Joseph, our brother, master of strategic boredom. The late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s “stature, and his important role in Church developments, make it seem entirely appropriate that his Selected Works should be issued in a handsome set of two thick volumes–over 1,300 pages of sermons, official statements, and public lectures,” writes Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books (April 26). “But all these words, coming from a man who caused so much excitement, are disappointingly dull....

Cure for Writers’ Cramp Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For most of its nine-year history, Writers’ has been a one-man show. Artistic director Michael Halberstam, who founded the company with Marilyn Campbell (now literary manager) and first board president Betty Askow, hung on when the original ensemble fell apart after the first year. Since then, with minimal staff, he’s done everything from acting to swabbing the toilet....

Vadim Peare’s reputation as Russia’s premier trip-hop DJ is a little misleading–not only did he come of age in Britain, but some of his more experimental tracks are too discordant to really bunk down with the rest of that snoozy genre. Like many non-Anglo turntablists, Vadim is attracted to a cool internationalist funk that even acid-jazz fans have been known to groove to, but he’s got the wit and dexterity to chop it up into something just as suited to spazzier sensibilities....

“Real, raw–that’s what I prefer,” Harmonica Shah told Living Blues in 2001, and his recordings testify to that. Shah was born in 1946 in Oakland, where he listened to rootsy one-man bands Juke Boy Bonner and Jesse Fuller as well as Chicagoans like Eddie Taylor and Elmore James. He also spent a lot of time in Somerville, Texas, where he heard his grandfather sing field hollers and traditional country blues as he plowed his land behind a mule....

While war veterans solicited donations for poppies on Loop street corners the Thursday before Memorial Day, another group was offering something less traditional. As throngs of workers with briefcases and gym bags hurried home from work, 14 solitary figures scattered up and down LaSalle Street between the Board of Trade and the Chicago River carried small digital recorders playing the sound of a heartbeat sampled off the Internet. The speakers were hidden under their clothes, close to their hearts, and from 5:00 to 5:32 PM the microphones they held to their chests amplified the sound through ten-watt battery-powered Radio Shack megaphones....

Between Sound and Vision But as the 53 works by 45 artists (another 10 contribute live or recorded performances) in “Between Sound and Vision” at Gallery 400 reveal, such artists were making work as thoughtfully considered as any old master, though their ethos and approach couldn’t be more different. While this magnificent, enlightening, and just plain joyous exhibition concentrates on artists who came of age in the 50s and 60s, pieces by some younger and lesser-known artists show that childlike utopianism has at least a few heirs today....

A Woman Without a Name There’s a venerable tradition in philosophy and literature holding that everything that’s wrong–with everything–is the fault of Mom. Romulus Linney makes his contribution to this genre in A Woman Without a Name, in which he compares his protagonist, a turn-of-the-century housewife, to a crocodile chewing her own breasts. Though the play may be intended merely as a portrait of mother hatred, in Eclipse Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere it serves as an example of it....

It sounds quaint now, but the first time I saw the Journal of the American Medical Association I was shocked to find slick full-page ads from pharmaceutical companies hawking prescription drugs the way Revlon sells lipstick in the pages of Cosmo. I had assumed doctors made decisions about drugs by keeping up with the research, poring over heavy-duty papers in their spare time to find the best medicines for their patients....

Pansy Division are more famous for being gay than for being great–their lyrics were always more radical than their music, a charged punk-pop that was addictive but hardly revolutionary. In the early 90s they were a beacon for the various emerging branches of the queer punk movement, but it’s been five years since their last album, and the new Total Entertainment! (Alternative Tentacles) arrives in a different political environment, at least on the surface: sodomy’s good and legal (but the White House is more hostile), and openly gay men are all over the idiot box (albeit as unthreatening best friends to straight girls and fashion advisers to straight boys)....

15 Minutes By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the record, I enjoyed it just as much the second time, though it held up better as entertainment than as satire. Part of the reason may be that satire, even more than action, demands clarity and purity of purpose. By the time this movie gets to the homestretch, its attempt to combine a vitriolic anger at the media and the rabble-rousing, vigilantelike efforts of the fire marshal to defeat the villain is more than schizophrenic; by this point, the left hand barely seems to know what the right hand is doing....

EL GRAN SILENCIO 7/6, ARAGON On their 1998 album for Ark 21, Libres y locos, the Mexican group El Gran Silencio concocted a sprawling mix of hip-hop, dancehall, hard rock, and Mexican regional styles like cumbia and nortena. It was clear from the outset that they couldn’t claim mastery over any one of these, but the proportions gave it quite a punch. Their playing seems technically improved on the follow-up, Chuntaros radio poder (due for domestic release on EMI-Latin in a few weeks), but this time the variety feels forced....

TAMI HART 8/2, FIRESIDE BOWL What Passed Between Us (Mr. Lady) is the second album from Portland-based artist Tami Hart, who blew out some ears last year with her performance at Ladyfest Midwest. She comes out of a queer indie scene that’s in some ways a logical successor to the “womyn’s music” movement of the 70s, but with some important differences: queer men and transgendered people aren’t shunned, and neither are big, loud amplifiers....

Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So credit is certainly due Lookingglass, and particularly director David Schwimmer, for using his celebrity, the company’s high-profile new space, and Terkel’s iconic status to explore a topic no one wants to discuss. Because we clearly still need to do something about racism: no sooner had the lights gone up at intermission after a seriocomic explanation of how the Puerto Ricans are the niggers of the Latino community and the Irish the niggers of Europe than the man behind me was fuming, “Why do they always pick on the Irish?...

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, The Mirror) takes a giant step forward with his third feature (2000), shifting his focus from little girls to grown women and presenting such a scorching look at what they put up with in their daily lives that it’s no surprise the film was banned in his native country. This masterpiece is radical in form as well: it begins one morning in a hospital and ends that evening in a jail cell, the camera revolving 360 degrees in each space, and its narrative passes from one character to the next as does Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (and Richard Linklater’s Slacker)....

I was an editorial assistant in the books division of the University of Chicago Press for two and a half years, and for most of that time I was terrified of Susan Abrams. Actually, I was terrified in general. Publishing frequently feels like running for your life from a pack of minutiae: if you can’t fend them off, they’ll gnaw you to death. An unofficial motto hung on the wall of more than one editor’s office: “The process of publishing consists of an infinite number of details, no one of which is important unless it is overlooked or improperly executed....

“Have you seen the one with the naked woman selling the Palm Pilot?” Manivong Ratts wants to know. “Or the Gucci hat ad where the woman’s head is cut off?” Ratts, a counselor at College of DuPage, is rattling off examples from about-face.org’s “Gallery of Offenders,” a collection of magazine ads. He’ll be using these examples and others to stimulate audience participation in Sex and Violence: Images of Women in the Media at the college this week....

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Richard Rodgers, and some of the Chicago area’s top cabaret singers and pianists join forces this Friday and Saturday to celebrate the show-tune king’s centennial with two programs of his music. The performers are all members of Chicago Cabaret Professionals, an organization founded in 1998 to promote the art of cabaret and develop new performers and repertoire. CCP’s 2002 summer gala, presented in conjunction with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, features two different lineups of local talent....

Conflating Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert develops a feminist take on the legend in her evening-length dance-theater piece. Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, is the central character: what guides this version is her perspective on her husband’s travels–as she says early on, this is “the story of Odysseus’s women.” Actress Dawn Mastin first plays Penelope, then Molly Bloom; both characters speak with an Irish accent. The work is set outdoors, on a waterfront (as it has been in past productions), and Blankert uses a real dinghy and the model of a ship, complete with sails, to suggest both the mobility and the transitoriness of Odysseus’s life....

LiliputLiliput (Kill Rock Stars) I’m not Tina Turner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And anyway, screw Keats–Negative Capability is also a record by the Urinals. It’s lucid and clean (remastered for CD!), but not publicly presentable (they were called the Urinals, for fuck’s sake)–the opposite of fake-objective journalism or responsible pop culture. Rickety, awkward, and personal, the Urinals never matured, softened, or grew overly competent....

The New Leaf Theatre’s elegant quarters in a Chicago Park District building must have presented something of a challenge to scenic designer Marni Woloszyn. It can’t have been easy to replicate a spartan cabin deep in the Alaskan wilderness in a room notable for its polished woodwork and floors. Still, the design never detracts from Cindy Lou Johnson’s delicately enchanting tale of a reclusive oil rigger and a runaway bride who find shelter together during a literal and spiritual snowstorm....