By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Fosser was born on the west side of Chicago 71 years ago. He was an asthmatic kid with a lot of forced downtime. His twin obsessions came into his life early on, thanks to an aunt who gave him a book on puppetry and took him, at the age of seven, to a performance of Il trovatore at the Civic Opera House....

NEW HORIZONS ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last time I wrote about New Horizons in these pages, a little over a year ago, they were plotting a live recording experiment at the Velvet Lounge; this week, leader Ernest Dawkins will release the fruits of that labor, Mother’s Blue Velvet Shoes, on his own Dawk label. New Horizons’ first in-performance album since their debut disc six years ago, it adds a couple wrinkles to the band’s carefully cultivated sound....

By Neal Pollack Jones and the guy sitting next to him got to talking about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. The story, Jones said, was all about God’s compassion for the poor. His trial was scheduled for 11 AM, but Judge William O’Malley had a full morning call. Witnesses for the prosecution began to arrive: two platform supervisors for the Chicago Transit Authority and four Chicago police officers, two plainclothes and two in uniform....

RICHARD “RIP LEE” PRYOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’d be easy to write off blues harpist Richard “Rip Lee” Pryor as simply an earnest imitator of his famous father, Snooky Pryor. No less than five of the eleven selections on Pitch a Boogie Woogie, Rip Lee’s 1998 debut, are his dad’s songs. And his harmonica style, obviously modeled on Snooky’s, overflows with warbles, flutters, crisp tongue-stops, and vocal whoops....

This may seem like a naive question, but where in New York can one take a friend for a discreet lay? Central Park? It appears to be designed so that you can’t have any privacy (most frustrating: the Ramble). My place or hers? We are each involved with significant others we both care about. A friend’s place? Nobody knows about us, and we want to keep it that way. A hotel?...

By Sarah Downey In the eyes of her followers, Mother Maria is already a saint. But so far she’s only cleared the first hurdle: she was named a “servant of God” in 1989, after Joseph Cardinal Bernardin officially opened an archdiocesan tribunal that has since probed into every aspect of her life and legacy. Only four people have been named saints for their work in the United States. In 1975, Elizabeth Ann Seton, founder of the Sisters of Charity, became the first American saint, 154 years after her death....

By Ben Joravsky This isn’t the first time central library officials have found themselves at odds with locals over consolidation–a similar dispute erupted in Lakeview over the Southport branch. The debate goes back to 1994, when library commissioner Mary Dempsey asked her staff for a “strategic plan” that “examines the library’s strengths and weaknesses.” A year later the staff issued a report that said one weakness was “too many libraries.”...

If, like me, you tend to think of musicals as brainless trivialities, spend an hour watching musical director Kevin Stites rehearse his cast for Babes in Arms. Analyzing a Lorenz Hart lyric as though it were the densest of Shakespearean sonnets, he unearths myriad complexities in seemingly straightforward numbers like “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “You Are So Fair.” And he communicates his revelations to the performers joyfully, without overlooking the slightest detail of their diction, phrasing, or acting....

Clint Paugh: Measured Tolerances/ Compound Differences By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve seen few better examples of this trend than Clint Paugh’s nine new works at I Space. Born in Wichita in 1970 and a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Paugh now lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Using processes common to carpentry–one of many kinds of work he’s done–Paugh examines random variations and human mistakes....

Seven years ago Jim Carrane seemed on the verge of something big. The theater group he’d helped found, the Annoyance, was white-hot. His one-man show there, I’m 27, I Still Live at Home and I Sell Office Supplies, was a big hit. He began to get TV gigs. He says his subject–Gen X-ers who move back home after college–“was very trendy back then. I even got on Jenny Jones.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sarah Staskauskas first entered the heady world of rock and retail in 1981, when she, her brother, and his wife opened a vintage store in Rockford called Pinkadelic. “A couple of the guys from Cheap Trick came in,” she remembers. “We were so excited–Robin Zander was in here! And we got on the news, because it was such a weird little store for Rockford.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

JIM TROMPETER QUINTET with SCOTT WENDHOLT & GEORGE GARZONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago pianist Jim Trompeter can’t be accused of going easy on himself. A few times a year he gets to lead his own group at the Green Mill, which gives him the chance to showcase his buzz-saw technique, overflowing melodies, and stretched harmonies. So what does he do but go out and hire spectacular east-coast hornmen to join the band–despite the distinct possibility they’ll overshadow him....

JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spencer and his boys haven’t learned many new tricks in the years that have elapsed since the release of Orange and its subsequent remixes–they retreated to the garage on last year’s Now I Got Worry, and in some ways the new Acme (Matador/Capitol) puts them right back where they left off in ’95. But they perform the old tricks with new feeling....

By Fred Camper On a recent afternoon the two men sat in the Daiter Gallery discussing their work and the years they spent together in the city. Asked to articulate the difference between their styles, Ishimoto says he can’t, then says it stems from their different personalities. “I myself am not trying to do it differently,” he says, “but it happens.” When Ishimoto was 17 his parents sent him back to the U....

Undesirable Elements/Chicago The usual immigrant story is a jumble of fact and fantasy, a banal Audie Murphy epic revealing the national character, as each successful new American recounts a hero’s journey through capitalist initiation. The impoverished immigrant arrives, works hard, learns the language, buys a house, raises a family, and lives well, with the loyal gusto of the newly free. There are elements of truth to this story; flawed as our systems might be, we are a wealthy, democratic country....

Sound Experiment Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The idea for the festival actually came from Mallozzi’s late wife, Dawn, with whom he cofounded ESS. It was planned for the fall of 1999, and by that spring, all of the artists were confirmed. Then Dawn was diagnosed with cancer, and the couple decided to postpone. “It was just a way to make some space for us, to not have this large, risky endeavor,” says Mallozzi....

Naked I–A Feast for the Senses This tightened performance of Carpenter’s playful, sometimes rueful tribute to gay male sexuality reveals a greater maturity. The raw subject matter and comedy are used more strategically, and the gestures that define the scenes are clearer. The piece is shaped into five theatrical beats: a punning funeral dance, a finely staged kinetic argument about a closeted movie star, a relatively sloppy parody of pickup bars, a double-edged scene of violence and eroticism, and finally a pseudocoy striptease....

VIC CHESNUTT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never completely acquired that elusive taste known as Vic Chesnutt, but last year I got pretty stuck on his remarkable The Salesman and Bernadette (Capricorn). In the ridiculously flexible Nashville country-rock orchestra Lambchop, the quirky Athens singer-songwriter finally discovered a backing band that could keep pace with his nutty warbling, which in fact is pretty close kin to Lambchop honcho Kurt Wagner’s own paranoid mumbling....

By Michael Marsh Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For nine years I covered high school sports for three local newspapers. Sometimes I wondered why I stuck with it, watching football games during hot humid days in the late summer and cold wet nights in the fall. After basketball games I’d anxiously wait for teenagers to get off pay phones. Sometimes I had to compile game summaries while I wrote my stories....

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christened in 1967, the flagship of the AACM this year sailed into its fourth decade, albeit with fewer scheduled departures: no longer the primary occupation of its members, the AEC reassembles but several times each year, and by my reckoning, it has played its hometown only twice this decade. When reedists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and bassist Malachi Favors first formed the Art Ensemble–“of Chicago” came soon after, courtesy of a Paris concert promoter–I doubt they expected to be together in 1997, but the full-force percussion of drummer Famoudou Don Moye, who joined in 1969, transformed the music and undoubtedly helped insure the band’s longevity....