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When Terri Kapsalis was doing graduate work in performance studies at Northwestern, she found a way to combine academics with her part-time job. She worked as a gynecology teaching associate, using her own body as a model to instruct medical students in pelvic and breast examinations. Once Kapsalis realized she was, in essence, performing on the job, playing the role of patient began to carry new and exciting connotations. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lonesome Coyote Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At a recent meeting of area artists and gallery operators, three different scenarios for ATC ’99 began to take shape. Justine Jentes of Inside Art gallery outlined the options in a recent memo that was faxed to interested parties, soliciting their opinions and participation. One plan would “scale the Coyote way down and focus on what exists in the community....

JIM CARROLL 12/4, LOUNGE AX Poet Jim Carroll earned his rocker badge mostly on the strength of his 1980 debut album, Catholic Boy, a solidly fierce piece of art punk that included the accidental standard “People Who Died”–the Impotent Sea Snakes have covered it, for chrissake. But his teenage-junkie memoir, The Basketball Diaries, and the persistent rumor that it’s him demanding Pernod in the background on the Velvets’ Live at Max’s Kansas City don’t hurt either....

By Neal Pollack But the liquor licensees on South Michigan weren’t going down easily. In February, a former CTA clerk named Ralph Bellamy had formed the Greater Roseland Liquor Association, composed of 33 bar and liquor store owners. In his campaign to rid Roseland of liquor stores, Meeks was willing to shut down neighborhood bars as well, and Bellamy’s bar, Ralph’s Place, at 113th and Michigan, was in the way. He was ready to fight to keep it open....

“I have found that a successful legal career requires not only hard work, but also a supportive environment within a firm, flexibility and keeping your sense of humor,” Chicago attorney Debbie Schavey Ruff tells Di Mari Ricker in Student Lawyer (April). Ruff certainly needed her sense of humor in her first job out of law school, at what Ricker describes as “Chicago’s second-largest patent boutique firm. In its 93-year history, the firm had never had a woman partner; nor had a female associate ever stayed at the firm more than three years....

Irving Penn: Photographs From the Years 1949 and 1950 By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ten photographs at Ehlers Caudill are mostly newer prints of photographs originally commissioned from Penn for Vogue. Born in New Jersey in 1917, he was a graphic and advertising designer in New York in the late 1930s. After a year of painting in Mexico in 1942, he began his career in magazine photography, which continued for decades; in the 1970s he also began exhibiting in galleries, both photos from new negatives and magazine negatives reprinted....

David Bowie Pop With the meteoric rise of jungle in the UK over the last two years, Anglophiles have finally found something tangible to hitch their wagons to. This highly aggressive and charismatic (as far as electronic music goes) hybrid of dub, hip-hop, and techno, also known as drum ‘n’ bass, has influenced disparate artists on both sides of the pond, from Tortoise to Nine Inch Nails, and from Everything but the Girl to Derek Bailey....

One minute I’m staring out a car window at a black Ferrari creeping through a Cabrini-Green parking lot; the next I’m standing on the dance floor of the Dragon Room, watching a guy pretending to kill a girl pretending to take a bath. Flashes pop, and a dozen people point digital cameras at the killer as he pulls out a big plastic knife. The girl never drops her rubber duckie, even when he slits her throat from ear to ear....

Steven Foster By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “Studies” are mounted here in four groups, each with considerable space between the pictures; the arrangements are unique to this exhibit. One soon notices that the pictures–mostly of figures, natural objects, or details from urban life–are mounted to resemble musical notes on a staff. These stark, small images are closer equivalents to musical notes than most photographs, and the musical arrangement encourages one to look at their relationships....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, GSB: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On your behalf, I called the Safeway nearest your return address, which I’m assuming is the Safeway nearest your home, and shared your letter with the manager, Mark. Do Safeway checkers get asked out all the time? “Well, it happens,” said Mark, “but we discourage it.” Why? “For obvious reasons–stalking and all of that stuff....

SILOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you weren’t paying attention, you might have taken the extended absence of a new Silos album to mean that the band’s 14-year career was creaking to a close. But in the fall, the “band”–which as always means Walter Salas-Humara and whoever he feels like playing with–quietly released Heater, its first studio album in four years, on Chicago’s Checkered Past label....

By Neal Pollack Essentially, the law would abolish street music downtown. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of a banjo player named Walter Friedrich, arguing that the ordinance unfairly singled out performances from other forms of speech in public places. In 1985, U.S. District Court judge Marvin Aspen struck down the law. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We live in an environment where we’re trying to have a mixed residential and business community....

Oval Onko Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many successful musical innovators have started with minimalism: Anthony Braxton’s massive Creative Orchestra Music couldn’t have happened without For Alto, his single-voice testing ground for his compositional tricks. Hans Reichel’s solo pieces for his “daxophone”–more or less a block of wood played with a bow–aren’t as funny as his version of “The Flight of the Bumble Bee” might be, but they highlight expressive possibilities that standard instruments don’t have, rather than the deficiencies of the daxophone within a traditional context....

TRANS AM/PAN SONIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For years now the music press has charted the progression of Trans Am with a laughable seriousness: this album leans heavily toward electronic music, while this one retreats into aggressive math rock, yada yada yada. The big scoop on their new album, Futureworld (Thrill Jockey), is that it reconciles those two sides. Which it does. But I’ve yet to see one review mention the one true constant: the band’s geeky humor, which has reached a fever pitch on the new album....

VANCE KELLY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Vance Kelly, a stalwart on Chicago’s south side for some years, has been making occasional forays north and west, including a torrid appearance at last year’s Blues Festival. His repertoire ranges from 12-bar Chicago-blues chestnuts to funky soul and R & B to contemporary postfunk aggression; he’s also been experimenting with a rough but promising jump-blues swing....

I don’t know how many times the priest came. He would anoint ma and give her the last rites, but then she’d revive. They don’t call it the last rites anymore. Now it’s called the “blessing of the sick.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I got up early in the morning and got my father’s breakfast–two soft-boiled eggs in a big cup, a couple of pieces of toast, and coffee....

Friday 3/21 – Thursday 3/27 Long before The X-Files, people read books to ponder alternate realities and other otherworldly occurrences. The new anthology Spec-Lit, compiled by Columbia College science fiction instructor Phyllis Eisenstein, contains work from 13 of her students, as well as work by Chicago writers Algis Budrys (Rogue Moon) and Gene Wolfe. Wolfe, author of The Book of the New Sun, and other featured writers will read at tonight’s publication party....

Several times each summer Doug Taron walks a precisely plotted route through Bluff Springs Fen and counts butterflies. He notes his starting and finishing time and records each sighting along the way. His tally sheet is divided into five columns so he can separate the insects seen under the shade of the old burr oaks in the savanna from those encountered on the gravel hill prairie, in the fen itself, in degraded portions of the preserve, or in areas that are being restored....

Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records by Rob Bowman (Schirmer Books) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stax was founded in the late 50s by Jim Stewart, a banker who played the fiddle, with help from his older sister, Estelle Axton. (The company name comes from the first two letters of each sibling’s surname.) Stax didn’t set out to record exclusively rhythm and blues–Stewart recalls that its earliest efforts were “washed-out” country pop....

Local Record Roundup Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » PLASTICS HI-FI Home Brewed (self-released) After a sloppy EP and a couple mediocre singles, these unofficial chairmen of the local Flaming Lips Appreciation Society have finally done their idols justice. Elegant hooks, often in the form of sweet vocal harmonies, emerge sleepily from clouds of psychedelic ephemera–swirling guitar arpeggios, analog synth noodles, and bad-acid organ, arranged via some sort of trippy feng shui–and though you barely notice them coming, once they’re out they buzz around your head like a swarm of gnats....