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Hey, Dan: Hey, John: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far as hate words are concerned, I’ve always been of the opinion that intent makes a word hateful, not a particular arrangement of letters. “Faggot” can be said with hateful intent, but so can “homosexual” or “gay” (have you ever heard Jesse Helms drawl out “homahsectshul”?). “Bitch” can be a term of endearment or a slur, and neither your average rap artist nor Chris Rock is niggardly about their use of the word “nigger....

By Michael Miner “I think he makes bad choices,” Beck responded. “Does that make him have to enter a 12-step program? I don’t think so. I don’t think there is such a thing as sexual addiction.” But doesn’t the Christian right insist on personal responsibility and dismiss the notion of mitigating pathologies? “Consenting, I may add,” said Beck. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The question of judgment does come up,” Hafferkamp allowed....

When I came through the Pavilion doors last Friday for the American Basketball League Condors’ inaugural game, there was a small combo by the concessions playing simpy Kenny G-style jazz. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had expected the Condors’ first game to be an event, and it was. After monitoring ticket availability throughout the week to make sure we could just walk up and get in, I was spooked into driving down earlier in the day to get tickets by a Sun-Times report that the game was close to being sold-out....

SYRUP USA 10/31, LOUNGE AX The true glory of prog rock wasn’t in the music; it was in the iconography–the airbrushed Martian landscapes, the knights and alchemists, “The Trees!” So no matter how many layers of irony I have to peel away, there’s still something I have to like about a band that’s willing to put a unicorn on the album cover and dress up in Renaissance Faire costumes for the inner fold....

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’d rather listen to techno than the Kinks,” Super Furry Animals guitarist Gruff Rhys recently told the music magazine Flaunt. In fact, throughout the Welsh combo’s press kit, Rhys takes every opportunity to distance himself from the exhausted Britpop scene, criticizing its rock traditionalism and inherent nationalism. But the proof’s in the pudding–Radiator (1997), the band’s excellent second album, rolls out more gigantic David Bowie choruses than the Velvet Goldmine sound track....

By Ben Joravsky With the trees scheduled to be uprooted in the spring, the mayor’s the only remaining hope. “Mayor Daley says he loves trees–well, we need him now,” says Joe Arnold, an Albany Park resident. “Here we are in the middle of the quarantined area and they want to tear down these beautiful three-story trees for Astroturf. They want to take away the community’s park. I can’t believe the mayor will let this happen....

APPLES IN STEREO/BEULAH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even an elephant might have trouble recalling all the records to come out this year under the auspices of the Elephant 6 Recording Company. The name refers to a clique of home-recording geeks that originated a decade ago in the college town of Ruston, Louisiana; its alumni, working in bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, and the Apples in Stereo, are responsible for some of the best indie pop of the 90s....

Enlightening Materials Meiing Hsu, the metalsmithing instructor, told me that while her students’ schooling includes intensive craft training–skills not required of most art-school graduates in the U.S.–she pushes them to “master both techniques and concepts.” With the exception of some elegantly crafted hairpins by Hsiao-Meng Su, the objects are not functional, though many allude to usable objects. The muted or monochromatic colors reminded me of the thousand-year tradition of Chinese ink painting, in which color was considered superfluous and line was the basis of expression....

By & About, G.B.S., Them, at Strawdog Theatre. Sam Patterson’s muddled attempt to distill two decades’ worth of correspondence between playwright George Bernard Shaw and renowned actress Ellen Terry suffers most from his inability to keep the characters consistent–surprising given that the entire text of Wit and Moonlight: A Paper Courtship is taken verbatim from their letters. Though thankfully Patterson hasn’t attempted to manufacture drama by adding dialogue, the way he’s arranged these fragments nonetheless sensationalizes the pair’s relationship....

John Berton leaned against the dryer in his basement one afternoon in late September, writing down everything he needed to buy before he could disconnect from Commonwealth Edison’s power grid. In a small room a few feet away, 50 gurgling nickel-iron batteries surged with enough energy to power his entire apartment. Fortunately, Berton’s friend Vladimir Nekola, an electrician and renewable-energy contractor, had agreed to help him finish. Berton wrote while Nekola rattled off the parts they needed: a transfer switch, a charge controller, a 16-breaker panel, a 12-breaker panel, 12 20-amp breaker switches, 20 15-amp breaker switches, three 60-amp double breakers, two breaker boxes, a 100-amp pullout disconnect, a two-inch pipe, lugs, cables, brackets, four 90-degree one-inch Greenfield connectors....

Sex sells: it’s an advertising cliche that spans an abyss, the one between our animal and higher natures. Dance straddles the same abyss–but unlike advertising, its treatments of sex can serve a variety of purposes. Sure, some sexy dance merely sells the show. But other times it puts us in the hot seat, squirming as we regard our own divided selves. On one program of the monthlong Dance Chicago ’98 festival, the Anatomical Theatre performs Robynne M....

Friday 4/9 – Thursday 4/15 The Chicago Latino Film Festival opens tonight at several locations, including Water Tower, which hosts a screening of last year’s Divine. Directed by Arturo Ripstein, the movie follows fanatics awaiting the end of the world who journey to a small Mexican village, where they’re given shelter by a priest obsessed with Charlton Heston and a dying nun who chooses a teenager from the sect as her successor....

Standing before a diverse sea of faces from Rogers Park, Insight Arts executive director Craig Harshaw uses the set-up time between acts in the group’s “Night of Insight” event for a little consciousness-raising. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soon he turns the audience’s attention back to the stage. A troupe of neighborhood teenagers calling themselves 15 Stories High performs four vignettes based on real-life stories from the community....

A poster promoting one of Salsedo Press’s Cinco de Mayo blasts–which are famous in Chicago’s lefty ghettos–shows a few of the world’s best-known politicos shaking their booties on a fire escape high above Chicago’s skyline. Emiliano Zapata looks stern. But an olive-drab Daniel Ortega is getting down, and a dapper Nelson Mandela has his fists raised above his head in funky triumph and is wearing a pin that says “Free Beer....

IRA SULLIVAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s made but two recordings in the last 15 years, and it’s been more than a decade since he famously toured the world with trumpeter Red Rodney. So how come Ira Sullivan still marshals such respect and excitement when he comes home to Chicago? Well, for me, the mere mention of Sullivan stirs the memory of my grade-school clarinet teacher curtly informing me that no matter what I’d heard, read, or seen, nobody could play both the saxophone and trumpet without each skill suffering in the process....

Jeremy Enigk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years ago Jeremy Enigk, front man for the Seattle emo-core band Sunny Day Real Estate, hit spiritual rock bottom, locked himself into a room for a month, and emerged a born-again Christian; shortly thereafter he left SDRE, effectively breaking up the band. The rhythm section joined Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters, and Enigk, after struggling with whether it was still OK to be a rock musician, recorded his solo debut, last year’s lush, psychedelic, decidedly un-grungy Return of the Frog Queen....

KENNY DAVERN-EDDIE HIGGINS QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When bebop arrived a half century ago, it made swing and its predecessors–New Orleans jazz and its offshoots in Chicago and New York–sound suddenly old. And despite the occasional faddish revival, those forms stopped really evolving; they’ve become historical artifacts, and in a cable-modem world few musicians still trouble themselves to invoke the carefully crafted melodies of that bygone era....

Maceo Parker Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If James Brown is indeed the Godfather of Soul, he could never have found a better consigliere than Maceo Parker, the alto man who gained fame in front of the J.B. Horns. His big sound oozes from the instrument, with a slippery and confident sensuality; that same quality also shows up in his hard, devilish smile. As the lead voice, Parker successfully molded the band’s explosive little horn sections in his own image, thus leaving nearly as giant a footprint on funk as Brown did with his patented squeals, grunts, and splits....

MARLENA SHAW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the three decades of Marlena Shaw’s career, people have been asking a musical question that’s been with us since the 1930s: Is she is or is she ain’t a jazz singer? When she started singing for Count Basie’s band in 1967–in a post previously held by heavyweights like Jimmy Rushing, Billie Holiday, and Joe Williams–she already had a pop hit (“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”) under her belt....

By Sarah Downey “Yes, quite close to perfect, isn’t it?” Martini muses as he strides ahead. “And you can see that it’s a bit beyond the range, so it’s never been an issue for our golfers.” Butt runs a top-drawer design firm in Canberra that specializes in solar-powered homes. A member of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, he points out that Griffin’s successes owe much to a strong work ethic: “He slogged it on....