Freelancers Chip Away at the Stone Those freelance contracts the Tribune wants everyone to sign cost travel editor Randy Curwen just one writer. But she was his favorite. And her reasons for leaving could have been fixed in a second with a pencil. “I’ve been in this business four and a half years as travel editor, and four and a half years ago you didn’t even have contracts,” Curwen told me....

Various Artists Basslines Garage is a soul-based, vocal-heavy offshoot of house music. Speed garage is a hyped-up version of the same, shot through with jungle’s sound and sensibility. The speed comes from the five- to ten-beats-per-minute increase in tempo from the house norm. Its subsonic fuck-the-crowd-let’s-move-the-floor bottom end, rather than seeping slowly through the double-time snare rolls of drum ‘n’ bass, anchors a disco-influenced four-on-the-floor pound. And aesthetically, speed garage shares early jungle’s love of kineticism for its own sake....

The city that pioneered high-rises also pioneered the high-rise parking garage. We had to. When Chicagoans figured out they could drive to those downtown skyscrapers where they worked, street parking stopped traffic cold. James W. Stevens, part-owner of the now departed Hotel LaSalle, figured out a solution: the five-story Hotel LaSalle Public Garage, 215 W. Washington. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago architects Holabird & Roche, better known for structures like the Palmer House and Soldier Field, designed the garage in 1917....

John Corbett Goes on Record Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who’ve listened to his radio shows are familiar with Corbett’s impossibly deep record collection. The Unheard Music Series–inspired in part by Dexter’s Cigar, the now-defunct reissue label David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke ran when they were still in Gastr del Sol together–will give him a chance to release out-of-print favorites as well as some of the more fascinating obscurities he’s come across over the years....

Austin Powers wasn’t the only one time traveling last week at the McHenry Outdoor Theatre. Turn into the dusty driveway just north of Route 120, hand a five-dollar bill to the girl in the glass booth, and roll up to a speaker pole in front of the big screen (try to find one that works). Before you can say “Ivana Humpalot,” it’s 1969. Well, 1969 on life support. The plug was pulled on a sister screen in Grayslake before the season opened this spring....

Battleaxe Betty at Second City, Skybox Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last two decades, however, in America at least, parody has been debased and satire declawed. Ailing comic institutions like Mad magazine, National Lampoon, and Saturday Night Live do nothing but churn out laughless send-ups and flaccid barbs. And Second City, once known for its cunning political jabs, has relegated parody to a back burner and all but eliminated straight-ahead satire from its repertoire....

PETER SCHICKELE WITH THE LARK QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iowa native Peter Schickele claims to have been the only bassoonist in Fargo, North Dakota, in the 50s, but today he’s better known as a composer, a pianist, and the leading (and only) authority on P.D.Q. Bach, a fictitious son of Johann Sebastian. His presentations of P.D.Q.’s “undiscovered” work skewer concert-hall etiquette and the pretensions of classical music while sneaking in a lesson or two in cultural history....

Angels Into Dust: The New Town Anthology By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems Chicago columnist Jon-Henri Damski (who died in 1997 at the age of 60) devoted his life to answering this question, applying a PhD in classics to Chicago street culture, chronicling gay life over a period of 22 years. “My routine was to walk continually–day and night–and gather stories,” he wrote in the introduction to his collected essays, Angels Into Dust: The New Town Anthology....

This may be the year Nuevo Latino cooking finally takes off in Chicago. When the restaurant Mas opened in Wicker Park on the first day of the Great Blizzard of ’99, it was immediately filled with customers. A month earlier Rich Melman opened the more upscale Nacional 27 in River North where Hat Dance had been. Havana–an earlier effort in the idiom–shut down, but the beat goes on at the Mambo Grill, its sister spot....

SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t light up with a hot-rod Zippo, decorate my living room in leopard print, or collect Bettie Page merch, but thanks to an old roommate–who strode around the house singing “Banana Puddin’,” from Southern Culture on the Skids’ last album, 1997’s Plastic Seat Sweat, until I realized that it’s great precisely because it’s stupid–I’ve developed a healthy respect for the kitsch appeal of these Chapel Hill garage-rockabilly torchbearers....

THOSE BASTARD SOULS 9/30, the hideout; 10/1, schubas; 10/2, EMPTY BOTTLE With the release of their second album, Debt & Departure (V2), this side project of the Grifters’ Dave Shouse seems to have grown into a going concern–more so than the Grifters, anyhow. The new record (which rethinks several tunes from the Souls’ 1996 indie debut as well as one from the Grifters’ last record) is a lovely selection of dark, lightly psychedelic on-the-road-at-night rock without a trace of the Grifters’ fucked-up blues....

Staying Power There are still abandoned buildings and vacant lots in the city, but there are also attractive homes and manicured lawns. New housing is under construction on the city’s south side. The Crown Hotel, which faces the Saint Louis skyline across the Mississippi, and the Casino Queen riverboat have helped revitalize the riverfront, and Joyner-Kersee recently helped build a boys and girls club named after her. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Jeffrey Felshman But Henry understood there was no cause for jealousy. Janina was only 14 in 1942, when she’d risked her life to sneak food to Shalom, his two younger brothers, and his sister. Janina knew that Henry understood. She worried about being able to understand Shalom. Before this postcard the last sign Janina had seen of Shalom had been in 1943–a note left under her family’s farmhouse door. “I was here,” he’d written, and signed his name....

The violent struggle between Islamic fundamentalists and the secular government has dominated what little news we’ve heard from Algeria over the last decade. And buried in the reportage has been the plight of the Berbers–the original inhabitants of North Africa–who’ve been caught in the cross fire. In fact, even in the emergence of Algerian music on the global market, the Berbers are left out: mostly what we hear is rai, the largely hedonistic pop music of Algerian youth....

Louise Bourgeois at the Arts Club of Chicago, through January 3 Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1947-1997 at Rhona Hoffman, through December 31 D’Nell Larson at TBA Exhibition Space, through January 17 Pink Days and Blue Days evokes a complex variety of emotions, some doubtless not consciously intended by the artist. Still, it’s hard to believe Bourgeois wasn’t thinking at all about the way that women’s fashions make women into objects of display, especially since the title suggests the kind of chatter that advertisers aim at women and the blue cloth beneath the jewelry is printed with fashion drawings labeled “Fall 1932,” “Spring 1946,” and the like....

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Excaliber Shakespeare Company of Chicago, at Pulaski Park. This troupe’s always provocative color-blind casting aside, director Darryl Maximilian Robinson plays Williams’s quintessential tale of family dysfunction and emotional impotence fairly straight. Perhaps too straight. Though Robinson does a good job of locating the play’s humor, this staging barely scratches the work’s surface, nailing the obvious tensions between the characters but missing most of the underlying mind games: when Maggie and Brick argue over whether to have a baby, it seems more a simple quarrel than an epic battle of wits....

Calumet Fisheries hasn’t always been at the foot of the 95th Street bridge, although the little red-roofed shack that serves fried perch and catfish and home-smoked shrimp and salmon seems as integral to the scenery of Calumet Harbor as the drawbridges that lift for the passing ships or the tall cranes that unload steel coils from their holds. The take-out restaurant, which was founded early in the century, used to be next to the 92nd Street bridge....

Chicago Underground Film Festival Frank Grow’s effects-laden, MTV-paced independent feature follows Larue, a young man suffering from “compulsive reading syndrome,” as he’s prematurely discharged from a mental institution and takes up residence in a seedy rooming house. Everyone else in the film is crazy too: Dr. Noguchi, who has his own theory of evolution, keeps a giant primordial worm that escapes into the sewer system and emerges from toilets to attack the unwary; Larue’s neighbors include a young mute woman who uncontrollably throws herself upon him and her cleanliness-obsessed mother....

Hey, these are the suburbs–we can’t say “manure” around here. From a Meadow Lane Products press release: “Mary Kopidlansky of Cary discovered a unique way to combine her child-rearing schedule with her passion for animals–sell llama by-products. The owner of several llamas and a resident of unincorporated Cary since 1989, 34-year-old Kopidlansky was aware of how valuable and nutrient-rich the llama by-product was. But she never thought of actually marketing the product to gardeners in search of a rich, organic fertilizer....

FUNKSTORUNG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the new Additional Productions (Studio K7) Funkstorung–the duo of German Michael Fakesch and Italian Chris De Luca–wields its beats like blades, dismembering familiar tunes like Bjork’s “All Is Full of Love” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Reunited” and assembling the motific detritus into something else altogether. Vocal snippets become buoys, floating guidelines to keep the dense, stuttering rhythms connected to the original source no matter how far out they drift....