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ROCKATEENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From their not-all-that-humble origins as a southern-fried garage rockabilly unit, Atlanta’s RockaTeens have evolved into an institution, with a burgeoning discography and at least one mildly famous alumnus–the very Kelly Hogan Chicago now claims as its own. But they’ve yet to put out the same record twice. On their fifth album, Sweet Bird of Youth (Merge), the scruffy Cabbagetown rockers go into the studio and get arty....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two particular arguments in this hopelessly biased article rang especially comical. Firstly, Mr. Clark was constantly quoting the sniping Mary Valentin (wife of Steve Grossman, the assistant coach of Whitney Young’s saintly academic decathlon team–boy, there’s a source with little prejudice!), but her remarks were so acidic and catty and holier-than-thou they handily repulsed any empathy. I raised my eyebrows especially high for her comment about the student on the Steinmetz High School team who was supposedly portrayed as the hero of the film....

The White Sox remain the south-side equivalent of what Jack Brickhouse used to call “a snakebitten Cubs ball team,” and that’s even truer off the field than on. The Sox returned from a road trip in mid-May with a record of 18-16 and with every sports reporter in town repeating the club slogan “the kids can play” and chiding Sox fans–that dying breed–for not supporting their club. The Sox at the time had the lowest average attendance in the American League, and were beaten in the National only by the soon-to-be-moving Montreal Expos, who have been completely abandoned by their fans....

BLONDES 2/5, HEARTLAND CAFE This trio of light-haired ladies has been harmonizing at Chicago cabarets for years now–some of Sarah Motes’s compositions on the group’s self-released debut, Try, date all the way back to 1989. At times the cheese is overwhelming, but gutsier tunes fall somewhere between the Roches and the Go-Go’s–and I gotta love any song that starts with the line “I gave my fat clothes to a drag queen....

My Giant With Billy Crystal and Gheorghe Muresan. By Lisa Alspector Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At one point Sammy starts to tell Max the story of King Kong but stops, having suddenly realized that Max might see a parallel to his own life. Because it occurs to Sammy that Max might interpret the tragedy of the big ape as a comment on his chances of winning the love of an average-size woman or the respect of people who see him as a monster, the audience is distracted from another possible subtext of the scene....

levin.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The phone call that Mr. Joravsky mentioned from me to Streets and Sanitation commissioner Eileen Carey resulted in a small army of municipal workers being sent into the flood areas even as the rain continued to fall. These workers removed damaged trees and fallen branches, repaired storm-disabled streetlights and traffic signals, and performed other emergency tasks that continued around the clock until everything was fixed....

Richard Brauer studied art history at the Institute of Design, Chicago’s breeding ground for modernists, and he specialized in 20th-century American art. But when Brauer joined the faculty at Valparaiso University in 1961, he became caretaker of a collection heavy with 19th-century landscapes and portraits influenced by the Hudson River school. It included painters like Frederick Edwin Church and Junius R. Sloan, whose son Percy, a Chicago public school teacher, had donated the collection to the Indiana university....

Automatic Writing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, a child of Chinese and Australian parents, directed this intriguing and original 1996 film about her Chinese great-great-grandfather. An orphan in 19th-century Hong Kong, he was kidnapped, put to work in a brothel, and taken to San Francisco; there he converted to Christianity, worked as a servant to a Jewish family, and returned to Hong Kong, where he worked for a doctor and eventually became a surgeon....

Besieged With Thandie Newton, David Thewlis, and Claudio Santamaria. For me the best of these was The Last Emperor–if only because it suggested a temporary resolution to the uneasy competition between Marx and Freud that had dogged Bertolucci’s work from the beginning–and the worst was Little Buddha, a film that floundered conceptually and sprang to life only momentarily, approximating the magic of a fairy tale. But all three confirmed that Bertolucci was no longer a mannerist with a manner, or even a culture, he could call his own....

“Liberal Catholicism and liberal Judaism are not really two different religions getting along with each other, but only different flavors of the same religion,” argues Daniel Taylor in the suburban-based Christianity Today (January 11). “They are much closer to each other in core beliefs than they are to more conservative believers within the religion each espouses. They, in fact, do not really respect other religions so much as they try to shame members of other religions to give up their ‘absolutism’ to join them in the progressive club of the open-minded....

CROWN ROYALS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cracking the soul code is a damn near impossible task: how did 60s labels like Stax, Volt, Hi, and Josie get that sound? The delicate mix of dirt and polish is as elusive as a good recipe for cheese grits, but Chicago’s own Crown Royals have come as close as anyone to nailing it on their debut disc, All Night Burner (Estrus)....

Dept. of Misunderstood Thespians Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thank you for your timely review of our latest production, The Vile Governess and Other Psychodramas [Section Two, March 26]. It goes without saying that any theater community, equity or nonequity, can benefit from an unbiased, qualified review from publications such as yours; however, after having read Nick Green’s critical analysis/review of Mom and Dad Productions’ latest offering, a few questions beg to be answered: 1....

Don’t Tread On Me Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The quality of my work has been highly appreciated in the press over the years both in Chicago and around the country, and I have a thick folder of reviews to prove it. The audiences have continued to support Light Opera Works for nearly 20 years because of the spirited, colorful, well-choreographed, and artistically satisfying productions that have been the hallmark of my work at the company....

HANDSOME FAMILY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their third and latest CD, Through the Trees (Carrot Top), Chicago’s Handsome Family emerge as space cowboys in the best sense: anchored by the sparest of electronic beats, shorn of all but the simplest instrumentation, their homespun ballads seem as arid and limitless as a desert. When drummer Mike Werner left the band a year ago, husband-and-wife songwriters Brett and Rennie Sparks started using a drum machine to order their guitar, bass, banjo, and Autoharp; and while such a gadget might seem antithetical to their rural sound, its passionless rhythm actually complements Rennie’s morbid lyrics, in which personal relationships turn as strange, beautiful, and menacing as forces of nature....

HEDWIG DANCES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jan Bartoszek’s The Story’s Body is a lovingly made dance about love–the love of books. The soloist who opens the piece is as focused on her book as any lover could be on the object of her affection; it’s the center of her universe, the single point around which she literally revolves. Later three other dancers, two men and a woman, join her, and their rhapsodic dancing expresses in almost 19th-century fashion the way books can transport us....

The Designated Mourner Both Howard and Judy are dead when The Designated Mourner begins–though they’re onstage alongside their “designated mourner,” Jack, offering their views on how, but not why, their “very special little world” came to an end. For Howard, a onetime writer of radical tracts who turned to the less controversial (because less comprehensible) form of poetry in order to survive, it was a matter of gradual diminishments in the quality of life–the closing of an espresso bar in the park, the chopping down of a grove of trees–until one day a brick came through the window....

By David Harrell The CCC members and the other activists were so consumed with designing the park that they hadn’t given much thought to naming it–until last year, when they met Marguerite Brown. The 88-year-old Brown had been trying to get something named in honor of her son Henry “Mandrake” Brown, who died in 1996. She’d tried to get a city ordinance named after him, only to be told that wasn’t allowed....

Mike Orlove Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1992, fresh out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a history degree, Orlove took an unpaid internship in the programming office of the Department of Cultural Affairs, which runs the Cultural Center. Three months later he was hired as a “programming associate.” Though the job also involved booking film, theater, dance, and lectures, an experience in his first year cemented his interest in presenting music: While organizing events to celebrate Black History Month, he set up a last-minute concert with South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela....

Jega The ambitious intent of the Detroit kids who invented techno back in the late 1980s was to use computers to begin an endless evolution of dance music–or, as Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton put it in their 1999 book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, to answer the question: “If house is just disco played by microchips, what kind of noise would these machines make on their own?...

ONE EYE OPEN, Billy Goat Experiment, at Heartland Studio Theater. A quarter century ago the Body Politic’s Dream Theatre allowed audience members to have their dreams acted out. If the performances were unlike the dreams, however, the contributors were too polite to show their disappointment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The same problem crops up a generation later with the Billy Goat Experiment’s tangled attempt to evoke the subtexts of dreams in an imaginary investigation....