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Mort Sahl Two summers ago Mark Crispin Miller wrote a cover story for the Nation about the “national entertainment state,” which he identified as the ownership of America’s major news outlets by Disney, Time Warner, General Electric, and Westinghouse. This creeping monopoly of electronic and print media, he argued, has poisoned our democratic culture with sleaze, violence, and corporate propaganda, choking off informed dissent and turning our political process into a tightly scripted soap opera....

By the time I arrived at the county courthouse in Skokie last Saturday, the Ku Klux Klan rally was in full swing. I counted more than 400 protesters and more than 100 police, some on horseback. I’d read that about 30 KKK members were expected, but I couldn’t see or hear them. They were near the courthouse or inside, and police in riot gear had blocked the long driveway leading up from the road....

Tax Day Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A pair of middle-aged women–whose surprising effect on young men isn’t meant to be ironic–are the main characters in this kaleidoscopic narrative, which has the two of them sashaying in and out of other characters’ dilemmas as they make their way to the post office on April 15. The meandering adventure includes acrobatic, dance, and musical performances, even a magic show....

Modern circuses generally come in two varieties: very arty or very kitschy. The arty ones like to tart up their shows with lots of novel commedia dell’arte costumes (Cirque du Soleil) or weigh them down with dark, angst-filled narratives of children adrift in Bosch-like lands (Cirque Ingenieux). The kitschy ones are so frantic to be fun for children of all ages that they frequently alienate all but the most childish. The Big Apple Circus combines the best of both....

The Delta Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ira Sachs wrote and directed this stylistically captivating, subtly nuanced, and structurally unpredictable 1996 independent feature. Like Spike Lee’s forthcoming He Got Game, the film focuses on an oedipal scenario that partially hinges on skin color. The central figure is Minh (Thang Chan), the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and a black American soldier, although his centrality isn’t apparent at first....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am writing in response to the article by Jack Clark, “On the Streets Where I Lived” [January 15]. While I found the article to be insightful regarding how white people lived in the Austin community prior to 1968, I took exception to how the black people who moved in were perceived by the author. It paints them all as criminal....

DAVID “FATHEAD” NEWMAN/ED THIGPEN QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman risks being pigeonholed in the “Texas tenor” tradition, thanks not only to his Dallas nativity but also to his full-bodied tone, his hard swing, and his easygoing jump on the blues. But Newman’s alto playing–with its haunting tone and emotional reserve–has always played a nearly equal role to the tenor in his music; and his cool, funky proficiency on flute became yet another calling card in his soul-fusion recordings of the 70s....

Directors Seeking Direction Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To earn a shot at the big time, a director has to get the right people to see his work, so a little over a year ago Lucas and Acerra launched the Chicago Directors’ Fo-rum, an artistic and networking organization that provides local directors with a newsletter, workshops, and social events. According to Lucas, membership has ballooned to nearly 120, and last month the group held its first formal conference, Directions 1998....

Rock, Rot & Rule (Stereolaffs) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They’re probably right: though I’d been a rabid fan for 20 years before I started writing criticism, the last three years have been a perpetual crash course in the past, present, and future of popular music. But the longer I pay my dues in this fraternity of insufferable know-it-alls, the more I realize that the job demands something no stack of books, pile of magazines, or shelf full of box sets can supply: the sheer electric thrill we all felt cranking up that first great rock ‘n’ roll record....

It Ain’t Hummel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In those days people were ready to dip their dicks into anything,” she says. She experimented with various casting substances for two years, including sand and water, wax, clay, and even aluminum foil, but it wasn’t until she discovered the alginates used in dental molds that her scheme began to solidify. And even that method required some refinement....

MUZSIKAS & MARTA SEBESTYEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether accompanied by techno rhythms (on Deep Forest’s Boheme), ambient electronics (with Karoly Cserepes), “world music” (on last year’s solo Kismet), or the opening credits to The English Patient, Marta Sebestyen’s singing is unmistakable. But it still sounds best with Muzsikas, the Hungarian folk group she’s fronted for nearly 20 years. Her voice is a strikingly emotive and technically immaculate instrument that effortlessly negotiates the bold rhythms, difficult harmonies, and melismatic embellishments of the band’s traditional Transylvanian repertoire, but she never sounds like she’s showboating....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the high-profile nature of his job, David Williams, sheriff of Tarrant County, Texas, has apparently stopped meeting with police and county commissioners and rarely goes to his office, according to a February Houston Chronicle report. His defenders say he is extremely shy, but some say he’s reacting to criticisms of his ties to the Christian political right; his eccentric new projects, such as attempting to assemble a helicopter fleet; and his attempt to acquire sovereign powers from the county under an 1836 law of the Republic of Texas....

I was mugged. All of a sudden, this five-foot-two chick was taking my wallet. Later, I couldn’t even tell the police what she had been wearing, but I remembered her voice, so deep and strange, sort of artificial. Or maybe it was my ears–my hearing may have been thrown off by the circumstances. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I tried to stop her, but she said, “I’ve got a gun, bitch!...

Michael Manning, a bond trader, might never have gotten into the restaurant business if it hadn’t been for his sister. Lesli Doughty, known as Poni, worked in bars and restaurants, and about three years ago she convinced him that they should open a Korean place together. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doughty, who’d tended bar at Crobar and Smart Bar among other places, was well-known on the local club scene and acted in local productions as well, having majored in theater at Columbia College....

SCRAWL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A band that starts rerecording its own material is often just hoping to conceal creative bankruptcy. But when Scrawl, a rock trio from Columbus, Ohio, split its 1998 Nature Film (Elektra) pretty much fifty-fifty between new and old songs, it was fighting a more literal sort of bankruptcy: the labels that had issued five of the band’s first six records had all run out of money, patience, or luck, and rerecording was the only way Scrawl could get the vintage tunes back into circulation....

Just because you’ve got an internationally known event–one of the largest free jazz festivals in the history of the world, approaching its third decade–going down right in the city’s lakeside front yard, don’t expect the little institutions that gird and maintain the jazz scene the rest of the year to fold up like cheap tents. For many of them, the festival has become the impetus for special bookings throughout the week....

Hauwa Eva Graham was running a thriving restaurant on the outskirts of Abuja, the newly designated capital of Nigeria, when her son-in-law, an air force officer, was jailed for his alleged involvement in a failed coup against the Ibrahim Babangida government. She gave up her business to help her daughter Alexandra, who had her hands full with the fight to free her husband, three small children, and her position as a lecturer at Lagos State University....

Playwright, director, and composer Peter Glazer grew up listening to songs from the Spanish civil war. “In 1942 a group of folksingers, including Pete Seeger and my father, recorded an album called Songs of the Lincoln Battalion, which was the first American recording of songs sung by the American volunteers in Spain,” he says. Tom Glazer, who had been a prominent member of the New York folk scene in the 40s and 50s–“My father sang with Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly”–had learned many of the songs, like “Vive la Quince Brigada” and “There’s a Valley in Spain Called Jarama,” firsthand from veterans....

Denial The Workroom Well, yes, some were. Despite the determination of Hitler and his henchmen, some Jews survived the sadistic slaughter. Some got out of harm’s way early on in Hitler’s reign; others were protected by sympathetic gentiles like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. And some who were deported to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen survived despite the astounding odds against them; their accounts are filled with tales of courage and cruelty, fate and chance–of being spared by their captors because they could play the violin or make electrical repairs, of being forced to assist in unspeakable atrocities against their fellow inmates in order to avoid the same fates, of stealing food and clothing from their dead and dying comrades, even of being sent to the gas chamber on a day when the machinery of death happened to stall....

WILLIAM FERRIS CHORALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local composer and church musician William Ferris carries a currently unfashionable torch for English anthems and French organ music–his stylistic sympathies lie with John McCabe, William Mathias, and Charles-Marie Widor, to name a few of the more or less neglected fellow tonalists he and his 40-voice choir have championed over and over again. But Ferris isn’t exactly an outsider here–he studied with Leo Sowerby, an influential force in Chicago in the 40s and 50s, and his works have been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra....