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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hubbard Street’s topflight dancers have sometimes been stuck in choreography that doesn’t really take off. But not this year. Jiri Kylian’s Sechs Tanze (“Six Dances”) is the perfect vehicle for the company, a comic wonder reminiscent of David Parsons’s The Envelope but with better dancing. Set to a score by Mozart, it features four couples in 18th-century powdered wigs–so powdery, in fact, that the dancers sometimes occupy dusty clouds–who cavort and gambol and wrestle like five-year-olds....

Loop Holes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christopher Hill, the mayor’s commissioner of the Department of Planning, sounded mighty nervous on the phone last week when asked about the future of the Ford Center, which received $17 million from the city and is scheduled to open in October. After Drabinsky was escorted from Livent’s Toronto headquarters, investigators from the Ontario Securities Commission began examining the company’s financial records while furious stockholders filed lawsuits almost hourly; the U....

QUASI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Carry on like before / And don’t listen to me anymore / Don’t believe a word I sing / Because it’s only a song and it don’t mean a thing,” sings Quasi singer, songwriter, and keyboardist Sam Coomes on “The Golden Egg,” from the band’s new Field Studies (Up). But to paraphrase Elvis Costello, when Coomes says he’s lying he might be lying, or, as Lou Barlow might put it, he’s got a license to confuse....

SIGNIFICANTS AND OTHERS, Cobalt Ensemble Theatre, at TinFish Theatre. With its debut production, Cobalt Ensemble Theatre is already lost in the crowd of unremarkable storefront troupes. Assembling “a collection of comedic vignettes about love relationships” (a concept about as broad as “six pop songs about sex”), director Katherine Condit-Ladd keeps everything light and forgettable. With the exception of the final piece, David Ives’s farcical The Universal Language, these vignettes are nearly indistinguishable: all include a quirky setup (a man shaving his ex-girlfriend’s legs, a married woman desperate to cheat on her husband), lots of irrelevant quips (“I have fish–I’m working up to pets”), a psychological imbalance between two people that comes gradually to light, and a facile, faux-poignant ending....

Great athletes are blessed with what seems to be an extra set of senses. They have a sense of the action, usually displayed as a feel for where the ball is and where it’s going, and a sense of pace, for conserving energy and then putting on a burst at the proper moment. Put those two qualities together in an athlete and they form what’s commonly called a sense of drama....

YUKO NEXUS6 KITAMURA 10/24, Museum of Contemporary Art; 10/25, ARTEMISIA In an essay published in Xebec SoundArts in 1996, computer musician Yuko Nexus6 Kitamura asserted that using computers to make music “has come close to being as easy as it used to be for a young rock fan to borrow the electric guitar her or his older brother had gotten tired of and tossed aside to start a band”–a claim that may have been true in Japan, where she lives, but is only becoming plausible here as the price of technology continues to drop and the gray-box mystique to fade....

When I was about 12, my health teacher told our class that roaches sometimes crawl into sleeping people’s ear canals and get stuck. This causes pain and hearing problems. Within a week of being told this, I suffered pain and hearing problems in one ear. I freaked out, went to the doctor, and fully expected him to pull a roach out of my ear. Instead, he took out a lot of earwax....

Madison Fire-fighting sports enthusiasts patronize Jingles’ Coliseum Bar (232 E. Olin, 608-251-2434). William “Jingles” O’Brien founded his original stadium bar in downtown Madison in 1957; now its successor, run by Jingles’s son Mike, occupies a building catercorner from the Dane County Expo Center. At Jingles’ the hamburgers are cheap ($3.75), the beer is plentiful (7 brands on tap, another 30 bottled), and the many television monitors are tuned to news during the day and sports at night....

WARRIOR QUEENS, Footsteps Theatre Company. In a program note, director Sandy Borglum says that one of the goals of Warrior Queens is for us “to meet some forgotten, kick-ass women.” One assumes she’s playing fast and loose with her phraseology: at least three of the women featured in this historical collage–Margaret Thatcher, Catherine the Great, and Geraldine Ferraro–are far from forgotten. And though she brings to the stage many lesser-known ass kickers (like India’s Rani Lakshmibai, Britain’s Boadicea, and Vietnam’s Trung sisters), she never allows us to “meet” any of them....

From the pages of (P.O. Box 132, New York, NY 10024) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So in the last issue we left off where I was thrown into jail for jumping a subway turnstile because I was late for work and tired of waiting twenty minutes in line, and I am in jail without my shoe laces and my belt which were taken from me so that I would not “hang myself....

Charles Lloyd Quartet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You won’t find a more aptly titled album than Charles Lloyd’s new Voice in the Night (ECM), his eighth since ending a self-imposed exile from stage and studio in the late 80s–and arguably his best in 30 years. Lloyd’s tenor belongs to the twilight, with its dusky timbre, shadowy articulation, wing-flutter phrases, and ghostly, flutelike harmonics that float above the instrument’s proper range....

The right- wing case for campaign finance reform. “State legislators loaded up on pork this session like starving men at a sausage factory,” writes W. Kent Fung in “Taxnews” (Summer), newsletter of National Taxpayers United of Illinois. Despite protests from NTU and other tax-cut advocates, “The politicians chose to listen to their heavy contributors–the connected real estate speculators, construction contractors, education lobbyists, bankers, and bond issuers, who all stood to make millions from this pork....

Sometime in the mid-80s Rick Rann was sifting through items to add to his collections of Beatles, Batman, and Cubs memorabilia when he ran across a souvenir from the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. He was intrigued by the fair’s art deco logo and wondered how such an expensive spectacle could have taken place during the Depression. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The answer was early planning....

Getting Bigger All the Time Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most of the 90s, Imax theaters were found primarily in museums and theme parks: Navy Pier, Six Flags Great America, and the Museum of Science and Industry all have Imax. But the format is finding a home in giant suburban multiplexes. “It’s another way of trying to get customers to come to one multiplex instead of another,” says Kempf....

Juba!: The Masters of Tap and Percussive Dance Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Plenty of us thrilled to the thunderous rhythms produced by Riverdance’s throngs of step dancers, only to discover in the last few months that taped tapping was played during performances. I guess if you want the real thing, you’ve got to forget about glitz and go for the roots of the form....

MERCURY REV Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never been particularly fond of Mercury Rev’s loud but static brand of psychedelic rock: tossing in the kitchen sink never seemed like a good substitute for writing decent songs. But last year the band released its best album yet, Deserter’s Songs (V2), which picked up where its last and most focused previous effort, 1995’s See You on the Other Side, left off....

JACK LOGAN 5/28, SCHUBAS Working-class hero Jack Logan made more than 600 home recordings before a pal in R.E.M. recommended him to his first record label in 1994. As prolific as Robert Pollard but more willing to edit, he’s released five more LPs since. His latest, Buzz Me In (Capricorn), features the most elaborate arrangements yet, with gospelized backing vocals, trombone (by Vic Chesnutt) and sax, congas and bongos (by Curtis Mayfield affiliate Luis Stefanell), and violins and cellos, but many of its husky, alt-folky tunes nevertheless have the spontaneous energy of a quick sketch....

The Caucasian Chalk Circle Can see his fellow man keenly with accuracy –Bertolt Brecht Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course Brecht’s affinity for contradiction spilled over into his art, and particularly The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In the traditional Chinese parable that is its inspiration, two women trying to prove to a judge which of them is the real mother try to yank a child out of a circle....

Battle Lines Drawn, Raven Theatre. We all know Harold Pinter is a great dramatist, but who would have guessed he could be so funny? Raven Theatre director Bill McGough’s staging of A Slight Ache, one of two one-acts on this program, eliminates the soporific silences (jocularly known as “pregnant Pinter pauses”) that typically punctuate productions of his subtext-heavy plays, instead adopting a breezy pace and flippant tone that make the play’s cryptic denouement all the more chilling....

The names of all temporary workers in this story have been changed. A white woman–like me–with gray hair, wearing a Granny Smith-green shirt and matching bauble earrings, smiles and beckons me to the newly emptied chair beside her. She begins to talk the moment I sit down, noting that I’m new, and explaining that she’s been working through Ready-Men for a few months. A dispatcher behind a service counter calls out a series of names of people assigned to a day of work....