By Jeffrey Felshman They run the tune again, everyone trying to play fewer notes, and Bloom is a study in concentration. His hair swirls around his bald spot, he cocks his head at various angles, as if trying to tune in a frequency. “OK,” he says when they’re done. “How’d that work for you?” The bass player nods. “Where there’s a lack of constraint, there can be chaos. That’s one of the age-old complaints civilians have of jazz....

Just Playing Me, Cornservatory. Billed as a parody of one-woman shows, this self-indulgent, tedious piece displays none of Corn Productions’ usual campy glee or biting satire. Instead we get Jereme Cullens (P.J. Jenkinson), a former matricidal child star turned B-movie bombshell, punk princess, and successful Christian pop singer. Surrounded by four flamingly gay dancers (with their pouts and poses, Patrick Brooks, Kyle-Jason Schwartz, Joe Urso, and Michael Brandon are the show’s highlight), Jereme tells us the story of her awful life in banal songs....

On the front of her new album, Blacklisted (Bloodshot), Neko Case is pictured lying under her van, which is crammed with her belongings–a chest of drawers, a mattress, paintings. In real life Case has loaded up her van quite often over the years, logging time in Vancouver and Seattle before Chicago, and the songs here suggest that her spirit, at least, is still wandering: she celebrates various states of exile on “Outro With Bees” (“So it’s better my sweet / That we hover like bees / ‘Cause there’s no sure footing / No love I believe”) and “I Wish I Was the Moon” (“God blessed me, I’m a free man / With no place free to go”)....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Toronto’s National Post reported in August on the executive seminars offered by the local firm Case Solutions, which cost over $12,000 and encourage clients to use specialized Lego blocks to build metaphorical representations of their companies’ strengths and weaknesses. One executive, intending to portray himself as a multitasker, built an octopus wearing a hard hat and holding a skeleton; according to the Post, the skeleton symbolized “problems from the past” and the hard hat “his tendency to protect himself from sales quotas....

Your recent column about gay “bug chasers” was booooring. No one cares if gay guys want to infect themselves with AIDS! While you may be gay, most of your readers are not. Write about straight problems! Don’t spend so much time writing about booooring gay shit! –Ta Ha & Straight Edge Boy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But before we get to the gay shit, I need to get this out of the way....

Snow shovelers got off easy this year–until January 30. Our correspondent headed to Western Avenue, between 3200 and 3600 North, to report on the state of the sidewalks (surveyed Thursday, January 31, 2002): Bridgestone tire. Fair. They forgot to do the corners. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Party City and Kinko’s. Good. The sidewalk in front of Kinko’s is nicely done but as you go south the walk hasn’t been touched....

The Cubs turned their season toward the home stretch earlier this month with a Tuesday-night game against the first-place Houston Astros. Up to then the Cubs had done an admirable job of simply staying in the National League Central Division race, especially with pitching ace Mark Prior on the disabled list, recovering from the bumped shoulder he suffered in a baserunning gaffe in mid-July. They briefly drifted below .500 a couple of times, falling a season-high five and a half games out of first following a two-game series sweep at the hands of the Philadelphia Phillies in late July....

Dinner With Friends Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dinner With Friends shows how the collapse of Beth and Tom’s marriage affects Karen and Gabe’s. It’s true that couples become invested in each other’s success and are hurt–and often enraged–by the news of failure. A cynic might suggest there’s a gigantic conspiracy to pretend marriages can work. But more likely the anger is a way of expressing fear: how will I stand it if this painful thing happens to me?...

Rock, Pop, etc. ALLOY ORCHESTRA accompanies the silent film The Lost World (DVD restoration will be shown); free admission. Tue 10/23, 7 PM, Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. COULD IT BE MAGIC? THE BARRY MANILOW SONGBOOK Five cast members and a six-piece band perform a musical tribute to Barry Manilow. Fridays, 8 PM, Saturdays, 6 and 9 PM, Sundays, 3 and 7 PM, and Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 PM, Mercury Theater, 3745 N....

It’s always a nice surprise to find an appealing neighborhood bar and a menu that’s a cut above average, especially when they’re in the same place. Brothers Alexander and Nikola Samardzija have taken over the corner tavern operated by their Serbian grandmother for the past 27 years and turned it into XIPPO, a slick hideout where the upholstery is crushed red velvet, the music (acid jazz, hip-hop, house) is DJ-mixed, and the staff has a great personality....

Last year Chicago’s annual World Music Festival was clobbered by 9/11, as nearly two dozen acts–most of them major international artists–canceled their appearances. The fest has rebounded vigorously, with a lineup that’s at least as diverse as last year’s was supposed to be. But we’re not out of the woods yet. The 50-some acts on this year’s schedule cover a lot of geographical and cultural territory, but the most striking trend is the abundance of acts that bring together disparate genres or borrow from one or more foreign cultures....

Great pop may incorporate a host of influences, but at its best it buries them so deep they’re little more than haunting. Archer Prewitt’s third full-length, Three (Thrill Jockey), sets the Wayback Machine for the early 70s–there’s a little Steely Dan in the guitar on “When I’m With You,” as well as shades of the Kinks and Roy Harper and Brinsley Schwarz and the Velvet Underground throughout, but Three never sounds like pastiche....

Near the end of his life Italian horror maestro Mario Bava confessed to the magazine L’espresso, “In my entire career, I made only big bullshits, no doubt about that….I’m just a craftsman. A romantic craftsman….I made movies just like making chairs.” More often than not Bava’s tales are strangely sexual. In the marketplace his most important predecessor was Britain’s Hammer Films, which had stormed American theaters in the late 50s with gory and sexually suggestive remakes of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy....

After David Garrard Lowe’s Lost Chicago was published in 1975, people he’d never met began giving him photographs of long-gone buildings. Architect Bertrand Goldberg, whom Lowe had met when they appeared together on a talk show, “wrote me a letter and sent me a picture of a gas station and said, ‘This is something you should have had in your book,’” says Lowe, who grew up in Chicago and returns several times a year....

Renowned mentalist bends spoons and reads minds while sharing tales of his mysterious predecessors–genuine intuitives and successful fakes alike. Forgoing Vegas-style spectacle, Christopher Carter stands a few feet from the audience, giving us close-up views of pockets, sleeves, and other potential sleight of hand hiding places. He further disarms by acknowledging his imperfections, missing a few tricks and revealing some of his secrets. Then, out of nowhere, he correctly guesses an audience member’s phone number and shoe size....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though it makes for a more colorful story, this should not have been about two developers, in a love triangle with the alderman, getting macho over a couple of lots in Bucktown. That belongs in News of the Weird. What should concern us is something never even mentioned in the article: this very year, for the first time in 45 years, Chicago’s famous zoning law is being rewritten from scratch, top to bottom....

There are several theories about what happened to Michael Jansson outside Biology Bar in the early hours of Friday, March 9. No one–not his parents, his friends, the bouncers at the club, or the police–can agree on any of them. This much can be said with certainty: that night Jansson, a skinny 21-year-old from Lincolnwood, went to a party at the nightclub hosted by Phunky Pharaohs, promoters of club events attended mostly by young South Asians....

Two years ago Joe Strummer, former front man for the legendary punk band the Clash, pulled off one of the most unexpected–and welcome–rock comebacks in recent memory, assembling a backing band of young guns, recording the excellent Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, and quelling for the foreseeable future any misguided attempts to reunite his former group. That album was a bracing reminder that punk can have a more conscientious social agenda than giving the finger to everyone in sight; Lester Bangs put it best when he wrote that the Clash were righteous, meaning “you’re more or less on the side of the angels, waging Armageddon for the ultimate victory of the forces of Good over the Kingdom of Death....

Loren MazzaCane Connors Up in Flames They come on a handful of small labels; on CD, LP, and seven-inch vinyl; in solo, duo, trio, quartet arrangements, they seem to spring out of the air like thoughts. It’s as if Connors breathes through his guitar, generating records like most people produce carbon dioxide. Maybe he’s playing his guitar constantly and someone is simply following him around, recording. This theory has only been supported by the live performances I’ve seen....

Milly’s Orchid Show is that rare fringe crossover hit that has neither lost its hipster cachet nor gotten too big for its britches. And Milly May Smithy certainly could have gone uptown long ago. Not only does she routinely sell out big houses like the Park West (she was even invited to christen the glitzy new Goodman Theatre), she’s made a habit of including big-name acts in her homegrown hootenanny: Eric Bogosian, Robert Klein, Nora Dunn, Frank McCourt....