WRTE Pumps Up the Volume Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But in Chicago, at least, low-power radio has won a small victory. Next month, WRTE (90.5 FM), the 8-watt bilingual radio station owned by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, will boost its signal to 73 watts, which will bring its programming to listeners as far south as 79th Street, as far west as Oak Park, as far north as Fullerton, and as far east as Canal Street....

Alfons Koller: Imagine That! Kara Walker Koller emphasizes that all these works are for sale–most have price tags on them–and that fact seems a part of their meaning. Here one is invited to buy a piece of concrete that levels a floor or fills a corner. But if it’s installed in one’s own home, it’s riven from the context for which it was made. Koller critiques the very act of collecting....

Anarchist, publisher, comedian, Yippie clown, and “investigative satirist” Paul Krassner has been stirring things up since the early 60s, outliving most of his own iconoclastic generation, among them Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, whose autobiography he edited. (Sahl is technically alive but lost his comic edge at about the time he started cuddling up to Ronald Reagan.) The man who once gleefully published an account in the Realist of the newly sworn-in President Johnson violating Kennedy’s corpse on the flight back from Dallas to D....

News flash. From a recent press release from the city’s Department of Housing: “Most of Chicago’s low and moderate income residents are faced with finite resources.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Urban denial leads to urban renewal. Why don’t the stars turn out to save the remains of Maxwell Street? “The blues greats are the ones who are most likely to think they did it on their own,” Roosevelt University professor Steve Balkin tells Mark Guarino of the Daily Herald (July 13)....

Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream The usual practice at the death of an artist was to auction off the contents of the artist’s studio–possibly hundreds of works–which would then be removed from their context, changing hands from one private collector to another and perhaps finally arriving at a museum, an object of market speculation. A few years before his death, foreseeing this problem, Moreau began to organize his studio and apartments into a museum that would keep together all the finished works he still owned plus numerous unfinished works and thousands of sketches, notes, studies, maquettes, and variant versions....

From the Ground Up “The lady above us owned a traveling zoo,” says Neuwirth. “There was an armadillo nibbling on my feet when I signed the lease. There were monkeys and a bear and people were dropping off pets all the time. I admired a puppy she had in her arms, and she said, ‘Here, take it.’” Slowly but surely their search became purposeful, and in early 1993, after looking at 50 farms scattered across Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, they found a keeper....

In the Company of Men Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t tell anyone, but this blistering piece of provocation by independent writer-director Neil LaBute, his first feature, has a lot to do with capitalism and how it alters our notions of masculinity and romance; in short, it’s about how business affects the way we live and think and feel. Two 30ish male execs (Aaron Eckhart, Matt Malloy) sent to their company’s branch office for six weeks decide to date, flatter, and then humiliate a woman they pick at random....

L7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bratty Donnas may be hard rock’s favorite femmes fatales at the moment, but their spiritual foremothers in L7 could eat them for breakfast. “Sardonic” doesn’t begin to suggest the comedic disdain with which Donita Sparks and Suzi Gardner spit out their syllables on the new Slap-Happy, stretching vowels into sneers on such statements of purpose as “Place my bet on my rawkin’ macheen” and “I want a laaack-ey” and “Stick to the plaaan, maaan....

Jennifer Rexroat thought she was getting a great deal when she signed on as a graduate student in political science and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago: she’d get to study what she loved in exchange for teaching two classes a year. But three and a half years later she finds herself “upwards of $30,000” in debt–not because she’s splurging, but because UIC pays her only about $7,000 a year....

MONSTER MAGNET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Never mind the white-rappers-on-steroids metallurgy of Korn and Limp Bizkit: the real hard-rock renaissance band is this quintet from Red Bank, New Jersey. Last summer Monster Magnet capped off years of bongwater-drenched underground releases and a pair of heady major-label records (1993’s Superjudge and 1995’s Dopes to Infinity) with the staggering Powertrip (A & M), the best heavy-rock album since Soundgarden’s Superunknown....

Elisabeth Subrin first saw Shulie five years ago when she was doing research for a movie at Kartemquin Films. The half-hour documentary, shot in 1967 by four male Northwestern University students–including Kartemquin’s Jerry Blumenthal–follows 22-year-old Shulamith Firestone, then a student at the School of the Art Institute wrestling with her nascent feminist identity. Two years after the film was completed, she wrote the best-selling feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s more, she claims not to be able to bring herself anywhere near orgasm by any method. My observation is that she seems afraid of a potentially involuntary response. Should I consider her the proverbial “frigid” woman? She isn’t cold, really. In fact, she’s very much interested in sexual contact. But she can’t come. She likes intercourse and lubricates well, but I’ve done all the usual things to no avail....

DRAGKING 5/7, ROBY’S Since its 1993 debut this mysterious Chicago collective has drawn a lot of Beefheart comparisons, but that’s both too kind and too simplistic; likewise with the Negativland parallels. On its first LP since 1995, Indie Authenticity Crisis (Hardboiled), the group addresses its mix of detuned guitars, skronky horns, corrupted toys, strategic samples, and barely audible vocals to topics ranging from racial tension (“King Richie I”) to gender dysplasia (“Are You a Woman?...

Sonic Youth This is all the more impressive when you consider Sonic Youth’s unassailable stature in the, ahem, indie-rock community. Their simple endurance is celebrated by girls who hold up Kim Gordon as the paragon of cool and would love to have 15 years and counting of collaborative marriage like she has had with Thurston Moore; by collectors of avant-garde rarities who credit Moore and his business partner Byron Coley with introducing hundreds to unappreciated treasures (and blame them for singlehandedly driving up prices on used vinyl); by fellow musicians who wish they had the time and energy to stick their fingers into every pie; by everyone who ponders how a band that’s never had a gold album has maintained such sterling relations with Geffen; by critics who find it remarkable that the concept of a “new Sonic Youth album” actually means something....

THE GROUNDLINGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As anyone who’s seen All Star Instant Comedy With the Groundlings on cable can tell you, the LA-based Groundlings provide a slicker, noisier brand of improv, punching tag lines with the force of laugh-hungry stand-up comics and painting quickly in broad strokes the kind of well-defined characters guaranteed to win yuks from the yokels in the balcony....

Witness to the Persecution Sundell arrived in East Timor on August 21, part of the International Federation for East Timor Observer Project. The group of 190 people–5 from Chicago–was to monitor the vote that had been authorized by Indonesian president B.J. Habibie and that was being overseen by the UN. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This past summer Sundell arrived in Same, a city six hours from the East Timorese capital of Dili, during the last days of the campaigning on the vote....

BO DOLLIS & THE WILD MAGNOLIAS WITH MONK BOUDREAUX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every year at Carnival time, the Mardi Gras “tribes” of New Orleans–the Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Yellow Pocahontas, and Big Chief Bo Dollis’s Wild Magnolias, among others–deck themselves out in spangled, multicolored Indian costumes and take to the streets. The practice, which dates back to the 1880s, is thought by some to have originated as a festive tribute to Louisiana’s native people, who befriended runaway slaves and sometimes fought alongside them in rebellions....

Bottle Rockets’ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They resurfaced last year on the Austin-based, Mercury-distributed Doolittle label, which in November released the accurately titled Leftovers, a collection of dull tracks rightly edited off 24 Hours a Day. But their first new album for Doolittle, Brand New Year–for which bassist Robert Kearns replaces Chicagoan Tom Ray, who’s busy with Devil in a Woodpile–bears little resemblance to the tried-and-true rollicking roots rock of their previous releases....

Charlie Hunter & Adam Cruz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charlie Hunter’s devotees have doubtless heard more than enough about his eight-string guitar technique. True, Hunter’s astonishing–he plays sly improvisations on the top five strings and fully independent bass lines on the bottom three, and sends each line out through a separate amp–but that parlor trick is responsible for so much of the attention directed his way you’d think it was all he had going for him....

Ssshh! Over there! I’ve almost got it cornered! Prospectus for an August poetry workshop in north-suburban Winnetka: “This workshop will focus on close scrutiny as a means to pursue a poem in hiding and coax it onto the page.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What has been good about probation?” says Robert Gutter, principal of Wright Elementary School in Humboldt Park (Catalyst, June). “I don’t have to twist my staff’s arms, and I can demand more from them....