CHICAGO SINFONIETTA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it was formed in the mid-80s, the Chicago Sinfonietta was fairly unusual in the midwest as one of a handful of rainbow-coalition orchestras. Now, of course, even the slow-moving Chicago Symphony Orchestra can boast ethnic inclusiveness, but the Sinfonietta is still a step ahead of its senior colleagues in championing worthy nonmainstream composers and soloists on the rise....

DAT POLITICS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The French laptop quartet DAT Politics isn’t afraid of a funky beat or a little pop melody, so if you’re looking for electronic abstraction, go see Oval on Saturday instead. On the band’s two albums, Villiger (A-Musik) and Tracto Flirt (Tigerbeat6), cheesy hooks played on rubbery-sounding synths bounce through a minefield of ominous tones, deliberately tinny electro beats, liquefied samples, stuttering electronic glitches, ghostly hiss, and noisy decay....

Swans They certainly didn’t seem like contenders at first. No band before them had ever been so completely and deliberately devoid of such life-affirming qualities as humor and beauty. And no lyricist had ever spelled it out quite as flatly as Michael Gira: “Use sex for control / Use power for power / Use money for cruelty / Use hate for freedom…Sex, power, money, hate,” he choked out on Swans’ full-length debut, Filth....

By Ben Joravsky He heard about Timber Lanes when a friend asked him to join a Sunday mixed league there. “The first time I walked in there was, I don’t know, 1984,” says Kuhn. It was love at first sight. Timber Lanes looked exactly the way he thought a neighborhood joint is supposed to look: dank, smoky, dark. Then as now, it’s one long room–bar in front, eight lanes in back–that reeks of cigarettes and booze and reverberates with the rock ‘n’ roll blaring from the jukebox and the big beery guys bellowing, bickering, and laying down bets....

Mourning Has Broken Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one wants to laugh at a funeral, but suppressing the urge can often make a person laugh harder, and Noble Fool Theater Company has parlayed that into a long-running hit. Flanagan’s Wake, a partly scripted, partly improvised show at which audience members find themselves in the middle of an Irish wake, opened on Saint Patrick’s Day 1993 at the Improv Institute, where it ran successfully for a year....

For the first time in the three-year history of the Movable Beast Dance Festival, the performances are taking place only during the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Summer Solstice Celebration. But that doesn’t mean the dances are any less interesting–in fact, since they’re all site specific, this avant-garde event may be more avant-garde than ever. Among the festival’s three out-of-town guests is OnSite Dance Company from San Francisco, which plans an outdoor bicycle piece called Freewheel employing not only the five members of the company but participants from Chicago’s Bike Coalition and other members of the local biking community, including death-defying messengers....

Never Say Die But for activist attorney Marlene Kamish and the eight Pilsen plaintiffs she represents in Cortez v. City of Chicago, diligent reading has paid off. Just as the city was preparing to put the Pilsen TIF into motion at last, Kamish made one final attempt to stop it and came away with an important victory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For about a year the Pilsen Eight have been quietly showing up for a circuit court case arguing that the city violated due process in implementing Pilsen’s TIF....

The Territory Between When we reflect on our sense of identity, do we focus on what’s memorable and definite–on what we identify as formative experiences? Can we gain insight into ourselves by observing what we’re ambivalent about? Or is our identity more fluid: does our response to the ever-changing present moment reveal what’s fundamental in our natures? Such questions came to mind while viewing the final weekend of four in Fluid Measure Performance Company’s “The Territory Between” series on movement and the spoken word, featuring three works by the company and three improvisational solos by guest artist Simone Forti....

PAN-AMERICAN, GRANDADDY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his second album as Pan-American, 360 Business/360 Bypass (Kranky), Labradford guitarist Mark Nelson shakes off the superficial dub production of the debut in favor of a beautiful pulse-driven minimalism. Spare clicks, muffled bass-drum kicks, and fractured cymbal patter pump life into narcotic bass tones, heavily manipulated electric-piano riffs, and electronic bleeps. Nelson and Casey Rice–who mixed the album and did some of the electronic processing–conduct some interesting experiments in dynamics, dropping out the beats for a few bars here and isolating some pedal-steel drift there, but the music is best experienced by letting it wash over you....

RYOJI IKEDA, KEVIN DRUMM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You might hear snatches of voice or string quartet or the occasional disfigured techno beat on Ryoji Ikeda’s 1998 album, 0ÞC (Touch), but the Tokyo minimalist generally prefers to work with sounds that aren’t so complex. He’s a musical molecular scientist, crafting irregular staccato rhythmic patterns, all-enveloping ambient hums, and jarring blasts of white noise from the most basic electronic tones; the universes he spins can be haunting and soothing or beautiful and frightening at once....

JOHN SINCLAIR & his blues scholars 6/4-6, HEARTLAND CAFE Jazz poetry gets maligned from both sides: lots of jazz fans think the words are gratuitous, and lots of poetry fans don’t understand what all the honking and squeaking is for. John Sinclair, the New Orleans-based jazz poet who’s still most famous for his stint as the MC5’s beleaguered manager and chairman of the White Panther Party, has at times done little to remedy the problem: on his 1996 collaboration with former MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, Full Circle, Kramer is in fine dirty-blues form, but the extra competition causes Sinclair to stiffen up on the delivery of even the witty, moving moments of his stentorian music-history diatribes....

The Clutch of Fear “It was subtle, but it was clear what they were doing,” says Anderson, who’s encountered this kind of defensive maneuver before. Women clutching their purses around black men isn’t just an issue of black and white. Many Latino, Asian, and black women do the same thing–often with less subtlety. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not everyone shares Chandler’s opinion. “When you ask a white woman why she is clutching her purse in the presence of a black man, she says she’s not clutching it, just rearranging the contents,” says Heather Dalmage, an assistant professor of sociology at Roosevelt University....

While waxing nostalgic over our favorite cartoons from the 60s and 70s with some friends, we suddenly realized that Disney’s The Lion King bears a striking resemblance in plot and cast to the Japanese-made 60s TV series Kimba the White Lion (of which we can all remember every word of the theme song, by the way). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, it wasn’t a cheap rip-off–have you been to a first-run movie lately?...

Western By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given our extreme isolationism–in some ways perhaps even greater today than it was half a century ago–it’s logical that we tend to think of foreigners in stereotypical terms. After all, we have so little information and experience to draw on, and it’s symptomatic of the problem that we often think of non-Americans as wannabe Americans even though many of them clearly aren’t....

7 SHORT COMEDIES BY DAVID IVES, 5 from all in the timing, Theatre Vox, at Organic Theater Greenhouse, Lab Theater. If the secret to comedy really were “all in the timing,” then David Ives could conceivably be the next Tom Stoppard and Theatre Vox’s sumptuously designed production would be a hoot. But since Ives’s considerable technical skill and polished wit seem to mask a certain soullessness, his self-consciously clever one-line gimmicks posing as plays, his facile name-dropping, and his knowing Stoppard-by-way-of-Seinfeld humor ultimately grow tedious....

It’s a steamy Saturday in Berwyn. We’re standing in the backyard of Bill Miller’s yellow brick bungalow, staring through sweat at a gurgling six-foot-deep pond. Miller, a burly recently retired factory supervisor, is delivering a lecture on koi aesthetics in rich Brooklynese. “The skin has to have a texture to it that looks like a paintin’,” he says. “The white has to be impeccable. The reds can’t bleed into the other colors....

Sergeant Steve Brownstein comes across the same scene day after day in residential neighborhoods throughout the city: wounded and malnourished pit bulls chained in dark, feces-strewn basements, closets, garages, or vacant apartments. The animals’ owners, who use them in dogfights and bet on the contests, routinely punch, kick, and otherwise torment them, even feeding them hot peppers, to turn them into ferocious fighters. By the time-Brownstein gets to them, they usually cower at the, sight of humans....

Conversation With a Diva Things seem to be changing for the better at Bailiwick Repertory, which sponsors a yearly theater festival. In the past I’ve been disappointed by Bailiwick’s focus on generic gay themes and pretty bodies. Though most of the “Pride ’99” programming is boy crazy, the series opened strongly with Larry Kramer’s problematic but worthy play Just Say No, Tim Miller’s Shirts & Skin, and Dr. Shirlene Holmes’s Conversation With a Diva....

“The personal journalism that Chicago newspapers were famous for [a century and more ago] has now shifted over to television,” writes Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books (September 25). “Oprah is the modern Eugene Field, folksily homiletic, dispensing tart street wisdoms. Studs Terkel, in his long-running radio interviews for WFMT, is the equivalent of Carl Sandburg in his labor-reporting days–radical, but in ways that connect with ordinary people…....

friday 7/21 – Thursday 7/27 No one knows more about “The Writer’s Discipline” than the man who maintains a big-city law practice while turning out critically acclaimed, best-selling novels on a regular basis. Scott Turow will share his secrets at 7:30 tonight at the Hemingway Museum, 200 N. Oak Park in Oak Park. It’s the kickoff lecture for the Hemingway 2000 Colloquium: Assessing the Man and His Work, to be held at the museum from 7:45 to 4:15 tomorrow, July 22....