I’m always hearing it tossed around as fact that women are paid less than men for the same work. Most folks seem to treat this as common knowledge. Seems, then, that the smart thing for businesses to do would be to hire women exclusively. So, is it a bunch of hooey? –RevMarTye, Houston, TX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you want to be literal about it, yes, it’s a bunch of hooey....

Maybe they hope some mojo still clings to this name, which once belonged to bands that eventually became the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground. Maybe some does. Last year this large group led by Bobby Hecksher (a Brian Jonestown Massacre veteran who played guitar on Beck’s Stereopathetic Soulmanure) released its first LP, Rise and Fall (Bomp), a mesmerizing surprise of a trance-rock record that effortlessly picked up the Spacemen 3 torch so many have strained to catch....

Bearing in mind Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, this astonishing 230-minute epic by Edward Yang (1991), set over one Taipei school year in the early 60s, would fully warrant the subtitle “A Taiwanese Tragedy.” A powerful statement from Yang’s generation about what it means to be Taiwanese, superior even to his recent masterpiece Yi Yi, it has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other 90s film (a richness only partially apparent in its three-hour version)....

So-Called Repetition In the intervening 40 years, split-screen video has become a commonplace, but the wonder of that first encounter came back as I watched Esther Palmer’s video backdrop to So-Called Repetition, Molly Shanahan’s exceptional new work. The video shows a series of windows with a different dancer and single chair projected in each. It soon becomes apparent that the windows are those that run across one wall of the Link’s Hall studio, where the performance is taking place, and that the dancers’ chairs are actually a single chair, the original of which sits onstage....

In 1987 New York composers Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang launched the Bang on a Can Festival to showcase the bounty of new music that was getting lost in the gap between uptown classical orthodoxy and downtown improvisation. It was a fertile idea that’s since given birth to a record label (Cantaloupe Music), an annual summer workshop, regular year-round concert presentations, a house orchestra, and a more portable ensemble of festival regulars called the Bang on a Can All-Stars....

Growing up in Mississippi, Claire Holley’s tastes ran toward singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman. While attending college at Wheaton in the early 90s, she began to perform her own songs on the Chicago folk circuit, debuting on open-mike night at No Exit. She returned to the south to launch a recording career, releasing her first two discs, Night Air (1997) and Sanctuary (1999), herself. Last year she signed with Yep Roc, out of Chapel Hill, and the resulting CD, Claire Holley, propelled her to national recognition....

Since May, nearly 1,000 visitors to the Chicago Cultural Center have plunked down $5 to use a rehabbed cigarette vending machine in a corner near the gift shop. Patrons of the squat, faux-wood-paneled machine drop a brass token into the coin slot and pull one of its 22 Lucite knobs. Above each knob, where there would traditionally be a placard for Camel or Parliament, is a small square with an artist’s name, a title or description, and an image....

Thirtysomethings met Dave Frishberg while watching Schoolhouse Rock, for which he wrote a clever introduction to the legislative process, “I’m Just a Bill.” But their hipper parents and older siblings already knew Frishberg’s quirky lyrics from tunes like “Blizzard of Lies” (a hilarious catalog of the outright falsehoods we tell every day), “My Attorney Bernie” (a sharp stick in the eye to legal eagles), and “Peel Me a Grape” (a funny tribute to blase privilege)....

International Pop Overthrow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his fifth visit to Chicago, in early 2000, he was detained for a few hours at customs, and realized he wouldn’t be able to pass as a mere tourist much longer. “If they get the feeling that you’re spending more time there than at home, and if they can make an argument that you’re living here, they reserve the right to kick you out,” he says....

These suave, soulful ghost hunters haven’t learned many new tricks since the release of Turn On the Bright Lights in 2002, but they’ve gone a long way toward mastering the old ones. Almost every track on Antics (Matador), their brand-new second album, captures the incandescent image of an apparition equal parts Ian Curtis, Psychedelic Furs, and Echo & the Bunnymen–a specter whose likeness only flickered here and there about the first....

Until September 11, it looked like 2001 was going to be a banner year for Arabic pop in the United States. A new album by Algerian singer Cheb Mami was positioned to exploit his cameo on Sting’s hit “Desert Rose.” Mondo Melodia–the world music imprint of Ark 21 Records, owned and operated by former Police manager Miles Copeland–was throwing unprecedented amounts of money and time into releases by Mami, Rachid Taha, Kazem Al Saher, Amina, Faudel, Ragheb Alama, and Simon Shaheen....

Khan, born Can Oral (for real), has by his own admission lived a “hedonistic, fucked-up, self-centered lifestyle” that’s taken him from Germany to New York to Mexico and produced a discography that’s almost as well traveled as he is. In the last 20 years, he’s made recordings that range from lo-fi noise to more highbrow electronic collaborations with Jimi Tenor, his real-life brother Jammin’ Unit, and Jorg Burger, among other weirdos, and worked under a telephone book’s worth of pseudonyms–4E, H....

We had the money. To be exact, we had—my friend Zoe and I—somewhere on the far side of $1,000 to do with as we wished. That might not seem much by new economy terms, but we were an old economy pair. For five years we’d spent our spare cash on a project, a magazine, that, while personally satisfying, on its best days only tentatively wobbled toward self-sufficiency. Last year we pulled the plug, and now we were pleasantly surprised to see our labor trickle back to us in the form of a four-digit bank balance....

Soul of a Whore Soul of a Whore, which grew in part out of a Rolling Stone article Johnson wrote in 2000 about capital punishment in Texas, is a messy work. And Whitney Blakemore’s Viaduct Theater staging doesn’t tease out all the strands in this nearly three-hour voyage of the damned. While it’s not essential to have seen or read the first two plays–Hellhound on My Trail and Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames, which also premiered locally at Viaduct under Blakemore’s direction–it certainly makes parts of the plot more comprehensible....

Jazz drummers rarely play together. This is not an entirely bad thing, given the way dual-drummer setups have been abused. In the 1950s drummers might square off in (un)pitched battles–a chance for Buddy Rich to try to deafen Gene Krupa or Max Roach, say. By the 70s a real drummer was likely to be obstructed by a junior percussionist armed with chime racks, bell trees, and other fusion-era crud. But the right drummers can weave a polyrhythmic web around one another without bumping heads....

David Pyle is a public school teacher who lives in Pilsen, works on the west side, and has biked all over town for years without a problem. Until last Wednesday, when his bike was snatched from a heavily policed corner of Columbus Drive, apparently by the city. About three hours later he returned to find that his bicycle–a Fuji mountain bike–was gone. “It had vanished,” he says, “along with the lock....

September 11 It was probably inevitable that the terrorist attacks of September 11 were immediately seen as a blow against America rather than as crimes committed against humanity, the world community, or even just the people, many of whom were not American, who happened to be occupying three particular buildings. We deduced from the reported beliefs and intentions of the terrorists that America and what it represented to them was the desired target....

WHITE SUIT SCIENCE | By turns satiric, surreal, and painfully sincere, Shawn Reddy’s new play defies easy description. The hour-long piece begins as a discussion of Mark Twain and the myriad way his memory has been cheapened, particularly by impersonator Hal Holbrook and Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. But soon enough, under the guise of comedy, Reddy and his ensemble of deconstruction workers (Joe Binder, Jesse Fisher, Rick Lazarus, and Beau O’Reilly) engage in a fascinating postmodern analysis of whiteness, especially white suits in popular culture, and the ongoing whitewashing of history....

Twenty-six years ago, Reynaldo and Nell Garcia set out to create a gathering place for Chicago’s growing Filipino population. They had no restaurant experience–Reynaldo was working as a chemist, Nell as a nurse–but they believed their fellow expats would appreciate a place where they could relax with friends and enjoy some native dishes. The Garcias named their venture Little Quiapo, after a historic district in their hometown, Manila. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

They don’t have Q ratings in jazz, and even if they did, New York pianist and composer David Berkman wouldn’t score very high, despite the critical acclaim that met his first two albums (including several year-end best-of lists). Why? His compositions are cerebral, certainly: their splendidly crafted harmonies and form reveal subtly original thinking on his part and invite the same from his soloists. But Berkman goes way beyond theoretical constructs, turning his ideas into lyrical melodies and eminently likable tunes that should please even those who don’t know a diminished chord from a turnaround....