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CIVIC ORCHESTRA OF CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The condescension that has long relegated great unclassifiable American masters such as Duke Ellington and George Gershwin to the fringe of the orchestral repertoire or to pops concerts alongside hacks like Andrew Lloyd Webber and John Williams still prevails in most major orchestras–not to mention their apprentice ensembles, which often are weaned on a steady diet of mainstream mush....

I went to Deadtech gallery’s opening/kickoff on a tip from the front-page article of Section Three [May 21]. Now don’t get me wrong, I love abrasive sound and vulgar machines, so when I arrived at Deadtech I was disappointed to find out that the cupboard was bare. Please screen the crap that you write about more thoroughly before you send people out to waste their time at some so-called cutting-edge art event....

By Dan Savage Logic is on the side of the anticircumcision activists. Not even the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends the procedure routinely anymore. And the pro-circumcision arguments don’t hold much water. Family resemblance? Not something we usually judge on the appearance of genitals. Teasing in the locker room? Half of all boys born in America today are not circumcised; if your son gets teased, he and the other uncut kids can form a gang and beat the shit out of the snip-dicks....

Exploring the Great Unknown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A former advertising copywriter, Penniston had been trying without much success to write a salable screenplay when her husband, a graduate of Northwestern University’s theater program, urged her to try a play. Eventually she took one of her screenplays and revised it as Now Then Again. A throwback to the sort of witty, literate relationship comedies common on Broadway in the 30s and 40s, the play also allowed Penniston to introduce some high-tech elements....

These are the longest days of the year, and it seems like we need every minute of them to squeeze in all the stuff that is happening. During the past two weeks I have watched a pair of blue-gray gnatcatchers building a lovely nest of lichens bound together with spider’s silk. I have watched Baltimore orioles feeding their young in hanging nests and discovered fire pinks blooming by the hundreds in my favorite oak woods....

For all its reputation as a classic, and despite the greatness of Howard Hawks as a filmmaker, The Big Sleep has never quite belonged in the front rank of his work–at least not to the same degree as Scarface, Twentieth Century, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, Red River, The Big Sky, Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Rio Bravo, to cite my own list of favorites. Unlike To Have and Have Not (1944)–Hawks’s previous collaboration with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, writers Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, cinematographer Sid Hickox, and composer Max Steiner–it qualifies as neither a personal manifesto on social and sexual behavior nor an abstract meditation on jivey style and braggadocio set within a confined space, though it periodically reminds one that exercises of this kind are what Hawks did best....

Singer-songwriter Melissa Manchester is best known for straight-ahead pop hits such as “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and “Midnight Blue.” But in this musical, penned with Chicago-bred playwright Jeffrey Sweet, she draws on a childhood influenced by classical music (she’s the daughter of a bassoonist in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra). Her lyrical, complex score for this intimate one-act recalls the art songs of such American modernist composers as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber; listeners probably won’t leave the theater humming the tunes, but this sophisticated show is well worth the ear of an audience seeking an alternative to the shallow bombast of Jekyll & Hyde and Miss Saigon....

JUAN ATKINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s much too simple to call Juan Atkins “the godfather of techno,” but if there’s anything the music press loves, it’s a single-auteur theory–especially one that neatly sums up a genre built on records that nobody but DJs and other fanatics actually own. While it’s pretty much true that “Clear,” a single Atkins recorded as Cybotron in 1984, was the first techno record, hanging Atkins’s rep on that alone does him a grave disservice....

RAY WYLIE HUBBARD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ray Wylie Hubbard has spent most of the 90s putting the previous two decades behind him. He’s still best known as the guy who wrote “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a 1973 hit for Jerry Jeff Walker that became something of an anthem for the outlaw country movement, but that old tough-guy stance doesn’t have much to do with Hubbard’s own recent records, including his super new collection, Crusades of the Restless Knights (Philo)....

RICARDO LEMVO & MAKINA LOCA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When soukous, the coolly percolating dance music also known as Congolese rumba, blossomed in what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1950s, it was a homecoming of sorts. The Cuban recordings that flooded the country during and after World War II led to an ingenious adaptation of son’s hypnotic piano patterns for the electric guitar–a reclamation of rhythmic ideas that had originated in Africa....

BOOGIE SHOES 9/5, DURTY NELLIE’S, PALATINE What they play isn’t quite acid jazz, nor is it really funk, and I think it would be stretching it to call it hip-hop. But just about every one of the 23 tunes on their overly generous Bust It…Bust It…Bust It (Novo) sounds like it’s trying to be all of these things all the time. The chops are there, but Boogie Shoes ought to go back to their extensive record collections and listen for dynamic range....

The Last Poets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most encouraging comebacks of the 90s is the reemergence of the Last Poets, the black performance trio that burst upon the world in the late 60s, flourished throughout the 70s, then seemed to disappear in the 80s–paralleling the momentum of the African-American community to which they spoke. Founded on Malcolm X Day in 1968, the group takes its name from South African writer Willie Kgositsile’s assertion that black poets of his generation are “the last poets” in a racially oppressive world facing revolution....

TWO BY WEILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Written in 1929 to capitalize on their previous year’s hit, The Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s musical Happy End flopped in its premiere, and its jumbled script has dissuaded many a theater from attempting to revive it in the years since. Fortunately there’s an alternative. The Happy End Songspiel (sung here in Michael Feingold’s English translation) dispenses with the original dialogue while preserving the work’s greatest strength: its astringent yet lyrical score, in which Weill continued and even improved on Threepenny’s groundbreaking mix of classical, expressionist, and pop music....

By Michael Miner “Illinois was called the ‘Prairie State,’ and we have so little of the native prairies and open woods left, especially in this region,” she continues. “We should revere them, instead of fearing our prairies, or our wetlands, or our marshes. This is part of our history, and it’s a living history, a still evolving history. We read and we listen to music, but we also go out into nature....

By Michael Miner Because he’s not rushing to judgment, Abunimah can focus on curious specifics. “First we were told that someone said on the tape ‘I have made my decision,’” he E-mailed everyone on his far-flung list. “Later we learned from the FBI that this phrase did not exist. Now, out of the blue, we hear that the suspect phrase [Tawakalt ala Allah, or “I put my trust in God”] was actually spoken not once but anywhere between ten and fourteen times, depending on which ‘sources’ you choose to believe....

Econo-Manic Depression: A Crash Course About the Coming Crash Green Highway Theater Daniels’s Mamet-esque edge is apparent whenever he talks about the profit motive–which he does almost nonstop. It seems to be the only motive worth considering when trying to understand the world–or trying to envision a better one. Quoting his onetime mentor Professor Horatio Ishmael Hart (who fired Daniels for taking bribes from his students, even though he was simply obeying the directives of a free market), Daniels asserts that the chaos on the Titanic could have been averted if a profit-driven market had allocated places on the lifeboats....

Gee, all that patriarchy didn’t do the old guys much good. From a May 15 Illinois Department on Aging press release: “Men live on the average about 7 years less than women in the United States….By the age 75, men die of cancer at about twice the rate of women….Men are 7 times as likely to be arrested for drunk driving and 3 times more likely to be alcoholics….There is currently no effective program which is devoted to awareness and prevention of the leading health killers of men....

Friday 10/31 – Thursday 11/6 It’s not exactly The Devil’s Advocate, but the plot of the new indie flick Night of the Lawyers also tells a story of lawyers and their struggles with evil. Shot here in 23 days, it stars Tom Towles (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) in a dual role as a “good” alien and as the most corrupt partner at Moriarty & Company, an ambulance-chasing law firm that plans to take over the world....

Altered States: Alcohol and Other Drugs in America By Mark Swartz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Altered States: Alcohol and Other Drugs in America”–which originated in Rochester, New York, at the Strong Museum–presents the relationship between drugs and temperance as a tug-of-war–or, to use a more modern phrase, a mutual codependency. The curators’ juxtapositions of objects and images and their wall texts establish a distance from the drug wars depicted....

Los Mu–equitos De Matanzas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Founded in 1952 as Guaguanco Matancero in Matanzas, a city 60 miles east of Havana on Cuba’s north coast, Los Mu–equitos have long been the island’s foremost exponents of rumba–a highly rhythmic voice-and-percussion style that’s been used as both religious and secular music. Their program at the MCA, which kicks off the group’s fourth U....