By Mike Sula This trellis and many of the young, densely plotted trees and flowering bushes are surrounded by sections of chicken wire fencing. Other trees are supported by wood stakes set in the earth and bound to their trunks by pieces of wire coat hanger insulated by lengths of garden hose. The center of this plot is a patch of ground, roped off by clothesline, where more roses bloom around a large, branching weed with a knotty, fibrous stalk....

Fantasy Costumes Headquarters may never compete with Disney World, but it’s a block-long wonderland packed with everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. The sublime includes Mardi Gras ensembles with brilliantly hued sequined and feathered masks; faux-jewel-encrusted velvet Renaissance costumes for bride, groom, and attendants; and a black-and-white Ascot outfit like the one worn by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. As for the ridiculous, this is the place to find lamp-shade hats, gorilla suits, and gag items....

ISOTOPE 217 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Utonian_Automatic (Thrill Jockey), the second album by Isotope 217, is a small miracle of production detail. Little electronic burrs catch on the pant legs of passing rhythms, manipulated vinyl rustles in a thicket of John Herndon and Dan Bitney’s percussion, a keyboard noise grows fuzzy and then completely distorts while subtle shifts in resonance draw attention from deep focus to picture plane....

This much seems certain: on the fateful day four or five years ago when New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler ventured to the prosaic environs of Culver City on the west side of Los Angeles and pressed his finger to the door buzzer of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, he was ripe for the spore that would find him there, settle in his brain, multiply, and take over his life. Like the African stink ant (coincidentally on exhibit at this very museum), which when colonized by an ingested fungus undertakes a bizarre pilgrimage, leaving its home on the forest floor to climb skyward to the top of a fern or blade of grass, where it dies and then sprouts a brilliantly colored fungal horn, Weschler was fertile ground....

MITSUKO UCHIDA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Japanese-born pianist Mitsuko Uchida has quietly made her reputation with sharp interpretations of works from the two great Viennese schools–the first including Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, the second Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Many of the pieces are so familiar that a fresh take might seem impossible, and dozens of other pianists–including native Austrians like Artur Schnabel and Alfred Brendel–have already weighed in with persuasive renditions....

Pennies From Heaven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomaska, producer of the long-running Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, and Sloan, producer emeritus at Second City, first announced the multitheater complex in 1995, when the local theater scene was still fairly robust. But months dragged into years, and though Tomaska and Sloan have put considerable work into the 90,000-square-foot complex (one source estimates that they’ve spent close to $1 million), they’ve never announced an opening date, sparking rumors that funds had dried up, that the project was collapsing....

Shulie By Jonathan Rosenbaum The decision by Elisabeth Subrin and Jill Godmilow, two intelligent and resourceful academics, to remake little-known 60s political documentaries can neither be identified with the Hollywood remake syndrome nor entirely disentangled from it. It seems to me that they and Hollywood are responding to the same cultural and political block–an inability to come up with new thoughts about the present–but I don’t believe they’re responding in the same way or for the same reasons....

SCARED O’ THAT MESSIAH, OR “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUDDHA!”, Mom & Dad Productions, at Torso Theatre. You can taste how much director Joe Feliciano and his oh-so-motley cast want to be outrageous. Their two-act semisacrilegious parody Scared o’ That Messiah begins with a metal version of the Lord’s Prayer then leaps into a trashy Nativity, with wise men in Burger King crowns and a cranky Virgin Mother giving birth to a pink-haired troll doll....

John Grisham’s The Rainmaker Rating ** Worth seeing Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Written by Coppola and Michael Herr With Matt Damon, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, Mary Kay Place, Mickey Rourke, Danny DeVito, Danny Glover, and Virginia Madsen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s harder to come up with a model for the Eastwood film, but if I had to settle on a single one, I’d need to go back a lot farther than the 50s–all the way back to the 20s and F....

Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century The Cultural Revolution upended the social order to the point that drivers were instructed to stop at green lights and go at red ones. Students attacked and tortured their teachers. According to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn in China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, the Guangxi province saw “one of the largest episodes of cannibalism anywhere in the world in the last century or more”; the writers add that “the cannibalism took place in public, often organized by Communist Party officials, and people indulged communally to prove their revolutionary ardor....

Blues Man, Jacksons Fan As Spann later learned, you can pretty much call yourself anything you want to on the ballot so long as it’s not indecent and the name doesn’t belong to someone else. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “By the time I’d got around to talking to a legal person, it was too late,” says Spann. Despite the setback, he remains hopeful....

BACKSLIDERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Backsliders cofounder Steve Howell quit the band in the middle of recording its recently released second album, Southern Lines (Mammoth), and not long after it was completed everyone but singer-guitarist Chip Robinson followed his lead. Howell shows up on the songwriting credits for only 4 of the album’s 11 selections, and the sound of Southern Lines, produced by Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, is quite different from that of the band’s heavily countrified but eclectic ’97 LP, Throwin’ Rocks at the Moon....

BILL CODAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soul singer Bill Coday waxed some classic sides on Denise LaSalle’s Chicago-based Crajon label in the late 60s and early 70s, then disappeared for almost two decades. In 1995 he launched a comeback with the widely acclaimed Sneakin’ Back (Ecko), and this year’s Put Me in the Mood is the most completely realized album of his career....

By Grant Pick “Equity stakes, employee training, rich benefits and expanding opportunities have kept the company devoutly entrepreneurial while developing employee loyalty that is unusual in a business notorious for high turnover,” said Business Week in a flattering 1992 profile. “The result is a company with the resources and staying power of a chain and the spirit of a corner bistro.” Melman, the Lettuce CEO who has long advertised his informal management style, was only a fleeting presence....

Friday 7/23 – Thursday 7/29 Mexican musician Jorge Reyes combines ancient instruments like conch shells and carved stone whistles with guitars and keyboards to create music that looks to his country’s future as well as its past. He performs tonight at 9 (doors open at 8) at Apollo’s 2000, 2875 W. Cermak. Tickets are $25. Call 773-247-0200. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The way the local chapter of Watsonians talk, you’d think Dr....

COREY HARRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since arriving on the national stage in the mid-90s, guitarist Corey Harris has been a leading light in the revival of acoustic blues–but in the last few years he’s also steadily expanded his vision of what that means. The liner notes to his latest CD, Greens From the Garden (Alligator), declare the blues a living heritage and a voice for solidarity among people of the African diaspora; the music follows through, borrowing heavily from contemporary funk, Creole, reggae, and other Caribbean sources as well as from rural blues....

The summer before ninth grade, I fell in love with fire. On weekends, when my parents were golfing and my two brothers were holed up in their rooms, I would douse one of my few flawed model cars with gasoline, set it afire, and drag it behind my bike, creating spectacular curbside wrecks. One day in the garage I inadvertently dribbled a bit of gas on the concrete, and when I struck the match to light the model, the flame ran along the floor and set the can on fire....

A Brooklyn native, Mark Weglarz opened Metal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He rented a spot near the intersection of Clark and Belmont. “From the east, the north, and south, this is central, jetting out in all directions,” he explains, waving his arms around. “I wanted to be in an area where a lot of kids come, especially from the suburbs.” One of Weglarz’s buddies, John Shirey, says, “I’ve been looking for 15 years to find a Helloween shirt....

Although David McCracken’s pettiness does not in itself warrant a response [Letters, February 5; Culture Club, January 22], he does inadvertently touch upon several issues that I should once again reiterate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is self-evident that I have done well as an artist. I support myself entirely with my work without resorting to other means such as teaching. This is no small thing....

Nashville in the Rearview Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That was just one downer on a roller coaster Ketchum’s been riding for the last few years. In January 1998 he emerged from the Betty Ford Center free from the booze and heroin habits he’d developed since his first Nashville album, Past the Point of Rescue, scored big in 1991. The next month he married his third wife, hair and makeup stylist Gina Giglio, but that spring he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a rare spinal-cord disorder that caused his arms to become temporarily paralyzed....