Naked Raygun Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In “A Special Message” at the end of Naked Raygun’s “new” Last of the Demo Hicans (Dyslexic) a male voice asks, “Who is this Naked Raygun, anyway?” In the band’s heyday it was a legitimate question, but today it’s a gimme: Naked Raygun, along with the likes of the Effigies and Big Black, defined Chicago’s belatedly celebrated mid-80s punk scene....

The only time I’ve watched Louis Malle’s six-hour, seven-part 1968 documentary series in its entirety was 27 years ago, but seeing two sections again recently reminded me why this may be my favorite of all of his films. Malle’s upper-class misanthropy and morbidity have generally alienated me from his work, but this essayistic travel diary avoids any pretense of objectivity in order to present itself as a highly personal search, narrated in excellent English by Malle himself....

Jody Andre’s mother was appalled when her daughter decided to ditch her career in advertising to open a restaurant. “My mom said, ‘What makes you think you can take this nasty space and turn it into a successful restaurant? Do you know what that costs?’” Andre replied, “Mom, I was a tomboy growing up, I can figure out how to do this.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She and her friends loved Andersonville and its Mediterranean and Swedish restaurants, but always felt it could use a spot with more of “an American flair....

The best way to enjoy the barbecue at Smokin’ Woody’s is to sit at the chef’s table. Woody advertises this unique experience on his menu as “Meticulous Dining Adventures With Woody.” The table itself is a roving institution. “You sit at whatever table’s open,” Woody says, “and I join you.” “What is this?” I asked. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our bill came to $45 for four, a reasonable sum....

Sarabande (Maybe That’s Why Coach Got My Liver) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is to help you get through / This is a first-class operation / This is a sermon instead of a cure / This is comfort in the shape of diamonds.” These words, sung by a six-member ensemble dressed in uniforms suggesting the Heaven’s Gate cult, inaugurate Steve Clark’s silly, mysterious performance piece Sarabande (Maybe That’s Why Coach Got My Liver)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just got back from the Chicago International Film Festival’s screening of “Supersonic Shorts 1: Chicago Meets the World” at the Music Box Theater. As a civic duty, I usually attend at least one festival event. It is now also with a sense of duty that I must report that Chicago’s meeting with the world was an embarrassment beyond my powers to describe....

The Vagina Monologues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every house needs both a bedroom and a basement, notes a character in Eve Ensler’s set of solo pieces, based on interviews the New York playwright conducted with hundreds of women. Ensler’s candid, sometimes outrageous, sometimes poignant sketches roam the territory bounded by these metaphorical psychosexual extremes, offering provocative observations on women’s experiences. Ensler’s touchstones are messy, painful, ecstatic, and primal–blood, sweat, tears, and come–as she ranges from the witch trials of the 1590s (when the investigating attorney, apparently just discovering the clitoris, proclaims a suspected satanist’s sex organ a devil’s teat) to such present-day characters as a Pittsburgh massage therapist rhapsodically reclaiming the word “cunt” and an elderly lady from Queens gingerly talking about her “down there....

Bjork Bjork’s songs are filled with images of different sorts of breaking points: people snapping, breaking down, losing control. The narrator in “Hyper-Ballad” throws “car parts, bottles, and cutlery” off a mountain to feel better; a relationship comes undone like a ball of yarn in “Unravel”; and in “Pluto” Bjork simply announces, “Excuse me / But I just have to / Explode.” After three increasingly distinctive solo albums (four, if you count the great radical remix collection Telegram) it’s become clear that she thrives on the tension that usually precipitates human dramas....

It was the afternoon of Friday, November 3, time for voting to begin at Cook County Jail, but the voting machines, election judges, and ballots were late. From now through Sunday, voting machines would be set up in various locations around the jail’s 11 divisions–a law library, a dining hall, and here, in the nondenominational Mother York Chapel inside the new maximum security facility at 3015 S. California. This building houses about 1,500 prisoners, held on serious charges like rape, criminal assault, and murder....

The seventh annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, August 18 through 24, at the the Fine Arts, 418 S. Michigan. Tickets for most programs are $7; a $30 pass will admit you to five films, and a $55 pass will admit you to ten. For more information call 773-866-8660. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended. SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 Planet Krulik 2000 Leslie Jordan stars in an autobiographical feature, which he adapted from his off-Broadway play, about his search for companionship and sexual identity in mid-70s Atlanta....

April is the cruelest month, breeding IRS agents out of the dead land. According to the March 30 “Chicago Events Update,” issued by Free-Market.Net, the Chicago Libertarian Seminar is sponsoring a discussion on “libertarian and economic readings of modern poetry” on April 30. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ve lived in two countries with strict gun laws, Japan and Great Britain, and if I could press a button and make America’s guns vanish, I would do so in a blink (and I’d repeal the Second Amendment while I was at it),” writes Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal, reprinted in the E-mail newsletter “Center-Right” (March 22)....

DAVE HOLLAND QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For 15 years bassist Dave Holland has led a band as visionary as any in jazz, but until Points of View (ECM) garnered him his first Grammy nomination last year, not so many people knew it. When Wynton Marsalis began the rearguard action that would dominate jazz in the 80s, Holland grasped the progressivism dormant in this return to roots....

Dear sir: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am appalled that you would print a letter that expounds so much “hate.” We in the 46th Ward applaud our diversity and are constantly trying to fight hate and prejudice. In Mr. Charlton’s letter, he says home owners spew venom and bitter ooze. That is exactly what he spewed in this letter to the Reader. Pure hatred....

Go With What They Know Northlight Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Theatre’s artistic director, B.J. Jones, may have hit upon a strategy that will pull the company out of its $200,000 deficit. Under his predecessor, Russell Vandenbroucke, Northlight concentrated on untested new work, but with Jones at the helm the company has presented more high-profile plays, includ-ing Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive and David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood, which opened this week....

HIDEKO AMANO & JONATHAN YATES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This recital, organized by the Japan America Society of Chicago, commemorates the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and its unusual program features two compositions by Hikari Oe, son of left-wing Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe. Hikari, now in his mid-30s, was born with part of his brain outside his skull, and though surgery saved his life, it left him severely impaired–epileptic and autistic, with a vocabulary that has never exceeded a few words....

Brett Neveu’s artistic mission is simple: ruin everything. He’s been ruining puppetry with his “adult-themed puppet show,” The Pup At Theatre: Hidden Surprise Shows, which has been produced at a half-dozen venues around town since premiering at Sheffield’s five years ago. Neveu and sidekick Eric C. Johnson pull a few dozen ratty puppets from cardboard boxes and put them through pointless skits lacking any imagination whatsoever, barking their lines in a series of unconvincing voices....

OREGON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oregon, formed as an all-acoustic jazz quartet at the dawn of the electric era, has stood by its own unique brand of “fusion” for nearly three decades now–a blend splashed with chamber music, various ethnic traditions, and folk rock. It hasn’t always been easy: after founding percussionist Collin Walcott died in an auto accident in 1984, the remaining three members seemed unwilling to admit, even to themselves, that with him went some of the band’s original elegance and spark....

Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit Christo (1990) and the two Magnolias (1986) are part of a rich retrospective of the work of Graciela Iturbide now showing at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. These black-and-white photographs were taken in Mexico, Latin America, and Los Angeles between the 70s and the early 90s. As the show’s curators put it, this Mexican photographer aims “to investigate and articulate the ways in which ‘Mexico’ is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices....

Screen Test Number Two Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The camera never moves as it frames the face of a man playing a woman auditioning for the part of Esmeralda in a movie an offscreen speaker describes as a remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The speaker, who’s directing what’s both a screen test and a parody of a screen test, introduces himself indirectly by telling us that the voice of the tester is that of Ronald Tavel, whom he also credits with the “scenario,” having identified the footage we’ve just begun to see as “Andy Warhol: Screen Test Number Two....

BRADY 2/26, SCHUBAS On his debut solo album, On My Own, the Schubas soundman who calls himself “brady” is anything but solo–in fact, his septet of supporting musicians includes Aluminum Group keyboardist Liz Conant, who supplies seductive 60s organ flourishes to his pretty, whispered tunes. But while all the music’s played, arranged, and recorded well enough, the album gives the overall impression of being extremely ordinary. I guess that’s to be expected from a guy who won’t capitalize his own name....