The public passion for Pete Rose leaves me dumbfounded. Not only did Rose commit the unpardonable sin of betting on baseball–at least in the judgment of then commissioner Bart Giamatti in 1989–he was not a very great player. It’s ludicrous to count him among the game’s immortals, even as the all-time hits leader. So Rose amassed 4,256 hits in his 24-year career, topping Ty Cobb’s 4,191 (4,189 by the count of the revision-minded Total Baseball); he did so by playing more games, batting more times, and making more outs than anyone else in baseball history....

And it reveals the explosive desperation that propelled McCormick through the steel shutters on a bathroom window and out onto the manicured grounds of his 87-acre estate, where he wound up with his physician’s pet orangutan, each masturbating the other. Did McCormick really break out of his private rail car and attack a woman while being transported by train from a Boston asylum to California? Did his sister Mary Virginia, who also suffered from mental illness, strip naked in front of Stanley in the bathroom of their Rush Street mansion while their father’s body lay in state in the parlor?...

TORTOISE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t begin to count the number of references I’ve seen to Tortoise’s jazz leanings, yet in all the recordings and performances I’ve witnessed over the last six years, I’ve never heard the band borrow more than the occasional voicing or riff from that genre. And as for its supposed penchant for improvisation–well, if anything, Tortoise’s last Chicago show, way back in May 1997 at the Vic, demonstrated a collective inability to wing it....

Bailiwick Repertory Directors’ Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailiwick Repertory’s 11th annual showcase of projects by emerging directors features programs of one-acts–one to three per evening–that run the gamut from established classical and contemporary selections to avant-garde rarities and untested original material. The fest runs through August 25 at Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-883-1090. Performance times are Mondays-Wednesdays at 7:30 PM....

Yeah, but did Saint Jerome ever bat .400? “Shared memories hold us together as families, as baseball fans, as Catholics,” writes Cathy O’Connell-Cahill in U.S. Catholic (November). “Our history of Catholic heroes and heroines–saints, I mean–is much more fascinating and a lot longer than the history of major-league baseball, but while baseball makes better and better use of its own history (witness last year’s 50th anniversary commemoration of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the major leagues), we seem to have let the power of our own Catholic stories slip away....

Concept movies are rarely as galvanizing as this deliberately disorienting 1993 movie-within-a-movie. Some scenes seem improvised or even documentary, some are impossible to relegate to a single level of fictional reality. Yet there’s a clear story line in which Harvey Keitel plays movie director Eddie Israel and Madonna plays Sarah Jennings, a celebrity recommended for a lead role in his latest production by her on- and offscreen allure, star status in another medium, and capital....

The women sit cross-legged in the back corner of the Muslim Community Center mosque, near Elston and Kostner, their heads bowed under hajab scarves. “Like they say here in America, there is no free lunch!” says the disembodied voice of the imam, who is hidden from them by a curtain. In a cloud of swirling fabric, the rows of women rise, then sink to their knees and arch forward, their lips brushing the floor....

You may have seen the commercial. It’s shot in the crudely effective style of ads for bankruptcy lawyers and credit counseling services: a lone spokeswoman locks her gaze on the camera and, while print scrolls across the bottom of the screen, encourages every paranoid thought you might have had about participating in the bold new world of E-commerce. She speaks of hackers who’ve broken into computer files at the FBI and the Pentagon and asks if your privacy is destined to be invaded next....

MOUNTAIN VIEW, NATURAL SUNBATHING, Bailiwick Repertory. It’s a good thing several sexy men lounge about naked for much of Mountain View, Natural Sunbathing because there’s not much else to keep your attention for the production’s 90 minutes. Daniel Kipp’s aimless assemblage of bland conversations, part of the Pride Series ’98, is no more a play than a piano tumbling down several flights of stairs is a concerto. At a gay resort in Palm Springs, six men coagulate under the desert sun and chitchat for the first act–about the bar scene, working out, sexual ethics, dinner plans, and just about anything else that comes into their heads....

Paula Frasz and Kim Neal Nofsinger Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not every day you see a dance about middle-aged love–in fact, I don’t think I’d ever seen one until I watched Kim Neal Nofsinger’s Old and Easy, which he dances with Paula Frasz. Set to two Rosemary Clooney songs, it features an ancient, tacky armchair and lots of easy, comfy, sliding partnering, a little tongue-in-cheek old-guard romance, and a generally permissive attitude and style....

Before her first trip to America 11 years ago, Chinese writer Geling Yan had to do some paperwork for her sponsor, the U.S. Information Agency. “They had me fill out a form of who I wanted to see,” says Yan. “I put all these big shots’ names. I didn’t know that it was not possible to arrange that kind of meeting, so I didn’t see any of them. I was a big fan of Faulkner and Salinger and Fitzgerald, and I was very fond of Catch-22 because I was from the Chinese army, [where] there was a certain amount of absurdity....

By Cheryl Ross About six months later, Khanh Ha decided to leave the business–it was interfering with her singing career. Would Kim, who was still waitressing, like to buy her out? No, Kim still wanted to go to college. But that never came to be. Instead, Kim and Tuan’s families told her they thought it best that she marry Dan, who by now had become a partner in Pasteur after handing over his successful Houston hair salon to a sister-in-law....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, PA: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And fucking first is, after all, one of the perks of being a gay man. Look at straight boys: They’re required to make or fake an emotional investment in order to get themselves some pussy (see below). But gay men, since we’re not trying to con women into bedding down with us, are able to be a little more honest and up-front about auditioning potential life partners....

It was 1860 when a group of Methodists first trooped out to the banks of the Des Plaines River for a revival meeting, and they’ve been doing it ever since. Since 1865 they’ve been meeting at the same spot–a 25-acre hideaway tucked between two forest preserves that’s 12 minutes and a world away from O’Hare Airport. This weekend’s Country Fair at the historic Des Plaines Methodist Camp Ground is a fund-raiser that will feature reenactments of Civil War battles (the camp was a training ground) and (not for the squeamish) battleground surgery....

The Long Countdown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though the delay is hardly unprecedented–the hardscrabble roots-rock four-piece is only the latest in a regular armada of bands to run up on the sandbar of major-label bureaucracy–it’s nonetheless been rough on the Bottle Rockets. “Trying to have a life gets frustrating,” says Ray, who turned down all employment offers this past winter in anticipation of a tour....

The Radio City Christmas Spectacular, Rosemont Theatre, and A Christmas Fantasy On Ice, Drury Lane Theatre, Evergreen Park. There are really only two ways to enjoy certain holiday productions: either grab the nearest kid or senior citizen, shell out $15 to valet park your minivan, and sit back and “fill your heart with Christmas” or bribe the nearest drag queen, knock back a few special-recipe eggnogs, and wallow in suburban-style camp....

I’ve often read that there were 500,000 morphine addicts running around after the Civil War. Is this true? If so, did narcotics have a deleterious effect on the Old West? How many cowboys were wacko on these then-legal drugs? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You know, war is a bad thing. Even if we leave out combat deaths and injuries, civilian casualties, property damage, rape and pillage, lingering danger of unexploded munitions, economic disruption, refugees, famine and disease, and possible destruction of the planet, we’re still left with things like increased drug addiction....

Various Artists In his memoir Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut tells a harrowing story about his son Mark meeting Jack Kerouac very late in Kerouac’s life: upon observing the young man’s bohemian work clothes and his duffel bag, Kerouac took him for yet another of the On the Road-inspired slumming, ranting, mooching hippies whom the writer hated more than Dr. Frankenstein hated his monster, and challenged the college boy to a fight....

Ron Grenko By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both series are a bit unsettling. Yet there’s perhaps some ironic humor here as well: Grenko appears to be tweaking the aesthetic “purity” of traditional minimalism, in which geometrical forms seem designed to exclude the daily world, by using blood and murder weapons. Both series seem unbalanced, however; it’s hard for such simple forms to hold their own against the tabloidish content....

All that “first mainstream gay movie” hype for The Broken Hearts Club got us thinking about Trick, a 1999 independent film that took the boy-meets-loses-gets-girl formula and gave it a boy-meets-boy spin. Trick has a winning cast, with Christian “Dimples” Campbell in the starring role, John Paul Pitoc as the go-go boy of his dreams, and Tori Spelling as the why-can’t-you-be-straight high school girlfriend. Stereotypes are transcended and there’s music to boot....