VINYL RECKONING And oh, speaking of plastic: records. At the absolute height of my collectional zeal, bloated by too many years on the promo-album dole, my LP stash numbered in the THOUSANDS. Three? Four? Five? I now own, well, hundreds–many, most, almost all of which I never play, probably will never play. True–many or most are scratched or warped, caked with beer, wine, and fingerprints. But even among those eminently playable, there isn’t that much turntable action....

VOLCANOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the recent upswing of interest in surf music has come a legion of new surf bands–and with that multiplicity has come a wave of gimmicks meant to distinguish one surf band from the next. Many are visual rather than musical: Los Straitjackets wear Mexican wrestling masks; the Surfaholics donned tiki masks for the cover of their Tiki-a-Go-Go, and Man or Astroman?...

Rosewood Rating ** Worth seeing Directed by John Singleton Written by Gregory Poirier With Jon Voight, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Bruce McGill, Loren Dean, and Esther Rolle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a director, Singleton shares with Furious a didactic streak. Singleton is no demagogue, but his fast-action style tends to erase the nuances of interracial dynamics: in Rosewood white animosity erupts like the lava that torches another defenseless town in the latest volcano thriller, Dante’s Peak....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lisa Alvarado portrays herself as a victim of a large and insensitive institution that betrays the very artists who it supports. Randolph Street Gallery’s impeccable reputation and contributions to the artistic community were my principal motivation for accepting the position of business/operations manager last August. To set the record straight, I spoke to the writer only once very briefly....

CAUGHT IN THE WEB, Performance Theatre, at the Performance Loft, Second Unitarian Church of Chicago. This interesting hybrid of long-form improvisation and conventional playwriting has promise, but in the end Kelsey Hartman’s confusing new comedy garners more puzzlement than laughs. With the Performance Theatre ensemble, Hartman and director Darcy Hughes have cobbled together two one-acts about emotional dislocation in a technological world. The misfits and heroes of the plays lead surreal lives, transgressing time and space, that make very little sense despite the characters’ energetic physicality....

Tom Waits Twenty-five years ago, for his second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, Tom Waits wrote a song about “fumblin’ with the blues.” And though he’s since been acclaimed as a jazz raconteur, a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith for Skid Row, and a hobo sapient a la Harry Partch, both his fumbles and his successes have come out of a long, rambling sojourn to the blues’ brackish backcountry heart. With his long-awaited new Mule Variations, an extended suite of songs as spare, direct, and elemental as any in his catalog, he seems to have arrived....

For years the Music Box has been the premier venue for art films in Chicago. With its passionate, sophisticated audience and its prime location at the north end of the Southport strip, the beautifully restored 1929 movie palace is coveted by national distributors, and programmer Brian Andreotti wields considerable influence over the local exhibition of independent and foreign films. But the commercial landscape for art films could be radically different by the end of 2000....

HIS MAJESTIE’S CLERKES with ALICE PARKER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alice Parker conducting His Majestie’s Clerkes is a match made in heaven. A prolific composer and a respected choral director, Parker has been a real pioneer in a field not always known for its hospitality toward women. She was a longtime assistant to Robert Shaw and his chorale, but came into her own training generations of American singers in the workshops and summer camps she hosts–in fact, that’s where Anne Heider, the Clerkes’ artistic director, first met her....

white.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read the recent article on the fight over liquor licensing taking place in many Chicago communities [October 2]. It seems that the gentrification of the city will only increase the incidence of conflict between new residents and existing businesses. It is worth remembering that living in the city is not the same as living in the suburbs, nor should it be....

JOAN OF ARC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m just so, so / So sick / Of the city,” Tim Kinsella moans quietly into a tape recorder on the title piece of Joan of Arc’s forthcoming third album, Live in Chicago, 1999 (which is not a concert record; you pronounce the “i” short). “I’m just so sick of shouting / Monosyllabically.” It’s a repudiation of rock in the middle of a rock moment: most of the track is furious drumming, which cuts out when Kinsella starts singing....

NICHOLAS PAYTON QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most of the decade it looked certain that Nick Payton meant to leave his mark as the greatest New Orleans trumpeter of the late 20th century–and with his rawboned swagger and molten-gold tone, he still could. But he seems to want even more. Still in his mid-20s, he’s dared to step outside the New Orleans trumpet persona–beholden to Louis Armstrong’s spirit and Wynton Marsalis’s technique–and threatens to become an important influence on the jazz mainstream....

The Descent Beckons Some sections are giddy and silly and just plain dumb. When the piece starts, the stage is littered with piles of blowup dolls. The dancers eventually do almost everything imaginable with them–cuddle them, kick them around like beach balls, use them as bats and javelins, layer them between people to create a human Viennese torte, use them as partners in a square dance, and make them into puppets in a puppet show....

By Cara Jepsen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years later Seham was artistic director of the Performance Studio in New Haven, Connecticut, and started an improv troupe to perform late-night shows. “Most of the women didn’t last too long,” she recalls. Some of the men were “aggressive and domineering,” which violates the rules of Viola Spolin’s improv bible Improvisation for the Theater (1963)....

Having recently moved to Florida from Michigan, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the effects of ultraviolet rays on my eyes. You see, I have had the same sunglasses for ten years or so, which is no problem if the UV protection is inherent in the glass. But it might be time for new glasses if the UV protection was just a coating. Ten years of wiping might have removed it. Since the glasses are dark, my pupils must be enlarged and more vulnerable....

“These Parts” [June 18]–great feature, very interesting, and eagerly read, but: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First–although spell-check may not agree, “hung” does not describe somebody suspended by the neck until death occurs [“Down Town”]. You may have hung up your coat or hung a picture on the wall, you may have a hung jury, you may be considered hung (but then you shouldn’t be on a scaffold, you should be in porn movies), but if you dangle somebody from a noose until they die, then they’ve been hanged....

CASSANDRA WILSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Cassandra Wilson’s hands familiar songs turn to brightly colored clay; in her mouth the shapes into which she molds them turn to liquid gold. In the last few years Wilson has become extremely popular thanks to her distinctive interpretations of tunes by everyone from the Monkees and U2 to Robert Johnson and Hank Williams, but her recent Rendezvous (Blue Note), a mostly standards collaboration with pianist Jacky Terrasson, brings home that she is first and foremost a jazz singer....

By Joy Bergmann “You don’t have to own one,” he says. “Just understand my right to do so.” Asked about Columbine High, Beauchamp replies, “You can’t regulate stupidity.” There are already 23,000 gun-related laws on the books, he says, and the homicidal teenagers violated dozens of them. He says his own research into the 1997 school shooting in Pearl, Mississippi, revealed a little-reported act of armed heroism. “The assistant principal ran out to his car, got his own gun, and held the young gunman at bay until police arrived 11 minutes later....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra That’s why we get concerts like the one Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra put on at Orchestra Hall the other night. There were two works on the program: the world premiere of a major piece called Exody, by the contemporary British composer Harrison Birtwistle, and the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony. It was a pretty good concert, but it was also totally ridiculous. These two works have no business being yoked together on the same program....

Emily Severance Image Auto at 221 W. Chicago, through March 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I ran into her a few months ago in the grocery store and asked her if she was still writing. “I’m in art school now,” she said. “I’m in ceramics.” I fell for it. I actually believed she’d forfeited her demons, and her ambitions, for a more modest pastime....

LEIF OVE ANDSNES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes belongs to the postboomer generation of photogenic concert soloists favored by today’s increasingly image-conscious impresarios. While the fashion on the distaff side seems to be cute pubescent Asians with eerily phenomenal technique, the requisites for the privileged male circle include a square jaw, brawny build, and punky demeanor. Andsnes, however, is several cuts above the rest, many of whom, like his Scandinavian compatriot Olli Mustonen, may end up flashes in the pan....