GRANT PARK CHORUS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rachmaninoff is probably best known for his extravagant piano concertos, but for my money a few of his atmospheric, achingly spiritual orchestral and choral works rank higher in his oeuvre–namely The Bells, the Symphonic Dances, and All-Night Vigil, the last of which makes up the Grant Park Chorus’s entire program at both of its concerts this week....

Alien Hand, or Let the Right Be a Vision of the Left Yet today Lady in the Dark is little known and almost never produced. It’s remembered almost entirely for a pair of songs that served as showstopping vehicles for the performers who introduced them: British star Gertrude Lawrence, whose “The Saga of Jenny” allowed her to drop her veddy English propriety for a bump-and-grind act, and up-and-coming Catskills comedian Danny Kaye, whose tongue-twisting “Tschaikowsky” launched his career as a nimble patter singer....

This much seems certain: on the fateful day four or five years ago when New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler ventured to the prosaic environs of Culver City on the west side of Los Angeles and pressed his finger to the door buzzer of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, he was ripe for the spore that would find him there, settle in his brain, multiply, and take over his life. Like the African stink ant (coincidentally on exhibit at this very museum), which when colonized by an ingested fungus undertakes a bizarre pilgrimage, leaving its home on the forest floor to climb skyward to the top of a fern or blade of grass, where it dies and then sprouts a brilliantly colored fungal horn, Weschler was fertile ground....

MANDY BARNETT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even at the ripe old age of 21–seven years older than LeAnn Rimes–Mandy Barnett is easily one of Nashville’s most promising new singers. Following a two-year stint as the lead in the Ryman Theater production of Always…Patsy Cline, in 1996 Barnett released a stunning debut that drew a clear line from the beautifully overripe sounds of 60s countrypolitan to the high gloss of current country radio....

MASSIVE ATTACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By concerning themselves with honest-to-goodness songwriting, trip-hop granddaddies Massive Attack may have lost some of the beat faithful, but the trade-off is a body of work that transcends club music’s cycle of built-in obsolescence. On their third and latest album, Mezzanine (Virgin), they don’t cover a lot of new ground, but they aren’t running in place either....

By Cate Plys The British Public Record Office finally released 57-year-old documents showing that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn’t stand Charles de Gaulle. Churchill tried persuading his war cabinet to dump de Gaulle, then leader of the French resistance. At one point, Roosevelt telegrammed Churchill, “Possibly you could make him governor of Madagascar.” February 11 John Christopher, the undercover mole from the federal Operation Silver Shovel investigation that sent six Chicago aldermen to prison, was finally sentenced himself for various illegal shenanigans committed while he was working with the FBI....

To the Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have responded to a canvasser at my door from Citizens for a Better Environment on three separate occasions. On each occasion the canvasser assured me that all of my personal donation would go toward recycling, specifically the separate collection that is done around the city by the Resource Center, the organization I founded to create jobs doing environmental work....

Tranquility Bass’s Hippie-Hop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike those genre-hopping Johnny-come-latelies, Kandel has been immersed in both worlds for more than a decade. The 29-year-old Chicago native began dabbling in music at 12, learning to play guitar and keyboards. By 15 he’d loaded up on electronic gear and a four-track recorder and was madly concocting “experimental electronic tape manipulations” in his bedroom. After finishing at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, Kandel headed for Cal Arts, where he met kindred spirit Tom Chasteen....

Chicago has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the world, but while celebrations of ethnicity go on here all the time, they tend to be isolated: Indians, Iranians, and Italians alike end up celebrating themselves by themselves. The city’s first World Music Festival brings many of the traditions represented in these enclaves together–not under a single band shell, as with the jazz and blues festivals, but under a single banner....

Bargain Basement Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Cabaret Voltaire, the World War I-era Zurich nightclub that inspired its name, Chicago’s Voltaire has sought to maintain an eclectic, somewhat ambiguous profile as a restaurant cum art gallery cum avant-garde cabaret. Its campy monthly calendar has boasted a wide variety of shows: from full-scale (albeit low-budget) plays to improv troupes to monologuists, poets, musicians, and even tap dancers....

BELLE & SEBASTIAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With Belle & Sebastian’s recently released third album, The Boy With the Arab Strap (Matador), the cultish obsession with this eight-piece Glaswegian group has reached a fever pitch–they’re the kind of band fans and critics alike want to keep all to themselves. Their indelible whispered melodies, house-of-cards arrangements, clever and highly referential lyrics, and the bored lispy croon of lead singer Stuart Murdoch contribute to a calculated enigma destined to attract the same sort of maniacal but limited following as the Smiths–a shame, really, because Belle & Sebastian deserve to be more broadly loved....

“We subsisted on crackers mainly, and water, since there were food shortages and it was dangerous to shop at the markets,” says Northern Illinois University anthropologist Andrea Molnar of her tour of duty as an election observer in East Timor (“Northern Today,” September 20). “Many of the local people who worked with us were threatened that once we left their throats would be slit.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Idful Gone For Good Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he helped design Engine Studios–a state-of-the-art three-studio facility that opens next month just a few blocks from the old Idful location–Wood took extra care to make it the most comfortable environment he could imagine. Every room in the place, even the “live rooms,” where the artists actually play, has a window–the only time Idful’s interior ever saw natural light was when the roof came off....

IMAGINING BRAD, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company. In life, we play the hand we’re dealt. And in this engaging drama, Peter Hedges–best known for the screenplay What’s Eating Gilbert Grape–uncovers the survival tactics of two very different women. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfolding over nine short scenes, the play begins simply enough. Dana Sue Kay–a loud, nosy, but well-meaning southern Christian–tries to draw conversation and intimate data out of a mousy newcomer known only as Brad’s Wife....

Dear Ben: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As we grudgingly trudged up the beach we saw the lifeguards corralling people into a roughly 40-by-100-foot area just south of the Pratt Boulevard pier. If a person were to venture outside the invisible “corral boundaries,” they were promptly yelled at and told to get over closer to the designated swimming area. This small area was guarded by no less than four and sometimes five or six lifeguards: one in a boat, two or three on the beach, and occasionally one in the water....

Natyakalalayam Dance Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ahimsa–a new evening-length piece by Chicago’s foremost classical Indian dance company–represents a real triumph for this small but accomplished troupe. The show’s goal is nothing less than moral regeneration, and to that end choreographers Hema and Krithika Rajagopalan (mother and daughter) have marshaled Indian mythology, Christian precepts, and the more modern belief in self-reliance. The title of the piece means “noninjury,” and its traditional stories illustrate various forms of himsa, or violence: violence against children, women, and the downtrodden and between those who should be friends and equals....

RAQUEL BITTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Edith Gassion (1915-’63) sang for spare change on the streets of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, until a cabaret owner gave her a gig and a stage name–Piaf, slang for “sparrow”–and started her down a path that would lead to international stardom in the years after World War II. Today Piaf isn’t widely appreciated in America; because she sang in French, contemporary audiences don’t know the bulk of her repertoire....

The Fever Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Others have tried–most recently Brad Light at the Rhino in Winter fest–but no one in Chicago performs Wallace Shawn’s earnest, witty, insightful monologue The Fever as well as David Shapiro. While others take pains to reproduce Shawn’s high, nervous stutter or his intense, anxious way of speaking, Shapiro–who looks nothing like Shawn–delivers this 90-minute piece in an easygoing, teacherly style that’s the very antithesis of a New Yorker’s hectic ways....

By Josh Noel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the top of the sixth inning when the girl, who’s maybe ten, approaches the man behind me. “Excuse me,” she says in her little voice. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” Now he is looking. “Would you consider selling your Beanie Baby?” The Cubs are playing their final home game of the season, and to mark the occasion each of the devoted has received a purple bear Beanie Baby at the gate....

These Parts Edition Gaviotas, the 30-year-old solar-powered village in Colombia, has been called a utopia, but in 1965 all it boasted was toxic soil and mosquito-infested forests. Villagers used teeter-totters as generators, built windmills and solar water heaters, and grew food in containers filled with rice hulls washed with manure “tea.” No wonder the drug dealers leave them alone. Alan Weisman, author of the 1998 book Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, will give the keynote address at the Renewable Energy Fair Saturday at 1:30....