I used to come here every Sunday with the Chicago Women’s Rugby Team. I don’t play for them, but I have friends that do. Star Gaze is not as intense as the Spin-Berlin tragically hip atmosphere. It’s a great neutral spot. We would come to check out the karaoke. My friends would urge me to get up to sing because I used to do theater, but I’m terrified onstage. One of my friends signed me up anyway....

The work of Olivia Block plays with or even erases the distinctions between kinds of sound: natural and man-made, acoustic and electronic, musical and incidental. The Texas native, who’s lived in Chicago for about five years, assembles her microscopically detailed pieces by processing rehearsal recordings of acoustic ensembles—shifting, muting, or panning certain pitches, looping and filtering, cutting and pasting—and blending the results with environmental sounds like rustling grass, rattling stones, and fluttering breezes....

A businessman with a hangdog face (Alain Delon) drinks too much beer on a train. “What will happen to him?” he asks aloud, then answers: “Absolutely nothing.” An affectless woman (Nathalie Baye) appears and tells him, “The story begins on a train.” A sexual encounter between them leaves him smitten. Begging her to use him “as a minor character,” he follows her home to the suburbs and installs himself in her easy chair to wallow in his infatuation and drink more beer, sometimes joining her friends and bathrobe-clad neighbors in parading from house to house....

Some ideas have a Platonic perfection, and a hip-hop Romeo and Juliet is one of them. Choreographer-director Rennie Harris not only came up with the concept but brilliantly realizes it in Rome & Jewels (though he acknowledges inspiration from a few other sources, notably the 40-year-old West Side Story). For this 90-minute piece Harris divides his dancers into two rival gangs, the break-dancing Monster Qs and hip-hop artists the Caps. Rome’s love interest, Jewels, never appears onstage; unlike Shakespeare’s play, this hip-hop “opera” is less about young love than it is about what it means to be a man in a culture that looks on love as weakness....

The 1977 movie that catapulted disco from urban subculture to mainstream trend has been turned into a big, splashy musical that satisfies on its own terpsichorean terms, though it fails to duplicate the film’s emotional intimacy. Faithfully following the screen story line, Saturday Night Fever focuses on Tony Manero, a working-class kid from Brooklyn whose dancing talent makes him the king of the neighborhood disco and offers him the only meaning in a “life goin’ nowhere....

I am an 18-year-old female dating a 19-year-old male, and we are both virgins. We met in a behavior modification program. We are now both home and dating, which we couldn’t do in the program. It’s my first committed relationship, and we’re in love. We want to have sex. My parents are fine with it, but his parents are devout Catholics who would be very upset. He wants to have sex anyway, but his parents pay the bills for him and he could be in big trouble if they find out....

Sick Transit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I sympathize with Carlos Clarke Drazen for her troubles with the CTA (“Killing Them With Kindness,” April 6) and I think that your headline writer was almost on target writing “The CTA’s improved access for the disabled may be just a smokescreen for deep service cuts.” I’d change “may be” to “probably is.” Have you ever noticed how many elevators are out of service in el stations on any given day?...

Before the election I’d already planned a trip to my wife’s parents’ place near Fort Lauderdale for mid-November. George Bush beat John Kerry in Florida by about 400,000 votes, a much larger margin than most polls had predicted. Closer contests, like the one in Ohio, had quickly prompted official recounts. The lopsided Florida loss hadn’t, but it was the one my in-laws and I had the most trouble stomaching. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

They Only Wanted to Help Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McFarlin has built sets, run lighting and sound, and stage-directed, so he understood the economies that could come from networking. “You wouldn’t believe how much lumber we’d be throwing away when we struck a set,” he says. “I thought we can get a prop and set exchange going, share resources, save money, and come up with something useful for everybody....

How to Teach Your Dog to Talk, Representative quote: “A slightly undershot bite, as found in Affenpinschers, Boxers and Brussels Griffons, is great for the difficult to duplicate ‘f’ sound.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Representative quote: “Like a head banger discussing Nirvana after Nevermind, I was one of those reverse snobs about [Dom Perignon]. The ’88 vintage, which was a little tough for my taste, tended to confirm my skepticism when it was first released....

DISMEMBERMENT PLAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Call the Dismemberment Plan “emo” in front of one of their die-hard fans and you’re bound to get an earful about how they’re different from all those other whiners. And to be sure, while Travis Morrison does sing in the same plainspoken yelp, sometimes over those same watery guitar atmospherics, as, say, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, his best moments are when he’s mocking or fighting his pain, not wallowing in it....

Set up an imbalanced ratio of artsy to fartsy and you risk sounding either pretentious or asinine. Get Hustle’s secret to success is their lineup, which seems so wrong it just has to be right: pianist Mac Mann and drummer Ron Avila used to be in Antioch Arrow, practitioners of white-belt, black-hair indie rock; organist Mark Evan Burden was in the trashy neo-no-wave outfit Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre; and then there’s Valentine Hussar, a mysterious and elaborately tattooed chanteuse who lives in a house across the street from a graveyard....

This month the Film Center is inaugurating a monthly “Music Movies” series, five programs that will play on Sundays and Thursdays. The focus in August is jazz films, and the programs include four classics I first saw years ago and four others I’ve just seen for the first time. The worst film in the bunch (Cannonball) happens to be the newest one, and the two most interesting (Cry of Jazz and Black and Tan) are the oldest, though I don’t see any particular trend in this....

By Ben Joravsky So Kratzer found a space a few blocks away and returned to Dayton to watch the show. He acknowledges that it wasn’t a massive operation–the signs covered just three or four spaces on either side of Gore’s friend’s house. “At about four the police came, and they started writing tickets,” he says. “Word got out that it was Gore who was coming. Apparently he knows someone on the block....

On November 9 Mayor Daley released his 2005 budget and declared that all Chicagoans would have to pay higher fees and taxes so the city, strapped in hard economic times, wouldn’t have to make huge service cuts. He didn’t mention that when it came to property taxes some Chicagoans were going to arbitrarily pay more than others. A computer systems analyst with a passion for public policy, Tripp did an extensive Internet search to figure out what various politicians are paying in property taxes....

RAJESH MEHTA & PAUL LOVENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trumpeter Rajesh Mehta was born in Calcutta, raised in New Jersey, and educated on both coasts, and since 1992 he’s been living in Europe. But it doesn’t do justice to his boldly original music to label it merely multicultural–multiexperiential is more like it. Mehta had already earned an engineering degree at MIT when he decided to study composition with Anthony Braxton at Mills College in California, and he incorporates a mystical fascination with math into his recent quintet record, Reconfigurations (Between the Lines), a three-part work based on a numerically derived graphic score....

After watching a few episodes of Mind of the Married Man on HBO, I thought I would go out and try to get a massage with a “happy ending.” I looked through the yellow pages and classified ads and found a massage “spa” in a neighboring town. Heart full of hope, I went to the spa, and found it to be encouragingly low budget and almost dingy–but clean. The Asian woman who greeted me (and who was the only worker in the place) asked if I would like a shower and massage....

Seeing Double Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McDonald says Pier Walk juror David Pagel was OK with the cloning, and no one at the Lincoln Park show objected either. So the clunky twins are a visual link between the pier’s international event, which wound up with 34 pieces this year, and the ten-piece neighborhood exhibit that started as its antidote. Launched by Alderman Vi Daley on the suggestion of General Iron president Marilyn Labkon and run out of Daley’s office, mostly by her assistant, Barbara Guttmann, the clumsily named Lincoln Park Community Art Initiative is a nonprofit organization that exists solely to produce the 43rd Ward’s annual show of Chicago-area artists....

SUICIDE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Noise Pop has made some great scores this year, but it’s interesting that two of the greatest had their heyday in New York in the 1970s–when, as in Chicago nowadays, the historic action was going on mostly in very small clubs. While Television offered elevation, Suicide, the duo of keyboardist Martin Rev and front man Alan Vega, specialized in friction: Rev built mesmerizing and oppressive bee-swarm hums of juvenile-delinquent minimalism while Vega chanted and howled and proclaimed and stammered in a style that drew a good deal on rockabilly....

Lately I’ve heard that cow milk is the “worst beverage on earth.” There are several Web sites about it like www.milksucks.com and www.notmilk.com and books that seem a little nutty but make some sensible arguments that I know to be grounded in truth, like (1) many people, including myself, lack the enzyme to digest milk; (2) cow milk is actually bad for cats; and (3) you don’t see people drinking rat milk or dog milk despite the fact that they too produce milk....