The votes are in. They’ve been counted, recounted, and…actually, I’m going resist making the stock Florida/hanging-chad/Republican-coup jokes. After all, this is serious business: What term, from this day forward, will be the commonly accepted slang for a woman fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on dildo? Three candidates stood in this election: “bob,” derived from Bend Over Boyfriend, a popular series of how-to-fuck-your-man-in-the-ass videos; “punt,” for kicking the ball to the other team; and “peg,” after a device once used to, uh, keep the butts of some very unlucky boys gaping open....

About four years ago work crews came to Lincoln Park, fenced off the lakefront, and started ripping out the limestone at the edge of the lake. It was the first phase of the much vaunted $300-million project that’s supposed to protect about eight miles of the shoreline from erosion by replacing the old rocks at the water’s edge with long stretches of concrete. “I suppose they thought they were doing us all a favor,” says Bob Clarke, president of the South East Lake View Neighbors....

Regret was the main theme of Sarge’s first two albums, 1996’s Charcoal and 1998’s The Glass Intact; the latter found front woman Elizabeth Elmore wishing she’d hooked up with a girl she met at a punk show in Madison (“Fast Girls”) and lamenting in “Stall” that “I’m not the angel that he wishes I could be.” (“I’ve been with lots of boys / And they screwed me up so I learned to lie,” she explains in the same song....

Brian-Mark likes octopus, baked chicken, and macaroni and cheese. Given the choice of going to a gay bar or attending the opera, he’ll take Aida over Abba. His favorite color is purple, and he’s crazy about ornithology. His taste in reading runs toward novelists from the 20s and 30s–Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Edna Ferber. More than anything, though, he loves fucking on film, barebacking on film, jacking off on film, sucking cock on film....

Vance Gilbert was a jazz singer before he decided to adjust his style and hit the Boston singer-songwriter circuit in the early 90s. There he caught the attention of Shawn Colvin, who invited him onto her tour as an opening act; three well-received CDs on the Philo label followed. His latest disc, last year’s One Thru Fourteen (Louisiana Red Hot), showcases his deft classically influenced guitar technique, his facility with pop-folk melodies, and his supple vocal delivery....

Recent issues of American Theatre magazine have been chockablock with debate about the role of hip-hop in contemporary theater. But Cleetus Friedman’s new autobiographical solo piece doesn’t break any new ground. Instead this Eyes Po production feels like a throwback to the solo boom of the early 90s, when dozens of performers decided that their coming-of-age stories warranted an audience’s attention and money. A disaffected Jewish child of divorce in a Baltimore suburb who discovers his voice through hip-hop, Friedman tells a tale that simply isn’t novel enough to hold our interest....

Salt Creek Ballet, the west-suburban outpost of classical dance, has seasoned its cast of more than 100 local performers with a few guest stars and a member of the family for its 17th annual production of The Nutcracker. The ballet opens this weekend in Hinsdale and plays subsequent Saturdays in Aurora and University Park. Directors Sergey Kozadayev and Zhanna Dubrovskaya cast their son Alexander Kozadayev as the Cavalier and Salt Creek alum Katherine Bruno as the Sugar Plum Fairy for the first three performances....

Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara began his musical education at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, but on a recommendation from that school’s namesake, he went on to study at Juilliard and with Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions. Afterward Rautavaara signed on with the European avant-garde, embracing its de rigueur leftism. His first opera, which paid tribute to the 1956 Hungarian uprising, was appropriately sharp and dissonant, while a later opera combined Mozartean classicism with a Kurt Weillish mix of sardonic ballads and jazz riffs....

For her new exhibition, “Feather-stitch,” Dani Leventhal has an unusual collaborator: her cat. At 1:30 each day for the run of the exhibit, which opens Tuesday, August 26, Leventhal will meticulously dissect one of 22 songbirds killed by her cat over the last year and preserved in the artist’s freezer. “It’s a process that’s done with meaning,” she says. “I’m trying to extend the life of this bird, because I feel sort of responsible for this premature death that’s happened....

It’s official: Springing for hummus and a chicken kebab at Andie’s does more for the city’s fortunes than spending the same money at Olive Garden. Or so says a just-released study commissioned by local business groups in rapidly gentrifying Andersonville, who hope the results will push local policy makers–and consumers–to support locally owned businesses like the ones that pack the neighborhood’s thriving Clark Street strip. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Denyce Graves Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves has portrayed more than 20 operatic heroines, delivered art-song recitals, and sung concert performances of heavyweight works like the Stabat Maters of Rossini and Dvorak, but she’s most widely celebrated as a femme fatale, defining for the current generation the title roles of Bizet’s Carmen and Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila. She’s running the risk of being typecast, but she’s got the persona down pat: she plays her temptresses with fiery passion and regal hauteur, and her earthy, sensual voice can melt hearts as well as ensnare them....

In most free improvisation, familiar tricks and phrases generally reappear no matter how gifted the performer, but Dror Feiler seems determined to leap into the void every time he steps onstage. The Israeli-born composer, improviser, and reedist, who’s lived in Sweden since 1973, has repeatedly written that chaos and disruptiveness are essential to his work; he strives to create a space where both performer and listener aren’t sure what’s happening or what will happen next....

Late last year the NEA gave HotHouse a grant of $10,000 to commission new works by three Chicago musicians; a series of premieres this weekend for the Innovative Composers Project will reveal what came of it. Of the three composers, reedist Ed Wilkerson is the most accomplished–he’s best known for the witty, novel, and complex writing he does for his octet 8 Bold Souls–and much of the preconcert buzz surrounds his jazz opera about Harold Washington, Harold in Chicago, which he’ll present Friday night as a work in progress....

Film festivals are a lot like travel, in that they can greatly enhance our sense of the world as a diverse yet interactive community in a relatively short time. But I’ve just returned from a spate of actual travel (some of it film-related, some of it not) during which it became more apparent to me than ever that this community is livid about the direction Bush’s so-called war on terrorism is taking–and this is already starting to have an impact on the important cultural exchanges that the festivals foster....

Next week, 42-year-old drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts will release Bar Talk (Sony), only his second album as a bandleader in a career that spans nearly 20 years. This slim discography notwithstanding, during that time he’s been one of the busiest drummers in jazz, appearing on more than a hundred recordings with such leaders as Michael Brecker, Ravi Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and two of the Marsalis brothers (Wynton and then Branford, whom he followed to the Tonight Show band)....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oregon’s budget is under such strain that some of the state’s public schools were forced to end their academic years early, and lawmakers are cutting corners wherever they can. In April a prison doctor declared death-row inmate Horacio Reyes-Camarena a good candidate for a kidney transplant, a $100,000 procedure that would eliminate the even greater expense of his dialysis–$120,000 a year until his execution, which may be delayed by appeals for a decade....

Bobbing their hair, smoking in public, and going on unchaperoned dates weren’t the only ways in which liberated women of the 1920s were acting like men. They also were binding their chests, “because they wanted to have that boyish figure,” says Tim Long, manager of the Chicago Historical Society’s Hope B. McCormick Costume Center. So in order to properly display clothes from the collection’s extensive Jazz Age holdings for the exhibit “Fashion, Flappers ‘n All That Jazz,” Long and his colleagues had to take some drastic measures with the mannequins....

This year’s Cubs are a breed apart. They’re different from the Cubs of the past–even the relatively successful Cubs of 1984, ’89, and ’98–in that they’re less lovable but more steely and determined. That attitude is epitomized by Mark Prior, who established himself as the team’s ace in the second half of the season by going 10-1 with a 1.52 earned run average. That was after spending three weeks on the disabled list because of a July collision with Atlanta Braves second baseman Marcus Giles in a baserunning gaffe at Wrigley Field....

Underground Zero Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet we all have a right to process the trauma in our own way, with or without trained specialists standing by, and the testimony of individuals has been showcased over and over. Recently CBS aired The First 24 Hours, and HBO weighed in with In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01, which drew upon video from 16 news organizations and 118 freelancers and amateurs....

Gustave Flaubert’s speciality was presenting small subjects in ironic, often ambiguous terms. His 1877 short story “A Simple Heart,” about a pious servant girl entirely devoted to the family she serves, suggests that we both admire her faith and question her sanity. The dance-theater version of the work by New York-based Big Dance Theater deftly does the same, presenting images whose narrative import is clear but whose emotional meaning is slippery....