Dear editor, I am currently a resident at Ragdale. My experiences during both this residency and one last year prove that Gina Frangello’s attack on Ragdale published last week [“Room With No View,” November 15] is not only undeserved but also inaccurate. Contrary to what Ms. Frangello says, Ragdale staff members are professional, friendly, and helpful. They are people who focus their efforts on providing an invaluable resource to artists and writers seeking to produce work....

Toting such a pretentious name would certainly lead me to believe that Michaelangelo Matos would be schooled in the music he or she writes of (“A Couple of Live Ones,” February 2). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “notorious” Lou Reed Live album from 1975 has no dialogue at all. The writer is, in ostentatious musicoliterary cluelessness, referring to 1978’s Take No Prisoners....

Genesis 19, the story of the salvation of Lot from the fire and brimstone rained down by the Lord upon Sodom and Gomorrah, has long been a cornerstone of conservative arguments against homosexuality. God despised the sexual immorality of the wicked citizenry, runs the refrain, and thus destroyed them all, sparing only the righteous. But the end of the tale, in which Lot’s two daughters, hiding out with their father in a mountain cave, get him drunk, sleep with him, and wind up pregnant, muddies the waters a bit....

A classic premise of film noir–a virtuous woman drawn to a man with a shady past–gets a postfeminist update in this carefully scripted French thriller by Jacques Audiard. A mousy, hearing-impaired secretary (Emmanuelle Devos), abused by the men at work and envious of a friend’s sexual adventures, hires a soulful ex-convict (Vincent Cassel) as her assistant, and he proves as useful to her as she does to him. To their credit, Audiard and coscreenwriter Tonino Benacquista present her gradual corruption not as a source of peril but as a personal liberation, and while the intimate relationship at the center of the film approximates romantic love, it’s defined less by affection than by the characters’ complementary skills and needs....

Chicago-born Budd Boetticher, who died last November at 85, directed mostly B pictures and television, but as the Film Center’s current retrospective proves, he developed an austere yet graceful style perfectly suited to his stoic worldview and shrewd psychological insight. In this taut 1956 noir a meek, bespectacled ex-GI (Wendell Corey in a memorably creepy performance) masterminds a bank holdup, but the police track him down immediately. After his wife is accidentally gunned down by a cop (Joseph Cotten) he vows to avenge her death by killing the cop’s wife (Rhonda Fleming, unconvincing in her glamour-puss getups)....

They Took Us There Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pops Staples left Winona, Mississippi, to work in the Chicago stockyards in the 30s, but by the end of the next decade he’d formed a gospel group with three of his children, who were between the ages of 11 and 15. The Stapleses would become one of the music’s best-selling and most innovative acts, recording for seminal (and secular) labels like Vee-Jay, Riverside, Epic, Stax, and Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom....

Friday 2/8 – Thursday 2/14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The images of blossoming plant life on display in Steppenwolf Theatre’s second-floor gallery, 1650 N. Halsted, aren’t all roses, but the exhibit is called Bed of Roses to complement the many rose garden scenes in Steppenwolf’s main stage production of Maria Arndt, a mother-daughter drama. Featured works include photographs by Reader contributor Jim Newberry, prints by David Solzman and Sandra Frank, Erica Erdmann’s screen prints and etchings, and Carrie Notari’s painted glass jars full of seeds, dirt, and photographs of poppies....

It looks like a party for supersize time travelers: Abraham Lincoln, eleven feet tall, raises his arm sternly, as if to emphasize a point, while a nine-foot-tall Senator Stephen Douglas, hand on his hip, scowls. At his elbow is a thoughtful ten-foot Dr. W.W. Mayo; at a diminutive eight feet, Mother Alfred Moes, the nun who persuaded him and his sons to staff what would become the Mayo Clinic, looks on serenely....

Dan Sullivan’s first performance at the Mental Graffiti open mike was on April 7, 2003–the day he turned 21 and thus the first night Funky Buddha Lounge would let him in. Host Krystal Ashe knew him from the all-ages slam scene–he’d won the 2002 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award–and scheduled him to perform at the beginning and at the end, right before the evening’s featured poet. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Michael Miner In the publishing trade, a good piece of the conventional wisdom about the AM News is that each week gallant journalists put out a magazine so scrupulous that AMA executives despised it. AM News reporters have not been known to discourage this vision of their labors, and I’ve heard enough testimony over the years to suppose that it’s largely true. Lundberg speaks on the subject with imposing authority but no semblance of disinterest....

Until a couple years ago, Jason Roebke had a fadeaway problem. He’d be thwacking along in the thick of the action, then abruptly drift off into private, whispered consultation with his bass. But his improvised showdowns with various partners at last summer’s Vancouver Jazz Festival appear to have been a watershed, and Tigersmilk (Family Vineyard), a new disc recorded in 2001 with Vanc drummer Dylan van der Schyff and Chicago Underground cornetist Rob Mazurek, shows a heightened presence and confidence: he gets a plosive jazz attack when he wants to and a fat writhing tone once the string is set vibrating....

Five years ago Jim Lauderdale–one of the most singular melodic minds in country music–signed with RCA, no doubt hoping that his fifth label in seven years might open some doors. He’d already achieved a different sort of success, as a top Nashville songwriter who’d penned material for the likes of George Strait, Patty Loveless, and Mark Chesnutt, but it had never translated into broader success as a performer. Lauderdale went on to cut two fine albums for the label, all the while piling up more hits as a songwriter, but even after he sanded away the eclectic tendencies that fatally distinguished his 1994 classic Pretty Close to the Truth (Atlantic), they still failed to advance his cause....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I took several extra copies of the Reader article on the Peotone airport boondoggle [“Runway Inflation,” March 15] to the March 20 meeting of the Intermodal Advisory Task Force of the Chicago Area Transportation Study, where a variety of interested parties explore freight transportation problems of the region and seek solutions. As we introduced ourselves and reported recent news snippets, I made the extra copies available and said this is just the sort of boondoggling in transportation I am against, also that author [Robert] Heuer met named source Jay Franke at our previous meeting....

When I saw the reunited Soft Boys for the first time, at South by Southwest in March, I was neither blown away nor disappointed–and then I wondered how that happened. When you’re seeing a legend, doesn’t it have to be one or the other? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet despite rock ‘n’ roll’s seemingly endless capacity for making myths about itself, there aren’t too many about this phase in a band’s lifespan....

Dear Ted Shen: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second, you state that my film contains “images of children convulsing from exposure to nerve gas.” Never in my film is a definite statement made as to the nature of the gas used by the IDF. The assumption that the gas was “nerve gas” is yours, and yours alone. I personally do not assume that the gas used was “nerve gas”–as nerve gas (defined generally as organophosphorus-based gases such as Soman, Sarin, VX, and Tabun) will almost certainly cause at least some fatalities even when improperly prepared, such as in the Tokyo subway Sarin attack....

If you want to troll a depressing gay bar, head to Andersonville, where video screens showing blurry, joyless porn are a dime a dozen and neon beer signs featuring the gay rainbow hang against acres of black-painted plywood. The boy bins on Halsted near Belmont are less inviting still, with their polished brass and genteel prices. But Big Chicks at Argyle and Sheridan–a refurbished art deco storefront where a sign behind the vintage bar gives a definition of the German word gemutlichkeit (“an agreeable, cheerful, cozy feeling; a sense of well-being”)–looks like a house party that moved into an art gallery....

In an interview from the mid-90s, Chicago-based sound artist Nicolas Collins summed up his MO like so: “In a nutshell, everything I do has to do with sticking something into a machine and watching it come out different at the other end.” In the late 80s Collins designed the gadget he’s best known for–a trombone rigged as a processor, with inputs for other instruments and electronics. A small keyboard controlled the signal, and a speaker attached to the mouthpiece directed the sound into the horn so he could manipulate it further using the slide....

Geoffrey Bates, the curator of this show of five Illinoisans, says their works “shun the glib irony that typifies much recent contemporary art.” Most of these intriguing sculptures and installations–from Yvette Kaiser Smith’s over-the-top resin sculptures to Michael Ferris Jr.’s geometrically patterned busts–serve as a reminder that a lack of irony doesn’t have to mean a lack of humor. Lucy Slivinski’s sculptures made of discarded materials are standouts, with a powerful presence but no signature style....

Out of Fashion By the time Nana Sullivan was looking for a new store manager in 1994, Toshiro had expanded into the second and third floors, adding antiques and home accessories. Sullivan hired Moran, who’d been managing the Niedermaier furniture store at 900 N. Michigan. Three months later, tired of running the business and going through a divorce, the Sullivans sold Moran the store. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Soprano Patrice Michaels commands a pliant, luminous voice and a repertoire that stretches from Henry Purcell to Dominick Argento–she’s one of only a handful of vocalists in town who’ve collected checks from both Music of the Baroque and contemporary chamber groups. Her current program, “The Divas of Mozart’s Day,” premieres on Sunday and will be recorded soon after for local label Cedille, which has already released ten Michaels CDs. She’ll assume the personae of five historical singers–Katharina Cavalieri, Nancy Storace, Luisa Laschi-Mombelli, Adriana Ferrarese, and Louise Villeneuve–each of whom was in the prime of her career in Vienna in the 1780s....