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DAVID DANIELS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 17th and 18th centuries an exceptional boy soprano could hope for the kind of stardom pop divas enjoy today–if he ensured his voice would never break. Castrati originally sang alto and soprano parts in church services closed to women, but at the peak of their fashionability a new genre, opera seria, showcased their voices. They were the toast of Handel’s London, and in the opera capitals of Europe fans wore medallions embossed with portraits of their favorites....

Slaughter Belly to Belly By Joshua Green Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, hair metal may not lend itself to Ratliff’s grand pronouncements about metal’s ties to epistemology and the power struggles of the working class–it’s metal for teenagers who just want to rock ‘n’ roll all night. But for better or for worse, it’s not dead. It does, however, have an image problem–and more than half of image is age....

Jane: Abortion and the Underground, Green Highway Theater, at the Chopin Theatre. Few issues elicit a greater emotional response than abortion rights. Here journalist and playwright Paula Kamen dramatizes the experiences of the Hyde Park women who responded to this issue by creating an underground abortion service that helped 11,000 Chicago women between 1969 and 1973. Kamen constructed Jane: Abortion and the Underground from years of interviews and research. Neatly interweaving monologues and dramatic scenes, she shifts the spotlight from philosophical arguments to stories about the emotional impact of abortion and denial of the right to choose....

JIM LAUDERDALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although the melodic twists of his songs stand out on country radio like diamonds in a pile of manure, Jim Lauderdale is undeniably a cog in the big bad Nashville machine. George Strait continues to top the charts with his tunes on every new album, and in the last few years stars like the Dixie Chicks, George Jones, and Kathy Mattea have joined the long, impressive list of artists who’ve recorded his work....

JULIETA VENEGAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What I’ve found most consistently compelling about pop-rock produced in Latin America is the way many bands, including Mexico’s Cafe Tacuba, Colombia’s Aterciopelados, and Argentina’s Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, have fused regional traditions and international style. But not all Latin American rockers are interested in representing their native culture–take, for instance, the roster of Revolucion 2000, a 15-city package tour of mostly Mexican rock bands that hits Chicago this week....

MACY GRAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Epic has spent wads of cash to build buzz for the debut album by singer Macy Gray. A month before On How Life Is was released, the label sent her on a short club tour with a crack 11-piece band; her gig at Double Door in June was crowded, but most of the tickets were on the company’s tab....

MARVIN STAMM QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like most jazz fans, I recognized Marvin Stamm’s name as a mark of quality long before I could identify his trumpet style: busy and sophisticated technique; controlled, matte-finish timbre; and a blend of jazz’s traditions of lyricism and showmanship. After brief stints with the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands of the early 1960s, Stamm moved to New York, where he alternated between lucrative commercial-studio work and big-band or brass-backed jazz dates....

One of the Roamin’ Kind Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think it informed who I am now,” Mills says, “the fact of not being centered anywhere, of getting places and having them be really strange, and then by the time they eventually became comfortable, immediately leaving.” When Mills was 12 his family settled in downstate Collinsville, a town of about 20,000 some ten miles east of Saint Louis, but he could never shake the feeling that he was a visitor....

Peter Br…tzmann Tentet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January Peter Brštzmann came to town for two concerts, presiding over an octet that featured his often cataclysmic saxophone work amid a host of like-minded Chicago improvisers. The shows received plenty of buildup, but Brštzmann exceeded all expectations in what remain two of this year’s signal musical events. During this week’s return trip the German Brštzmann will record with the Chicagoans for the local Okka Disk label, then share the wealth with an audience....

Sleater-Kinney Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Waitresses, who after all knew what half the world’s population liked, claimed they could rule the world if they could only get the parts, and what Sleater-Kinney (whose Corin Tucker, in a more blase moment, has been compared to the Waitresses’ Patty Donahue) have more than anything is the parts. There’s parts all over Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out, the two utter masterpieces the trio has unleashed in about a year’s time: Tucker will sing a lead part while second guitarist and singer Carrie Brownstein moans a backup part or vice versa; rockin’ parts screech into pretty parts; anthemic parts run up against heartbreaking parts; calm parts against angry parts; angry parts against angry parts....

PRAGUE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Established in 1951 with first-chair players from a bigger radio orchestra, the Prague Chamber Orchestra made its name specializing in works by Bohemian composers. It also tackled the Baroque repertoire, for which its modest size (36 musicians) and mellow, lyrical string playing seemed ideally suited. When the cold war ended the PCO found itself without state subsidy, but decided to forge ahead; in the past six years it’s traveled the world as it was never able to do under communist rule, winning kudos for its precision and clarity....

RAPHE MALIK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boston trumpeter Raphe Malik is part of an underappreciated class of musicians–including the AACM, New York’s loft-jazz scene, and various sidemen obscured by their leaders’ visions–who helped channel the raw energy of 60s free jazz into something not only more cerebral but also more liberal. From the mid-70s through the early 80s Malik’s powerful, extroverted playing was vital to the music of pianist Cecil Taylor and saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, but when the extremes of slavish neobop and too-cool downtown experimentation began to suck attention away from the vast middle, he, like lots of other less recognized 70s vets, was left in the cold....

Three’s a Crowd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then last month, with the opening of Rent at the Shubert, New York’s Playbill made its first foray into Chicago as the program supplier for all Shubert productions. The granddaddy of the theater program business, Playbill has been Broadway’s primary program for more than a century, and it services a number of off-Broadway theaters as well....

The black-and-white footage shows a line of young men. Some are clean-cut and boyish, others have shaggy hair and dark glasses. One by one they step up to a microphone, say a few words, turn around, and hurl something over a fence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicagoan Barry Romo was there as a leader of the group. At its height the organization boasted 50,000 members who returned home to denounce the war, dealing a serious blow to the conflict’s political and moral legitimacy....

CORNELIUS/NATURAL CALAMITY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Japanese invasion continues: this week the granddaddy of Tokyo’s pomo popsters barnstorms into Chicago. On his U.S. debut, Fantasma (Matador), Cornelius (aka Keigo Oyamada) hijacks electronica’s dice-and-splice MO to concoct his grandiose pop-rock fantasies, making wild stylistic leaps as nonchalantly as you might change the channel on your TV. The bio that accompanied my copy of the album claims it’s a tribute to “stadium stardom”–and Cornelius does sell out arenas in Japan–but to my ears it sounds more like an obsessed and impatient pop fan playing DJ with a really big CD collection....

Fluid Measure Performance Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once upon a time there were three women who pooled their talents and produced their own fractured fairy tales full of the oblique ways and sayings of wise women–that is, witches. Without ever pretending to understand anything, they explored everything–madness, safety, sex, jealousy, fear–using incantatory motion, stories carefully unraveled and woven back together again, and a sly, self-deprecatory sense of humor....

Lead Stories In the September 19 primary in New Ashford, Massachusetts, none of the town’s 202 registered voters cast a ballot, including the town clerk, who manned the polls for 14 hours. A Green Party candidate for the Maine legislature failed to vote for himself in the June primary, leaving him with zero votes and forcing him to return his public financing. And the money flowed so freely at the GOP convention in August that Philadelphia Inquirer reporters discovered a lobbyist’s check for $5,000 stuck to the bottom of a utility cart outside the hall....

Putting Censorship to Good Use Fear & Favor in the Newsroom is a nice show. Produced by independents Beth Sanders and Randy Baker of Seattle, it’s an hour long, narrated by Studs Terkel, and it makes the right points about powerful advertisers, old boys’ networks, interlocking directorates, and cozy cliques of civic pooh-bahs. We hear about Bill Kovach, who took on Coca-Cola and the downtown banks and lasted two years as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Sydney Schanberg, whose muckraking metro column disappeared from the New York Times, Jonathan Kwitny, whose muckraking Kwitny Report on PBS won a Polk Award but lost its corporate underwriting; Jon Alpert, who shot tape in Iraq that made the gulf war look less like surgery than butchery and was dropped by NBC president Michael Gartner, who didn’t show the tape....

Repulsion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by Roman Polanski and written by Polanski and Gerard Brach, this 1965 character study is a fascinating conflation of the perspective of a woman on men and the perspectives of men–including Polanski and Brach–on a woman. Catherine Deneuve gives an almost silent performance as Carol, a manicurist who grew up in Brussels and lives in London with her older sister....

On our way home from dinner with friends, my wife and I enjoy talking about who among our friends we could imagine having sex with. These conversations get especially interesting when the woman I could imagine having sex with is married to the man my wife could imagine having sex with. Naturally, this raises the question of a swap. “In my experience, it is not a wise idea, and rarely successful, to try to introduce one’s dinner companions to swinging unless you’re sure that couple is interested or already involved in swing activities,” Robert said when I shared your letter with him....