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By 10 AM on Sunday, Hollywood Beach is already filling up with people. The volleyball games start at noon, the picnics soon after. Everywhere you look–on the grass, in the water, on the sand–there are bodies, male bodies, a sea of beefcake. Single men, couples, groups of five, gangs of twenty or more. Against a backdrop of high-rises, the beach looks like Miami or Honolulu. It’s gay Elysium. “The first year,” he says, “people would call and say, ‘Are you going to be out there?...

MARCIO FARACO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s from Brazil, where people are making great music left and right these days, but Marcio Faraco insists that he had to move to France to make a record. “I was like a rat, begging in the gutter,” he complains in the liner notes to his recent debut album, Ciranda (Blue Thumb). “A Brazilian artist’s life is a hard existence....

New York Eye and Ear Control Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Canadian artist Michael Snow is better known for Wavelength (1967), but this rarely screened 1964 film is playful and wonderfully inventive in its exploration of issues that have long preoccupied him. The camera moves across landscapes and cityscapes, often discovering enigmatic life-size silhouettes of a woman standing in a room or among buildings or trees....

ORISHAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Livan “Flaco-Pro” Aleman, a Cuban expat living in Paris, originally conceived Orishas as a fusion of son and hip-hop that would feature rappers from Havana’s bustling scene. But he ended up fleshing out the group without ever leaving France. Lusty-voiced sonero Roldan Rivero and tough MCs Yotuel and Ruzzo, all of them fellow Cuban expats, signed on to help Aleman and French producer Don di Niko mesh son’s infectious guitar and piano patterns with lean funk breakbeats on A Lo Cubano (Universal Latino)....

vargas.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is a ridiculous and reprobate move to suggest divorcing politics and art in responding–or better yet, reacting–to recent efforts to incorporate the Mexican (-American) community in this yearly run open house [Neighborhood News, September 26]. I do not know Sue Draftz and I have no detailed knowledge of her efforts beyond what I’ve read in the Reader and past issues of Exito....

Ira Glass’s twice-weekly radio show, This American Life–essentially an anthology of radio interviews and performance pieces–is easily one of the most entertaining and unpredictable shows on radio. And now a “best of” version is playing live on Sunday nights at Steppenwolf’s Studio Theatre. Seeing Glass in person takes a little getting used to–I would never have guessed that the man with the ready self-deprecating wit and Woody Allen voice would look so much like Buddy Holly....

Round Food: Part Two Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jacobs had his first slice in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, and to oversee the kitchen at Piece he’s hired Ray Peck, an old high school friend who’s been in the pizza business in New Haven for the past 16 years. With the help of Matt Brynildson, former head of brewing operations at Goose Island Brewery, Jacobs is installing a microbrewery whose dramatically lit equipment will be a focal point of the decor....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The item in question comes from Dan’s response to a reader distraught over the gradual disappearance of letters written by “people fucking their dogs, screwing their moms, or eating their poo” from the column. Dan suggested two theories to account for the lack of such correspondence: people are too busy playing with electronic toys to be kinky, and people have turned to advice columnists less hostile to these particular kinks for support....

One Flea Spare Playwright Naomi Wallace may be one of the few awardees whose work merits the popular nickname of her MacArthur fellowship: the “genius grant.” Her remarkable plays combine Brecht’s confrontation of the audience with Ibsen’s brutal realism and Chekhov’s comic sense of inevitability, tempered by a contemporary irony reminiscent of Maria Irene Fornes in her mysterious, intelligent metaphysical dramas. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wallace’s plays have recently begun to see more American productions; certainly Chicago companies have taken up the challenge, with mixed results....

Lennon in America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries by Geoffrey Giuliano (Cooper Square Press) In the two decades since, the public appetite for Lennon’s private life has never come close to being satiated. In the publishing arena alone it’s devoured at least a dozen biographies and oral histories, from Ray Coleman’s respectful Lennon: The Definitive Biography to Albert Goldman’s muckraking The Lives of John Lennon, not to mention memoirs by Lennon’s boyhood friend Pete Shotton, his half-sister Julia Baird, his mistress May Pang, his personal assistant Fred Seaman, and the Lennons’ personal mystic, John Green....

falesch.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upon awakening from this most recent fantasy, I found my eyes focused near the middle of the Reader article “House Blend: Will the eclectic Logan Beach Cafe change under new management?” (Our Town, January 16, 1998). “Yes,” I say to myself, “it’s right here! Artistic foment, originality, experimentation, and exchange of ideas are right here in Logan Square....

ACETONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On its 1993 debut, Cindy (Vernon Yard), Acetone decorated a Velvetsy foundation with icy psychedelia, chunks of garage noise, and a sprinkling of Isaac Hayes guitar. But apparently the LA trio found its own concoction unsatisfying, because over subsequent albums, it radically changed the recipe. In fact, its recently released, eponymously titled third album, on Neil Young’s vanity label, Vapor, is the musical equivalent of a whispered conversation, a collection of fuzzy pop tunes so elongated that the melodies and chord progressions practically dissipate as they’re played....

Chumbawamba The members of the band Quixote, interviewed in the most recent issue of the zine Punk Planet, were asked “What is ‘selling out’?” They replied: “Very simple… Chumbawamba.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chumbawamba’s first single–“Revolution,” on the band’s own Agit-Prop label–was competent, abrasive art-punk, along the lines of what the Ex were doing around the same time. The lyrics mostly concerned the counterrevolutionary treachery of the music business....

BRYN TERFEL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since his operatic debut in 1990, Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel has sung major parts in operas by Wagner, Richard Strauss, Handel, and Verdi; in Mozart’s Don Giovanni he’s played Leporello and Masetto, as well as the title character; and at this point the role of Figaro seems written especially for him. In his push to widen his repertoire, the thirtysomething Terfel has taken a part or two that didn’t suit him–in Puccini’s Tosca he was all huff and puff, stuck in the one-dimensional part of the villain Scarpia like a tiger in a paper bag–but his magnetic personality and bright, robust voice usually breathe life into even the least-developed characters....

Frequently called the Bruce Springsteen of Greece, George Dalaras has been his country’s biggest pop star for several decades–so much for the comparison. Dalaras masterfully blends traditional Greek styles like rembetika (a bawdy urban blues) and smyrneiko (a similar style imported from the old Turkish city of Smyrna, now called Izmir) with an ever expanding phalanx of contemporary international pop moves. Influenced early on by American protest singers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, he advocated democracy for Greece in the 70s and criticized the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in ’74; he still uses recordings–there are more than 50–and concerts to raise money and awareness for various causes....

Hefty Plans Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I try to have a humble approach to the money,” says Hughes from his Bucktown apartment, which also houses the Hefty office and a steel-doored electronic recording studio. Indeed, none of Hefty’s promotional materials mentions Hughes pere. Then again, as with Peter Getty’s Emperor Norton label, they don’t really need to. “People know who my dad is,” says Hughes....

JOHN DAVIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When a man steps up to the microphone with an acoustic guitar, he carries not just the instrument but a heavy bundle of preconceptions. If he’s black, it’s assumed he’ll play the blues–ever tried to find Ted Hawkins’s records in the R & B bin, where they belong?–and if he’s white, he must be a folksinger. But for some time now, John Davis, a librarian from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the taller half of MTV stars the Folk Implosion, has managed to leaven that load with unexpected elements of punk, pop, and poetry recitation; he even nods to the Ramones in the title of his second (and better) album, Leave Home (Communion)....

By Ben Joravsky To understand his frustration one has to realize how far he has come since he moved to Chicago in 1976 as a 25-year-old Korean immigrant who spoke little English. For a few months he lived with his parents, both garment workers, in an apartment at Saint Louis and Wilson in Albany Park. Then, not knowing what else to do, he joined the army. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Hyde Park Art Center is one of those few, and its experience reinforces Mr. Hodes’s point. Founded in 1939, the center has a 60-year record of supporting new and emerging Chicago artists. Artists as varied as Cosmo Campoli, Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Ken Warneke, Paul Sierra, Arnaldo Roche Rabell, Gelsy Verna, and Hyonae Blankenship all count the Hyde Park Art Center as one of the first spaces to exhibit their work....

MARIAN McPARTLAND & JUDY ROBERTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That this concert won’t air on McPartland’s long-running NPR program, Piano Jazz, means that it will include little (if any) of the delightful and informative banter in which McPartland engages her radio guests. But this rare event will feature the Grande Dame of American Jazz and a rather swell dame of Chicago piano performing together on two Baldwins, in the evening’s third and final act (after each has played unaccompanied for about half an hour)....