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It’s been said that he who destroys a good book kills reason itself. But artist Robert The has his own reasons for vandalizing old books and carving them into gun shapes. “I feel like I’m resuscitating a piece of debris,” says The, who gets the books from Dumpsters, thrift shops, and garage sales. “There’s a certain aura something gets when it’s considered refuse.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A California native and current Woodridge resident, the 35-year-old The made his first book gun six years ago....

Richard Pegue eyes the dance floor, quickly calculating how many dancers are up, down, or heading for the bar. It’s Friday night at Taste Entertainment, a south-side nightclub, and the joint is jumping, with nearly three dozen men and women slipping and sliding to James Brown’s “Funky Good Time.” But once he had that tape recorder, he found himself drawn into the radio world. He stayed up late to catch his favorite DJs....

Offered as an adjunct to the annual summer Rhinoceros Theater and Performance Festival, this monthlong showcase of fringe entertainment features mostly new work by such ensembles and individuals as the Curious Theatre Branch, Dolphinback Theatre Company, Ira Glass, Frank Melcori, Theater Oobleck, Jamie O’Reilly, Michael Smith, the Saint Ed Theatre Company, and John Starrs, among others. The festival runs through March 9 at three locations: the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, 2827 N....

JEB LOY NICHOLS 6/19, SCHUBAS; 6/20, GUINNESS FLEADH This Texas boy has an aesthetic that can politely be called cosmopolitan–he once shared a house with Neneh Cherry, producer Adrian Sherwood, and Ari Up from the Slits. That worldly fusion is evident on his promising 1997 debut, Lovers Knot (Capitol), where he blends down-home balladry, light R & B, and sultry jazz into a suggestive rural soul. Nichols’s slice-of-life lyrics are not particularly remarkable–certainly they’re no match for the intense stare he wears on the album’s back cover–but they’re made more substantial by unusual arranging touches, say, a blast from John Medeski’s Hammond organ here, a barrage of Cyro Baptista’s percussion there....

The Rural Route Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of the appeal of the 1952 anthology was that its oddball curator, Harry Smith, drew no lines based on color or geography, instead emphasizing similarities between American folk musics. Now the Yazoo label, which in the past reissued the sort of early acoustic blues that makes up a large portion of the Smith anthology, has expanded its horizon to include old-time country with a pair of superb two-volume sets, The Rose Grew Round the Briar: Early American Rural Love Songs and Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be: Early American Rural Music....

By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steger was doing the kind of work most everyone on the performance scene was doing in those days: disjointed, heady, aggressively antitheatrical. But while many of his contemporaries seemed satisfied to demonstrate their familiarity with postmodern performance theory, Steger never let theory overwhelm his practice. Despite his daunting intellect and penchant for academic musings, he couldn’t help but entertain....

Breaking the Code Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Herbert Wise’s somber, impeccably acted adaptation of Hugh Whitemore’s play dramatizes the tragedy of English mathematician Alan Turing, one of a small group of brain trusters who helped win World War II by cracking the Nazis’ “Enigma” military code. Unfortunately Turing’s homosexuality marked him as a security risk in the 1950s; ordered to undergo hormone treatment (which made him grow breasts) and placed under government scrutiny, he committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple....

Sammy Sosa sat in front of his locker before a recent game at Wrigley Field talking about his new sideline as a philanthropist. It all began when a real estate development project in his hometown in the Dominican Republic went down the tubes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years ago, while watching the Florida Marlins win the World Series on television at a friend’s condo in suburban Miami, Sosa met Mexican-American attorney Art Sandoval....

In January of last year Alisa Hauser had just started working as a social rehabilitation counselor at the Lockport Center for Behavioral Health when she saw a picture of celebrity photographer Marc Hauser in a magazine. “He looked a lot like my father, who had passed away,” she says. Curious, she called him. “We talked a little bit and found out that he and my father were cousins.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Ben Joravsky But the dead man’s friends and family believe Richman was the victim of bullies with badges who shared the system’s contempt for a bold environmental crusader. In 1981 Jack’s father, a lawyer and former FBI agent, suffered a stroke; six years later he died. Jack’s only sibling, a sister, lived in Boston. For the last two decades his closest friend and companion was his mother, a Chicago public school principal who eagerly drove him about in her Cadillac Fleetwood....

ISAAC STERN, JAIME LAREDO, YO-YO MA, AND EMANUEL AX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This chamber recital corrals four heavyweights for a conventional survey of the evolution of the piano quartet. All four have played together often (as a marketing creation of the honchos at Sony), but at their last ensemble appearance in Chicago, four seasons ago, it was quite obvious that violinist Isaac Stern, though still exuberant after six decades in the business, was having a bit of trouble with intonation and phrasing....

JOE LOVANO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Joe Lovano released Trio Fascination (Blue Note) last year, it’d been almost eight years since the saxophonist had recorded in a pianoless trio–a long time to abstain from what will likely be seen as his signature setting. He’s at home among all kinds of instrumental textures, from the 24-karat soul of guitarist John Scofield’s best band to his own experimental octet to the jazz-classical melange of his mid-90s triumph, Rush Hour; but whenever Lovano’s name comes up, in my mind’s ear I hear that skeletal format....

MRS. CONEY and THE CHRISTMAS SCHOONER, Bailiwick Repertory. These two well-crafted plays, running in rotation, should satisfy audiences seeking fresh yet traditional Christmas entertainment. Mrs. Coney, a premiere written and directed by Belinda Bremner, is a sly, slight story-theater tale of Christmas mountain magic. James, the middle-aged narrator, reminisces about how as a boy in Depression-era Kentucky he freed a rabbit caught in a trap, then came across Mrs. Coney, an ancient hermit also disabled by a leg wound....

NAFTULE’S DREAM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Naming your band after a musical genius, in this case pioneering American klezmer clarinetist Naftule Brandwein, is asking for belittlement. But Naftule’s Dream–and in particular Glenn Dickson, the group’s own licorice-stick whiz, and David Harris, its double-jointed trombonist–have the chops to warrant the moniker. The Boston-based sextet has already infiltrated New York’s trendy nouveau-klez scene–it’s signed to John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and has two releases in the imprint’s Radical Jewish Culture series and a couple tracks on Knitting Factory’s recent Klezmer Festival 1998 compilation....

Just for a second or two, no longer than it takes to pull out a machine gun and mow down five or six people, School of the Art Institute Film Center director Barbara Scharres sounded like Monica Lewinsky. It happened while Scharres was attempting to explain her attraction to Hong Kong cinema, which, she says, has a certain irresistible energy. “It’s like falling in love,” Scharres said. “You can’t predict who or why, you just know it when you see it....

Rennie Harris PureMovement Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s easy to think of Rennie Harris, a young hip-hop artist from Philadelphia, as a new sort of teacher, a straightforward ambassador from the ghetto–especially now that he’s performing in the rarified confines of a Chicago museum. But though his style is up-to-the-minute, the idea of taking movement out of the ghetto and onto the concert stage is not: it’s been going on at least since Eleo Pomare impersonated a junkie in the 60s....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, LTU: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cruisingforsex.com features up-to-the-minute listings, cop alerts, opinionated reviews by cruisers in the field, maps–heck, there’s even a link to the Weather Channel’s Web site so you can make sure you won’t get rained on wherever you want to go cruising. I surfed onto cruisingforsex.com and three clicks later had a printout in my hands of more than 30 places in Minneapolis–some even accessible by skyway!...

I am a woman who is attracted to gay men. In fact, I wish I were a gay man. When I fantasize about being with a man, I always imagine myself as also having a penis. I know there are ways a man can surgically become a woman, but it’s tougher to enlarge a woman’s clitoris into a functional penis and even more difficult to get one that would entertain a gay man....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I too was molested, in this case by a trusted uncle of my mother. They were so close she called him “Uncle Daddy.” The time he spent baby-sitting my younger sister and me, the money he gave us for birthdays and good grades were not the generous, loving actions of a doting uncle but a plot to endear him to the family and allow him access to us....

MEG LEE CHIN, JARED LOUCHE 11/5, LIAR’S CLUB On her solo debut, Piece and Love (Invisible), industrial diva Meg Lee Chin–who’s lent her nasal, sometimes piercing voice to Martin Atkins’s supergroup Pigface–puts an attractive spin on Atkins’s stiff production with her own above-average programming and catchy songwriting. I could see this going over big in tiny-T-shirt land. Chin’s labelmate, former Chemlab leader Jared Louche, is also pushing a new record: Covergirl, a collection of pointless industrial-lite revamps of classics like Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” and Iggy Pop’s “Sister Midnight....