By Linda Lutton The Pure Love Alliance is one of a growing number of abstinence groups that package traditional values in presentations oozing with pop culture. In April, Project Reality, an abstinence-only education group based in the northern suburbs, held its annual rally at the UIC Pavilion. Ten thousand middle and high school students watched skits, heard testimony from sports heroes and a former Miss Black California, and jammed to hip-hop music that all said the same thing: wait for the wedding bells....

Mummenschanz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What makes this venerable trio’s creations so cartoonish is the fact that they’re humanoid rather than human: a Mummenschanz creature might have Mickey Mouse’s skinny little black body, for example, but an even less human head–perhaps an oversize malleable bag in which the performer can punch a nose and eyes. A column of fabric isn’t an abstract shape but a worm playing ball....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January DigiPen Institute of Technology opened in Redmond, Washington, offering the nation’s first four-year college degree in video-game development at a cost of about $11,000 a year. Forty students enrolled in the first class, but 1,000 applications for the 100 seats in the fall class have already been received. The curriculum emphasizes computer languages and graphics but also includes math, physics, business marketing, and mythology....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A pamphlet for parents on coping with marijuana use by their kids, written by a Utah criminology professor and recommended by U.S. senator Orrin Hatch, identifies “excessive preoccupation with social issues, race relations, environmental issues, etc” as a warning sign of drug use. Also mentioned are more obvious signs like staying out all night, needing more money, and a sudden interest “in Ras Tafari religion,” according to an October report in the Washington Post....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The wise judiciary: In December a judge in Bloomfield, Iowa, sentenced two men who had clubbed 23 cats with baseball bats (killing 16) to one day in jail per cat, but then suspended even that sentence. Also in December a judge in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, sentenced the men who beat a man to death on the eve of his wedding to a mere 16 months in prison....

By Bill Stamets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week, to commemorate Veterans Day, Barnes & Noble is releasing the first U.S. edition of War of Our Fathers: Relics of the Pacific Battlefields, a collection of Marin’s landscapes and studies of relics. Rendered by Varouj Kokuzian, senior printer at Gamma Photo Labs, Marin’s black-and-white photos are meditations on nearly erased horrors. War sites are memorialized with photo captions that carry terse notes like “bombed 1942,” “assaulted 1942,” “sunk 1943,” and “destroyed 1943....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The answer? I’d like to encourage FAs to move beyond their fetish and toward loving women as people rather than bodies. I’d like to encourage big girls to never settle for a partner solely because he (or she) is willing to accept one’s size. And I’d like to encourage everyone to start broadening their fuckin’ twisted definitions of what is beautiful, what is desirable, and what is lovable....

Hey, Faggot: You were a virgin coming into this relationship, and from the sound of things, you’re not going to be much worse for wear coming out. Pardon me for being blunt, but you’re not in love with this guy, and he’s definitely not in love with you. In the past 14 months, you two may have become quite close, and developed a sort of friendly bond that in your inexperience and naivete you mistake for love, but you are not in love with him....

BLACKS 3/11, EMPTY BOTTLE On Just Like Home, its second release on Bloodshot, this local “family” act has toned down its Appalachian cabaret shtick in favor of a more straightforward roadhouse-rock vibe, losing some distinctiveness in the process. Though they’re all precisely arranged, none of the songs are all that special–except for Tom Waits’s “Goin’ Out West,” which doesn’t necessarily benefit from the melodramatic treatment it gets here. With the departure of songbird Nora O’Connor, whose biting harmonizing probably will be sorely missed live, the Blacks are stripped-down to a trio; both Gina and Danny Black play half a dozen instruments on the record, but onstage it usually comes down to Danny’s spare, ringing rockabilly guitar and Gina’s mesmerizing dance with her upright bass....

I Stand Alone By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Put more simply, I Stand Alone is a movie that removes your head, fucks with it for a while, and then hands it back to you. I wonder what the late Samuel Fuller–perhaps the filmmaker most interested in hatred and how it functions–would have made of it. There are two very violent scenes, one near the beginning and one near the end, and women are the victims in both....

WATERSON:CARTHY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pedigrees don’t come much more impressive than that of Waterson:Carthy, perhaps the leading proponents of traditional British folk music today. Martin Carthy shocked the loyal back in 1971 when as a founding member of the influential Steeleye Span he plugged in his guitar, but unlike Dylan in 1965, it didn’t hurt him with the movement: subsequently he performed with a who’s who of British folk, Albion Country Band, Fairport Convention’s Dave Swarbrick, and Three City Four among them....

Headline Of course, I am an easy target. It doesn’t enhance your credibility as a reviewer to take potshots at my past accomplishments on The Love Boat. Come on Nick, even you think you’re better than that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But let’s deal with what the public really wants to know . . . is Four Queens a good play? Is it worth venturing to the Onyx Theatre?...

CAETANO VELOSO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Pra ninguem” (“For No One”), the final song on Caetano Veloso’s superb 1998 album, Livro (“Book”), is little more than a series of shout-outs to great Brazilian singers and the songs they sang–“Djavan singing ‘Drao’ / Chico singing ‘Exaltacao a mangueira’”–until the final couplet of each verse, when he warbles, “Better than this there’s only silence / And better than silence only Joao....

CHICAGO A CAPPELLA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frank Lloyd Wright once likened architecture to “frozen music”; he wrote in detail about how the structures and ornaments of music inspired those of his buildings. He’d grown up listening to Unitarian hymns and chorales–his father and uncle were both Unitarian ministers–and he intended his Unity Temple, built in Oak Park in 1908, to see service not only as a church and a secular meeting place but also as a venue for concerts....

Chris T Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the case of Chris T, it’s not for lack of trying. Kelley’s work seems practically drunk on ideas, incorporating nearly every thought anyone has ever had about racism in America, how the powerful victimize the powerless, and how the Christ story can be reconfigured to reflect those issues. But these thoughts are tossed off aimlessly rather than organized, and the evening ends up sounding like the reading of a first draft....

By John Conroy One might think, then, that Morrissey’s unwillingness to listen to claims of a coerced confession was well-grounded. One might think that the battle is lopsided, a waste of time, a legal technicality required by a higher court. In fact, this battle is well drawn. Long-hidden police documents indicate that an investigator from the department’s own Office of Professional Standards revisited the case in 1993 and concluded that the El Rukn was more credible than the cops....

Polish Film Festival in America Turn-of-the-century Lodz supplies the backdrop for this epic critique of industrialization by Andrzej Wajda (Man of Iron, Danton), recipient of a 1998 lifetime achievement award from the Venice film festival. A near-operatic account of three young men–one German, one Polish, one Jewish–whose partnership in a mill leads to ruin, this 1974 film presents an uncompromising vision of industrial society tumbling into an abyss of violence, decadence, and cruelty....

By Ben Joravsky “I’m working to set up a pension fund for retired fighters with Senator John McCain of Arizona,” he says. “I want to clean up the sport around here. They’re killing it. We got incompetents in charge of other incompetents. What they did to the Park District boxing is a disgrace. It’s the rape of boxing, I call it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was just a kid on the street until I found boxing,” he says....

neuhaus.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In my northwest side neighborhood there are not many eloteros who stake out a corner like those described in Neal Pollack’s article. Most push their carts through the streets and signal their approach with large bicycle-style horns. I can hear the blaring approach of a corn vendor from over a block away. When a cart passes the front of my house and I am in the backyard I can hardly carry on a conversation....

KING KONG, UZ JSME DOMA 12/5, LOUNGE AX We here in America tend to equate traditionalism with sincerity and the avant-garde with cold, calculating intellectualism. But for Czech bands like Uz Jsme Doma, subsisting for years on smuggled Frank Zappa and Residents, to break musical taboos is still truly gutsy, even revolutionary. On its Fairy-Tales From Needland, recently reissued in the U.S. by the D.C. label Skoda, the quintet has created a concept album based on, as lyricist Miroslav Wanek explains, “trying to imagine what it would be like 600 or 700 years from now when people would tell fairy tales based on our experience....