Going Public Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Popp didn’t invent the approach–New York sound artist Nicolas Collins was experimenting with skipping CDs in the late 80s–but he certainly popularized it. The distinctive sound of early Oval albums like Systemisch and 94 Diskont (issued in the U.S. by Thrill Jockey) has begotten an entire subgenre, known as “glitchwerks,” whose better-known representatives include Pole, Pita, Vadislav Delay, Noto, Stilluppsteypa, and Farmers Manual....

MARINE RESEARCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amelia Fletcher, her brother Mathew, and guitarist Peter Momtchiloff formed the core of Talulah Gosh and later Heavenly, figureheads of the self-effacing British indie-pop scene that reclaimed “twee” as a compliment. Both bands were smarter than most of their imitators (Amelia’s also an economist with an Oxford PhD), but after Mathew’s suicide in 1996, Heavenly couldn’t go on....

Want to feel old? Consider that it’s been 12 years since Brigid Murphy premiered Milly’s Orchid Show, the vaudeville jumble she presides over as the queen of tackiness, Milly May Smithy. At one time Murphy jammed her rotating roster of performers into the tiny back room at Lounge Ax, but as the club grew, so did the show–and by 1990 she was selling out the Park West. National figures like Eric Bogosian, Nora Dunn, Emo Philips, and Blue Man Group have enlivened her free-for-all, but she’s starting all over again in her newest installment, filling the evening with “everybody who’s never done it....

MUNTU DANCE THEATRE OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In keeping with the company’s community roots, Muntu concerts resemble family reunions: you’ll notice lots of audience members who haven’t seen one another since the last performance shaking hands and catching up. But talent is the real foundation of the troupe’s popularity: Muntu musicians have contributed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performances of Hannibal’s African Portraits, and the dancers have all the bursting energy and stringent control required for African movement....

Lead Stories The Entrepreneurial Spirit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The New York Times reported in August that more than a third of all bottled water sold in the United States is merely filtered tap water and that several cities will soon begin selling their municipal water. “What comes out of the tap is truly excellent water,” said the public works director of Houston....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Being a responsible member of the media, I realize I’m supposed to hustle on down to the next item on the feeding-frenzy buffet–The Lost World, Hong Kong, Eddie Murphy’s tranny pals–as even Ellen’s fans are sick of the Ellen/Ellen thing. But we old-fashioned sex-advice columnists, dependent on the U.S. Postal Service, have a longer lag time than folks working in higher-tech media....

By Bill Stamets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nuns killed his desire to play the piano by whacking his knuckles whenever he hit a wrong note, but his mother nurtured other cultural pursuits. Skrebneski’s father, a mechanic for International Harvester, would stay at home while his mother dragged young Victor to the Dearborn movie house on Division. “My mother took me to see Laurence Olivier and what’s her name in Wuthering Heights practically every night for weeks....

kemper.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wrongfully convicted or not, your story on Rolando Cruz [November 13] fails to acquit him of perhaps the only crime of which he is guilty, being patently uninteresting. Jeffrey Felshman’s attempted paean reveals instead a simplistic, macho dope given to referring to himself in the third person, posing fathoms-deep, eternal questions such as “Whassup, man?” and who takes obvious adolescent pride in recounting his dreary little barroom showdowns with off-duty prison guards....

FRIENDS OF DEAN MARTINEZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The sting of sand blown against your face, the flap of bat-wing saloon doors . . . the slurp of a cool foofoo drink? On The Shadow of Your Smile (Sub Pop), Friends of Dean Martinez’s 1995 debut, John Convertino and Joey Burns of Giant Sand joined Van Christian, Tom Larkins, and Bill Elm of Naked Prey (originally calling themselves Friends of Dean Martin) to concoct a version of lounge music with a distinctly southwestern twist....

The clientele at La Cumbamba is a mishmash of young professionals, shaggy-looking students, cabdrivers, prostitutes, and police officers. No one is excluded, says William Restrepo, proprietor of the airy and attractive Colombian restaurant on North Avenue just east of Western. “I love a bum who can come here and have a cup of coffee and sit down in a beautiful chair. Honest to God.” Restrepo goes on to tell the Poopy Colombians that he originally intended for La Cumbamba to be a place where poor families could eat dinner out “and be served as every human being deserves....

Godbaby The Defiant Theatre seems hell-bent on living up to its name. With each new season the company’s productions become more outrageous, gleefully flipping the bird at good taste and “professionalism.” Even their press releases and programs are full of hoaxes, pranks, and salaciousness; in a brochure announcing the current season, “XX” was quoted as saying he laughed so hard at last season’s shows his jaw hurt more than when he was earning cigarettes in prison....

MICHAEL WEISS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Were he ten years younger, pianist Michael Weiss might well have snared one of those early-90s major-label contracts that went to such pianists as Cyrus Chestnut, Benny Green, and Stephen Scott–pianists who, like Weiss, rely on the mainstream jazz of the 50s and 60s as their prime inspiration. Of course, a younger Weiss might not play with the measured absorption that marks his music today....

PORCUPINE TREE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven Wilson, the auteur behind this British art-rock quartet, gets angry when people compare his band to Pink Floyd. But where British art-rock auteurs are concerned, making them angry isn’t necessarily such a bad idea. Stupid Dream (K Scope), Wilson’s fifth album as Porcupine Tree and his third using other musicians, has more fire in its belly than you might expect of a record whose 7-minute opening cut, “Even Less,” was scaled down from a 17-minute original version....

Jellyeye Jellyeye is far more radical. Though it makes use of several traditions, the troupe is a direct descendant of none. And though in the past it’s relied on narrative–most notably in the “drum opera” Avalanch Ranch–it now seems to have moved away from story lines, reveling in the abstract pleasures of pure music and movement. In fact, watching a Jellyeye concert is not unlike watching a very lively performance by the CSO, because for the viewer-listener the music and the performers’ embodiment of it form a single gestalt....

Records for the Feminine Lifecyle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Early childhood is a time for whimsy, wonder and not-so-subtle indoctrination techniques. What little girl wouldn’t want to sing along with this ditty from the Songs for a Mormon Child LP (Covenant Recordings, Inc., 1976), called “I Want to Be a Mother”: “When I grow up I want to be a mother / One little, two little, three little babies of my own / Of all the jobs I’ll choose no other / Four little, five little, six little babies in my home....

I’m 38 years old and my wife is 39, both white, healthy, and happy. I’ve had this particular fantasy for close to 20 years now but only revealed it to my wife four years ago. I want my wife to be with me and another guy. This fantasy seems to be of interest to her: it’s one of her favorite story lines in those letters to Penthouse, and she gets off on talking about it when we’re having sex, but she shrugs it off whenever I mention actually doing it....

How do you tell a guy you really love that he’s trying too hard in bed? My boyfriend and I have been together for just under a year. He was a virgin before we got together, and I wasn’t. Without exaggeration, he is the best sex I’ve ever had. Initially I enjoyed our forays into phone sex, sex toys, food, and the Kama Sutra, but it’s getting to the point where he begins every session by saying “I’m going to get you off ten times tonight” and won’t leave me alone until he has....

The Big Takeover Mangen knew that Jewel was developing the tract bordered by Roosevelt, Wabash, 13th Street, and State–the food giant had bought up just about every piece of land there but 1239 S. State, the piece Mangen’s dinner theater stood on. The transients from the St. James Hotel across the alley who used to help out at Tommy Gun’s–one even painted the murals of Prohibition-era gangsters on the walls–had all moved away when the hotel was shuttered for demolition....

The past is a foreign country, more foreign than we know. Its inhabitants seem to speak our language. They seem to go through the same daily round. They also seem to have been much better citizens than we are today–and we kick ourselves for not being as good. And we think Americans showed what good citizens they were when in the late 1800s some 80 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in presidential elections (compared to just over half today)....

Dealer’s Choice Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Arming themselves against any repeat of this financial fiasco, Roadworks has not only produced fine drama but marketed three separate plays cleverly aimed at three different but overlapping audiences. Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice is a superbly executed drama meant to appeal to a general audience, Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone is a late-night satire of corporate America perfect for the office buddies, and Jose Rivera’s Maricela de la Luz Lights the World is a daytime children’s show to which everyone can bring the kids....