Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. TED ANSANI Free performance. Thursday, July 13, 7:30 PM, Starbucks Coffee, 31 Town Square, Wheaton....

Cairo, Illinois Across Washington from what is possibly the ugliest county courthouse in the country is Harper’s (2013 Washington, 618-734-0538), a local institution that serves both normal fare and pretty good Chinese food. Harper’s has long been the nicest place in town, even after its recent purchase by J. Andrew Clarke, a former county clerk and current county commissioner. The garrulous local Teflon politician displayed Clinton-esque deftness when he was indicted in the mid-80s for crimes associated with his office....

Art in Chicago, 1945-1995 The complaints about exclusion seem a bit silly: of course a viewer is going to have different tastes than curator Lynne Warren; of course no one is going to like everything in the show. I doubt Warren does: she seems to have included some artists for their historical importance, as she should have. It would be a shame if discontent with critical judgments makes it harder to mount curated exhibits of local art; I still shudder to recall the hysteria about selection that finally killed off the “Chicago and Vicinity” shows in 1990....

Even in this incomplete restoration George Cukor’s 1954 musical remake of the 1937 Hollywood drama is devastating. Judy Garland plays a young singer discovered by aging, alcoholic star Norman Maine (James Mason), who helps her to fame as “Vicki Lester” even as his career slips. Garland gives a deeply affecting performance–halting, volatile, unsure of herself early on and unsure of Norman later–and her musical numbers are superb. Yet the film’s core is its two-character scenes, in which small shifts in posture subtly articulate the drama’s essence....

“We talk about agribusiness and corporate farming as something to be regretted,” muses environmental historian William Cronon in Illinois Issues (April). “If those farmers have the option of selling their land to a developer or selling to a neighbor with four farms–that [neighbor] is a corporate farmer–I’d have to say I’d rather have [the latter] going on than suburban tract development. Making our peace with some increase in the scale of individual farms is one of the ways to protect the agricultural countryside from urban sprawl....

By Erika Erhart Phil is an engineer with gray hair, big blue eyes, and long, black eyelashes. When I first met him I thought he looked like Chuck E. Cheese, because of his cartoonish wide smile and because those eyes seemed to click when he blinked. Phil is Theresa’s second husband. Her son Tim says she’s changed a lot since she was married to his father, Bob, and living in Glenview 25 years ago....

geovanis.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh, please. First of all, Charlie Kyle deserved to be outed to the taxpayers who pay his salary. He said what he said, namely that the Clemente LSC was worthless–his exact word–and that he saw little way the school board could avoid reconstituting the high school. Then Kyle had a hissy fit when he learned that his actual opinions (rather than his carefully cultivated “public” opinions) were published in a muckracking piece I wrote for Chicago Ink on the Sun-Times smear of the Clemente LSC....

Having the Joffrey in Chicago could be a win-win situation for both the company and Chicago’s dance community if the Joffrey wises up and focuses on its own brand of art instead of populist pabulum, and if the community learns to leverage the presence of an internationally recognized ballet company. It seems to be happening. The Joffrey has returned to what it does best: innovative, accessible, varied repertory. It was this approach that put them on the map and caused so many other companies to follow in their footsteps....

Why don’t you take advantage of E-mail technology? Instead of publishing a single response to a letter you received (probably via E-mail!), why don’t you send a response directly to the person with the problem? Then wait for the advice seeker to respond, and publish the whole back-and-forth for your readers. That way we wouldn’t be left wondering how things turned out. For example, I’m sure everyone wants to know if Giddy Schoolgirl slept with her TA....

I have read that one of the tallest buildings in the world–if not the tallest–is a hotel in, of all places, Pyongyang, North Korea. My fragmented knowledge is that it was built after a South Korean company built the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and that it has never been occupied, despite the booming convention business in North Korea these days. But I never find it included in lists of tall buildings....

BILLY CHILDISH & THEE HEADCOATS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Half the songs I steal ideas direct, the other half indirect,” head Headcoat Billy Childish once said. “Sometimes I have an idea of my own.” Since he’s released more than 70 records with Thee Headcoats, Thee Headcoatees, Thee Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, and others, it’s no surprise that most of the three-chord ditties the 39-year-old Brit penned for last year’s The Messerschmitt Pilot’s Severed Hand (Damaged Goods) sound familiar–especially the sneering, Sex Pistols-y “We Hate the Fucking N....

BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 40s, either by design or serendipity, tenor saxist Paul Quinichette played so much like Lester Young, aka Prez, that he was nicknamed “the Vice President.” And in the 50s every city seemed to have an alto man who’d learned Charlie Parker’s licks well enough to earn the name “Little Bird.” But in a genre that treasures originality the way jazz does, such a moniker ensures a musician second-tier status–despite the distinction of being linked with an important innovator....

Captured at www.blackenvy.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The picture of Mr. and Mrs. Black that emerges from these web pages is of deeply complex individuals who are not afraid of personal contradictions. For example, Mr. Black declares that “our federalist and patriotic credentials are unquestionable,” but he is also comfortable with his opinion that “most Canadians would prefer an American Canada to a socialist one....

The Patriot By Reece Pendleton Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Conscience-stricken by his own brutality during the French-Indian wars, Martin opposes South Carolina’s entry into the conflict with Great Britain and gives a heartfelt speech (the first of many) at a town meeting, pleading with the assembled statesmen to give diplomacy a chance, to spare their families the horrors of war. He tries to stick to his pacifist inclinations, but the battle literally spills over into his backyard....

Cardenio, or the Second Maiden’s Tragedy By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Hamilton were ever to dust himself off and come out of the stacks, he might see what really matters about Cardenio: its outrageous theatricality. Whoever wrote this shameless crowd pleaser didn’t have much on his mind beyond sending the audience into a giddy swoon. A high-octane plot machine, the play is rife with seduction, adultery, revenge, murder, corruption, and necrophilia....

Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s ironic that an internationally known company with a five-and-a-half-week tour of Europe starting later this month should be seeking a higher profile in its hometown, but so it is. Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago (now headed by Gus’s daughter Nan Giordano) was founded in 1962; it was the first jazz troupe to tour the Soviet Union twelve years later....

It’s a given that abstinence-only “sex education” proponents like the Pure Love Alliance are nothing but fronts for religious political extremists intent on injecting their brand of Christian conservative sex negativism into the public schools. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what Linda Lutton fails to mention in her otherwise excellent profile of these and other fear-based organizations [July 14] is their reluctance to explain how their wait-until-marriage scare tactics would apply to gay students, who, unless they commute to Vermont, currently are locked out of marriage laws....

Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors Consider how different the sculpture Bonsai Tree is from a real bonsai tree, with its small, elegant twists and turns, its trunk a fount of change and growth. Lichtenstein’s silver-barked tree by contrast feels frozen. But though his tree doesn’t look like it will ever grow or change, as a sculptural form it’s hardly dead. Denying the fractals of natural landscapes, enlarging and objectifying the bonsai’s curves and humps, it creates an odd but ultimately powerful tension between its organic twists and the bark’s limited detail and smooth metallic sheen....

MISIA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year, when the great fado singer Amalia Rodrigues died, the government of Portugal called for three days of mourning. At least that much was warranted, because no one alive can fill her shoes–with the sole possible exception of Misia. At its inception fado–Portuguese for fate–was a working-class invention much like Argentinean tango, Greek rembetika, and American blues....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After a two-week hearing in January in Washington, D.C., federal judge Royce Lamberth threatened to hold Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin in contempt of court for failing to turn over records of federal trust funds held for Native Americans, which Lamberth had ordered released in November 1996. Department staffers contend that a federal records-depository in the southwest is contaminated with rat droppings, and researchers will not enter it for fear of being infected with the deadly hantavirus....