“In Chicago in 1961 you didn’t take on the police department,” says Seymour Hersh in the Progressive (October), recalling his time at City News Bureau. “Two cops reported that a prisoner had tried to escape and they’d shot him….I wanted to interview these cops first and write a good story on them killing this idiotic prisoner who had tried to escape. Two beefy, white Irish cops came out of a car....

LOUISIANA RED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Louisiana Red can encapsulate the Delta-to-Chicago blues diaspora with a few shimmering strokes of slide guitar; his unusual tunings and edge-of-chaos harmonies hark back to real rural roots, and his vocals can attain a larynx-ripping intensity–but it’s his lyrics that really set him apart. His stories range from harrowing descriptions of the traumas he’s endured to surreal bits of free association: in “Story of Louisiana Red,” he recounts witnessing his father’s lynching by the KKK and then pleads, “I’m beggin’ you people / Please don’t kill me no more”; and in the only slightly less terrifying “Red’s Dream” he embarks on a one-man foreign-policy rampage, threatening to give Castro a “Georgia shave” and use Khrushchev’s pate for a baseball, then finally takes over the Hill and installs the likes of Ray Charles and Big Maybelle as senators....

DR. LONNIE SMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though keyboardist Dr. Lonnie Smith has outdistanced the soul preservationists of the acid-jazz wave with recent albums devoted to the music of Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, you still have to credit the revival of interest in organ jazz for his renewed career. When he left the scene in the 80s, the critical establishment hadn’t yet caught up with him–so despite his galvanizing style, even now most lists of the important jazz organists omit the good doctor....

By Melissa King I don’t know his name. I played basketball with him, his brother, and their roommate today. They were new to the game, but they played hard. The most experienced player (also the tallest and the best English speaker) was the one who asked me to play. I had been at the other end of the court shooting baskets, stealing glances at them, knowing they were returning the favor....

JACOBITES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What do you do for a second act when the bedroom rock band you formed with your little brother and a couple high school buddies churned up some of the richest soil of a musically fecund age? The Swell Maps, led by Nikki Sudden and his brother, the late Epic Soundtracks, have gotten props over the years from members of Sonic Youth, Big Black, and Pavement for their prescient blend of punk economy, Krautrock-inspired experimentation, and lo-fi production values....

By Tori Marlan Kazmier’s friend Jim stops by every now and then to “shoot the bull,” but Jim, who’s 73, hasn’t been well lately. The only regular visitors these days are a pair of pigeons Kazmier calls Pete and Repeat. He talks to them and feeds them sunflower seeds and popcorn, but he’d like them a whole lot more if they didn’t get feathers on his carpet and leave droppings on the area above the front door, which he’s now shielded with cardboard....

Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago started out nearly 30 years ago as a collective formed to study African dance and music. Since then a lot of collectives have come and gone, but Muntu (pronounced “moon too,” it means “the essence of humanity” in Bantu) is still dancing. Under the direction of Amaniyea Payne, working with guest choreographers from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and Liberia, Muntu performs centuries-old ritual dances along with contemporary African-American and African pieces, always accompanied by live music, usually percussion and flute....

Moving Memorial Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fulle and producer David Miller hope the film festival exposure will lead to a distribution deal for the low-budget, independent picture. Such deals are rare for small, nonstudio films with no star power, but Miller remains optimistic: “I think our best bet is to hook up with a specialized distributor who could arrange a limited or specialized release for the picture....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April a federal judge in Hartford, Connecticut, threw out the defamation lawsuit against Princeton University filed by disgruntled would-be medical student Rommel Nobay, who claimed that when Princeton bad-mouthed him for lying on his application it discouraged other schools from accepting him. Nobay admitted to fudging his class standing and SAT score, among other things; however, he had attracted more suspicion with his essays claiming that a family of lepers in Kenya had so much faith in him that they had donated “half their beggings” to help him with his education....

Lead Stories Sixteen people are still imprisoned as a result of inconsistent and heavily coached testimony from children who say they were molested at day-care centers in Massachusetts and North Carolina and by a ring of sexual abusers in Wenatchee, Washington, though appeals court decisions in August and September brought to nine the number of people who’ve been released. Former Wenatchee police detective Robert Perez defends his arrests–which began with allegations by his then ten-year-old foster daughter that dozens of adults had had sex with dozens of children all over town every week for nearly six years–even though he has admitted to harassing his daughter after she tried to change her story....

By Michael Miner “Dear Colleague, I want to share with you the National Labor Relations Board’s final report on the crushing vote against the Newspaper Guild’s recent attempt to colonize the Sun-Times advertising department. Advertising staff decided by a margin of 2-1 to reject old-style collectivism. The vote was a 118-60 humiliation for the paid guild activists and their dwindling band of followers in the editorial department. “In rejecting the guild by such a clear margin, I believe advertising staff have said they do not want to import into their department the divisiveness and old resentments that the guild has nursed for years in the editorial section....

At 9:30 on a Friday night, things are just starting to roll at Hunter’s in Elk Grove Village. There’s a mannerly array of mostly male customers around the big, cozily lit bar on one side of the L-shaped space. On the other side, a lone muscled man-boy in tank top, baseball cap, and jeans gyrates to “Dancing Queen.” A few singles and couples perch at the small tables lining the darkened dance floor, their eyes raised to the images flashing on a dozen video monitors–tarted-up no-talent kids lip-synching to bad music....

RUINS/MUSICA TRANSONIC/MAINLINER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Japan’s sprawling rock underground is a strange and wondrous thing, and it’s hard to think of a figure who represents its manic diversity better than drummer Tatsuya Yoshida. In the past he’s played with legendary heavies like YBO2 and Zeni Geva, but he’s best known as the constant in a revolving-door duo called Ruins. Over the years he’s paired off with a variety of technically dazzling electric bassists (the latest is Sasaki Hisashi) to create a mind-fucking fusion of prog, punk, and opera....

NECKBONES 10/22, EMPTY BOTTLE I have no doubt that when it first started happening, survivors of the New York Dolls and the Dead Boys were shocked to learn that people had actually memorized their licks ‘n’ tricks and were ready to fill the void with tribute-band accuracy. By now, though, everyone’s pretty used to it. The Doll-perfect Neckbones, who are from Oxford, Mississippi, are one of several rock-identified acts watering down the roster of that town’s Fat Possum label, also home to old Delta bluesmen like T-Model Ford and R....

The other day a line from the old Jim Croce song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was running through my head: “The south side of Chicago is the baddest part of town.” I got to thinking, is the south side always the baddest part of town? Think about it. South Bronx, South Central LA, South Baltimore…for that matter, southern Italy and South America. What is it about the south that poor people always wind up living there?...

For many years Euripides’ The Bacchae has tantalized Xsight! artistic director Brian Jeffery. It must seem a natural for the man who helped create the 1989 sexual thriller/murder mystery What Are We Going to Do About Mary? and Xsight!’s 1990 religious satire, The Pope’s Toe, to explore the collision of religious faith, sexual passion, and social convention at the heart of this ancient Greek drama. But though Jeffery seems attracted to the play partly because of its excess–he says that nothing in contemporary drama is so “graphically out of proportion as the Greeks”–he’s also hoping to “live up to the challenge of a classic....

Royal Flush Gay theater in America may as well be on life support: most gay plays are inert, kept alive by a sense of social obligation, not social necessity. It’s nearly impossible to find one written in this decade that does more than restate obvious and facile truths while suggesting that references to ABBA and Judy Garland are outrageously original. Show me a play with mostly gay characters, and I’ll show you two earnest hours spent skimming the surface of pressing contemporary issues, passing time until the lead actor’s pants come off....

By Neal Pollack “It’s a tradition with pregnant women in Tunisia that when they’ve got some vice you have to give it to them. For instance, if when my mom got pregnant, she said, ‘You know, I’d love to have six beers now,’ and we were in the desert, you have to bring her six beers. Anyway, she was with my father in a restaurant, a club. And they started playing darbuka....

Last week’s performance by the Art Ensemble of Chicago–the best-known group to come out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians–was a rarity not just because the group plays out less and less frequently, but because the Art Ensemble members are the only first-generation AACM musicians who still work together regularly. Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, and others meet up for the sporadic special-occasion concert, like Abrams’s Experimental Band reunion at Jazz Fest a few years ago, but for the most part they’ve gone their separate ways....

bechtol.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two openings, including one given by SIGGRAPH, hosted over 400 gallery visitors [“Blank Screens,” October 10]. The ARC show also recorded higher than average attendance records, with over 200 for the opening alone. Both sites had CD-ROM inclusion of over 150 works by artists representing schools from all over Illinois. The education and outreach aspects used a Web site created by UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab, which will continue to grow and connect artists and schools around the state....