Woman Against the World El Saadawi, currently in residence at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has published 30 books–novels, plays, memoirs, essay collections, and books of short stories–since the late 50s. Her problems with the Egyptian government started with the publication of Women and Sex (1969), which addressed the physical, mental, and social oppression of women in Egypt and the Arab world; she asserted that veiling, female circumcision, and the glorification of virginity were linked to the political and economic oppression of women....

Friday 4/4 – Thursday 4/10 If we weren’t such jive-ass Chicagoans whose fingers are way off the pulse of the pop cult jugular, we would have been bestowed a Polly Esther’s earlier than this. The popular nightclub chain, which institutionalizes the dubiously stabilized 70s retro craze in much the same way the House of Blues institutionalizes you-know-what, has already landed in seven other cities. Of course truly hip nostalgics may want to hold out for the imminent arrival of establishments themed on the kooky hairstyles, clothing, and music of the early 90s....

Tap is a portable pleasure, a fact recalling its origins in juba: when slaves were denied their drums, they slapped their bodies or any old thing they could find to make music. Tap doesn’t even require shoes–all it takes is a sense of rhythm. In Foot Notes–The Concert, 26-year-old Savion Glover “taps” in his stocking feet, having first sprinkled the floor with sand. Punctuating the hushed scraping with occasional stamps, he might sound like a distant train or like lovers whispering jokes at 2 AM....

Various Artists In the 70s rap pioneer Afrika Bambaataa used to ask Bronx party people, “Would you ever dance to the Beatles?” When they shook their sweaty heads smugly he’d smile back, just as smug: “Well,” he’d say, “you did tonight.” He’d go on to collaborate with nonrap artists as far apart as James Brown and Bill Laswell, John Lydon and George Clinton, but 20 years later the DJ culture is mutating at a rate even he couldn’t possibly have anticipated....

Marc Alan Jacobs: Hymietown William Conger: Circus Paintings There’s humor in Jacobs’s repetition, and by encouraging the viewer to punch, he asks us to examine our capacity for prejudice. The way the sculptures right themselves–with a motion Jacobs says resembles the rocking made by Jews in prayer–is a witty response to aggression. And the show’s title–taken from Jesse Jackson’s notorious reference to New York City, where Jacobs now lives–is humorously echoed in the forest of identical bar mitzvah figures....

Literary foreigners have ever been drawn to this country, curious to see for themselves the doings of our bumptious, God-fearing, and famously democratic people. Such notable authors as Tocqueville, Dickens, Henry James (American by birth, but cosmopolite by persuasion) and Nabokov have passed our way, leaving reports that continue to instruct and amuse us. After 160 years, for example, Tocqueville’s observation that in America “each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object: namely, himself” has only sharpened its edge, and it will take more than interstates and Holiday Inns to dissipate the pall that Humbert Humbert left hanging over our highways after his desperate romp through the stucco courts and the clapboard cabins of a bygone America....

credille.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was stunned to read the review (July 10) of Dan and Paul Dinello’s film Shock Asylum, shown at the Chicago Short Comedy Video and Film Festival. Depicting patients in a hospital being threatened with physical harm and being terrorized and tortured is cruel and dehumanizing. To set up an audience to laugh at intentional human suffering degrades the audience....

Boukman Eksperyans Buying any of the many “world music” samplers on the market right now is like collecting messages in bottles without reading them. Whether they’re plucked from Tangier or Tibet or anywhere else in the world where people don’t speak English, the mysterious and exotic tunes that score our cosmopolitan cocktail parties often come out of cultures where the song is so integral to the singer’s daily existence that it can’t simply be clipped back into its plastic box when the party’s over....

For the last eight years I’ve been taping myself naked and jacking off solo with a camcorder. Nothing too far-out, I just thought it would be fun. Here’s the problem: I’m 21 now and don’t know what to do with these old vids of myself. The person on the tape is clearly me, and I’ve racked up quite a huge archive over the years. I’ve been called really cute by many people, and since the wallet is low, can I sell them?...

The Cure for Dance Fever Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Javor, who started listening to experimental electronic music when he got bored with the industrial scene about five years ago, was moved to promote concerts because while following his favorite acts on the Internet he found that they frequently skipped Chicago on tour. He used his connections as a contributor to the on-line electronica magazine Urban Sounds to get in touch with them and arrange shows....

I’ve just begun reading your latest book, The Straight Dope Tells All. On page two, while ruminating on the subject of “questions…that give you pause,” you write, “The other day someone writes in and says, ‘If making a robot limb is so hard but other types of machines are easy, how come no animal species has ever evolved wheels?’ Had to think about that for a while.” You then go on to answer a completely unrelated question....

The Beauty Queen of Leenane But in Martin McDonagh’s fine The Beauty Queen of Leenane–receiving its Chicago premiere in a virtually flawless production at Steppenwolf directed by Randall Arney–the object in question is merely an envelope containing a few pages of text. We know that if McDonagh’s troubled antiheroine, Maureen Folan, gets the letter, she’ll most likely move away from her drab life in the small town of Leenane to join her beloved Pato, the letter’s author, in America....

My brother-in-law Lewie wanted me to pack up the boys and take them to the lake sometime this summer. I wasn’t going. If he wanted to take them to Michigan it was OK by me. He could even take my car. I didn’t have to drive 150 miles for painful memories. I had plenty of them at home. Everyone who loved her was pained by her loss, but my pain was different....

By Fred Camper Name says one benefit of this arrangement was that younger artists picked up the skills of an older generation. From Cernovitch, Name learned how to stage and light a theater production. With Warhol their work together defined the relationship. “Andy and I really loved each other; we were so interested in the projects we were involved in, the paintings, the silk-screenings, the movies, the still photography–so a sexual or romantic relationship seemed so silly, almost old hat....

Bradley Williams & His Original 21st Century Review Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally, the moment Bradley Williams has been waiting for since he formed this postmodern retro-chic vaudeville band in 1995: the dawn of its namesake century. Williams’s initial concept–an eclectic, almost zany mix of material spanning six decades, from the 20s to the 70s–has matured into an elaborate stage show, a streamlined vehicle that purrs in first gear and roars in fifth....

Aphex Twin 68 Million Shades Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aphex Twin is the most recognized of Richard D. James’s numerous aliases (AFX, Polygon Window, and GAK among them), and under this name he was a club favorite in the late 80s. James, a true experimentalist, has drifted from unusually substantive techno (Selected Ambient Works 85-92) to spare and creepy soundscapes (Selected Ambient Works Volume II) to punishing, hip-hop-inflected attacks (…I Care Because You Do) to hypnotically relentless grooves (Donkey Rhubarb, which included a collaboration with Philip Glass)....

“In 1979, CANDO [the Chicago Association of Neighborhood Development Organizations] had no real model to follow,” the group reflects in its 1998-’99 annual report. “There were no citywide neighborhood economic development coalitions from which to borrow organizational concepts. For the most part, CANDO had to invent itself from its original base of eight neighborhood-based nonprofit member organizations. In 1999, CANDO has become the model to follow. We regularly entertain visitors from other cities and other countries who wish to learn from our experience....

ELIJAH LEVI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Music is in Elijah Levi’s genes–the venerated Sam Cooke was a cousin–but he’s done his part to develop the gift. Levi served ten years as a young-blood replacement in a latter-day version of the Ink Spots, a vocal group that presaged R & B in the 40s, and in the process acquired a polished, sanguine presence on disc and onstage....

A Basketmaker in Rural Japan By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The viewer can only guess, from the exhibition’s instructional materials, at the full significance of these objects. We learn from the catalog and a video on view that Hiroshima almost always knew the people he designed baskets for and tried to make objects that would please them, fit their bodies, and please himself as well....

By Michael Miner In February, with Glass saddled up as star witness, D.A.R.E. sued Rolling Stone for $50 million. The suit alleges that Rolling Stone limited its fact checking to comparing Glass’s manuscript with his New Republic article, which D.A.R.E. had condemned on publication. When Glass was exposed 14 months ago, “the New Republic published an apology and retraction,” says D.A.R.E. attorney Skip Miller, explaining why one magazine was sued but not the other....