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Growing up, Michael Ferguson loved horror films. In 1974 he read about the release of Andy Warhol’s Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein. “When I heard they were gross, X-rated, and sexually perverse, I became very interested,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ferguson’s discovery of Dallesandro came at a time when he was coming to terms with his homosexuality. “The fact that he was open or appeared to be open to the attentions of both male and female audience members made me that much more attracted to him,” says Ferguson, who calls Dallesandro “this great, virtually unexplored, and sometimes barely acknowledged male sex symbol....

JOHN WALLOWITCH & BERTRAM ROSS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist John Wallowitch and his partner, singer Bertram Ross, love to rummage through the garbage cans of Tin Pan Alley; there they reclaim discarded rarities like a couple of Depression-era socialites on a scavenger hunt. This slightly mad Manhattan duo, which returns to Chicago almost exactly a year after its last engagement, augments the old oddities with Wallowitch’s own eccentrically hilarious originals (favored by the likes of Dixie Carter and Blossom Dearie)....

LARRY CORYELL TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the long and winding career path of guitarist Larry Coryell, there’s still no straightaway in sight. His previous three albums tackled Brazil and smooth jazz; on the recent Spaces Revisited (Shanachie) he reunited with old friend and archetypal jazz-rock drummer Billy Cobham for a return to the big bang of his fusion years. Those were good years for Coryell, who started out as a rocker and worked in the Free Spirits to help pioneer fusion from the rock side; in 1967 he joined vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet to record the first true jazz fusion album, Duster, recently released on CD for the first time by Koch....

PAN-AMERICAN/STARS OF THE LID Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the recent onslaught of laptop-toting Teutonic sound artists has left you yearning for something a little more organic, this pairing of performers associated with the local Kranky label is your ticket. The Austin duo Stars of the Lid make their lush, glacially paced music the old-fashioned way. On their latest album, The Ballasted Orchestra, Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride use a four-track recorder to compress electric guitars, cellos, and field recordings into tranquil, richly layered drones....

PHAROAHE MONCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a member of Organized Konfusion, rapper Pharoahe Monch has been acclaimed by the hip-hop faithful for most of the decade, but not until he released Internal Affairs (Rawkus) a few months ago did he finally get the sales to match his skills. On his current hit single, “Simon Says,” he even jokes about his hard-earned cred: “I sold wood in the hood / But when I’m in the street and shit it’s all good....

PHOENECIA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Afrika Bambaataa’s classic “Planet Rock,” which hijacked the electro-pop of Kraftwerk for the burgeoning hip-hop nation, has influenced music the world over, but nowhere has its effect been more powerful than in Miami. The song’s futuristic bass-heavy beats became the foundation for Miami bass, a genre that’s still expanding today. The best known exponent of Miami bass is the lewd novelty act 2 Live Crew, but the scene has produced countless hits, from Tag Team’s “Whoomp!...

Politics Is Personal Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local,” and you could add to that my father’s motto: “All politics is personal.” Political discussions at our dinner table were not for the faint of heart. My parents rarely agreed on anything. During the last years of the Vietnam war, my father taped a large world map onto the broad shade that hung in front of our French doors, so at dinnertime we could see the countries we talked about....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, CG: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What do I think about what? Did you have a question? Is something troubling you about your desires? I mean, is there a reason you sent me a letter? You’re young, you’re fun, you’re bi, you have an active fantasy life, you pretend to be someone you’re not on-line, you’re attracted to swishy guys. What do I think?...

TOP GIRLS, Piven Theatre. In the decade since Caryl Churchill’s contemporary classic Top Girls premiered, the problem she addresses–how a woman can make it in a man’s world–hasn’t changed significantly. While women in America and western Europe have made strides toward equality in the workplace, unresolved issues of pay, child care, and maternity leave show that it’s an ongoing battle. Part of what makes Churchill’s play such a fascinating and complex exploration of this challenge is her first act, in which Marlene, a high-powered British businesswoman, dines with a sampling of archetypal women from history....

Chicago choreographer Winifred Haun has always had a wry side. The solo Offer Void (which she made while still dancing with Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre some ten years ago) alternates contemporary classical music with Joe Cocker’s “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window”–and the dancing likewise vacillates between the astringent and the overblown and floppy. The 1991 Close My Eyes is a funny, horrifying account of a cocktail party gone terribly awry....

By Jeff Huebner Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mortell grew up in Kankakee, spending the summers in Montana on her grandparents’ ranch. She says she was a “clinically hyperactive, rebellious tomboy. I was a terrible student, and I was in trouble all the time.” In 1971 she got an English-literature degree from the University of Colorado (“I spent a lot of time marching against the war”), then moved to Denver to work as a sound engineer and commercial photographer....

Looking at his paintings, Ellsworth Kelly suggests, is “on the same level as looking at your shirt.” He taps my arm. “I’m not interested in depiction–I’m interested in literal space. Our eyes are open all the time, we use our eyes to live, but we don’t play, we don’t investigate. I’ve always been investigating perception, since I was a kid.” A leading exponent of hard-edge abstraction, Kelly says, “I feel my thrust all along was trying to do one color, one shape....

ASTRUD GILBERTO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She could never really carry a tune–rather, she’d sort of bobble the melody, precariously balancing it between the notes that ran flat and ones that strayed a little sharp–and her voice packed all the punch of a hungry kitten’s mew. But that didn’t stop Astrud Gilberto from becoming a pop icon in 1964, when she contributed the dreamy, half-whispered vocal to Stan Getz’s hit recording of “The Girl From Ipanema”; in fact, for listeners the world over, she was that lissome Carioca on her way to the sea....

BARRELHOUSE CHUCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Barrelhouse Chuck learned at the feet of greats–Sunnyland Slim, Little Brother Montgomery, Detroit Junior–and his earnest reverence for his teachers’ music has tempted critics to dismiss him as a mere acolyte. But Chuck’s 1999 debut, Salute to Sunnyland Slim (Blue Loon), proves he’s developed a style that, if not entirely his own, is definitely greater than the sum of its parts....

BETH ORTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What a difference a hyphen can make. Someone somewhere once called Beth Orton a “techno-folkie,” and through critical echolalia the tag has stuck to her like bubble gum. Whoever came up with it, it’s a publicist’s dream: since the release of her 1997 album, Trailer Park (Dedicated), she’s been pitched like a Hollywood blockbuster: “Bob, you gotta hear this Beth Orton....

Bob Fosse, John Kander, and Fred Ebb’s 1975 musical, based on Maurine Dallas Watkins’s 1926 comedy about celebrity, crime, and corruption in Prohibition-era Chicago, ingeniously uses classic showbiz forms to tell the story of a Windy City showgirl, Roxie Hart, put on trial for killing her boyfriend. Roxie’s lawyer is a Ziegfeld Follies-style tenor accompanied by fan-waving chorines, for instance; the butch prison matron is a Sophie Tucker-like red-hot mama, and the hanging of an eastern European immigrant is portrayed as a “famous Hungarian rope trick....

A tale of two cities, told this time by Sharon Schmidt in Substance (March): “On January 3 Daley rang in the New Year with Alderman Patrick Levar of the 45th Ward, on the Northwest side. The occasion was the ribbon cutting ceremony of the $10.6 million addition to the Portage Park Elementary School, 5330 W. Berteau. Daley and his large cast of Chicago public school appointees celebrated the new school building, where a new addition and repairs, landscaping and wrought iron fences had been added to the original school....

Long before becoming a famous novelist, Chester Himes was a budding criminal. But his life changed after he was arrested in Chicago. With little fanfare, Himes was posthumously honored in Chicago this October, when he was inducted into Chicago State University’s National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. He was not as well known or appreciated as most of his fellow honorees–distinguished writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin....

By Neal Pollack Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Betty’s Resale Shop was either a treasure trove or an eyesore, depending on who was looking. Last week the city stepped in to settle the debate (detailed in the Reader September 25). On Wednesday, November 18, five garbage trucks pulled up to the strip of storefronts on the 3400 block of North Lincoln. They were followed by officials from the Department of Streets and Sanitation, several police officers, and Alderman Ted Matlak....

Guided by Voices Earwhig is British slang for that blabbermouth at the end of the bar who fancies himself the world’s greatest storyteller. There’s a metaphor here for Guided by Voices’ way-beyond-prolific leader, Robert Pollard. Sure, he labored admirably over his four-track down in that now-famous Dayton, Ohio, basement for ten years as the world passed him by, but ever since the indie-rock universe started kissing his ass, circa 1993’s Vampire on Titus, he’s had songwriting diarrhea of the worst sort....