DOROTHY MOORE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like a lot of other artists previously characterized as “soul” or “R & B” entertainers, vocalist Dorothy Moore has hit the blues circuit in search of a comeback. Born in Mississippi, Moore got her start in gospel music, but by the time she was in her teens she was performing secular music in talent shows. In 1966, as lead singer of the Poppies, she enjoyed some success with “Lullaby of Love”; after the band broke up she did session work with a variety of soul and R & B artists as well as the occasional recording under her own name, but it wasn’t until “Misty Blue” (1976) that she established herself as a headliner....

Going in Style After a few introductions Byrd, the club’s host, says into the mike, “Hit it!” A couple more minutes pass as the murmuring crowd waits. Jo-Jo and Billy the Kid had been the first of the performers to arrive earlier that night. Around 10:30 PM they skipped past the line forming outside and greeted the bouncers. Descending into Shelter’s cluttered basement, they passed a rack of employee time cards and a large painted plywood sign that read “Shelter open thru MAR ’98” and settled into the makeshift dressing room with its high ceilings, black walls spray painted with a few unintelligible phrases (“until your smile makes it right”), a couple of ragged couches, a cardboard box marked “old clothes,” and a sparkle-covered sign that reads “The Glitter Palace....

I thought Renaldo Migaldi’s article “Natural Born Killers” (Reader, Section One, 11/26/99) was beautifully written, and especially considering the controversial nature of the subject matter remarkably measured, reasoned, and compassionate. His descriptions of the hunting with the dogs was marvelous, as he joined his father in his “killing a few consciousnesses” in the Michigan countryside. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would ask only one thing....

John Frusciante If a Red Hot Chili Pepper falls and nobody hears, does he still make a sound? Unfortunately, yes. John Frusciante, who as a teenager held down the Chili Peppers’ notoriously unstable guitar post for their commercial breakthrough albums, Mother’s Milk and BloodSugarSexMagik, walked out on his fellow cocksockers in 1992, right in the middle of the big payoff. Reportedly unstrung by the band’s swelling popularity and then increasingly enthralled by heroin, he all but disappeared, then resurfaced with his eerie 1994 solo debut, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-shirt (American)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was surprised to see the June 23 Reader cover story on the Veterans Administration’s hospitals and the Hot Type piece on the AMA and “universal health care” in the same issue. Michael Miner takes a strident, clearly pro-free health care tone, but he would do well to read the cover story on our existing free health care system....

New York City during the summer of 1977, with the Son of Sam serial killings providing a frame for (and backdrop to) the main action. This sprawling, highly ambitious film, adapted from a script by Michael Imperioli and Victor Colicchio, is the first in which director Spike Lee has concentrated almost exclusively on white characters (most of them Italian-American), and if his own cameo as a TV reporter is the least convincing performance, it nonetheless offers a succinct and fascinating summary of his complex relation to the story....

The Incredible Shrinking Acts Group Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ideally, Goldenberg would like PAC to maintain a presence during the first part of the season while it restructures and prepares a more significant lineup of events for the spring. “Maybe we could do the Vermeer [Quartet] in the fall,” she says. But even that depends on the success of the current fund-raising effort....

I agree with you that homeopathy is bunk, but what about acupuncture? Most of the commentary I’ve seen so far has been of the “maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, more research is needed” variety. Come on, I’ve been reading about acupuncture for years–surely medical science has been able to form some tentative conclusions by now. (2) There’s pretty sparse evidence that it does. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. B-52s perform at the 10th annual black-tie benefit for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago....

TRIO GLOBO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The band’s name describes the music it plays–music from around the world, Rio to New Delhi, Oslo to Johannesburg. But almost any project that stars Howard Levy ought to have the word “globo” in its name. The Chicago-based Levy is a musical polymath, absorbing both musical styles and musical skills like a sponge. A demon pianist in his teens, he began fooling around with the blues harp before he left college and soon invented a technique of bending notes up, not just down like every blues-harp player before him; he can take a little Hohner Marine Band where no harmonicat has gone before....

BRIAN LYNCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jazz fans don’t usually start with trumpeter Brian Lynch when they name the young lions who came of age in the 80s–even though at 42 he’s only five years older than Wynton Marsalis, and can play rings around most of his contemporaries. Talk to musicians, though, and Lynch’s secure place in the modern jazz mainstream becomes obvious: he’s earned it with both his muscular technique and the way he solos from the ground up, building chorus after chorus on rock-solid motivic foundations....

Mark Arctander John Hoft Much recent art, including three current exhibits, addresses this reduction of experience to objects. Several of the 16 new works by Mark Arctander, a Chicagoan born in Elmhurst in 1956, at Roy Boyd deal explicitly with books–a subject that’s become so common critics have coined the term “book artist.” In his statement Arctander suggests that by presenting books in ways that make them incapable of fulfilling their “normal function” he allows the viewer to “inject his/her own mental text....

CHARLIE HUNTER & POUND FOR POUND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few musicians in the 90s have managed to personalize 70s funk as adeptly as guitarist Charlie Hunter–he digs a deep groove but lines it with silk. To do so he puts on a bit of a freak show, simultaneously playing bass lines and guitar solos on an eight-string guitar and sending the low end out over a separate speaker....

Sun Ra The Singles (Evidence) In the 1940s Sun Ra migrated from Alabama to Chicago, where he worked with R & B vocal combos as well as star solo singers. He also played piano in an ensemble led by the legendary Fletcher Henderson, and when he formed his own group in the 50s, he took a cue from Henderson, composing and arranging for specific instrumentalists rather than instruments. That, and the complex and uncanny nature of the arrangements, made such outstanding jazz musicians as saxophonists John Gilmore, Pat Patrick, and Marshall Allen faithfully devoted to him....

CUBANISMO! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between our government’s foolish embargo and the proliferation of watered-down pop salsa, many of Cuba’s most potent musical traditions have lost their currency. And though he’s been living in London for the past four years, trumpeter Jesus Alema–y seems hell-bent on resuscitating them. On the two albums by his 14-piece band, Cubanismo!, Alema–y is the primary voice in a fiery front line that weaves its way through a variety of Cuban rhythms, both in original tunes and classics....

By Heather Kenny Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As set changes transformed the stage into various famous clubs–none of them in Chicago–and androgynous young men in skinny pants gyrated to the beat, models sashayed down the runway (consider yourself warned: flowered pants for men and women appear to be big for fall). In between songs, Queen Latifah and Chic entreated the audience to get up and boogie....

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious The Neo-Futurists have a knack for finding the funny in even the most serious issue. That’s one reason their late-night hit Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind has been running continuously for almost 12 years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Neo-Futurists have kept their aesthetic purity and scrupulously maintained their on-the-fringe stance. None of them has gone on to star in a sitcom or appear in a movie with Adam Sandler–or even, I suspect, dreams of it....

Four Corners I’ve been brooding a lot lately about the way in which many of the best movies around have been ravaged by “narrative correctness.” This is the notion fostered by producers, distributors, and critics–often collaborating as script doctors and always deeply invested in hackwork–that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of telling stories in movies. And woe to the filmmaker who steps out of line. Much as “political correctness” can point to a displaced political impotence–a desire to control language and representation that sets in after one despairs of changing the political conditions of power–“narrative correctness” has more to do with what supposedly makes a movie commercial than with what makes it interesting, artful, or innovative....

In 1967 Roger Fouts, then a grad student at the University of Nevada at Reno, began working with psychologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner on a project to teach an infant chimpanzee to talk. The chimp, Washoe, had been captured in Africa for air force medical experiments. The Gardners had brought her home from a lab in New Mexico and were raising her almost like a human child. Washoe played with dolls, ate in a high chair, and was learning to “talk” using American Sign Language....

Actor and director Chi Muoi Lo can trace his fearlessness to his mother. As a seven-year-old in southern China, Lo says, she was sold by peasant parents to a childless couple, and she learned early to fend for herself and to be resourceful–skills that would come in handy later. In the mid-50s she and Lo’s father fled China’s communist regime by boat and headed for an enclave of ethnic Chinese merchants in Phan Rang, near the southeast coast of Vietnam....