By Cate Plys If I weren’t against book burning, I’d be recruiting some torch-bearing villagers to advance on the publisher’s warehouse right now. Instead I’ll have to content myself with torching Crittenden’s outrageously faulty logic. Two prominent IWF members who have provided more than their share of commentary are Laura Ingraham, a former Reagan White House aide and law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University philosophy professor and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that often assists the IWF in compiling studies....

Jerry Hadley and Bo Skovhus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tenor Jerry Hadley and baritone Bo Skovhus, both regulars with the Vienna State Opera, have performed frequently with the Lyric Opera, though never in the same production. But this week they’ll sing together in a freebie concert at Grant Park offered by the Lyric as a goodwill gesture and a promo for its new season–Hadley will sing the title role in The Great Gatsby, and Skovhus has a role in The Queen of Spades....

Love and Death on Long Island Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A reclusive, old-fashioned, intellectual novelist and widower living in London (John Hurt) stumbles accidentally into a screening of Hotpants College II at his local multiplex and becomes hopelessly, obsessively enamored of one of its young American stars (Jason Priestley). Fan magazines and the purchase of a VCR fail to satisfy his longings, so he travels to the Long Island town where his beloved resides and plots to encounter him in the flesh....

Clearly Shirley Mordine wants something bigger than the human, larger than life, from her dancers for the conclusion of her new piece, Tracking the Heart: during rehearsal she tells them that they should feel they’re “moving mountains, changing oceans.” The phrase “grand opera” keeps coming up. And indeed the last scene of the dance’s third and final section, a man gently pulling a reluctant woman offstage, has a biblical resonance, as if we were watching Lot lead his wife out of Sodom or Adam leaving the Garden of Eden with Eve....

MOUNTAIN GOATS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the end of his 1994 tune “Seed Song” John Darnielle, the singer and guitarist who calls himself the Mountain Goats, closes his tale of a disastrous drought by singing “I know you’re waiting for the ironic ending / And I know you’re waiting for the punch line / And I know you’re waiting for the rain to come by / So am I....

It seems to be universally agreed that Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) is the greatest Spanish-language filmmaker we’ve ever had, but getting a clear fix on his peripatetic career isn’t easy. The authorized biography, John Baxter’s 1994 Bunuel, isn’t available in the U.S., and the deplorable English translation of Bunuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh (1983), is actually an unacknowledged condensation of the original French text. Better are an interview book translated from Spanish, Objects of Desire, and a recently published translation of selected writings by Bunuel in both Spanish and French, An Unspeakable Betrayal, which includes his priceless, poetic early film criticism....

PIERRE FAVRE DRUM ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Switzerland, the country that practically invented timekeeping, has produced only a handful of internationally known jazz musicians–and not surprisingly, most of them have been drummers. Of the three important Swiss percussionists of the last 30 years, Pierre Favre is the least well-known, behind Daniel Humair and Fritz Hauser; he tours infrequently, and in fact this performance is his local debut....

I’ve been going out with a guy I’m in love with for two years. I’m 16, he’s 18. He says it would be OK for me to do things with other people, short of any actual sex acts. The person I have the most interest in besides my boyfriend is one of his closest friends at our high school. My boyfriend knows I’m attracted to his friend and told me it’s OK....

The Case of the Disappearing Dildo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in 1997 the museum’s special events department invited six artists to decorate umbrellas for the terrace; the following spring Heather Felty, a curatorial assistant, was asked to add a dozen new pieces to the collection. Darmody had recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute (where he’d once worked for MCA assistant curator Michael Rooks), and he eagerly accepted a $200 commission to design an umbrella, with up to $100 for expenses....

Six stories above the intersection at Clark and Halsted looms a billboard that reads, “The Secret to selling Real Estate is Chaz. ” A photo shows the smiling Chaz Walters wearing a tie and white shirt, his shoulder revealing a hint of suspender. A red box announces that he’s sold more than $67 million worth of houses and apartments. “Call me cheesy if you want,” says Walters, “but I’m the person who will sell your unit....

An Apology for the Course & Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening The more it’s tapped, the more Theater Oobleck’s well of creativity seems to replenish itself. A decade ago, this scraggly band of political and literary renegades arrived from Ann Arbor to produce a string of sprawling, ambitious, exhaustively entertaining plays. Holed up on Broadway in the former home of onetime avant-garde darlings IgLoo Theater, Oobleck worked so fast and furiously that their torrent of brilliance seemed destined to dry up in short order....

HAMID DRAKE & MICHAEL ZERANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve circled the sun six times since Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang first celebrated the winter solstice with an intimate concert in 1990. Their annual event–which has evolved from that single performance of Mesopotamian frame-drum duets into this year’s two-day, four-part international percussion extravaganza–has taken root over a period that’s seen vast changes in Chicago’s jazz community, and Zerang and Drake have been in the thick of those developments....

KENNY DREW JR. QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An inheritance can be a burden as well as a gift, as Kenny Drew Jr. well knows. He received his name and his talent from his father, who played piano with Lester Young and Sonny Rollins in the 50s and composed several hundred jazz songs before his death in ’93, and anyone who’d heard the old man’s carefully carved solos would have high expectations for his son....

Northwestern Dean Bolts With Fellowship Program Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But all of this is about to end in Chicago. At the conclusion of the current school year a revamped version of the NAJP is moving, along with departing Medill dean Michael Janeway, to the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York. For at least the next three years all NAJP fellows will be based at Columbia, where in addition to teaching courses Janeway will take over administration of the program from Medill professor Abe Peck....

Rushmore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wes Anderson’s second feature has some of the charm and youthful comic energy of its predecessor (Bottle Rocket), also coscripted by Owen Wilson, but it also represents a quantum leap. Jason Schwartzman plays an ambitious working-class tenth-grader who’s flunking out of a private school–the Rushmore of the title–because he’s too engrossed in extracurricular activities. To make matters worse, he develops a crush on a young widow who’s a grammar-school teacher (Olivia Williams)....

By Mario Kladis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There were three of us standing in front of the Charles Ray orgy at the Museum of Contemporary Art last Friday night–me, a short girl wearing rabbit ears, and a tall girl in a see-through dress. They were both really pretty and they were talking about the artwork. Since I couldn’t tell what I thought of it, I moved closer to hear their opinions and maybe make up one of my own....

Morning, Noon and Night Spalding Gray is a pig. Charming, articulate, funny, but a pig. So what? you might ask. You’re not married to him. Oh, but I am (or was for 25 years, until my husband’s death two years ago–and no, I did not murder him, much as I would have liked to on occasion). Countless American women are married to Spalding Gray: the assumptions about gender roles he makes in his insidiously attractive new monologue, Morning, Noon and Night, are pervasive in men of a certain age and class–assumptions that strangle women’s creative lives....

Is it possible to have eyes of two different colors? I scoffed when I heard this at work recently, but others said it happens all the time, and one guy even claimed to know a woman who was “bi” (colored, that is). Are these people imagining things, or is it just that I’m a wuss who never looks people in the eye? –John O’Keefe, Westchester, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Did the Russians ever play Russian roulette? Somewhere I acquired the explanation that czarist Russian officers played the game to prove their bravery. Could you get to the bottom of this barrel for me? –Perry Starkey, San Antonio, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nowadays Russian roulette is generally understood to mean a particularly grim game of chicken in which you load a revolver with a single bullet, spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger....

THEE HEADCOATS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1978 a disgruntled teenage dockworker in Chatham, England, took to heart the advice in Mark Perry’s fanzine Sniffin’ Glue: he learned three chords and formed a band. Bill Hamper quit his job to become punk rocker Billy Childish, and nearly two decades later he’s still gainfully unemployed. He’s published more than two dozen books of dyslexic poetry, exhibited his oil paintings and woodcuts in London galleries, and released 60-odd albums with a surfeit of groups, including the Pop Rivets, the Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, and Thee Headcoats....