Stephanie Lentz and her admiring boyfriend, Chris Oakes, were photographed by Kathy Richland at a preprom party in May 2000. Stephanie and I spoke the following January in the town house she grew up in, just west of Old Town. The neighborhood was “pretty rough when my parents first moved here,” she told me. “Now it’s yuppie mania.” I’ve really enjoyed my time in the city–having grown up here is a pretty neat thing....

Martin de Maat was one of the few remaining improv teachers in Chicago who’d studied with Viola Spolin, the mother of Second City-style improvisational theater. His death last week in New York City left a lot of Chicagoans wondering about his legacy. De Maat had another secret: he had AIDS. The Second City’s official announcement attributed his death to “complications from pneumonia,” by now a transparent euphemism, which was dutifully repeated in the daily newspapers....

On a weekday afternoon in 1972 I visited a fellow film aficionado in his Los Angeles home. Several other people interested in film were also there. Suddenly, at 3 PM, everyone gathered around an old black-and-white television. A longtime auteurist, I wondered what obscure classic was commanding their attention. It turned out to be a daily show of Hollywood cartoons from the 40s and 50s–everyone was trying to guess the directors....

Rock, Pop, Etc. BIG HEAD TODD & THE MONSTERS, JANAH, CECILIA Fri 8/22, 6 PM, Lincoln Park Zoo, 2200 N. Cannon. 312-742-2000. CATHERINE AVE. Free in-store performances. Fri 8/15, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1 N. La Grange Rd., La Grange. 708-579-9660. Sat 8/23, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park. 708-386-6927. DWELE, KANYE WEST Fri 8/22, 7:30 and 10:15 PM, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E....

Dear Madam or Sir, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. “America,” the sum of the countries that occupy the Western Hemisphere, is not really at issue at all. What both writers meant to say was the “United States of America,” the country upon whose soil the events of 9/11 took place, whose citizens’ deaths are sought by those who orchestrated those events, whose government and social institutions are hated by those same persons, and whose destruction those persons seek....

“I’m on your side,” croons vocalist Andrew Kenny on the lead track from American Analog Set’s new Know by Heart (Tiger Style), a pretty pastiche of lazy guitar strums, brushed drums, and gauzy, backlit vibraphone. It’s not necessarily what you’d expect from a song called “Punk as Fuck,” but the title’s less a reference to the record’s sound than to its concision. On the Austin quintet’s first three albums–The Fun of Watching Fireworks (1996), From Our Living Room to Yours (1997), and The Golden Band (1999)–the tracks ran together in an uninterrupted whole, with the band’s hazy, surging sound spread out over meandering, we’ll-know-where-when-we-get-there song structures....

Allen Conkle has carved a small clearing in the thicket of bric-a-brac that is his Edgewater living room, creating just enough space for him and two actresses to stand uncomfortably close together. He sends her off to his bedroom with the CD to screech in private while he works with actress Andrea Cornett. She pulls out her copy of “The Truth May Be Deceiving,” the anthem her character, Hallelujia Blythe Bliss, sings at two pivotal points in the show....

Box Set, WNEP Theater. Two solo shows of short comic sketches by ImprovOlympic veterans have been packaged together here, though it’s not clear why: they have very different themes, and while one is sterling enough to stand on its own, the other needs rethinking. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Something Suite, written and performed by Dina Facklis and directed by Paul Grondy, is exceptional....

It Seemed Like Such a Good Idea . . . “Our intention was to build a live database of stuff that goes on in the underground,” says Manousos, now 26. “The whole point of the site was to spawn a community that would live on its own, that could ultimately pay for itself through licensing of content as well as services related to record labels and the artists.” In other words, he’d hoped to use Supersphere to draw in clients for a sort of consulting arm, which would teach labels and artists how to take advantage of the Internet....

In the late 80s, Argentine singer Juana Molina lucked into a job doing TV comedy–but she only took it to pay for guitar lessons, she says. As she saved up, however, she also moved up, eventually starring in her own show. “I had a lot of money but no time, and I realized I was very, very far from my first goal,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tom Moon. Almost a decade later she finally returned to music, releasing the rock-driven Rara (produced by Cafe Tacuba regular Gustavo Santaolalla) in ’96....

MAKANDA KEN McINTYRE & JASON KAO HWANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ken McIntyre’s music is steeped in the bop tradition, but his association with players like Eric Dolphy (on McIntyre’s 1960 debut, Looking Ahead) and Cecil Taylor (on the 1966 album Unit Structures) accurately indicates his experimental impulses. Unfortunately, his decision to pursue a teaching career in 1961 didn’t allow for much documentation of his work–regular gigs with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and some straight-ahead albums for Steeplechase Records constitute the bulk of his public activity for the last few decades....

“Eesinnuh, eesinnuh.” My mind flashed to Citizen Kane and Rosebud. I imagined Ben decades from now on his deathbed, uttering his last thoughts to someone who has no more idea what he means than I did. “Eesinnuh, eesinnuh.” It had been a nice day. Ben’s occupational therapist had called to cancel his standing appointment, which meant we had no scheduled activities for him that day. That can be a challenge. But the weather was nice for January, and Ben always loves the train....

On a typical morning Ronald Davis fishes a paper coffee cup out of a garbage can, wipes it out with his shirt, and plants himself on the Monroe Street bridge, near the Mercantile Exchange. With his back pressed against its steel frame, he shakes his cup and asks people to help the homeless. “I give all the people respect,” he says. “I don’t be harassing them. I don’t be offending them....

What if, in its early days, the U.S. space program had struck Americans as a fringe outfit of nerds and dreamers–a wacky wing of the military-industrial complex–and drawn sneers instead of Top Gun pilots and MIT engineers? That alternate history is the premise of the 1987 Japanese animated feature Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise by Hiroyuki Yamaga. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With an unprecedented budget of 800 million yen ($8 million U....

Hubbard Street 2 is two things: the training company of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and its community-outreach arm. On July 20, at a free performance for elementary school kids at the Vittum Theatre, these two missions collided. The concert opened with Ron De Jesus’s Lucid Dream, probably because it’s a difficult piece and the dancers needed the practice. It’s also a piece incorporating everything I hated about ballet in elementary school: soporific music, airy-fairy costumes, and–especially–overt displays of crotch that no one is supposed to notice....

Hardly any American rock band gives less of a fuck about listener expectations than the Sun City Girls. For more than two decades Rick and Alan Bishop and Charlie Gocher have followed their own illogical muse, building a catalog of more than two dozen full-length albums (most of them hard to find) that gives new meaning to the term stylistic reach. Lots of the group’s music is painfully self-indulgent–a double CD called Dante’s Disneyland Inferno (released on the band’s own Abduction label in 1996) is dominated by Gocher’s lunatic ravings and absurdist comedy....

Howie Samuelsohn’s in the basement of his Highland Park home, inserting tapes into a VCR. The monitor shows a Native American woman in a velvet sport coat with a flower in her hair. She’s singing and playing a guitar. Samuelsohn switches tapes and new faces appear: Joan Baez, John Prine, Harry Chapin. There’s Jesse Jackson, Afro reaching skyward, sitting in a TV studio. Jane Fonda speaks at a Detroit rally. Donald Sutherland solemnly stares into the camera and reads an antiwar poem....

Brian Collier: Earth and Water Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Collier’s Some Properties of Water: Phase Two, Evaporation (2003) lyrically celebrates water. The installation is made up of 81 framed digital prints of the locales from which he sampled water; the 81 tubes he used to hold the samples, arrayed in three cases on the floor; and a grid of 81 glass-bottomed trays into which he poured the water....

We were learning about vegetables in school: what made a vegetable a vegetable, how we should eat lots of them, how they grew, and whatnot. Vegetables grew in the ground, they were roots; fruits came off trees and had seeds. So when mother sent me to school with a million tomatoes from our garden–not for the class project but to get rid of them, as our freezer was already overflowing with Ziploc bags full of frozen tomato sauce, the pantry filled with jars of homemade ketchup, and dessert every night a slice of creepy mock apple pie made with green tomatoes–I protested....

Dear Jack Helbig: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The onstage combat in that production was perhaps the single most dangerous thing I have ever seen on stage. Not only was I frightened, as an audience member, to watch Austin thrown around on an uncontrolled trajectory (stopped only by his head), but as an actor, I am frightened for the safety of both actors if that show runs much longer as it stands....