wycoff.qxd You both recently reviewed StreetSigns’ production of Helene Cixous’ The Perjured City. I have no issues with your evaluations of the production as a whole, but I was shocked by one commonality. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It amazes me that you find it strange that one of the leading proponents of feminism in her time should choose motherhood as a vehicle. She has chosen an appropriate path that goes by way of the rage of Electra, the despair of Iphigenia, the resolve of Antigone....

RICHARD BUCKNER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his last release, Since, Richard Buckner turned out one sad-sack story after another, chronicling the narrator’s pathetic romantic fumblings. The lyrics on his new album, The Hill (Overcoat), are a dramatic improvement, but unfortunately Buckner didn’t write them: each of the 19 tracks is named after a poem from Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 classic Spoon River Anthology, a collection of 244 monologues delivered from beyond the grave by citizens of fictional Spoon River, Illinois....

Prodigy At a central Illinois truck stop I recently picked up a tape by a man named Larry Pierce. Over slick, bland modern-country stylings, Pierce sings lines like “Corn was made to shuck / And girls were made to fuck” and “If you want me back, we’ll get back in the sack / Roll over and I’ll fuck you in the rear.” The album, Songs for Studs, is on Laughing Hyena, a small Kansas label whose biggest claim to fame is having distributed the first recordings of comedian Jeff “You might be a redneck if…” Foxworthy....

I was just writing in response to an ongoing problem I and many others have with one of your critics, Justin Hayford. I have never been one to question another man’s opinion. In fact, I have never really cared about what someone has to say, especially Justin Hayford. But as an ongoing supporter of the Trap Door Theatre, I think this problem should be addressed. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Truman Show With Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone, Holland Taylor, and Ed Harris. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far so good, I suppose. But this cleverness starts to look dumb as soon as one tries to imagine the concept stretched any further than the movie stretches it. If for the past three decades millions of viewers across the globe have been following Truman’s life with some regularity–presumably taking time off to live their own lives–how many of them have stayed tuned to his dark bedroom during the hours he sleeps every night?...

The Newton Boys Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not to be hyperbolic, but Richard Linklater’s first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch. Linklater, Clark Lee Walker, and Claude Stanush (who also worked on the script of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men) have adapted Stanush’s oral history about the Texas-born Newton brothers, who between 1919 and 1924 became the most successful bank robbers in the U....

XTC Apple Venus Volume 1 Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) (TVT) Partridge hasn’t minced words about his old friend’s departure. During the press junket that followed the album’s release he repeatedly laid the blame on Gregory’s diabetic mood swings and declared that Gregory had saved him the trouble of sacking him. When David Veitch of the Calgary Sun asked Partridge if he’d ever want to mend fences, Partridge revealed that once or twice he’d gotten drunk and dialed Gregory’s number, only to hang up before anyone answered....

What fresh hall is this? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three years ago this month, Schuba, owner of the popular north-side club that bears his name, opened the Coronet with a similar agenda, but noise complaints from neighbors and a liquor license that restricted drinking to the lobby before the show and during intermission led him to abandon the venture in June 1995. The building has been vacant ever since....

ALAN LICHT & DARIN GRAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crafting quirky pop tunes and unleashing torrents of guitar noise are all in a day’s work for New York guitarist Alan Licht. In the liner notes to his 1997 solo disc The Evan Dando of Noise? (Corpus Hermeticum), as he tries to explain why a form as rigid as the pop song isn’t incompatible with improvisation, Licht argues that the act of living is the ultimate improvisation, and that even if certain structures are inherent, what matters most is the process of perpetually reinventing them....

By Ben Joravsky Casey was a working-class kid, born and raised in Chicago. His father, a police officer, died in 1977. His mother moved her family of five from one congested north-side neighborhood to another. “I joined the Boy Scouts but we never got to see nature,” he says. “We camped out in a big industrial garage on Broadway. One time we went to a forest preserve. It was in the winter and under two feet of snow....

The Lost World: Jurassic Park With Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vanessa Lee Chester, Vince Vaughn, Arliss Howard, and Pete Postlethwaite. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here director Steven Spielberg reprises the endearing preoccupation with good parenting he showed in Jaws, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, and Schindler’s List, which all revolve around endangered children. The heartbeat that animates The Lost World is family values, which are typically represented at mealtime....

By Justin Hayford Don’t warble something trite by Jerry Herman Don’t tell me it’s a song that I don’t want to play… Take my advice and Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight’s first set was a giddy cavalcade of gaffes and blunders. Menzie’s voice cracked on the third measure of her opening number, a satirical homage to plastic surgery she just wrote called “Color Me Beautiful....

IRA SULLIVAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Burly, sometimes goateed, and partial to vintage plaid shirts, multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan looks like Kerouac’s picture of a rough-and-ready hipster. And his music, which he developed in Chicago in the hard-bopping 50s, still brims with the freewheeling expressiveness that the beat writers sought to emulate in their own rhythms and imagery. Twenty years ago he might’ve come off as a throwback, but these days–after the 80s’ surfeit of glossy, carefully scripted jazz–his low-tech creativity and casual, unfettered virtuosity seem visionary all over again....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also in March prominent Christian conservative psychologist Paul Cameron told Rolling Stone that he fears gay sex will supplant heterosexual sex unless society represses it. “Marital sex tends toward the boring,” he said. “Generally it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.” If all one seeks is an orgasm, he said, “the evidence is that men do a better job on men, and women on women…....

Picabo Street stood at the bottom of the women’s super-giant slalom run in Nagano, Japan, and waited to see if her time would stand up as the best in the world. She chatted with supporters, fans, hangers-on, and reporters, smiling all the while. CBS TV cameras and microphones picked her up saying, “I am a true racehorse if I win this thing,” but there seemed more humility than hubris in the remark....

DECLAN NERNEY 9/11, ABBEY PUB I suppose it’s only fitting that while Americans are stuffing the coffers of Michael Flatley and weeping like premenstrual maidens over bagpipes on movie soundtracks, at least one son of Erin is digging Del Shannon and Dolly Parton. On Declan Nerney’s Let’s Dance (Hooley/Universal), the Dublin native might have explored the hybridizations that link traditional Irish music to American country to early rock ‘n’ roll–but he didn’t, instead applying layers of schmaltzy pedal steel and vaguely Cajun accordion to the Shannon title track, Parton’s “I Love You Still,” Bob Wills’s “Don’t Be Ashamed of Your Age,” and even originals like “The Kingdom of Kerry....

TOTO LA MOMPOSINA Y SUS TAMBORES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cumbia is Colombia’s most popular musical export, but the accordion-driven strain that’s so popular in Mexico these days is a far cry from the enchanting music performed by Toto la Momposina y Sus Tambores, a troupe of musicians and dancers based in Bogota. Toto (who takes her stage name from her birthplace, the Magdalena river island of Mompos) doesn’t play pure cumbia either–but like most Latin musics, it wasn’t pure to begin with....

Joel Nickson had a simple mission: to create a neighborhood hangout that served healthy, affordable southern cooking. Though raised in New Mexico and New Jersey, he learned to love the south through visits to his grandparents in North Carolina. At age 15 he ran away from home to live and work for a year and a half with a family who operated Pauline’s Passion Pit, a Harlem soul food restaurant. A dozen years later, having amassed a solid cooking background that included culinary school, stints in elegant San Francisco restaurants, and terms as food and beverage manager at several large resorts, he opened Wishbone in a storefront at 1800 W....

The Eel With Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Fujio Tsuneta, Mitsuko Baisho, Akira Emoto, and Sho Aikawa. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a truism for quite some time that the Japanese cinema is in terrible shape, financially and aesthetically (particularly now that Akira Kurosawa has died)–though it’s not clear to what extent one should believe the overseas commentators who sift through the available evidence....

CAROL SLOANE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Carol Sloane sings, she connects inspiration and respiration: it’s as if she were exhaling music. As effortlessly as she draws breath, Sloane imbues a tune with a lifetime of nuance, relying on flawless intonation to sell both the original melody and her gentle but welcome departures from it. Her voice has not only smoke but substance, a combination that has distinguished a lot of the great jazz singers–think of Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan–and has made Sloane, who never learned to read music, a musicians’ favorite since the early 60s, when she occasionally subbed for Annie Ross in Lambert, Hendricks & Ross....