PETER CASE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1989, singer-songwriter Peter Case titled his second solo disc The Man With the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar–an apt, if unwieldy, characterization of the sound he’s pursued since disbanding the Plimsouls over 15 years ago. On this year’s Flying Saucer Blues (Vanguard) his rootsy picking draws from traditional blues, rockabilly, and acoustic pop, among other influences, and his vivid lyrics demonstrate a taste for wry wordplay and self-deprecating humor....

When Sree Nallamothu was nine, her family left the Indian city of Hyderabad for Orchard Lake, a suburb of Detroit. The contrast between the two cultures provides the background for her short film She Was in Love Once. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 20-minute movie follows Maya, a young Indian-American woman who finds out she’s pregnant just as it’s dawning on her that she’s fallen out of love with her husband, Prem....

TINSLEY ELLIS 5/22, FITZGERALD’S Just as between love and hate, there’s a fine line between blues and blues rock. Atlanta guitarist Tinsley Ellis walks it with a compelling, sometimes vertigo-inducing lurch, giving everything a slight Allman Brothers shading and inviting the occasional really frightening guest to play on his albums (R.E.M.’s Peter Buck was on 1992’s Trouble Time). On his latest, Fire It Up (Alligator), Ellis’s mastery of his instrument is clear....

Staging a Comeback Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A direct descendant of Andries Pretorius, who led the Boers to victory in the Blood River Battle, Chris Pretorius earned a degree in visual arts at the Cape Town Art Institute and found work as a designer in the opera and the theater. “I enjoyed manipulating images on the stage,” he explains. During the 80s he established himself as one of South Africa’s leading avant-garde directors, staging about two plays a year, many of them at the prestigious Market Theatre in Johannesburg....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whenever Jonathan Rosenbaum writes a film review he seems to find it imperative that he reference at least one utterly obscure film as a kind of testament to his sagacious grasp of moviemaking history. “Wow, this guy must really know his stuff,” we are supposed to mutter to ourselves. (I can usually hear the faint pat on the back as he extends his arm behind his shoulder in hearty self-congratulation....

Subtle Charms Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It looked like the quartet, which plays a uniquely folksy strain of instrumental minimalism that falls somewhere between Morton Feldman and John Fahey, would have to go dormant for up to a year. Given that its debut, Town and Country, had come out in 1998, that meant a problematically long lag between recordings. But Thrill Jockey owner Bettina Richards suggested that the group record an EP of music that would make the best of Payne’s physical limitations....

American Women Composers-Midwest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it started in 1982 American Women Composers-Midwest had the modest ambition of cheering on performances of compositions by women past and present. Now it’s one of the city’s busiest and most daring presenters. To kick off its 15th anniversary, the group has enlisted members of the Chicago Chamber Musicians–a rather conservative bunch of ace instrumentalists normally indifferent to contemporary works–for a retrospective that includes exemplary works from four of the AWC’s officers, each with a distinctive sensibility....

JANUARY 5 JANUARY 17 Israeli lawyer Ron Major explained the genesis of his idea for a Sea of Galilee tourist attraction, a 240-foot-long platform just below the surface of the water that allows tourists to look like they’re walking on water: “I was ashamed to share it with other people at first, for fear they would think that I was a lunatic.” FEBRUARY 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now....

PHILIP GLASS AND ROBERT WILSON’S “MONSTERS OF GRACE” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nonesuch’s 1996 release of Philip Glass’s early-70s opus Music in Twelve Parts made me wonder what the Philip Glass who wrote it would think of the music Philip Glass is making now. His contemporary work has none of the austerity that gave his early composing its edge, and his deep structural use of change that was so incremental as to be nearly static has given way to a bloated, fluffy stylization of his basic techniques: looping arpeggios that modulate whimsically, additive rhythms that cause shifts in the melodies....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When my lover’s fingers were inside me, I loved the sensations, but they were sensations of both pleasure and pain. I’m not sure I can take his whole hand. My vagina wasn’t exactly sore the next day, but it occasionally twanged and throbbed and generally made me aware of its existence. Is it possible that my lover’s fist may be too big for me?...

I’ve been having the best time sending sleazy E-mails to a man I met through the personals. He lives three time zones away. He recently requested that I send him a pair of my well-worn panties. I said no, because I couldn’t stand the thought of him sniffing my dirty, crusty, skanky underwear. Well, I’m thinking about changing my mind. I know he would enjoy them, even though I think they’re gross....

SHAKE YOUR GROOVE THING, Griffin Theatre Company. Playwright William Massolia and director Richard Barletta’s overlong look at love and loss at the tail end of the disco era recalls the dance records of the time: thin but diverting material is padded into something tediously predictable. The story, inspired by Restoration playwright Aphra Behn’s The Rover, follows a circle of friends through three evenings over nearly a year in a midwestern disco–from New Year’s Eve 1979 to the day after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election as president....

DOUGLAS EWART & INVENTIONS 12/2 & 3, VELVET LOUNGE It’s been said that Douglas Ewart’s oeuvre could easily be mistaken for the work of a small civilization. The Jamaican-born musician and instrument inventor moved to the U.S. in 1963 and for several years honed his skills as a tailor–background that benefits his work with masks and costumes today. But by the late 60s he’d switched to music, studying saxophone, clarinet, theory, and composition at the school run by the AACM, of which he’d later become president....

Having recently debunked the Super Bowl Sunday violence story, perhaps you could check into this secondhand smoke business. I seem to remember that after the initial study came out blaming secondhand cigarette smoke for every kind of ill, this study was found to be seriously flawed. Is this another case like the “LSD causes chromosome damage” study? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let me begin by saying that I’m allergic to tobacco smoke, and laws against smoking in public places have personally benefited me....

TONE ROAD RAMBLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new-classical-music realm sometimes operates like a series of dark, disconnected chambers: composers are writing, but they have to look high and low for ensembles willing and able to interpret their works; meanwhile performers must scour the earth for scores that suit their interests and abilities. In 1981 a handful of performers and composer-performers banded together as the Tone Road Ramblers to deal with the problem collectively....

Bombs in the Ladies Room Timothy McVeigh is currently the most publicly excoriated American terrorist, but he wasn’t the first. We just don’t hear as much about the others, whose crimes are often smaller–perhaps their bombs didn’t detonate, or they never even got to plant them. Maybe they left a bomb where news cameras had limited access, and the shattered glass of a multinational office or bank building didn’t become an emblem of betrayal overnight....

ICP ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The great promise of jazz–as a creative ferment where anything and everything is possible–is rarely fulfilled by those who claim to play the music these days, be they neoboppers running through the same old scale patterns or free improvisers recycling pet licks. Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg, one of the few musicians who still seem genuinely interested in exploiting the full potential of jazz’s bastard beginnings, heads a loose ensemble he calls the ICP (or Instant Composers Pool) Orchestra, and it makes some of the most exhilarating, surprising, beautiful, and downright joyful music I’ve ever heard....

IQU Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instrumental electronic musicians have it tough onstage: when you’ve only got a DAT and a Powerbook to work with, it’s hard to do something that’s interesting to watch; it’s even hard to improve on your albums, except by making everything louder. But IQU (pronounced “ee-koo”), a hyperactive trio based in Olympia, Washington, has absorbed the DIY rock ethic of its hometown, and with its constant touring–most recently as part of the Flaming Lips’ Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue–the band has developed an assertive, unruly, and very physical stage presence....

Lead Stories Multiculturalism in Sports Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a November New York Times report, Chinese soccer fans now harass opposing teams by yelling a word that is street slang for female genitals. The press has dubbed the yell the “Beijing curse.” And in Lagos, Nigeria, in November, the star player on the Cameroonian women’s soccer team, Gwimotoh Lilian, was disqualified from the championship series because all of her physical features are “male” except for her genitals, according to officials....

In a week, maybe two, the tax-refund forms will be mailed out of City Hall, and the first of the last official acts in the life of Mayor Daley’s great circulator will have commenced. The circulator was so closely linked to Daley it’s hard to remember that the idea was born in the early 80s, years before he took office. Wouldn’t it make sense, boosters conjectured, to link the Metra and Amtrak stations along Canal Street to the eastern portions of the city’s rapidly expanding business and shopping district?...