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ANSON FUNDERBURGH & SAM MYERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Texas-based guitarist Anson Funderburgh and veteran Mississippi harpist and vocalist Sam Myers make for one of the most unlikely pairings in contemporary blues. Though Funderburgh’s capable of balls-out rock ‘n’ roll aggression, he relies on well-crafted solos to anchor his style: he creates tension with sustained lines, builds in precise phrases that climb carefully but relentlessly through the registers, then lets it all fly in explosions of closely bunched notes....

Bailiwick Directors’ Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailiwick Repertory’s annual showcase of generally unknown pro, semipro, and student directors features one-acts ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material. There’s a lot more of the latter than the former in this year’s fest, which includes a number of efforts by writer-directors. Coordinator Jonathan Pitts promises greater selectivity than in the past, noting that the 18 projects being shown were chosen from 36 applicants....

Fighting the Blight Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last 14 years Raven has staged its plays in a converted storefront at 6931 N. Clark, a few blocks south of Touhy. But two weeks ago Menendian’s landlord notified him that the building might be razed to make way for a new public school. Joe Moore, alderman for the 49th Ward, says that school officials have yet to make a final decision on where to build....

The Chicago Underground Film Festival has come a long way since Bryan Wendorf and Jay Bliznick, both video store managers, dreamed up the idea six years ago. The first edition attracted about 200 entries and was held at the old Bismarck Theater in the Loop; according to Wendorf its entire budget came from entry fees and program ads. This year nearly 1,000 films and shorts from around the world competed for 165 slots on the program, and with generous backing from Camel cigarettes and Stolichnaya vodka the sixth annual festival will be held at the Village Theater at Clark and North from August 13 to 19....

Lead Stories In February the Hawaii House Agriculture Committee approved a bill to legalize cockfighting, provided the roosters wear tiny padded gloves on their feet instead of the traditional metal leg spurs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September in Des Moines, Iowa, federal prosecutor Kevin Query, 40, was sentenced to ten years in prison for fondling a 12-year-old girl and taking nude photographs of her....

By Ben Joravsky The city won’t say why the door’s locked, on the grounds that the issue’s in court. In 1998 Meeker filed a federal lawsuit that accuses the city of “refusing to accommodate [him] by permitting handicapped accessibility to the work place immediately adjacent to the parking space” and of “failing to provide [him] with a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for failing to promote him.” He’s seeking unspecified damages for the “loss of pay he would have earned had he been…promoted” and for “physical pain and suffering [and] mental and emotional distress, humiliation, inconvenience and loss of enjoyment of life....

Enoch Light As lounge music, favored by “mature” listeners of the 1950s, finds a new audience in the post-baby-boom set, a flood of imitations, compilations, and reissues has rushed in to meet the revived demand. Central to the trend is a renewed fascination with the idea of the space-age bachelor pad–the legendary souped-up penthouse into which a playboy of the late 50s might lure young women in order to seduce them....

“Ruthian,” I jotted in my notebook when Michael Jordan stole the ball, and almost immediately recognized how unsatisfactory that adjective was. When Jordan unretired and led the Bulls to the second round of the playoffs a mere three years ago, I speculated that he could still have his greatest feats ahead of him and cited Babe Ruth, whose most famous exploits–his 60 homers in 1927 at the age of 32 and his supposed “called shot” in the World Series against the Cubs five years later–both came after his 1925 bellyache/stomach virus/syphilis attack, after many had written him off as over-the-hill, a has-been....

EKOOSTIK HOOKAH 12/28, MARTYRS’ I’m not surprised to learn that this long-lived Columbus band was invited to play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame–they sound a little like nearly every band Rolling Stone thought was important circa 1972, fronted by Ian Anderson on a handful of herbal pep pills. Not my cup of tea, but to be fair, they embody all that’s good about hippie jam culture, including independence (they’ve sold about 75,000 copies of their six self-released records), generosity (charity concerts out the wazoo), and industriousness (they host a biannual festival that attracted 12,500 fans this spring)....

BLUE MEANIES 6/27, METRO Every once in a while a record comes along that blasts a tired genre wide open, and the Blue Meanies’ new Full Throttle (Thick) might just be one of those. Oh, it’s relentless ska-core all right, but the Meanies feel free to break into swingy jazz or waltz-time sweeps or chipper surf-guitar drippings at will, and they do it all fluently and with insane speed–blink and you miss half the nuances that make it a lasting delight....

Ten in One on the Fence Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ten in One may not be closing its doors at 1542 N. Damen–at least not in the foreseeable future–but if the gallery does relocate, New York’s gain would be Chicago’s loss. Over the past nine years, Ten in One has been a premier venue for young, conceptually oriented artists, and Leib’s hustle and marketing savvy have brought attention to a diverse group of mostly local painters and sculptors, including Walter Andersons, Stephanie Brooks, Tom Denlinger, Michelle Grabner, Tatsuya McCoy, Rebecca Morris, and John Spear....

TEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Free jazz has always been underground music, and you can’t get any more subterranean than Test–for years, two of this New York-based quartet’s main venues were the Grand Central and Astor Place subway stations. When they weren’t under the sidewalks, they were playing on them: flutist, trumpeter, and saxist Daniel Carter, drummer Tom Bruno, and multireedist Sabir Mateen, all veteran street musicians, met in 1992 when Mateen staked out a corner two blocks from Carter and Bruno’s regular spot....

What’s the deal with the plastic rings that hold six-packs of beer and soda together? Is it true that animals get caught in them? Is it important to cut the rings apart in order to prevent needless deaths? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six-pack rings first floated into public awareness in the late 1970s when environmentalists began calling attention to the problem of waterborne trash, also known as marine debris....

TOM PAXTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Paxton is a veteran of the early-60s Greenwich Village folk explosion, but he’s never found himself trapped in the notorious folkie pitfalls of preciousness or overearnestness. Paxton’s social commentaries–from the haunting eco-parable “Whose Garden Was This” to the harrowingly contemporary “On the Road From Srebrenica”–combine realism, righteous outrage, and fearlessness; he’s willing to immerse himself in the terror of modern life so he may envision paths that might lead us out of the darkness....

patt.qxd In 1990 Jerry Meites resurrected the judicial evaluation committee (I think it had met last in the 1960s). Letters were sent to all IVI-IPO members who were attorneys, inviting them to join the committee or, if unable to attend meetings, to submit in writing any information they had about judicial candidates. Although given the option of anonymity, most members signed their responses. Invitations were not extended to nonattorneys, although any member who knew of the existence of the committee was allowed to serve....

Belfry In this spare, beautiful work Roche proves he understands the central paradox of playwriting: that the best path to universality is through the particular. If you set out to write something that speaks to all people in all times, you’ll probably end up with something as gaseous and empty as the avant-garde play within a play in the first act of The Seagull. But if you focus on the details of life around you–the curl of someone’s hair, the turn of her phrases, the million petty particulars that make this time and place utterly different from anywhere else–you have a fighting chance of touching everyone everywhere....

By Michael Miner PHONE SEX Clinton has disgraced himself, O’Toole acknowledged. But who in this affair, he wondered, has not? Normally a scandal finds its heroes, its dauntless reporter and “heroic whistle-blower,” its sympathetic victim and “steely, incorruptible investigator.” But who have we here? he wondered. For a whistle-blower, Linda Tripp; for a victim, a young woman who promptly put herself on display in a preposterous Vanity Fair photo spread; for an investigator, Kenneth Starr, the “Smutfinder General” whose methods, O’Toole told his Irish readers, “have at times bordered on the maniacal” and whose associates encompass “the most virulent members of the Christian Fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party....

BRIAN WILSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brian Wilson’s return to the spotlight last year at the Rosemont Theatre was one of the weirdest concerts I’ve ever seen–even after all this time I’m still not sure what to make of it. Backed by a small army of musicians, reading his lyrics off TelePrompTers, never smiling and seldom looking at the audience, Wilson seemed less a star than a hood ornament....

By Cara Jepsen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Wabash River was home to indigenous people for 10,000 years. That effectively ended on November 7, 1811, when then-general William Henry Harrison and his forces won the Battle of Tippecanoe in Prophetstown and proceeded to burn the outnumbered locals’ homes and food supply. The rout opened expansion into the Indiana Territory, which included Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin....

CELTIC FEST CHICAGO PRESENTS music at several locations in Grant Park: the Chief O’Neill Tent (Columbus and Jackson), the Harp Tent (Columbus south of Jackson), the Celtic Crossroads Stage (Jackson and Lake Shore Dr.), the Uillean Pipe Tionol/Evening Showcase (Columbus and Jackson), the Performing Arts Stage/Singing Tent (Columbus and Monroe), the Celtic Crossroads Stage (Jackson and Lake Shore Dr.), the Ceili Dance Tent (Columbus and Jackson), the Bagpiper’s Circle (Columbus and Jackson), and the Petrillo Music Shell (Columbus and Jackson)....