BITS, BYTES, AND BOULDERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What does “electronic music” mean nowadays, when just about every composer under 50 works on a synthesizer and electronic gizmos have liberated almost all musicians from the confines of acoustical space? This concert, a survey of some recent trends grown from the postwar tradition of electronic music, doesn’t offer any ready answers. Organized by Christopher Preissing, who got a master’s in music from the University of Illinois in the early 90s, it instead points in a bewildering variety of directions....

Chicago’s Own: Creating Light Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas Gosser’s Ingredients is the best thing on this program of local experimental work and one of the strongest first films I’ve ever seen. Given a class assignment to make his own movie camera out of ordinary materials, Gosser built a box whose imperfect functioning becomes a key element in the film. He balances jittery, suggestive imagery of a city at night against printed titles that list all the “ingredients” used to make the film, and the disparity between the image and the text reminded me of the way Jasper Johns uses words in his paintings: language that appears simple becomes mysterious, almost mute....

[Re: Hot Type, June 25] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I arrested minority offenders committing murder, mugging, rape, burglary, and domestic violence on their victims who populated and passed through my assigned beats. Little did I know that I was committing the almost hate crime of racial profiling. When I made traffic stops in those areas, the violators were mostly minorities. The only feeble defense I can muster regarding this is, “They were there,” similar to Hillary’s reasoning for climbing Everest....

taglia.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As for Exit the Dragon, I admit that I didn’t particularly like it. (Heck, I even admit I don’t own a copy of it or of any of their recordings.) Nevertheless, I was told it sold several hundred thousand records. Gold or platinum this ain’t; still, such sales figures (if true) would place it among the top-selling recent records by current Chicago alternative-pop bands....

landy.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I approached the Chicago International Film Festival [“The Reader’s Guide to the Chicago International Film Festival,” October 9 and 16] with the same sense of delight with which I greet all the diverse festivals Chicago offers throughout the year. This one drew an exceptionally smart crowd; it had to be to decipher the program. The ticketing process seemed equally baffling; one woman was trying to “scalp” tickets to a weekend film that she couldn’t make because she couldn’t exchange them and said her E-mail about this had gone unanswered....

LINDA CHESIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although there are plenty of female flutists in orchestras–the flute supposedly being the wind instrument of choice for young girls–only a few have cracked the glass ceiling to emerge as concert soloists. This recital, sponsored by the Chicago Flute Club, brings to town a woman who’s as good as celebrated fellows like Jean-Pierre Rampal and James Galway, but doesn’t yet have the resume to prove it....

Metal, Machines, Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the most successful example of what he’s talking about is the military-industrial-complex satire of the Bay Area’s Survival Research Laboratories, but this kind of work has become increasingly common with the emergence of artists who’ve been raised on high technology. Yet the current gallery system doesn’t provide much of a forum for it to be seen, much less sold, says 25-year-old Ray, who will open one such forum–a multimedia space called Deadtech–this Sunday in a Logan Square loft....

Naked Raygun Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In “A Special Message” at the end of Naked Raygun’s “new” Last of the Demo Hicans (Dyslexic) a male voice asks, “Who is this Naked Raygun, anyway?” In the band’s heyday it was a legitimate question, but today it’s a gimme: Naked Raygun, along with the likes of the Effigies and Big Black, defined Chicago’s belatedly celebrated mid-80s punk scene....

Jack Spencer: Silent Dramas By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Spencer does show faces, he often avoids the dead-on view in which the photographer “unmasks” his subject. The man in Eugene, Greenville, MS shades his eyes with his hand, intensifying their appearance by framing and darkening them, allowing him to look out while “shielding” himself. Cooter With Glass, Coila, MS shows us the man whose hand was on the screen door, now looking through a piece of plate glass....

RORY BLOCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rory Block came of age during the folk boom in New York, when aspiring blues guitar pickers could still learn directly from immortals like Reverend Gary Davis, Son House, and Mississippi John Hurt. Along with Stefan Grossman and other fellow travelers, Block developed a style that was as true as possible to her mentors’ musical and spiritual roots but also incorporated aesthetic and lyrical complexities absorbed from the bohemian intellectual atmosphere of the time....

Shattered Realities: Films by Julie Murray Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julie Murray’s short films balance on the knife-edge between humor and confusion, order and chaos, meaning and its absence. An Irish-born New Yorker who also makes collages, Murray edits together her own footage with found footage from various sources, producing a dense weave at once alluring and frustrating–appropriately so, because the form she strives for is both open and poetic, a kind of postmodern pastiche in which meaning is variable but not absent....

Chicago Human Rhythm Project By Laura Molzahn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watching the dancers during the seventh annual Chicago Human Rhythm Project, I realized tap dance has a lot of the same appeal as sports–and it’s also traditionally been dominated by men, though women are becoming more prominent. No winner is ever declared during a tap concert, of course, but the competition among the dancers is obvious, as each takes a turn and tries to outdo the others....

It was pure pandemonium when the Saint Louis Cardinals came to Wrigley Field last month, pitting Mark McGwire head-to-head against Sammy Sosa in the race to surpass Roger Maris. Along Irving Park Road and–so I heard–the other arteries leading to the ballpark, the atmosphere grew more intense the closer one got to Clark and Addison. Wrigleyville was gridlocked–not only its streets but its sidewalks–and Wrigley itself turned electric whenever either slugger stood at the plate....

Apparently it wasn’t the manager. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the time this August rolled around, Lynch had gone the way of Riggleman, and Andy MacPhail had stepped down from the team president’s office to assume the role of general manager, a position he’d held previously in Minnesota, where he won two world championships with the Twins. Yet the sort of team MacPhail was putting together seemed no clearer a concept than Lynch’s teams, which were usually ragtag bunches that mixed obvious talent with obvious deficiencies, thanks to Tribune Company budget constraints....

What does “pop goes the weasel” mean? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom collected two dozen versions of “Pop Goes the Weasel” from both sides of the Atlantic. Many were similar, with one key difference: in North America, the opening line was generally “all around the mulberry bush,” possibly due to conflation with the similar tune “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” In the UK, however, it was usually “all around the cobbler’s bench....

One day, in response to a case of the munchies, I started scarfing forkfuls of cold macaroni and cheese from a dish in the fridge. I soon gave myself a case of hiccups, which I proceeded to douse with a drink of milk. This got me to thinking: what are hiccups? Do they have a role in how our bodies function? Why does rich food (even macaroni and cheese) cause hiccups?...

Ragtime Look, up on the stage of the renovated, Persian-rococo Oriental Theatre. It’s a musical. It’s an opera. No, it’s a pageant–a panoramic, patriotic parade of history and speculation. As corny as an old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks display and as timely as the latest performance-art experiment, Ragtime is a triumph of slick but not overspectacular stagecraft, perfect fare for any family that can cough up the bucks. (Regular prices are $27-$75, and “VIP Suite Service” tops out at $125....

Relativity Modern dancers influenced by the minimalist movement–the search for the fundamentals of art–have produced substantially different results. The first generation of modern dancers, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, rebelled against ballet. The second generation, including Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, rebelled against both modern dance and ballet, rejecting not only the classical emphasis on straight lines but almost everything to do with training the body to perform unnatural movements. Many postmodern choreographers created works for people with no dance training at all; a number of athletes became dancers, such as Chicago’s David Dorfman....

Jeff Tweedy at Lounge Ax, June 14 & 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then Tweedy took a crucial step in Wilco’s evolution: he hired Jay Bennett as the band’s permanent guitarist. Bennett’s prior work in the Champaign-based Titanic Love Affair didn’t presage the impact he would have on Wilco, but over time he has become Jiminy Cricket to Tweedy’s Pinocchio: as a constant advocate of the limitless possibilities of the studio and as an adventurous arranger, he seems to have given Tweedy the confidence to explore his own talent in the broader realm of rock ‘n’ roll....

CIVIC ORCHESTRA OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all the events in this weekend’s marathon bash inaugurating the new Symphony Center, Sunday’s three-hour open rehearsal of Monday’s concert by the Civic Orchestra seems the most appropriate: an ensemble of musicians in training for the next century trying out a revamped hall designed for the future–under the guidance of a conductor with definite notions about where serious music ought to be headed....