Bill Traylor: High Singing Blue By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Traylor’s story is the classic, almost defining tale of the outsider artist. Born a slave on a small Alabama plantation, probably in 1856, he lived there most of his life as a farmhand. Later in his life he recalled doing basket weaving and some surveying as well as farming. By the 1930s his “white folks” had died, and after a short stint in a Montgomery factory, he found himself unable to work due to rheumatism....

Listings are excerpted from the Reader Restaurant Finder, an on-line database of over 1,200 Chicago-area restaurants. Restaurants are rated by more than 2,000 Reader Restaurant Raters, who feed us information and comments on their dining experiences. Web ratings are updated daily; print listings reflect the most current information available at publication. Reviews are written by Laura Levy Shatkin (LLS), staff, and individual Raters. Though reviewers try to reflect the Restaurant Raters’ input, reviews should be considered one person’s opinion; the collective Raters’ opinions are best expressed in the numbers....

ROBBIE FULKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never completely understood why people celebrate the passing of another year by surrounding themselves with obnoxious, anonymous drunks, but if overlubricated artificial camaraderie is your bag, you won’t find a better sound track for it than Robbie Fulks’s Let’s Kill Saturday Night (Geffen). In fact, the sentiments of the title track–a raucous heartland romp about obliterating the memory of the working week–are so appropriate that this whole evening’s being billed as “Let’s Kill 1998....

AFRICAN/CARIBBEAN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF LIFE 7/2-5, WASHINGTON PARK Less hyped than any other Chicago festival of its size, this four-day stand–held near the DuSable Museum of African American History–promises food, crafts, clothing, and some 60 acts performing music and dance from across the African diaspora. Friday’s bill features Messianic Sons (“positive hip-hop”), the R.S.B. Band from the Dominican Republic, the African dance company Dansika, and local reggae stars Aswah Greggori and the Enforcers....

BUSKER SOUNDCHECK 12/17, DOUBLE DOOR For their annual holiday show, this midwest alt-rock juggernaut will good-naturedly demolish traditional tunes as well as “Christmas classics” by the Beach Boys, the Andrews Sisters, and the Kinks. KAHIL EL’ZABAR’S RITUAL TRIO WITH PHAROAH SANDERS 12/17 & 18, DeJOIE’S Percussionist and promoter Kahil El’Zabar, who briefly but effectively made a jazz hot spot out of Rituals, is booking a new venue: DeJoie’s, a restaurant and club on the trendy Randolph Street corridor....

By Ben Joravsky and Kari Lydersen But the changes incited protests from students, faculty, and alumni, who accused Sonnenschein of dumbing down standards. “They made the curriculum easier to attract the gentleman C student,” says Stone. “They want to bring in more undergraduates, particularly in business, because studies show that undergrads in business donate more in the future.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heresy, the protesters charged....

Hey Cecil, I have a question that I’ve been bouncing around for the past few days. How do caterpillars have sex? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think this question is worthy of Cecil as it: (1) comes from a questioner who is obviously dumber than a box of rocks, thus offering ample opportunities for ridicule; (2) features a question so incredibly ignorant that the Teeming Millions will instantly feel smug, thinking they know what the answer is; and (3) allows Cecil to puncture their bubble and explicate learnedly about such fascinating topics as paedomorphosis, neoteny, the repulsive axolotl, and why humans are like baby chimpanzees....

Dear editors– However, my understanding of the situation is that Giamatti banned Rose from baseball because of his refusal to cooperate with the investigation into his alleged gambling. In this scenario, Rose enters the ban from baseball freely and willingly, in exchange for the allegations against him to remain unresolved. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The exact reasoning behind Giamatti’s ban of Rose is complicated by a number of issues at play at the time....

WRIST ERROR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago’s fertile free-improv scene is still pretty much unparalleled in terms of activity and depth, but its DIY ethic is no longer unique. Scrappy communities of hungry young instrumentalists have cropped up in places like Baltimore, Boston, Madison, and Toronto–where percussionist Mike Gennaro and guitarist Kurt Newman, who perform together as Wrist Error, curate a biweekly series at a local cafe....

From the pages of Stay Free! ¥ Issue #15 (P.O. Box 306, Prince Street Station, New York, NY 10012; $3) David Cross is the bald, Jewish one Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a little mom and pop store where I live (the quaint hamlet of Hollywood, California) that gives away free shoes. It’s true! It’s called the Nike store, and they’ll give you free clothing…well, not you, but me....

AMON TOBIN/HERBALISER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most exciting frontiers for sample-based music is the creation of some otherwise impossible ethnic fusions. As demonstrated by lots of well-meaning real-time collaborations by musicians from disparate cultures–Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan riffing on Michael Brook’s bland ambience, Ry Cooder jamming the “Ganges Delta Blues” with V.M. Bhatt–the clash of personalities can result in less-than-ideal compromises....

Leland H. Gregory III grins at a press release from Colorado State University. It says the school will conduct a study with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine whether surgically castrated prairie dogs will still protect their turf. “That’s too funny,” he says. The study’s goal–finding a way to control the prairie dog population–may be worthwhile. But Gregory muses, “What I’d like to know is how much it’ll cost.”...

The producers of Forever Plaid claim their show is Chicago’s longest-running musical, but the honor actually goes to Co-ed Prison Sluts. Years before anyone thought of bringing Forever Plaid to town, this raggedy-assed, iconoclastic musical comedy was running in a blues club and then in the Annoyance Theatre’s space on North Broadway. Created through improvisation in the late 80s by a handful of local actors under the direction of Mick Napier, Co-ed Prison Sluts quickly became a hit, reviving interest in both late-night shows and the use of improv for making theater....

DAVE DOUGLAS TINY BELL TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York trumpeter Dave Douglas has been a hard guy to catch standing still in recent years. He’s played foil to John Zorn in Masada, fronted his own pianoless Miles Davis-flavored quartet with saxist Chris Potter, recorded abstract tributes to composers as different as Booker Little and Joni Mitchell, and experimented with a string-dominated third-stream group, among other things....

Friday 11/28 – Thursday 12/4 29 SATURDAY Environmentalists are hung up on deforestation, preserving parks, and preventing pollution. But loss of arable land is a far greater threat to our well-being, says Dwight Lowell Mather, a tax specialist and former Methodist minister who has studied the problem since he was a teenager. He’ll discuss The End of the Food Supply tonight at the College of Complexes. According to the Department of Agriculture, the U....

Danny Bouncing (1) Martin McClendon as Danny, feebly attempting to win back his girlfriend by standing outside her apartment and serenading her with a karaoke version of the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” while his friend Hector–a Camel billboard model turned criminal–looks on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (6) Another Hollywood-movie parody in which an actress prepares to audition for the part of a hooker in a new Bruce Willis-Walter Matthau vehicle about a bomb expert and the ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright....

By Ben Joravsky In 1991 Lynch was placed on the tenure track. She had six years to prove her worth as a scholar and teacher and earn the ultimate prize in her profession: lifelong job protection for free expression and independent thought. “President Bienen made some statements about tenure as soon as he got here,” says Newman. “He began talking about how too many people were getting tenure. Then he denied that standards had changed or procedures had changed....

A friend in Los Angeles writes: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The yoga, the fasting, the tinkly fountain I got for Christmas–they were all fate, preparing me for my guest-star turn on Family Law. I play a monk from Nepal who has journeyed to Los Angeles to find the reincarnation of his high lama and discovers him as a young American boy (yes, shades of Little Buddha, but no Keanu Reeves)....

Not long after John Lennon’s death in 1980, an earnest 16-year-old from LaGrange named Steve Darnall visited a local forum on gun control. While speaking to a woman legislator, Darnall began to cry, apologizing for becoming so emotional. The woman told him not to be embarrassed, because the world needs more people with strong feelings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was advice Darnall took to heart, fueling his writing with indignation over ugly truths most would rather ignore....

Eliot Ness occupies a heroic place in the popular imagination. With bravery, honesty, and blazing tommy guns, he single-handedly brought down Al Capone. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1934, at the age of 30, Ness left Chicago after being assigned to the Treasury Department’s “alcohol tax unit” for southwestern Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, an area known as the “moonshine mountains.” A year later he was named the Director of Public Safety in Cleveland, where he exposed massive corruption and ties to organized crime in the police and fire departments....