Chicago Puppetry Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Theater Dank’s three-week festival of national and local puppetry opened last weekend with inspired, uneven, but often brilliant performances. The ongoing centerpiece of the festival is Theater Dank’s dreamy, coarse, lyrical Succubus, which brings an ancient myth about soul stealing to life with tin puppets, film, and handheld homunculi. Last weekend’s best offering was Ben Majchrzak’s The Milking, a brilliant transformation of half-full milk bottles into living beings; but the emerging puppeteers in the showcase veered from goofy to lyrical to cynical....

DIGITAL UNDERGROUND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few groups in the history of hip-hop have had as good a grip on what’s funny about rap music as Oakland’s Digital Underground. DU peaked early with their 1990 debut album, Sex Packets (Tommy Boy), and its massive hit “The Humpty Dance,” a self-mocking manifesto that combined hip-hop braggadocio with unabashed geekiness over grinding P-Funk grooves. Cucumber-cool leader Shock-G’s alter ego Humpty Hump, he of the Groucho Marx demeanor and fake swollen nose, provided a much-needed antidote to his peers’ outsize boasts, unscrolling his inadequacies in his attempt to get a piece of the action....

hewson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, I think we should be fair to Terrence McNally (“lavender dustbin of irrelevance”!?) who has come a long way since the tragic tone of his Lisbon Traviata almost a decade ago. Mr. McNally was developing gay characters back in the late 60s when they were significantly missing from the Broadway stage. And while his later plays may not have been completely queer focused, the gay characters have been a viable presence (Lips Together Teeth Apart, A Secret Ganesh)....

GEBHARD ULLMANN’S TA LAM ZEHN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The all-reed format has pretty well lost its novelty value–over the last couple of decades sax quartet after sax quartet has made insightful investigations of pure timbre, harmony, and counterpoint. Still, there’s something intriguing–freakish, even–about Gebhard Ullmann’s Ta Lam Zehn, a tentet with nine reed players and a lone accordionist. Ullmann, who splits his time between New York and Berlin, started the project as an outgrowth of his duo with Swiss accordionist Hans Hassler, a regular with the Vienna Art Orchestra; five 1991 pieces on the new compilation Ta Lam (Songlines) feature just the two of them, with Ullmann overdubbing six woodwind parts....

Playwright Charles Pike considers himself a member in good standing of the Lord Buckley cult, though the first time he heard of him was two years ago. He was driving with a friend listening to a compilation of beat poetry when suddenly he heard a peculiar voice. “I wasn’t sure who it was,” Pike says. “I wasn’t sure what he was saying. I thought it was Scatman Crothers at first. And he was talking about the ‘ding-ding players’ and the ‘wang-dang players’ and the ‘reed heads’ and the ‘lute heads’ and the ‘hip Gan....

Like the wrangling over whether Al Gore or George Bush won Florida, the tiresome hype for the Goodman Theatre’s big, fancy, expensive new space seems to be endless. Most folks with an interest in Chicago theater don’t care what the place looks like–they care about what goes on inside. But the Goodman has picked a great way to renew its artistic lease: throwing open its doors to numerous local artists and inviting the public in to sample their work for free....

Artist Brian Dinkins finds his inspiration in the mundane landscape of Kansas. “Every day you notice the same things over and over again, just feeling the repetition of the telephone poles or the chain-link fences.” He ascribes “a vastness” to the area around Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City where his family lived. “When we first got there it was very much on the fringe,” he says. “Behind our house was farmland all the way to Lawrence....

Portland Street Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raymond Yip’s 1998 gangland melodrama approaches the pathos, intensity, and visual punch of John Woo’s Bullet in the Head, as “Sister Thirteen,” a macho but tenderhearted gang leader (Sandra Ng), battles for control of a seedy district in Hong Kong. The chronicle of her triumphant rise plays like a traditional Chinese martial-arts saga, driven by honor, revenge, and chaste love, but Ng delivers a fierce, multifaceted performance as the stoic Thirteen; part Madame Mao, part Mercedes McCambridge, and part Mother Teresa, she’s a force as elemental as James Cagney in White Heat....

SARGE/ANGIE HEATON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These two acts come from the depressing downstate college town of Champaign, and it shows. I’m willing to cut Sarge leader Elizabeth Elmore some slack, since she’s still in her early 20s. There’s nothing naive about “A Torch,” a little ditty about a gang-rape victim’s revenge from the band’s recent The Glass Intact (Mud), but too often Elmore’s smart, analytical lyrics focus on tiresome postcollegiate boy-girl dilemmas, and tunes like “Fast Girls” and “I Took You Driving,” about romantic entanglements with touring punk-rock musicians, have even narrower appeal....

Scarrie–The Musical, Sweetback Productions, at the Sweet Corn Playhouse. Despite blazing pyrotechnics and the star presence of Betty Buckley, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s lavish musical adaptation of Stephen King’s schlocky coming-of-age story, Carrie, the Musical, was a colossal failure. Now, a full decade after the show was buried under an avalanche of negative press and even worse word of mouth, the spirit of one of Broadway’s biggest examplars of wretched excess and shockingly poor taste has been channeled into Scarrie–the Musical....

You say you can deliver the Straight Dope on any topic. Try this one. Who am I? or Who is the knower? or What is consciousness? (All the same question, roughly.) If consciousness (which we all experience intimately) is merely an epiphenomenon of the mind, which is an epiphenomenon of the brain, then there must be a physical mechanism in the brain that accounts for it. But then the same question can be (and must be) asked again: What submechanism within the broader mechanism is responsible for consciousness?...

Carlinhos Brown Omelete Man (Metro Blue) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But its aesthetic–a willingness to blend styles that took three more decades to sprout in this country–has influenced a great deal of Brazilian pop music since. And while highly visible albums by tropicalistas Tom Ze and Caetano Veloso–whose terrific 1998 record, Livro, was just released by Nonesuch in anticipation of his first major U....

Friday 7/9 – Thursday 7/15 10 SATURDAY The five members of Voladores de Papantla reenact a ritual from their Aztec ancestors: at the top of a 70-foot pole four of them–representing earth, air, fire, and water–will tie ropes to their feet and “fly” to the ground as the fifth works a lowering contraption. They’ll do it today at 4:30 and 7 and tomorrow at 1:30 and 7 at the Latino Art Beat Competition and Hispanic Heritage Festival in Douglas Park, Sacramento and Ogden....

The city’s crackdown on eloteros–or corn vendors–could easily have been ended through common sense. After all, the issue seemed fairly straightforward this spring: the vendors needed to conform to the sanitation code, while the city needed to acknowledge the vendors’ right to make a living. In the months following the initial controversy, city spokespeople even said a compromise was imminent. Yet as negotiations have dragged on, the situation has grown more complicated, and street vendors continue to be prosecuted....

Of Grammatology Representing Maude Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A scratchy-voiced soul diva with a neon fright wig, she got a major media blitz devoted to her debut: a two-part feature in the New Yorker, a special clothing line designed by Donna Karan, appearances on Leno and Letterman on the same night, and full-length posters at the Body Shop and Burger King. Due to a management oversight, she neglected to record an album....

GRANT PARK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Movie music, long dismissed as a bastard art form, is now a crowd-pleasing component of almost every orchestra’s schedule. But even in snootier times, many serious composers grudgingly acknowledged the craftsmanship and encyclopedic knowledge of musical styles required to write a good film score, and the most open-minded among them (Copland and Shostakovich, for example) were quite proud of their contributions to the genre....

GREYBOY ALLSTARS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s now known as “acid jazz” has gone by many other names–and whatever you want to call it, the Greyboy Allstars play that funky music, with its irresistible pulse and soul-fortified solos, like there’s no tomorrow. But they do have a keen awareness of yesterday: the Greyboys make no bones about their allegiance to the bluesy and popular recordings that defined the Blue Note label in the 1960s–the funky sanctification of Herbie Hancock’s Takin’ Off, the boogaloo-laced beat of Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder–or to the electric turns the music took with the fusion-era Brecker Brothers; and the guiding spirits of James Brown and his straw boss, saxist Maceo Parker, always hover close by....

Lead Stories The San Jose Mercury News reported in May that because of a housing shortage in Silicon Valley, people are renting attics, basements, and storage sheds to live in. Others pay as much as $200 a month just to sleep in a corner of someone’s living room to avoid a lengthy commute from their homes. And in June the New York Times quoted a yakuza crime boss in Tokyo lamenting how his turf has been taken over by immigrant gangs from China: “The Japanese yakuza think of long-term business relationships, but the Chinese mafia thinks just of the short term....

Random Acts of Kindness Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I like performers whose every measured gesture and struck attitude shows their training and polish. But I save my respect for people like Brenda Wong Aoki, an actor and dancer with great technical skill who doesn’t make her virtuosity the point. Instead she focuses tightly on the stories she tells–about her daily life in San Francisco; her journey to Japan to study No theater, a male-dominated art form; and her painful experiences performing No-inspired shows for people who interpret her references to demons, ghosts, and other supernatural beings as proof that Aoki is satanic and her show anti-Christian....

CLARICE ASSAD 4/16, LaS MANOS GALLERY I hope all the circulating copies of this Brazilian piano prodigy’s demo tape aren’t marred by the dense buzz that nearly drowns out her playing on mine. Because even when it’s hard to hear, it’s very much worth the effort–Assad negotiates the line between classical music and chamber jazz with liquid grace and the subtlest applications of her native rhythms. Her talent is obviously hereditary: her father and uncle, Sergio and Odair, comprise the classical guitar duo the Assad Brothers, and her aunt is acclaimed guitarist and singer Badi Assad....