barnett.qxd One of the things that made me decide to leave was what went on in the Fifth Ward in 1995. Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle and the near south chapter of IVI-IPO, of which Lois Dobry is the political action chair, were supporting Janet Oliver-Hill for alderman of the Fifth. Oliver-Hill and her family had been pretty close to Daley for a long time, so I wasn’t supporting her. I wanted to work for an independent, so I got involved with Barbara Holt’s campaign....

Return to Paradise Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Compared to the self-righteous xenophobia and hypocritical pornography of Oliver Stone and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, this drama about a Malaysian drug bust and its consequences for three young Americans is serious, intelligent, and powerful. Three buddies (Vince Vaughn, David Conrad, and Joaquin Phoenix) do some adolescent carousing in Malaysia, then the first two leave the third behind....

Hey, Everybody: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During one of my earliest blow jobs, I was naturally quite excited. When I ejaculated I came so much that some of it dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. To an inexperienced male it was visual proof that I was too much man for her. Later, when I was having frequent sex, the volume of come per ejaculation wasn’t always enough to produce the desired result....

She Shoots, She Scores Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fermin’s parents moved to Wisconsin when she was just a year old. Her father had been an accountant and her mother a teacher in Manila, but in the U.S. their poor English forced them into factory jobs. Her father, who played rudimentary piano and violin, got Anna started in piano lessons when she was just four; she continued studying for the next 14 years and picked up the violin as well....

Smoke Signals Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good-natured but haunting, elliptical and repetitive as narrative but extremely likable, this is a poignant and sometimes funny story about two young Native American men (Adam Beach and Evan Adams) who travel from their Idaho reservation to Phoenix to retrieve the ashes of an estranged father of one of them. Directed by Chris Eyre and adapted by Sherman Alexie from stories in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the film is being billed as the first feature written, directed, and coproduced by American Indians, and while its general notations about being Native American are nothing to sneeze at, its particularities are the best thing about it....

I just returned from a holiday in the States. While there I rented a 1998 Ford Mustang. There was a notice on the visor to look on the other side. I did and took a picture of the second notice. See attached. Am I crazy, or is it logical for a safety device to have a notice that it may kill you? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No question, pops, it’d be a bummer to have a safety device that killed more people than it saved....

WARSAW PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra has been Poland’s flagship orchestra since 1901, when it kicked off its first season in an architectural jewel of a hall and with prime-minister-to-be Ignacy Paderewski at the piano. Its fortunes have waxed and waned over the decades: Before World War II, the orchestra was considered one of the finest in Europe, an exemplary practitioner of the mellowed, folksy central European sensibility; by the end of the war, half of its roster of 80 had fled or been killed, and its hall lay in ruins....

Brown and Black and White All Over Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Storyteller Antonio Sacre excels at revealing the deeper meaning behind even mundane moments–lunch with a parent, a chance meeting at a party. He can transform a mildly funny reminiscence about feeling awkward as an adolescent at a dance into a life-changing moment. So what happens when he tackles something intended to be a huge transformative event?...

DEBORAH COLEMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Deborah Coleman’s 1997 disc, I Can’t Lose (Blind Pig), earned praise for its blend of youthful aggression and musical maturity–for the emotional complexity beneath the bad-girl strut. Since then Coleman’s been touring almost nonstop, and from the sound of her current release, Where Blue Begins, all that traveling has seasoned her as a musician and performer. Her voice has toughened into a leathery purr, and on the roadhouse cruncher “Walk Your Walk,” rather than attempt a red-hot-mama bellow, she slips into a slinky Mae West-like coquettishness....

The Monty Python folks were writers who also performed, not comic actors trained a la Second City to come up with their own material, when they got their own BBC show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in 1969. Eric Idle, for instance, had contributed sketches to The Two Ronnies, a mid-60s variety show, and to David Frost’s humorously topical The Frost Report. This may explain why so many of the classic Python bits stand up so well in repeat performances–even by the army of Python nerds ready at a moment’s notice to sing the Spam song or recite word for word the dead parrot routine....

Three days before the opening of Booth, director David Cromer is watching the cast rehearse a scene the playwright, Austin Pendleton, rewrote and distributed two nights before. He watches silently, cheek resting in the palm of his hand, knees bouncing up and down. Occasionally he gets up and moves to a different place in the makeshift, 50-seat theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cromer immerses himself so completely in his work that his life and the plays often become indistinguishable....

GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This large, amorphous Montreal ensemble has generated quite a buzz, considering that no one really even knows who’s in it–the credits on its new EP, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, list ten members “this time,” all by first name only. Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s equally enigmatic 1998 album, F#A#° (Kranky), is a long hallucinatory nocturnal road trip from one headphone to the other, built on apocalyptic mutterings, faint chimes and barely audible horns, ghostly guitars, strings that mass like thunderheads, pounding drums, and moments of ominous, thrumming silence....

Lori Belilove Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Behind all the cliches of the modern dancer–faux-classical gossamer garb, real classical music, thrown-back head, childishly lifted arms, skipping and leaping–was a real dancer, Isadora Duncan. And she was a revolutionary. But though the free rhythms and forms she brought to dance might be considered an outgrowth of American freethinking, she was never as popular here as she was in Europe and Russia....

Whatever your views on the romantic accounts by artists the world over of the “brave and bewildered amateurs” who fought against Franco, there’s no denying the opportunity a revue of music from the era represents. In Pasiones: The Songs of the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 some of Chicago’s foremost musical talents join forces in an hour-long program of multilingual period propaganda stirring enough to engage even the most cynical pacifist. Considerably tightened by award-winning director Peter Glazer since last winter’s Rhino fest appearance, Pasiones still features internationally acclaimed musicians Michael Smith and Jamie O’Reilly, who reconnoiter the intricate Iberian rhythms with such closely fused harmony and razor-clean enunciation (assisted by Katrina O’Reilly) as to seem a single voice....

Gang of Four Karl Marx believed that history, in its gradual unscrolling, would reveal man’s social and political destiny: as feudalism was overrun by capitalism, so capitalism would be overrun by communism. True to that notion Gang of Four, the brilliant neo-Marxist rockers who put Leeds, England, on the postpunk map, have always been preoccupied with gauging the wisdom of history. “History’s bunk!” they declared on an early single. “History is the reason I’m washed-up,” vocalist-guitarist Andy Gill concluded on the workingman’s lament “Paralysed....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am a part-time male stripper in Philadelphia. I only get a bachelorette party about once every two months, even when I spend a lot of money on ads. I love the parties where they want me to dance nude. I am willing to do parties for free. How can I get more parties or find a place where I can dance nude for ladies for free?...

Silver Images Film Festival A half-hour 1998 film by Ellen Walters about a North Carolina firehouse that’s been converted into a restaurant and the women who sing gospel music there. (Atlas Senior Center, 1:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his last day of work a young ambulance driver is assigned to take a 70-year-old woman on a six-hour drive to her birthday party....

It was vintage Phil Jackson. Honored at halftime of the Bulls’ final game of the season, he sat there with that bemused, distant, faintly superior smile so familiar from six championships. The smile always signaled that the job was done, the journey over, and it was time to take a step back and appreciate what he and the team had accomplished. Of course this occasion was not quite so festive. The Bulls were putting the finishing touches on an abbreviated 13-37 season in their first year since the 80s without Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen and the “supporting cast....

TETRAGRAMMANON IS, at Saint Paul Church of the Redeemer. What this is is a very noble effort for an extremely worthy cause. Unfortunately Francois Dimanche’s spiritual, surreal play–about an ordinary woman who’s transformed into what may be the new messiah–has some structural problems: it seems to end several times, and it’s filled with lengthy monologues that weigh the script down. But director Ira Rogers and his large cast give their all to create a thought-provoking production....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article by Ray Hanania documenting the changing of the pressroom at City Hall during the reign of Mayor Jane Byrne [March 19] brought back memories of my days as a journalist. Although I only worked for a southwest-side community paper at the time, the Southwest News-Herald, I would frequently bump into Hanania and his cronies from the “big papers” when the mayor journeyed out southwest for some media event....