Friday 5/10 – Thursday 5/16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 11 SATURDAY I remember my first time on a plane. It was 1978, I was four years old, and my family and I were about halfway to Disney World when the 747 hit heavy turbulence and suddenly dropped 100 feet. The plane leveled off, but for the next 20 minutes it felt like we were bumping over mountaintops at 400 miles an hour....

Media monopoly exposed. If you type “Chicago” in the Center for Public Integrity’s Web site (www.openairwaves.org) you’ll see a pie chart of who owns the 109 radio stations within 40 miles of the city. Two entities control 35 stations apiece: “educational” and “other/independent.” No media giant owns more than seven, and the total number of stations owned by Viacom, Clear Channel, NextMedia, Univision, Disney, and Bonneville combined is 31. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Drawing Power And Ted Rall of Universal Press Syndicate asserted, “If a single image does convey the real deal, it’s the New York Daily News’ photo of a severed hand lying on the street next to cigarette butts, and not even that does it. The Statue of Liberty crying, with a hole in her chest or with a model airplane smashing into her side only conveys one concept: Lazy Editorial Cartoonist....

Giant Sand’s recent Cover Magazine (Thrill Jockey), a charmingly erratic all-covers album, is surely the slightest record ever produced by Howe Gelb’s twisted Tucson roots-rock combo. But it’s a logical step: Since the late 80s the band’s guiding muse has been impulsiveness, if not quite improvisation; songs collapse into chaos, lyrics trigger free association, interludes erupt seat-of-the-pants style. It’s made for many extremely dull, self-indulgent performances over the years, but when things do fall into place, as they did on 2000’s Chore of Enchantment, the delicate balance of Americana songcraft, poetic unpredictability, and musical telepathy is all the more satisfying....

The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union In his odd, powerful The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, Scottish playwright David Greig posits a similar dissonance in the human heart and mind. His primary example is a pair of Soviet cosmonauts who have been orbiting the earth for 12 years. Long since out of communication with the ground, Oleg and Casimir don’t know that the USSR has been dissolved, much less what’s become of anybody they loved there....

Hiking With Johnny Appleseed, Theatre-Hikes, at North Park Village Nature Center and Washington Park. There’s much worth learning about the man behind the folklore: adapter-director Lara Filip’s 100-minute musical tribute, performed as a “theater hike” through assorted nature preserves, re-creates with love and imagination Johnny Appleseed’s inspirational life. Did you know that some of the apple trees John Chapman planted 150 years ago are still bearing fruit? Or that even before he died of exposure in 1845, at the age of 69, he’d become a living legend, notorious for going barefoot, wearing a pot on his head, and never using a gun?...

For the past few months Mark Thomas, owner of the Alley on Belmont, has been attacking the same neighborhood business organization he spent years building up, the Central Lake View Merchants Association. He claims it’s become an “insiders’ club with no sense of how to spend all the money it raises.” At 49, he looks like the aging hippie he is, with his baggy shirts and pants and his hair in a ponytail....

When Mike Jones was still a kid, he had a chance to ask the peerless Oscar Peterson how he too might become a great jazz pianist; Peterson told him to go to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Jones did, and one night classmate Diana Krall dragged him to a local hotel to hear another distinctive keyboardist, Dave McKenna. From these two models, Jones fashioned a hybrid piano style that’s among the most technically accomplished in jazz history....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September police in Irvine, California, told the Los Angeles Times they were stunned by the rampant abuse of handicapped parking placards uncovered during a recent crackdown. Highlights: A teenager used her grandmother’s placard to park at a Weezer concert three months after the old woman’s death, then tried to persuade an officer that she was her grandmother (“So you’re 80 years old?...

Joseph Standing Bear, one of Illinois’ most visible activists on Native American issues, vividly remembers a TV documentary he watched as a teenager about the federal government’s Indian schools. The schools were set up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to teach academic subjects and the ways of white society to Native American children, many of whom had been removed involuntarily from their parents’ homes. “The students had all had their hair cut short and couldn’t speak their own language,” he says....

I am a 21-year-old college student, sharing an apartment with a guy who’s been my best friend for a long time. We get along well and are very compatible roommates, but an incident two weeks ago has jeopardized all that. When you’re sharing an apartment, overhearing your roommate getting laid is unavoidable. The roommate who isn’t getting laid walks down the hall to the bathroom, and as he passes the door to the room of the roommate who is getting laid he hears a groan or a grunt or a thud or a slap....

For crying out loud! What the fuck is wrong with people?! What the fuck is going on when someone wants noxious gas sprayed in their face for sexual pleasure? For the love of god, what the fuck is going on when a man wants to consume feces? And finally, AGOG, I hope my normal readers are able to enjoy their sex lives despite the knowledge that there are shit eaters and fart sniffers out there–and there always will be....

Robert Frank: What Am I Looking At Frank’s photographs of political events and celebrations clarify this theme. In the late 50s, America was still awash in patriotism. The United States had withstood the Depression, vanquished its enemies during World War II, and helped reconstruct Europe. One of the reasons Frank’s book was so widely criticized was that it portrayed America’s self-idealization as fantasy. Take Fourth of July, New York. The setting is an Independence Day picnic, where two young girls stride toward a giant, tattered American flag hanging like a curtain in the middle of the frame....

JOAN OF ARC 3/15, FIRESIDE BOWL Indie savant Tim Kinsella is prolific as all get-out–but so much of his work is diverting instead of exciting that I’m tempted to accuse him of the musical equivalent of spamming. Sometimes persistence pays off, though–So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness (Jade Tree), the first Joan of Arc album since Kinsella got busy with the Owls and Friend/Enemy, is without a doubt his best work yet....

Illinois schools are underfunded, but Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn has a solution–soak the rich, though he and his aides prefer to call it a Robin Hood solution. Quinn, a Democrat, wants to double income taxes on the state’s wealthiest taxpayers and use the money to finance schools and to offer a property-tax rebate. “There’s a principle as old as the Bible–taxes should be based on the ability to pay them,” he says....

Just read the column on your Web site about the nine Eskimo words for snow, in which you encourage the idea that Eskimos have an unusually large number of terms for snow and ice. You’d better read the title essay in Geoffrey Pullum’s book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991). Ah, jeez, Marie. Does this mean our date is off? I confess that in my column on Eskimo words for snow I was–I know this will shatter the image many of you have of me–screwing around....

The Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s annual showcase of emerging talent–running Friday-Sunday, August 15-17–features a slew of local fringe ensembles and solo artists. Founded in 1989 to honor the late anarchist author of Woodstock Nation and to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, this performance marathon offers a steady flow of entertainment while seeking to foster a communal spirit among performers and audience (which may be enhanced by sleep deprivation)....

At the end of 2002, Edith Frost all but vanished from the music world. In six years she’d put out three albums, two singles, and an EP of sad, dreamy folk pop, and the last of those releases, the 2001 full-length Wonder Wonder (Drag City), sold roughly 15,000 copies–more than any of the others. But after finishing a European tour to promote it, Frost abruptly stopped playing shows. She stopped writing songs, stopped recording, and hardly even touched her guitar....

Back to the Futurists Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Later this year the label, which Prater runs in cooperation with an Italian partner, Filippo Salvadori, will release a compilation of hard-to-find early Italian futurist sound and writing by artists like Russolo, F.T. Marinetti, Francesco Balilla Pratella, and Silvio Mix, among others. Ampersand has also reissued six experimental-music titles originally released by the Italian imprints Cramps and Multhipla, including albums by legendary British guitarist Derek Bailey, composer John Cage, and the great Italian improv unit Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, which featured trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and composer Ennio Morricone, best known for his sound tracks to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns....

Fifth of July, Griffin Theatre Company. Few plays reveal decency in action the way this Lanford Wilson drama does. Lovingly crafted, it’s a group portrait of former 60s crusaders coping with the materialistic shift of the late 1970s, as three generations of the Talley family assemble for a Fourth of July reunion. Now 64, Sally (whose unlikely wartime romance with Matt Friedman drives the plot of Wilson’s Talley’s Folly) has returned to the family farm in Lebanon, Missouri, to dispose of Matt’s ashes....