Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I always thrill to the writerly stylings of the sly and handsome Neal Pollack, who I would call a friend, and who in the May 14 Reader argues that CTA president Frank Kruesi has better things to do than crack down on street musicians in the subway. He may have a point. But I would submit that Neal also has better things to do than attempting to characterize this nonissue as a free-speech crusade, as much as I love music–particularly good music–in spaces public and private, and here’s why: most of the music performed by street musicians is criminal....

NELDA NELSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mezzo-soprano Nelda Nelson came across the poetry of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz about ten years ago, while pursuing a doctorate in Spanish literature at Indiana University. Sor Juana was a 17th-century Mexican nun whose passion for knowledge brought her both great acclaim and significant hardship. Known as “la decima musa,” the tenth muse, the well-rounded woman taught herself to read Latin at age seven and began writing poems shortly thereafter; played several instruments; painted admirable miniatures; became proficient in medicine, canon law, astronomy, and advanced mathematics; and accumulated a library of some four thousand books, then the largest in the New World, before succumbing to the plague at age 53....

Holly Hughes was one of the NEA Four, artists whose work was deemed too subversive for subsidy. It may come as a surprise, then, that her solo show is fiercely patriotic. Hughes’s account of her suit against the National Endowment for the Arts echoes the classic American complaint, first enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, about our government failing to live up to its own ideals. But even if you’re bored by the inner workings of the legal system, Preaching to the Perverted is still worth your time as a take on the experience of sudden fame, an analysis of symbols, and a critique of herd journalism....

ROY HARGROVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The often brilliant young trumpeter Roy Hargrove came a cropper with his latest album, Moment to Moment (Verve)–a syrupy, strings-laden ballads collection that could put coffee to sleep. I can see why the project might have appealed to him: jazzmen have used orchestral backdrops to flatter their arioso playing ever since Charlie Parker legitimized the practice on his “With Strings” dates of 1949 and ’50, and Hargrove ranks among the most straightforward melodists of the post-Wynton generation, with a style that recaptures the lyrical heart of the 60s mainstream....

By Michael Miner Attorney Thomas Morrissey won’t say what damages he intends to seek for the abused women–who will be compensated either in a settlement or by court order. But when a similar suit against the city of Chicago was resolved in the 80s, individual damages as high as $75,000 were awarded. What’s holding up compensation this time, Morrissey says, is that most of the women in the class can’t be contacted individually because they no longer live at their last known addresses....

By Ted Kleine In Chicago journalism you’re not a player unless you’ve caught an alderman, and StreetWise had finally bagged its trophy. The paper has been around for five years, but the Granato story was its first attempt at investigative journalism. Frago had discovered the campaign contributions while researching how rising rents in West Town–especially in its Wicker Park pocket–have shunted poor Latinos out of the neighborhood, in some cases into homeless shelters....

THE BALTIMORE WALTZ, Ulysses Theater Company, at Shattered Globe Theatre. Paula Vogel’s 80-minute one-act–a quirky 1991 tribute to a brother who died of AIDS–keeps tragedy at arm’s length until its abrupt and haunting ending. With a kind of gallows humor, Vogel changes their fates: Anna, a Baltimore schoolteacher, imagines that she’s suffering from incurable “Acquired Toilet Disease” and that she accompanies her brother Carl, a gay San Francisco librarian, on the journey that he was well enough to plan but not to take....

A Night Near the Sun, Real Rain Productions, at TinFish Theatre. In great legends the hero slays the villain and claims the princess. But it doesn’t work that way in real life. Murderers, even those with the best intentions, are no longer honored and rewarded. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don Zolidis’s A Night Near the Sun, being given its world premiere, both relies on and subverts those legends....

OR If you missed Dumb Type at the Museum of Contemporary Art last weekend, you may not have a chance to make up for your folly: the likelihood of seeing this Kyoto-based performance collective in Chicago again is slim. Formed in 1984, Dumb Type has never performed here before and only rarely been seen in the United States. They tour mainly in Europe, where their brand of nonlinear, image-based work is readily sponsored by government-supported theaters that truly value the arts–even art as gloriously enigmatic and useless as Dumb Type’s....

AVALON STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Avalon String Quartet is well ahead of schedule: not only have its young players developed uncommonly mature interpretive voices, but since forming in 1995 it’s adapted to one personnel change and won a string of competitions juried by veterans. The Strad, a magazine for string professionals, mentioned its first performances, and soon afterward the quartet participated in violinist Isaac Stern’s series of Carnegie Hall workshops; Stern has since invited the Avalon to give a recital there this winter....

In 1959 the Bolshoi Ballet, renowned then as it is now, came to New York and performed Leonid Lavrovsky’s version of Romeo and Juliet, created in 1940. Set to the Prokofiev score, Lavrovsky’s choreography underwhelmed critic Edwin Denby, who compared the ballet’s pace to “that of an army’s indoctrination lecture.” Part of the problem was oodles of mime–as Lavrovsky said of the ballet, “The depths of passion and ideas, and the intensity of feeling conveyed by Shakespeare’s tragedy, demand the fusion of dance with mime…....

BUILT TO SPILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title of Built to Spill’s recent Keep It Like a Secret sure seems to be an apt description of the Boise trio’s strategy since signing to Warner Brothers in 1997. They’re playing the game, but they aren’t advertising what they’re holding. In a Spin profile earlier this year bandleader Doug Martsch said, “When I think about our audience, I think about my friends, you know?...

Electronic Connections Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Brazilian-born, New York-based Lee, who used sample-based music to score her 1995 exploration of the allure of technology, Synthetic Pleasures, set herself an almost impossible task: trying to encapsulate not just rave culture in its prime but also its historical precedents–including futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noise”–and the current wildly diverse landscape of electronica in a mere 75 minutes....

EVERETT GREENE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Indianapolis jazz vocalist Everett Greene tackles “Everything I Have Is Yours,” one of the late Billy Eckstine’s signature ballads, he doesn’t even try to distance himself from the source. And why should he? Through a combination of genetic accident and personal choice, Everett sounds a lot like Eckstine–so much so that he’d be foolish to ignore it....

Jamie O’Reilly and Michael Smith’s cabaret piece is not the deepest show about art I’ve ever seen–that honor goes to Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase. But it may be the most playful. Especially when Smith and O’Reilly wax mischievous and provide alternative lyrics to the old pop song “Mona Lisa”: here the artist’s subject, played by the luminous O’Reilly, tells us what a pain it is to pose for a man like Leonardo....

Thursday, Even though Billy Taylor’s solid playing, which draws on both swing and bop, is not particularly compelling, it makes perfect sense for the pianist to open this year’s festival. Over the years he’s become much beloved for his ability to make the history of jazz both coherent and interesting as the host of various popular radio programs–and in a smart move for WBEZ, he’s part of this year’s broadcast team....

KERMIT RUFFINS & THE BARBECUE SWINGERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what to call Kermit Ruffins, the thirtysomething trumpeter and singer who expertly invokes the classic Crescent City jazz of the 1920s–“neoclassic” already describes the wannabeboppers, who are trying their damnedest to bring back 50s jazz. Besides, Ruffins doesn’t really play “neo” anything: though his music harks all the way back to the birth of jazz, it’s never gone out of fashion in his native New Orleans....

Kurt & Courtney Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two freaky conspiracy theories rear their heads in Nick Broomfield’s gripping investigative narrative, which tries to get to the bottom of the relationship between Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love. Examining Cobain’s life up to his apparent suicide in 1994, Broomfield paints a horrifying picture of how devastating fame can be to a sensitive soul....

Lead Stories According to a January report in the New York Times, Afghanistan’s economy is so bankrupt under the Taliban movement that people have begun to raid cemeteries for human bones. After the skulls are broken up, the bones are passed off to dealers in Pakistan as animal bones to be used for cooking oil, soap, chicken feed, and buttons. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bottom of the Gene Pool...

RONNIE EARL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Ronnie Earl, one of today’s most versatile and sophisticated blues stylists, started out in the 70s in the Boston area, where he sat in with visiting Chicago luminaries like Otis Rush and Big Walter Horton. He eventually signed on with Roomful of Blues, a New England-based band that specialized in the kind of tight, horn-drenched arrangements favored by postwar Texas-California bluesmen in the T-Bone Walker mold–a style with which Earl quickly became closely associated....