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DAN BERN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Singer-songwriter Dan Bern has been shrugging off the obvious comparisons for most of his career: on “Talkin’ Woody, Bob, Bruce & Dan Blues,” from his new Smartie Mine (available from www.dbhq.com or at Bern’s concerts), he bangs away at an acoustic guitar and saws on a harmonica, spinning a tongue-in-cheek tale about how the legend of Bob Dylan visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital inspires him to scale the gates of Bruce Springsteen’s estate, jam a thermometer in the Boss’s mouth, and argue that he needs to anoint a successor too....

Films by Lewis Klahr Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I haven’t seen Whirligigs in the Late Afternoon (1996), the longest show on this program, but Lewis Klahr’s dreamlike work is so special that I’m sure it’s worth checking out. I’m especially partial to Altair (1994), a gossamer “color noir” culled from late-40s pages of Cosmopolitan and set to the strains of a section of the Firebird Suite, and Pony Glass (1997), a collection of kinky and gender-bending nightmares involving repressed homoerotic fantasies, Superman sidekick Jimmy Olsen, and such stray elements as a maple leaf and a turtle....

A few years ago Sarah Steedman noticed that most of the vegetables grown in her Uptown community garden ended up rotting on the vine. “No one was harvesting them because they were on vacation or forgot or lost interest or whatever,” she says. “I thought it was terrible, because there was a lot of poverty in that neighborhood. I thought it would be a good idea to give it to a soup kitchen so it wouldn’t be wasted....

By Jack Helbig Clark felt like he had a calling, but his father wasn’t pleased. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I especially loved Bughouse Square, Washington Square, in front of the Newberry Library. I thought this was the most fertile territory. I would walk over there and wait to be propositioned by a man or a woman and start up a conversation.” Clark particularly remembers meeting a man who made a living turning tricks in the park....

sullivan.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » the rain forest. The goal of conservationists is to preserve as much of the earth’s biodiversity as possible. Since tropical rain forests contain more biodiversity than any other terrestrial ecosystem, their preservation is critically important. No temperate zone region can match the biodiversity of the tropical forests, but this does not mean that temperate zone ecosystems are not worth protecting....

OUT OF ORDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the early 80s, when Chicago’s hardcore punk scene was thriving, Out of Order commanded a devoted statewide following of Mohawked and flanneled teenagers who thrashed in counterclockwise circles and screamed out the choruses to burners like “Concerned,” “Cell Block B,” and “Survival of the Fittest.” The quartet had talent to spare, but when the scene fell on hard times, Out of Order did too....

This Saturday, when the parades are stepping off across America and the cherry bombs start to pop, Ron Haring will be exercising his independence at the Kane County Flea Market, setting out his phonographs, cylinder records, and busts of Thomas Edison, awaiting the buyers who storm the grounds at the stroke of noon. Two months ago, wife and three kids notwithstanding, Haring chucked the repair and warehouse management job he’d held for eight years to see if he could make a full-time gig of his moonlight persona–Victrola Man....

Out With the Show In mid-August Duchon offered the group the vacant Matz Funeral Home at 2058 W. Belmont. It seemed like a nice fit. “This place is like no funeral home you’ve ever seen,” Scambiatterra says. “It has vaulted ceilings with sky scenes painted on. It’s beautiful. I thought, this is the perfect place for this play.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Duchon offered to pay for another space if the group would move, but Scambiatterra told him nothing he suggested suited their needs....

By Jeffrey Felshman We regret to inform you that the KINESIOTHERAPY CLINIC and POOL Programs for the patients of bldg 228 will be eliminated as of FEB 17, 1998. If you have any questions about the elimination of these services, Please feel free to contact: Sincerely, An earlier attempt to scale down facilities in Chicago had stalled–all four area VA hospitals remained in full operation. A couple years ago West Side VA almost lost its surgical program, but this move was blocked by an intense lobbying effort from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Medicine....

name2.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In defense of assistant state’s attorneys Mike Jacobs and Dave Meyerson, who I knew when I worked for the Cook County state’s attorney, and from my own experience representing this sheriff’s office in civil litigation, whether you have all the necessary facts in a case depends entirely on your client’s willingness to be honest and truthful with you....

OK, I know the answer to this, I just want to hear some reasons. Why isn’t fire alive? It breathes oxygen. It eats wood. It reproduces (sort of). What defines life? How do we know it’s not an advanced non-carbon-based life-form? On that same note, why isn’t a rock alive? If a rock grew at a nanometer every million years, how could we possibly study something like that? –Gwidion15, via AOL...

By Neal Pollack Bennett fought back. His music and poetry became a way for him to control his illness. “I was put in a situation,” he said, “where I was diagnosed by this one psychiatrist who proved to be totally wrong. We’re talking about something very, very subliminal here. Anyone who walked into that office was tagged as an insane person, was tagged as someone who would never succeed. I was a child when it all happened, but the sad aspect of it is that it took a half century to fight back....

“There are many worse things in politics than hypocrisy,” the University of Chicago’s Jean Bethke Elshtain reminds us in U.S. Catholic (June). “For example, vicious cycles of retribution, whether against nations or groups or other political figures. On the whole list of political sins, crimes, and misdemeanors, hypocrisy would come pretty low on my list. Remember the line that says, ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue’? Hypocrisy at least indicates that we still have some virtuous standard we know we ought to aspire to, and in our own bumbling, human way we’re trying to live up to that....

Unfortunately, Craig Greenman’s experiences attempting to swim at a lakefront beach [August 13] are similar to my own. He quoted a lifeguard as saying, “If you want to swim, go to a Park District lap pool. The lake’s not for swimming, it’s for playing.” I think this attitude is the crux of the problem. This idea has been conveyed to me repeatedly by lifeguards at North Avenue Beach since the early 80s....

Dragon Town Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wu Chien-lien dominates this 1997 costume drama, shot on location in northern China, about an ice maiden seeking revenge against the warlord who massacred her clan. Posing as a married couple, she and a hired assassin infiltrate the warlord’s lair and befriend his family, and director Yeung Fung-leung rises above plot machination to focus on the characters as they try to ferret out each other’s motives....

Electronica Hits the Highway Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big Top, organized by a pair of old-school underground dance-music supporters, is being promoted in Chicago by the firmly establishment Jam Productions, while the Electric Highway tour–sponsored by BF Goodrich and Spin–has gone through the respected independent promoters at Innovations, who are also behind the popular local rave magazine Thousand Words. Depending on how you look at such things, either the street cred in both cases balances out the corporate interests or the corporate interests negate the street cred....

FRED HERSCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m hard-pressed to name a pianist who has less in common with Thelonious Monk than Fred Hersch, who explores Monk’s music here this weekend. Monk wrote much like he played, with jagged edges, blunt harmonies, and choppy rhythms, while Hersch’s encyclopedic technique, pinpoint attack, and lawyer’s command of nuance allow him to balance romance and intellect with little apparent effort....

Home of the Free Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The remarkable proliferation of free jazz, improvised music, and other experimental activity here in recent years can’t be explained by a single factor, but Vandermark’s persistence and willingness to play under less-than-ideal circumstances–bad sound, poor promotion, low attendance–have been integral to the scene’s health. His quartet’s incendiary, relentlessly edgy, almost weekly performances at HotHouse between 1993 and 1995 attracted lots of curious listeners, many of whom were bored with rock but knew little about jazz, and helped open minds all over town to challenging music....

JOSHUA BELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Corigliano’s first film score, for the 1980 movie Altered States, earned the neoromantic composer an Oscar nomination, but tussles with director Ken Russell over creative control soured him on Hollywood. He didn’t return to film for five years, and his next score–for Revolution, a British-Norwegian production about the American war for independence–was tampered with when the studio reedited the picture at the last minute....

Victor/Victoria Victor/Victoria went on to become a Broadway crowd pleaser–but only as long as Andrews was in it. The show closed soon after Raquel Welch took over the lead, and a post-Broadway touring edition with pop singer Toni Tennille, booked into the Chicago Theatre last October, was abruptly canceled due to poor ticket sales. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Happily, even in Mark S....