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Local Anesthetic Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet during the 40-some hours of weekly jazz programming on WBEZ, the only local artists you’re likely to hear are middle-of-the-road vocalists like Patricia Barber and Kurt Elling. Over the past five years the station has been streamlining its programming, says general manager Torey Malatia. “It’s not supposed to be different shows by different people that just happen to occur on the same radio station....

PAPA M, QUIX0TIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his new and best album, Live From a Shark Cage (Drag City), guitarist David Pajo has changed more than the name of his solo project. On past recordings as M and Aerial M, and to a lesser extent in his work with Slint and Tortoise, he’s shown a fondness for circular fingerstyle arpeggios, but this is the first time he’s let the technique lead him back to its American folk roots....

karl.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am familiar with various groups going after federal monies for these types of trails. They are not really trails but rather roads where motorized vehicles are supposedly not allowed. This type of concept works great, say, for a link within a rails-to-trails conversion, where the trail actually connects to a greater network. The idea with the federally funded trail is that it can be used by would-be commuters as a means of alternative transportation....

I haven’t read Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities, but it’s reportedly director Leos Carax’s favorite novel. What there is of a plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in semi-incestuous content with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva) who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee (Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write another novel....

Quentin T Do Amateur Night at de Apollo On the stage and off, Michael Martin is loud and opinionated. Playing the role of producer–of this or that low-budget, non-Equity production–he can always be counted on to tell you what he thinks of his show. Even as a company’s quasi-official PR guy, a position that requires some diplomacy with the press, he’s never hesitated to ring me up and tell me exactly what I’ve gotten wrong in my reviews, in painstaking detail....

Bobsled Builds Momentum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though his taste now leans toward guitar pop, Salerno’s interest in music began when he discovered Kiss in the 70s. At age seven, he begged his mother to buy him his first record. “She was going out to run some errands and she said that if I wrote the name of it down she would get it for me,” he says....

Champion of the Gabfest Brundage made good on his word in 1951 when he used a $6,000 workman’s comp settlement to open the original College of Complexes, a tavern at 1651 N. Wells. He named himself “janitor,” and billed his bar as a “playground for people who think.” The place consisted of two rooms with black walls, which customers were encouraged to deface with white chalk. On the ceiling, Brundage wrote this description in two-foot-high letters: “No television, no jukebox, no 26 game–just beer, booze and bull-oney....

How de facto school choice operates now. Dan Weissmann and Lisa Lewis write in Catalyst (November) that 17,000 students left the Chicago Public Schools between September 1995 and September 1996. “Students bailed out at every grade level, but 8th grade topped the list, with about 2,700 students leaving for public suburban or non-public schools. Kindergarten was next with 1,600 students. Other grades averaged about 1,200. While the leavers are more middle class than is total CPS enrollment, most are low income....

Little Bugs in a Big Web Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But CEO and president Gene Hoffman, a 23-year-old computer whiz who recently appeared on the cover of Forbes, told that magazine he’s never played a vinyl record. He founded EMusic (under the name GoodNoise) less than two years ago with Robert Kohn, the attorney who literally wrote the book on music licensing–Kohn on Music Licensing–with his father, Al, a retired vice president for Warner Brothers....

Pizzicato Five Advance publicity for Pizzicato Five’s summer tour promised that the animated Japanese popsters would be backed by a live band, the largest group they’d performed with outside of their home country. Up to now they’ve toured in a scaled-down version due to financial constraints. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At once obsessed with pop’s past and future, Konishi, who writes and produces most of the group’s music, sets Bacharach-cum-Brasil ’66-esque hooks amid drum ‘n’ bass mayhem....

PRE-PARADISE, SORRY NOW, Trap Door Theatre. In an age dominated by flat-footed realists it’s hard not to yearn for writers with dash and daring like playwright-filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Call him a nihilist, call him cracked–he was both, and a drug addict to boot–Fassbinder never bored his audiences with the predictable or conventional. Given the subject of the notorious 60s “moors murders” in England–perpetrated by two psychotics (superbly played by Steve Walker and Sandra Walter) trying to prove through torture and murder that they were members of a superior race–most writers would have produced a docudrama....

I had been looking forward to my first Krispy Kreme for years, ever since everyone started talking about the famed doughnut’s migration north from Winston-Salem. Last month the franchise finally rolled into Chicago, or rather into suburban Summit. It took me a while to unfold the map and determine that the doughnut mecca is located on a strip of fast-food shops (including a nearly abandoned Dunkin’ Donuts) a few blocks west of Midway....

Barry Bursak has taken a long, convoluted path since his hippie days in Haight-Ashbury, but he’s carried a bit of the 60s metaphysic most of the way. For more than a year now he’s owned a nifty River North restaurant where, in addition to pursuing the usual entrepreneurial goals, he’s out to make a point: cuisine can be haute and ecologically correct at the same time. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Nora Bergman is faithful to Ibsen’s plot, which tells a common story in an uncommonly powerful melodramatic way. Nora gradually learns that if she wants to grow up and create a marriage of equals, she must leave her oppressive, infantilizing husband and follow the hard road of independence. In Ibsen’s time, women couldn’t own property, vote, or control their own finances; Nora broke this rule when she borrowed money, forging her father’s signature, to pay for a year abroad that saved her husband’s life when he was dangerously ill....

Alberto Mizrahi, a Greek-born cantor with the north-side Anshe Emet Synagogue, has been studying Jewish chants since childhood. His knowledge of them is encyclopedic, and his remarkably pliant tenor brings out the nuances in inflection and accent that set apart their regional variations. For almost three decades he and conductor Matthew Lazar have been presenting Jewish music to a wider audience, and several years ago they recorded Chants Mystiques, a sampler of mostly Ladino and other western European Jewish chants, with Lazar’s New York-based Chorale Mystique....

CHICAGO OPERA THEATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Opera Memphis artistic director Michael Ching’s 1997 one-act, Buoso’s Ghost, picks up where Puccini’s short farce Gianni Schicchi left off 80 years ago. Puccini’s opera–usually staged last on a triple bill titled Il trittico (1918)–ends with the wily peasant Schicchi triumphant in a scheme to trump the greedy relatives of dead Florentine merchant Buoso Donati. In Ching’s sequel the curtain opens on the Donati mansion just hours later, as Puccini’s young lovers–Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta and Rinuccio, the most sympathetic of the Donatis–are rhapsodizing about their impending marriage....

DIE MEISTERSINGER VON N†RNBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of Die Meistersinger in 1995 was a genuine blockbuster–a fitting fireworks display to cap off Georg Solti’s illustrious career, which had been intertwined with Wagner’s music from the start. But the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production of the five-hour comic opera, on loan from the Brussels Opera House, is likely to top even that....

EUGENE CHADBOURNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a subset of close-listening free improvisation that has long been referred to as “insect music.” The tag makes intuitive sense: always seeking new sonic possibilities, improvising musicians use alternative and extended techniques to produce unorthodox timbres and textures–including what sound suspiciously like buzzes and chirps. North Carolina guitarist and wacko troubador Eugene Chadbourne has decided to take the term literally, composing a suite of ten short pieces based on the “movements, activities, and sounds of insects....

American Beauty With Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, and Allison Janney. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, unlike Mumford–another ambitious comedy-drama opening this week that’s pitched as a sort of State of the Union address–American Beauty can’t be accused of wrapping an audience in the comforting cocoon of nostalgia. Yearning for an older version of America and American movies constitutes both the appeal and the limitation of Mumford, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s parable about a mysterious young man (Loren Dean) with the same name as the small town he moves into, posing as a trained psychologist....

By Neal Pollack Cathy stares into her beer glass. This is the first night her man has let her go out without him in three years. She doesn’t have much time to go out anyway; she’s got three kids, all under ten years old. Cathy knows this is the last time she’ll go out for a while, maybe forever. After work on October 22, most of the company’s 165 union employees gathered at the Jay County courthouse, and they were angry....