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[Re: “Lake of Ire,” August 13] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I grew up along the lake (in Michigan) and swam frequently on lifeguardless beaches. I consider myself an experienced swimmer–and also experienced enough to know when not to mess with the lake. So imagine the culture shock after I moved here. As a regular recreational swimmer at North Avenue Beach, I too have been subjected to the increasingly authoritarian tactics of lifeguards who have nothing better to do than harass people who swim in water more than waist high....

Last Sunday morning, while most of Chicago slept, artist Ben Rubin defaced the plaza in front of the John Hancock Center, chalking a series of circles on the sidewalk and writing the word mine in each one. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rubin did have prior permission from the building’s management firm to carry out his stunt. He’s one of 15 local artists participating in “Not in My Lobby, You Don’t!...

OMINOUS SEAPODS 7/18, SCHUBAS I’m not impressed by this east-coast nouveau jam band’s claim to a national grassroots following–thousands of orphaned Jerry fans can indeed be wrong. But I am somewhat wowed by the tightness and efficiency on its live album, Matinee Idols (Hydrophonics). There are actual songs here, long though they may be, and it sounds like the players are actually listening to each other. I know it seems a small thing to ask, but I’ve really come to appreciate it....

THE GREAT GATSBY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There hasn’t been a great American opera yet, though good cases have been made for Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and Philip Glass’s Satyagraha. John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby isn’t it, either, despite the fact that Harbison borrows his narrative from a great American novel. Reviews of Gatsby’s December 1999 premiere, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, were mixed–the Times was underwhelmed, the Chicago Tribune enthusiastic–and, though I’ve only heard a radio broadcast, I’m likewise ambivalent....

The Top Ten Albums of 1996 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Norma Waterson, Norma Waterson (Hannibal). On her solo debut, this three-decade veteran of the British folk scene (she was a charter member of the Watersons) largely bypassed traditional material in favor of more rock-identified tunes by the likes of Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, and even Jerry Garcia. Backed by husband Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson, and upright bassist Danny Thompson, she treats each tune with remarkable empathy, balancing the bitterness in Richard Thompson’s “God Loves a Drunk” with sad compassion and imbuing Oscar Brown Jr....

TRAIN IS COMIN’, Chicago Theatre Company. With an ensemble as uniformly excellent as the ten performers the Chicago Theatre Company has assembled and gospel music as stirring as the 25 or so songs included here, all it takes is the basic skeleton of a plot to create compelling theater. And that’s what playwright McKinley Johnson has provided, telling the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who performed around the world in the late 1800s to raise money for Fisk University....

BUFFY BAGGOTT AND FULCRUM POINT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, the company’s training arm, has seen many of its alumni take major roles on the Lyric’s main stage–recent graduates Juliana Rambaldi and Mark McCrory, for instance, star in this season’s production of A View From the Bridge. Mezzo-soprano Buffy Baggott is the cream of the center’s latest crop....

Last Name First: New Work by Stephanie Brooks By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Implicitly Brooks critiques society’s institutions as cold, unemotional, dehumanizing; her work also reflects the feminist emphasis on individual emotions. But Brooks herself doesn’t see her pieces that way. A Chicagoan with an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Brooks, 27, told me her work is “about resignifying forms–about information, and how fluid it can be....

FATAL MAMBO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the first notes Fatal Mambo sounds like a pleasant, vivacious salsa band–albeit one that takes a decidedly lighthearted approach to traditional Cuban dance rhythms, incorporating humor and even a fair amount of camp (a la Perez Prado). But you realize something’s not kosher as soon as the singing starts: the lyrics are all in French. Turns out the band hails not from Cuba but from the southern French city of Montpellier, where the band seems to have sprung full grown from the whimsical brain of Jean-Francois Hammel, the group’s founder, lead percussionist, and vocalist....

By Todd Savage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His style is entirely self-taught. As a child, he loved cartoons and enjoyed thumbing through his parents’ New Yorkers to admire the work of artists like Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Al Hirschfeld. When he was ten, his parents hosted a cocktail party at their Ohio home. He recalls using a portable chalkboard to create a drawing of his impressions of the party: adults standing around in fancy clothes, drinking and laughing....

browning.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Adam Langer informed me last spring that he wished to write an article for the Reader about me and my teaching career [Our Town, September 11], I readily gave my permission, for I agreed with him that teachers are too infrequently recognized for the valuable work they do. Langer’s article touches on some central features of my life and rightly stresses some of my concerns about both American democracy and American education, which I see as inextricably bound together....

In Leaves When Tiina Harris met her 94-year-old Estonian great-grandmother for the first time, the great-grandmother looked carefully at her and said, “You are the first one who looks like me.” Although we tend to think about looking back at our ancestors, illuminating the past in search of our origins, it’s also likely that our ancestors looked forward into the blinding light of the future to see us. They hoped, perhaps, to find themselves re-created....

The art form was made up of supershort segments arranged in a slapdash manner, combining music and sensational images, often with simplistic humor and infantile scenarios. By that definition, no matter what moralists say, music videos differ little from vaudeville, except that the clothes have changed. So it’s only natural that Laura Cohen and Christopher Ellis are trying to tie in the old with the new in their weekly “Vaudeville Nights” showcase at the Mary-Arrchie Theatre....

Rich Bott, half of the video-making duo Animal Charm, wishes he “had a quarter for every naked ass or every naked person in a fetal position” he saw while studying at the School of the Art Institute. “I had a total opposition to that kind of art, performances about ‘myself and family’–therapy for rich kids.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fetterley, 27, and Bott, 26, are both from less-than-wealthy backgrounds: Fetterley’s mom tended bar and cleaned houses while raising him alone in Rockford, and Bott’s parents ran a trailer park in Arkansas....

The Name of the Game Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The media beat is no less competitive than the gossip columns or the sports sections in the two dailies. Miner seemed to go to great pains to cast Kirk as being less than professional in his work for apparently “punishing” a source by ignoring news about his radio station, when Feder is known to do the same thing all the time....

Three years ago Marc Rosenbush should have been on top of the world. Not yet 30, the stage director had already accumulated a resume full of productions and a thick file of favorable reviews. He was helping to transform the Splinter Group’s modest annual Buckets o’ Beckett festival into a big-budget affair with important Chicago directors like Frank Galati and Sheldon Patinkin and a cast list that included such nationally recognized actors as John Mahoney and Estelle Parsons....

A Veteran’s Debut Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After about a year in LA, Carducci realized he wasn’t ready for prime time and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he worked as a clerk and then a buyer in an import-only record store called Renaissance. He persuaded the owner to get into record distribution, and by 1979, when the shop closed and the business (which changed its name to Systematic) moved to Berkeley, Carducci was running the first major system for disseminating punk rock in America....

On a blue, windy morning in April, Robert Baldori, attorney-at-law, climbs into his black BMW for a drive to Hastings, Michigan, where he’s defending a family charged with growing and selling marijuana. Baldori doesn’t dress like a lawyer: his courtroom outfit, which he’s likely to wear two days in a row, consists of a wicker-colored sport coat, chinos that taper to a halt an inch above his crinkled loafers, and a richly cut white oxford with “BOOG” stitched on the cuff....

Captured at www.jpfo.org/askrabbi.htm Dear Rabbi Mermelstein: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where are all the pro gun Jews, indeed! Well, I know of Aaron Zelman, the chairman of JPFO, and myself. Maybe a few others. We keep trying to win over more Jewish minds, especially my personal campaign to convert Orthodox Jews to our thinking. It says in our Torah, “And you must surely guard your life....

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 14th year, runs from Friday through next Sunday, October 10 through 19, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton (unless otherwise noted). Tickets are $4 for children and adults, but various discounts are available to those who buy four or more tickets, including an unlimited pass for a family of four, costing $100. For more information call 773-281-9075. Animation Celebration 1...