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JURASSIC 5/DILATED PEOPLES/WORLD FAMOUS BEAT JUNKIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gangsta rap has ruled the Los Angeles hip-hop landscape for most of the fading decade, but while everyone from Ice Cube to MC Eiht was boasting about his pathologies, acts like the Pharcyde and the Freestyle Fellowship were struggling to retain the inventive wordplay at hip-hop’s heart. Judging by the talent in the LA underground these days, their hard work seems to have paid off....

By Marie-Anne Hogarth Within a month, Callier was spending every night at Second City, hanging out and watching the sets on the company’s main stage. The manager finally put her to work selling T-shirts and washing glasses. “I could lip-synch the whole show,” she says. “I would go to school, come home and do my homework, and go to Second City.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Callier graduated from high school her mother wouldn’t let her major in theater, so she enrolled at Rosary College to study business and sociology....

LOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I first heard Low’s 1994 debut, I Could Live in Hope, I dismissed the band as a Galaxie 500 rip-off–another quiet, mixed-gender trio who’d probably worn out a few copies of the Velvet Underground’s third LP between rehearsals. (Producer Kramer had even treated the album to the same reverb bath he gave Galaxie 500’s records in the late 80s....

By Ben Joravsky Chalk one up for consistency. Win or lose, empty seats or sellouts, as far as Peterson’s concerned his war for “honesty” will continue. His political beliefs are somewhat surprising, given that he’s the son of a conservative Republican who ran a trucking company. He was raised on the southwest side–hardly a bastion of radical politics–and graduated from Marist High School in 1977. “I can’t say that there was any kind of earth-shattering event that took place in my life transforming me politically into what I am now,” says Peterson....

Sophie Calle, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Mat Collishaw, and Candida Höfer The Summer Show Calle’s work is also haunted by the idea of absence. The images she gives us are substitutions for what cannot be shown. The wedding chapel photo, the text tells us, was used to cover a hole in the wall made by the objects her husband threw at her, and in a sense all her images function similarly: they “cover” holes in her life, failures of the spirit, even the inability to truly see another....

By Cara Jepsen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The CWLU, which moved from an office on Cermak to Lakeview and eventually ended up in Logan Square, was an umbrella organization that focused on education, social service, and direct action. Knauss taught a class on women’s health in the CWLU’s “liberation school,” which also offered courses on “everything from fixing cars to Marx and Freud,” says Diane Horowitz, another member....

Patti Smith Group Nympholepsy–the state of violently longing for impossible ideals–is best known in its most sensationalistic form, nymphomania; it’s been most commercially viable when it manifests itself as rock ‘n’ roll. But every poet has it too, and every politician and every preacher–in short, every performer who’s ever hankered for a pulpit hopes to hone his or her particular version of the sound of desire. And if Patti Smith’s version, her idiosyncratic fusion of rhythmic, linguistic, and phantasmic flights with crude 70s punk-inflected rock, has never quite been perfected, it’s always been more than sharp enough to leave me wanting more: nympholepsy can be contagious....

I once read a quotation along the lines that there are only seven basic story lines, and that all the stories in the world can be seen as permutations of those seven. Do you know: (a) Who said/wrote it? (b) What the exact quotation is (including the descriptions of the basic story lines)? Thirty-six. Attributed to Carlo Gozzi and reprised by Georges Polti in The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1917). Polti comes across as somewhat daft, stating that there are precisely 36 emotions, which in some unclear manner are tied to the 36 situations....

Bob Mould Since Mould delivered his proclamation, fans and critics alike have been dropping rose petals at his feet, lamenting the roaring guitar pop he pioneered in the 80s with Husker Du and refined in the 90s with Sugar. But Mould has been doing this Hamlet routine for four years now, coincident with three of his weakest records. Sugar’s slick final album, File Under: Easy Listening (1994), was ushered in with the endlessly repeated story of how Mould had hated the original masters, impulsively erased them, and made the band start over....

Edward II Red Hen Productions Edward II was first performed in or about 1592, just one year before Marlowe–an open homosexual, outspoken atheist, and sometime spy for Queen Elizabeth–was killed at age 29 in a tavern brawl. (The fight supposedly began as a disagreement over the bar bill, though historians have also suggested political assassination and a lovers’ quarrel.) The play is rarely done nowadays; Chicago audiences may know it from Derek Jarman’s 1991 movie version, from a stunning British production starring Ian McKellen shown on PBS almost 30 years ago, or from Bertolt Brecht’s reworking of the Marlowe script, presented by the Absolute Theatre Company in 1986....

Jung Frankenstein–A Neo-Transylvanian Musical By Jack Helbig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today few comic actors in Chicago have the mental and cultural resources of a Mike Nichols or an Anthony Holland or an Elaine May, and it shows–even in how they choose to work. Pure long-form improv is easier than a sketch comedy show. Likewise a formless one-act with no story is easier to improvise than a one-act with a story and strong characters....

The reason Freud never figured out what a woman wants–Was will das Weib?, as he put it–is that he was asking the wrong people. If he’d talked to either Coco Chanel or Diane Von Furstenberg, he’d have learned that what many of us want is something decent to put on in the morning, for a change. A whole literature exists on Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel–to date, at least four biographies–and none of it is especially revealing about the person behind the elegant and exhaustively photographed face....

HASTINGS STREET BLUES BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On its 1998 debut, Down on Hastings Street (Serious Sounds), this Detroit-based group dresses its tunes to the nines, with a playful, stylish theatricality: Johnny Roberts’s organ burbles beneath Paul Washington’s graceful guitar patterns, which recall T-Bone Walker and B.B. King, and bassist Christopher Kent and drummer-bandleader Bobby White alternate easy-rolling shuffles with percolating blues funk....

MARKED TREE, Seanachai Theatre Company, at the Theatre Building. Playwright Coby Goss does an excellent job of extrapolating from historical accounts of the 1913 murder of a pregnant 19-year-old in Arkansas that resulted in the state’s last sanctioned hanging. His characters, many of whom had the motive and opportunity to commit the crime, are distinct and memorable, and he creates a looming air of menace in the Arkansas town: even the most banal interactions are potentially significant in the face of the murder we know will take place....

Mrs. Brown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still mourning the death of Prince Albert after three years, Queen Victoria brings Highlander John Brown to Windsor in 1864 to supervise her horseback riding–and ultimately her life in some of its most significant political and personal aspects. Judi Dench is a Victoria whose depth can be inferred from an impressively crafted surface; she expresses a yearning for companionship through nuances of the eyes and mouth that a lesser performer couldn’t manage, even given the subtle scripting by Jeremy Brock of this quiet yet inwardly turbulent character....

Last winter artists Marc Fischer and Matti Allison created a series of collages in which they arranged photos from ads and magazines to suggest a relationship among the images. The Logan Square gallery Temporary Services displayed the collages in its storefront window. “People walked by and really understood it, without understanding it was artwork,” says Fischer. “It made sense to them.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After their display came down, Fischer tried to think of other places to put the collages where the non-gallery-hopping public could see them....

Tanya Saracho was one of only three Latinos in Boston University’s 200-person theater program, so when three of her bilingual, Latina-themed plays were produced there, white non-Latino students took starring roles. Saracho was disappointed with the productions. Actors were mispronouncing Spanish words and didn’t quite grasp their characters. Saracho couldn’t “hear” what she had written. Last fall Saracho was denied a chance to audition for a Latina part in a local independent film because she was “too light-skinned....

vallas.qxd My responsibility is to determine the best uses of our money. This means addressing the educational needs of all children, increasing learning experiences for students, and looking for ways to reduce noneducational expenses so we can increase educational services. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Magnet schools serve an important educational need in Chicago. They give children the opportunity to receive an education that meets their special interests....

Last week I congratulated the Chicago International Film Festival for failing to attract more Hollywood studio interest, thereby making it easier for us to see good movies without being pressured by hefty advertising budgets. But this week I feel obliged to point out that the Chicago festival’s organizers probably wouldn’t have minded more Hollywood hoopla. I’ve noticed over the past several years that they tend to hold most of their high-profile events during the opening weekend, reserving many of the less glitzy items for the second week....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ted Shen’s article about the history of classical music broadcasting in Chicago [March 12] has just reached me by a circuitous route. I was an employee of ‘NIB for several years in the 1970s and commend Mr. Shen on the accuracy of his dates and places. The degree of hostility between ‘NIB and ‘FMT was not sufficiently conveyed....