MSBR/GOVERNMENT ALPHA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that Merzbow, elder statesman of the Japanese noise underground, is releasing albums through John Zorn and appearing at major festivals (he’ll be at Victoriaville this year), it’s about time somebody else stepped up onto the bottom rung of the ladder. This double bill promises a glimpse into the future of Tokyo experimentalism. On the recent Geosynclines (Flenix), MSBR (aka Koji Tano) engineers wild leaps in dynamics and density, shifting from exceedingly quiet bell tones into overdriven jet engine blasts....

Arturo Herrera Wolfgang Laib: You Will Go Somewhere Else Other critics have pointed out how suggestive Herrera’s abstract shapes are, seeing in them breasts and penises and mouths and dogs and feces. In the booklet for this show, curator Hamza Walker argues convincingly for a connection between Herrera’s work and the childhood fantasies psychoanalysis has unearthed. Herrera himself–a Chicagoan (now in New York on a fellowship) who was born in Venezuela in 1959 and who has an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago–prefers to reveal little of his biography and intent....

A great hero needs to be offset by a great villain, and the temptation is to say they don’t make ’em like that anymore. Oh, there might be a Michael Jordan on the one hand–allowing him the more human-size heroism of the present day, as opposed to the mythic heroism of a Babe Ruth or a Joe Louis–but they just don’t make ’em like Bill Laimbeer or Rick Mahorn or, for goodness’ sake, Dennis Rodman....

Anatomy of a Bust While the city has always been a major drug distribution hub, larger quantities are arriving from Mexico, according to DEA spokesman Mark Hannan. He says drug shipments are increasingly routed through that country because of expanded commerce and traffic across the U.S. border brought about by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The federal government’s figures support the trend....

BLAZERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rock-en-espa–ol movement that’s burgeoned over the last year didn’t come out of nowhere. As the recent compilation ÁAy Califas! Raza Rock of the ’70s & ’80s (Zyanya/Rhino) reminds us, there’s a rich tradition of Latino bands tweaking rock conventions to meet their cultural needs. Although East LA’s Blazers, who’ve been around for a couple decades now, aren’t included on that collection, they share an aesthetic with bands that are....

Thunder Knocking on the Door The mainstreaming of the blues, which brought it in the 70s from the smoky haunts of 47th Street to the frat-boy territory of Lincoln Park, may have rescued a great many artists from poverty and obscurity. But whether it boosted the art is another matter. Widespread acceptance can breed complacency and a certain lack of innovation, and though “Sweet Home Chicago” must be doing wonderful things for the Willie Dixon estate, and B....

Go-Betweens Punk’s democratization of rock ‘n’ roll in the late 70s is perhaps the single most romantic moment in the history of the music–at least to those of us who weren’t there to step in the vomit. With the birth of DIY came a support system of fanzines, labels, small clubs, and adventurous friends that gave bands time to evolve at their own pace, and more fascinating still, it was a worldwide phenomenon....

CAFE TACUBA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their recent double album, Reves/Yosoy (Warner Brothers)–the title translates to “Backwards/I Am”–Mexico City’s Cafe Tacuba make clear that nonchalant style blending isn’t exclusive to Brazilian pop. On previous discs, like Re (1994) and the superb covers collection Avalancha de exitos (1996), the quartet established its daring range, fusing traditional rancheras and boleros with alt-rock, pop, and club music, presaging a movement that now includes bands like Plastilina Mosh, Titan, Molotov, Bersuit, and Aterciopelados....

For Kate Buddeke, it all began with hormones. She wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer, but in the early 70s a friend invited her to a rehearsal of the Chicago Free Theater, which put on original rock operas. She was 16. “I kind of fell in love with this guy onstage,” she says. “They said they had classes on Monday nights, so I went–just to go meet this guy....

Earnest C. Merritt III By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The central object in Particular Road is a crow perched on a paintbrush, two elements that seem to recapitulate the painting’s formal dualism: the crow suggests flight, an escape from materiality, while the brush reminds us we’re looking at a painting. Similarly, at first the crow and paintbrush seem to be hovering above the road, but both their shadows indicate they’re on the ground....

GEORGE FREEMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George Burns!—the title of George Freeman’s new CD on the local Southport label—does more than capture the goofy charm of the jazz album titles of the 1950s. The pun also shouts out the link between Freeman’s otherworldly guitar playing and the humor of the classic comedian who, in conflating on-screen and offscreen action on his mid-50s television program, did more to seed the vast wasteland with honest-to-goodness surrealism than anyone except Ernie Kovacs....

If Children Remember, Spirit Expressing, at Unity in Chicago. Excitement about the arrival of Santa Claus can overshadow the religious import of Christmas for children. But this shouldn’t happen with Ed Townley’s If Children Remember, with music by Ed Tossing. Adapted from an L. Frank Baum tale, this musical brims with aphorisms, and the script is heavy with religious overtones (the play’s “great teacher” is Jesus). Of course, Townley is a senior minister at Unity in Chicago, a religious organization....

ISOTOPE 217 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Jeff Parker, the inventive young AACM guitarist best known for his work with Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble, became a permanent member of Tortoise this year, he solidified a promising link between two of Chicago’s most exciting music scenes. As he applies his jazz sensibility to that outfit’s rock-based collages, and as members of Tortoise indulge their taste for the funk with Parker and other jazz players in Isotope 217, interesting questions arise: What went wrong with fusion the first time around?...

My Name Is Joe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is one of Ken Loach’s most powerful films, even if it takes a wrong turn–a lamentable failure of imagination in Paul Laverty’s script that foreshortens the leading female character about three quarters of the way through to accommodate the deterministic plot machinery. A reformed alcoholic and volunteer soccer coach (played with charisma and nobility by Peter Mullan) doing odd jobs in a Glasgow slum meets and falls in love with a sensitive health worker (Louise Goodall) and gets a new lease on life....

Lead Stories In November Ontario College of Art student Jubal Brown told the Associated Press that he was the person who vomited publicly on two masterpieces this year. At the Art Gallery of Ontario in May he regurgitated red food coloring on a Raoul Dufy work, and at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in November he threw up in blue on a Piet Mondrian painting. Brown claimed that his goal was “to liberate individuals and living creatures from banal, oppressive representation....

Silver Images Film Festival Cory Anderson’s hour-long 1992 documentary offers an engaging if cursory profile of Indian-born conductor Mehli Mehta, cutting between interviews with the maestro to footage of him guiding musicians from the podium and of colleagues, students, and family praising him. Mehta is rightly credited for having brought Western classical music to India in the 30s and 40s–and the Bombay footage from that era is a find–but the film glosses over his Zoroastrian upbringing, his long-standing ties to Israel, and the trouble he’s had finding a top-notch conducting post in the West....

SONNY SIMMONS & SUNNY MURRAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he retired from music in the 1970s, the adventurous and soulful saxist Sonny Simmons had left little impact on jazz: some work with the equally obscure Prince Lasha, one recording with John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones, a couple of sessions on which he backed Eric Dolphy. So when he suddenly reappeared four years ago–and on Qwest, the label owned by mainstream maven Quincy Jones–no one knew what to expect....

Just what does “colitis” mean? In the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles the first lines are, “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitis rising up through the air.” I remember I tried looking it up at a university library years ago and couldn’t find the answer. I know songwriters sometimes make up words, but I didn’t see a Dr. Seuss credit on the album....

TARIKA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The comparative isolation enjoyed by the people of Madagascar, which sits several hundred miles off the southeastern coast of Mozambique, has produced some of Africa’s most original and exuberant music. And the singer-songwriter sisters who founded Tarika–Rasoanaivo Hanitraivo and Raharimalala Tina Norosoa, better known for obvious reasons as Hanitra and Noro–have made the most of it, concocting a powerhouse modern mix yet avoiding “world beat” homogenization....

The Spider’s Web Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1989 German epic, directed by Bernhard Wicki and running 198 minutes, makes visible the kind of soulless opportunism that helped lead to Nazism. Set mostly in 1923, it centers on Lohse (Ulrich MŸhe), a former army lieutenant putting himself through law school by tutoring the son of a Jewish banker. Propositioned by an elderly prince, Lohse is revolted but has sex with him anyway in the hope of improving his situation, and he carries on an affair with the banker’s wife despite his professed anti-Semitism....