initiative. Twenty-five years ago it would have been hard to imagine a project of this magnitude that was mixed-income and claimed a mainstream politician like Daley as its champion. As recently as the late 1970s, most of the land around Cabrini was written off as an unsalvable slum....

They wanted me to come to a high school in Glenview, Illinois, to lecture about my writing and they paid me very well, so I did it. Last Thursday. There was a time when I might have commanded more, but this was something like 250 dollars a minute for an hour or so. A lot of that time I just read from my work, or recycled old stories about myself, and it was a good cause, so why not....

BIG SANDY AND HIS FLY-RITE BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These days it’s pretty hard to tell one rockabilly revivalist from the other, much less get juiced about what they do. They’ve all got the vintage duds and vintage gear, and they all cover the obscure nuggets, but they’re all too reverent to bring anything distinctive to the party. Anaheim’s Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys is a rare outfit with the songwriting skill, instrumental prowess, and sheer exuberance to bust out of the nostalgia trap....

Friday 4/2 – Thursday 4/8 The Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum has said that viewing the 13 movies made by French director Robert Bresson as they were made to be seen–on the big screen–“will transform [our] understanding of what the art of the film can be and do.” Tonight the Film Center will screen new prints of Bresson’s films Les anges du peche and Les dames du Bois de Boulogne at 6 and 8 respectively....

FRANK GRATKOWSKI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reedist Frank Gratkowski may not get confrontational as quickly as his contemporaries in the German avant-garde, but he’s no less adventurous. The restrained, chamberlike quality of his playing translates as well to jaggedly mathematical improvisations as it does to long, gently burnished ones. His instruments of choice–clarinet, bass clarinet, alto sax, and soprano sax–line up toward the delicate end of the reed spectrum, which obviously contributes to the often hushed fragility of his music, but just as important is his sharp sense of drama and architecture....

PITA/FENNESZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Electronic music has long been equated with cold perfection, but in the last decade a number of artists have set their sights on fucking up its flawless systems. While British artists like Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada have pulled it off in the context of what can broadly be labeled dance music, a number of veteran German and Austrian techno artists have been removing their experiments to a separate realm, a world without beats....

I’m a 17-year-old breeder chick. I really love guys. The problem is, I want to be the one with the dick. I’ve heard of guys who will let their wives fuck them up the ass with a strap-on. What I’ve never heard of is a teenage boy who’ll let me fuck him up the ass. I can’t place a personal ad because I am not 18, and I’m not interested in some 30-year-old guy....

Is there such a thing as a pornography recycling center? I just got a new girlfriend and she wants me to get rid of my collection of porno videos (about 30). I also have some hard-core het print magazines I want to get rid of (they remind me of a time when I had neither girlfriend nor VCR). You can’t just toss these things in the garbage, for fear that someone might find them, and none of my friends wants my old porn....

SHEMEKIA COPELAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You have to signify to qualify,” Shemekia Copeland’s father, the late bluesman Johnny “Clyde” Copeland, told her. And Turn the Heat Up, her 1998 debut disc on Alligator, would’ve made her daddy proud: from its first note Copeland exudes sass and self-assurance far beyond her 19 years. Her potent voice is simultaneously dusky and brilliant, ornamented with fine variations in timbre; she deftly negotiates extended phrases and tricky intervals with unfailing sureness of pitch and emotional intensity, and her distinctive blues style spans everything from fervid gospel to slick modern-day R & B....

In a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement, American sociologist and historian Richard Sennett examined the failure of socialism in the United States and argued that Americans seem to have a different take than people in England and continental Europe on collectivity itself. One reason he suggests for this difference—that slavery confused and perhaps even undermined our overall sense of the dignity of labor, ultimately altering our sense of collective labor—is both provocative and debatable....

By Michael Miner “Illinois was called the ‘Prairie State,’ and we have so little of the native prairies and open woods left, especially in this region,” she continues. “We should revere them, instead of fearing our prairies, or our wetlands, or our marshes. This is part of our history, and it’s a living history, a still evolving history. We read and we listen to music, but we also go out into nature....

Born in Caracas, the son of a harpsichordist who founded one of the first Baroque ensembles in Latin America, Aldo Abreu didn’t take up the recorder until his early teens. He liked its dulcet, hollow sound, but realized that most people didn’t consider it a serious instrument: it was too simple and old-fashioned, a folk curiosity or a toy. In his studies, though, he discovered a trove of Renaissance and Baroque recorder pieces–many of which were already well-known in their flute transcriptions–and knew he’d made the right choice....

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shaw Chicago has dug up another half-buried Shavian treasure, an early trifle written for Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw’s favorite actress–until he encountered Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Lady Cicely Waynflete is a spunky globe-trotter (based on a real explorer) who defies convention with her invincible common sense. Gamely journeying to Morocco with her magistrate brother-in-law and a guide, the gruff Captain Brassbound, she’s confronted with a family scandal and a sheikh who slaughters Christians....