LUNA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For four years I’ve been trying to figure out just what it is about Luna’s records that dissolves my brain cells into giddy little pleasure bubbles. But this band’s appeal is impossible to pinpoint–it’s not in any one thing but rather in a thousand little things. It’s the sad grandeur of Dean Wareham and Sean Eden’s guitars, the McCartney-esque bass line in the coda of the new single “Dear Diary,” the clipped acoustic strum and spiraling riff of “Rhythm King” (from 1995’s Penthouse), the line “You can never give the finger to the blind” (from “Slide,” on the band’s 1992 debut, Lunapark)....

Mommies Dearest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In true 90s fashion, Mom’s the Word grew out of a support group. Six actors in Vancouver had agreed to meet every Saturday and talk about their experiences as mothers, and as they shared their thoughts and feelings a script began to take shape. In 1998 the group performed the piece at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where it was so successful that it spawned an Australian production with a new cast....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Timothy Lobdell, 20, escaped from Alaska’s Fairbanks Correctional Center in January but was picked up the next day after he was recognized by several people. Lobdell, who was awaiting sentencing for assaulting a police officer, has an expletive (the reports did not reveal the specific word) tattooed in inch-high letters on his left cheek. The Litigious Society...

By Dave Hoekstra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A former beautician, Bert opened the Pinto Lounge in 1962, next to the Rock Island railroad tracks in downtown Tinley Park. He built the bar in the shape of a horseshoe, covered its edges with pinto hide and cattle brands, and mounted a Plexiglas spotted pinto on the roof. During the parades the pinto would come down off the roof and be mounted on a truck to follow behind Bert and Pronto, with a country-music combo bringing up the rear on a flatbed trailer....

For lucky Chicagoans who can afford to see Blue Man Group–and for those who can’t–it’s time to support the vital experiments of our local avant-garde. This week Dexter Bullard’s physical-theater company Plasticene slams down its newest piece, Volume XII. Involving three dancer-actors and a complete set of the blue-bound Encyclopaedia Brittanica, this is an irreverent, visceral twist on a lover’s triangle, inventively orchestrated in short scenes with stacked, tossed, and toppling books of knowledge, which become weapons, dance partners, and life stories....

By Ben Joravsky So she was surprised to open the local Press in June and learn that 41st Ward alderman Brian Doherty and his allies on the Norwood Park Chamber of Commerce were backing plans to chop about six feet off the eastern end of the park. The city, the article read, “will undertake a beautification/ streetscape improvement project to provide nine to 15 new parallel-parking spaces for commercial and commuter use along Avondale....

From the pages of Chip’s Closet Cleaner I got ahold of this newfangled CD-ROM phone directory and began to wonder what would happen if some loner guy named Chip Rowe was caught robbing liquor stores in his boxers. My name would forever be associated with a nutcase. Could happen, although the only guys I know who share my name are a dairy manager in a grocery store in Roebuck, Alabama, a lawyer for the U....

BOBBY HUTCHERSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last weekend vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson appeared in McCoy Tyner’s star-studded sextet at Ravinia, and listening to him caress “I Loves You Porgy”–which he and Tyner played in duet–provided just one more reason to eagerly anticipate his own booking this week. His instrument doesn’t invite artful exploration of a ballad’s tender mercies the way the saxophone and trumpet do, but Hutcherson has found a distinctive way to coax sentiment from the vibraphone’s whiz-bang percussiveness....

Dept. of Amazing Coincidences. Brian Rogal writes in the Chicago Reporter (December) that over the last three and a half years the Chicago Housing Authority has evicted more families from developments it planned to “revitalize” than from developments not slated for revitalization. Why the difference? Perhaps because evicted tenants need not be provided with replacement housing when buildings are torn down for revitalization. “Eviction rates are highest in the four developments already awarded $152....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many reporters, in a defense of their unethical brethren, have asserted erroneously that Food Lion never directly challenged the substance of ABC’s report. In a letter to the network, Richard Wyatt, attorney for Food Lion, wrote: “Food Lion has publicly maintained since the night of the PrimeTime Live broadcast on Nov. 5, 1992, that the show was false....

HAKAN HAGEGARD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard doesn’t have Pavarotti’s flash or Ben Heppner’s power, but he doesn’t need them: though he’s had moderate success on the operatic stage, he’s found his niche in more intimate settings. In 1975, seven years after debuting as Papageno in a Stockholm production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, he reprised the role in Ingmar Bergman’s movie version....

This may be about more than the money. Hollinger International is selling off all but one of its major Canadian newspapers, and it could be the deal that finally punches Conrad Black’s ticket into Britain’s House of Lords. Hollinger is selling off 149 daily and weekly newspapers, 85 trade publications, and various Internet properties to CanWest Global Communications, in a deal described by one of those newspapers, the Vancouver Sun, as “the latest in a host of North American mergers and acquisitions aimed at converging information from print, radio and television into one dominant Internet-based platform....

LOOK BACK IN ANGER, Writers’ Theatre Chicago, and LOOK BACK IN ANGER, Floodlight Theater Company, at Strawdog Theatre Company. When John Osborne’s play opened on May 8, 1956, it shook the British theater establishment to its roots. Set in a dreary one-room flat without running water and filled with unlikable characters–a verbally aggressive protagonist, his mousy wife, her predatory best friend–it’s saddled with a plot so messy, digressive, and pointless it could pass for real life....

By Michael Miner The London press also linked the two stories. The Guardian headline, “US Obsessions: A beleaguered president, a triumphant baseball player,” ran over a six-column picture of McGwire clobbering his 61st home run. The Observer termed the “contest” between Sosa and McGwire “a happy apotheosis to the President’s problems.” The Telegraph had McGwire remarking, “People have been saying it is bringing the country together. So be it. I am happy to bring the country together....

Postmortem, WNEP Theater Foundation, at the Playground. Inspired by our fascination with obituaries and the raw appeal of real lives, the WNEP Theater Foundation has found fresh fodder for improvisation. Each night a tight ensemble of seven performers takes a newspaper obituary and performs an hour-long characterization loosely based on that small amount of information. The real strength of this concept is that the actors give us more than just a hypothetical survey of one person’s life, also portraying characters who have no direct contact with the central figure to provide context and comedy....

In the first weeks after the all-star break, the White Sox played .500 baseball, which according to the major prognosticators was all they had to play to keep the Cleveland Indians at bay, thanks to the huge lead the Sox built up during the first half of the season. But despite winning as much as they were losing–remaining 23 games over .500 going into this week–the Sox weren’t playing on an even keel....

DYLAN HICKS 9/4, SCHUBAS There’s nothing particularly unusual about this Minneapolis indie-pop singer-songwriter, but he does embody some of the best virtues of the embattled breed; his songs are accessible, self-effacing, well arranged, and clever. So clever, in fact, that all possible potshots are disarmed right there in the lyric sheet to his Poughkeepsie (No Alternative): “I can hear those bullies calling me a fairy / Now they call me adult contemporary,” he sings in “That Look Wasn’t Meant For You,” and he admits outright that he’s too self-absorbed to be anything but a “Bad Boyfriend....

THE STY OF THE BLIND PIG, Onyx Theatre Ensemble, at the Edgewater Theatre Center. The story is the stuff of mythology: a parent and adult child are locked into a stifling relationship. Then a stranger comes, stirs things up, and brings a bit of hope to a hopeless situation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Phillip Hayes Dean’s three-act play, a blind street musician comes into the lives of a bitter old woman and her desperately lonely daughter....

Le palindrome Compagnie Philippe Saire at the Museum of Contemporary Art, April 2-5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saire’s evening-length piece, Le palindrome, was created in collaboration with visual artists. Saire’s idea was that the dance would reflect visual art, and the art would reflect the dancing. It’s a fairly common premise, the basis for much work in Chicago. But the two art forms here don’t so much comment on as go to war with each other....

Vote Lieberman-Cheney and support the permanent government. “Richard Cheney and Joe Lieberman are two of the most curious choices for vice president of recent times,” writes Sam Smith in the “Progressive Review” (August 22). He thinks the constituency they bring to their respective tickets “is not a collection of voters but the defense industry, which they can be expected to serve as faithfully as they have in the past. Lieberman comes from the land of the Sikorsky helicopters and told Connecticut voters as recently as last October that ‘In my view, one layoff is one too many because each and every worker represents the very heart and soul of our national defense....