Bloggers Rush In Where Dailies Fear to Tread Besides, what compelling news interest would coverage serve? Alan Keyes will be lucky next month to get 25 percent of the vote. The dish on his daughter would make no difference. And then there was always the possibility of a hoax–though neither Keyes has alleged one and regular readers of xanga.com seem to have no doubts. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Dramatist Revolutionary Army was looking forward to playing the Lincoln Park West Care Center. The theater group’s latest project, War-Dice–an interactive piece designed to mimic the unpredictability of life during wartime–had been suffering from poor attendance. On August 4 a hoped-for audience of teenagers had failed to appear at the Albany Park Community Center. So the cast of eight performed for the family of Catherine Hanna, one of the actors....

Saxophonist Joe Lovano was nearly 40 before anyone outside his native Cleveland and his adopted hometown of New York became aware of his extraordinary gifts. So by the early 90s, when his work in John Scofield’s high-profile quartet and his own Blue Note recordings started to reach the wider jazz audience, Lovano already had the poise and authority of a veteran. His burry, organic tone was a welcome change from the metallic gleam preferred by many of his contemporaries, and his combination of vivacious intensity and slipstream technique (as demonstrated on a rash of inventive recordings with lineups ranging from pianoless trio to kick-ass nonet) made Lovano the definitive jazz saxophonist of the decade....

For months rumors had swirled, and finally, on June 1 of last year, Zarin Mehta handed in his resignation as president and CEO of the Ravinia Festival. Three months earlier, Mehta had confided to the head of Ravinia’s board of trustees, David Weinberg, that the New York Philharmonic Orchestra had been asking him since the fall of 1999 to be their executive director. Mehta recalls, “I kept fending them off, saying, ‘No, no....

I had the goofiest idea the other morning. Yes, Mannheim Steamroller, aka Louis “Chip” Davis Jr., the man who kick-started both the New Age music industry and the 70s trucker craze–and, if you ask me, an evil semigenius who plots tirelessly to destroy Christmas from his 100-acre rural stronghold in Nebraska. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But then came 1984–the year Mannheim Steamroller released its first Christmas record....

This may be the last chance for Chicagoans to hear folk-music icon Rosalie Sorrels in person. The hard-traveling chanteuse has told me she’s been “trying to retire” from the road for some time; now in her late 60s, she prefers not to drive at night, and over the last few years she’s cut back her itinerary sharply, mostly playing towns close to her Idaho home or making brief jaunts by plane....

Equal Footing/Equal Earing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Each of the three programs features different collaborations, but all performances begin with Love Square, an improvisation by choreographer-dancer Asimina Chremos and three musicians, in this case composer-guitarist Nathaniel Braddock, percussionist Jerome Breyerton, and vocalist Carol Genetti. This may be a useful exercise for the participants, but as performance it verges on parody. Genetti makes sounds somewhere between a yelp and a gargle, to which Chremos responds with hip-hop-inflected abandon while Braddock and Breyerton obediently pick or drum along....

Dear reader, That first issue really put Scumsquat on the map, and I sold out the entire 300 copies in a matter of months. I also garnered the prestigious One to Watch in ’99 award from the editors of You Ain’t Zine Nothing Yet. Of course, this was back in the glory days of zines, not like these lame-ass losers doing it now, back when getting a One to Watch was quite an honor, I assure you....

Six o’clock in the morning–what an ungodly, uncivilized hour for a major sporting event. Not that one can’t be ungodly and yet civilized, something Europeans seem to specialize in, or godly yet uncivilized, a uniquely American specialty. But to be both–that’s just plain nasty. Yet six was the hour I dragged myself out of bed, at the beck and call of my almost-teenage daughter, to watch the World Cup final on Sunday–before the morning papers had even arrived....

Recipe for Long Life: How the Heartland Cafe’s Antiestablishment Founders Built an InstitutionBuilding a pillar of stability in an ever-changing community wasn’t exactly what Katy Hogan and Michael James had in mind when they opened the Heartland Cafe. As radical political activists and followers of nutritionist Adele Davis, they had other ideas. “We were casting about for a new way to organize people, to provide jobs, and maybe make a living,” says Hogan....

What’s up with menopause? As a woman in her late 40s experiencing hot flashes and other signs of the looming cessation of menstruation, I’m wondering why women lose the ability to reproduce while men retain it, at least theoretically, until death. Not that I’m going to miss the pill, tampons, etc, but there’s a lack of symmetry here that bothers my sense of aesthetics. Please advise. –Kitty Phelan, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Designer Geoffrey M. Curley likes to begin with a clean slate. The less he knew about the sets for other productions of Willy Holtzman’s Hearts: The Forward Observer the better. He wanted to solve the puzzle the play presented on his own. Hearts, which previews this week at Northlight Theatre, stars Mike Nussbaum as a World War II veteran looking back on his life from the vantage point of his basement rec room....

The two galleries at I Space where Therese Zemlin’s works are on exhibit are dark except for the light that comes from the small incandescent bulbs that shine through paper or film. For the impressive The Bed Project she placed 144 Japanese-style lanterns in a 12-by-12 grid on the floor; the lanterns’ frames are covered with ink-jet prints on Japanese rice paper, made from scans of natural objects–pine needles, flowers, fireweed–she collected in northern Minnesota, where she has a cabin....

Formed on the cusp of the 80s by brothers Phil and Dave Alvin, the Blasters played a major role in turning punk rockers and other underground musicians on to American roots music. Dave, the primary songwriter, left the band following 1985’s Hard Line, but the Blasters continued to perform live, with a string of replacement guitarists including X’s Billy Zoom and future Beck sideman Smokey Hormel. This year Dave, pianist Gene Taylor, and drummer Bill Bateman rejoined Phil and original bassist John Bazz for what’s billed as a one-off reunion tour–and as documented on the recent live CD, Trouble Bound (Hightone), they haven’t missed a beat....

Friday 6/20 – Thursday 6/26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1982 an informal group of musicians spontaneously put on the first Fete de la Musique in Paris. Nowadays the annual summer solstice event is overseen by the ministry of culture and protected by the police, and it has spread to 100 countries. Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs launched its own version, Miles of Music, last year....

Friday 8/16 – Thursday 8/22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 17 SATURDAY Perhaps the mayor should consider designating August 17 Drepung Gomang Monastery Day–the touring Tibetan Buddhist monks from that overcrowded and underfunded Indian monastery are participating in no fewer than three events today. At noon they’ll perform a ritual dismantling of a sand mandala–meant to symbolize the impermanence of the material world–that they’ve been working on since Tuesday at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

1984 “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but . . . something resembling it could arrive,” said George Orwell of his 1949 novel 1984. Writing at the dawn of the cold war, Orwell prophesied a totalitarian state at once highly advanced and woefully inefficient, where socialist revolution had turned in upon itself. He’d issued a similar warning in Animal Farm, his 1945 fable about farm animals who overthrow their human master only to become slaves of the pigs....

Chicago a Cappella–thanks to fine singing, an eclectic repertoire, and marketing savvy–has survived its first decade, and to celebrate, the nine-member group is kicking off the new season by reprising some of its greatest hits and premiering two new commissions. One of them is The Fall by bass Jonathan Miller, the ensemble’s artistic director; it’s a setting of a whimsical, sarcastic poem by Russell Edson. The other is The West Lake by Chen Yi....

For the last year flutist Claire Chase has been communicating by E-mail and cell phone with dozens of musicians across the country to hammer out the logistics for ICE Fest 2003, a six-concert series of new music that starts this Saturday. Presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble, a network of musicians and composers Chase cofounded, the series is intended, she says, to draw art music out of its “elitist bubble.”...

Dawn Reiss’s first big professional assignment might have been a bad idea to begin with, but she’s glad, just barely, that she took it. Advertising’s job was to find what Reeves called a “marquee” corporate sponsor, and late last summer the search paid off big-time. Associate publisher Paul Rothkopf calls the mix of Visa, the Sporting News, and the NFL “a confluence of very great things.” On the paper’s Web site, beneath Visa’s motto “It’s everywhere NFL fans want to be,” three young adventurers would live out “a fantasy” (Rothkopf), by taking “the ultimate road trip, every fan’s dream trip” (Reeves)....