GORAN IVANOVIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I first heard 23-year-old classical guitarist Goran Ivanovic about a month ago at a Music in the Loft concert, where he played with a rapt intensity that made his lightweight selections–a few dances and a transcription of a Macedonian folk tune–feel as substantial as a Bach partita. I picked up his debut CD, Solo Guitar (Willow Records), not long after, and I’ve been listening to it regularly ever since....

In 1947 the great dramatists Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill sat down at their respective kitchen tables and each wrote a play called A Streetcar Named Desire. When they compared notes they discovered that not only were their titles identical, so were their plays. They flipped a coin, Williams won, and the O’Neill manuscript was tossed into the fireplace. On July 7, 1999, the weekly Tri-State Defender in Memphis published an article headlined “Poison in the System....

Four years ago, when George Hogland, Sean Doheny, and Pat Cummings invited 25 drinking chums to pile onto a bus and spend a day hunting for the best Irish bar on the south side of Chicago, they intended the excursion to be a cultural enterprise, not a vomit-inducing pub crawl. “We’ve got five or six guys here who’ve brought their sons out with them,” said Cummings. “It’s about heritage, it’s about tradition....

Two brothers–one a high school senior, the other an ex-con trying to go straight–struggle to keep their balance in the melting pot of Upper Manhattan’s Latino neighborhood in this impressive debut feature by writer-director Eric Eason. Scorsese’s Mean Streets has become the template for all such fraternal low-life dramas, and while this one lacks the earlier film’s narrative drive, Eason captures with graphic realism the male rivalry, manic tensions, and social aspirations of a New York ethnic enclave....

DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid Gold Teeth Thief Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spooky’s a gifted self-promoter–he’s probably the most famous-for-being-famous person in postdance culture–but he’s never done justice to the aesthetic he articulated so well on paper. His production work has been scattershot; like his most obvious forebear, Bill Laswell (both play bass, both are highly prolific, both tend to make music that reads better than it sounds), he’s at his best when he focuses instead of sprawling, as on 1998’s almost poppy Riddim Warfare....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between June and August, 34-year-old Jonathan Harris, an ex-con and high school dropout, acted as his own lawyer in three Philadelphia felony trials and won them all–even beating a murder charge that could have sent him to death row. (At press time he was also scheduled to defend himself in an unrelated 2001 firearms case.) The prosecutor from the murder trial blamed the verdict on unreliable witnesses and vowed to retry Harris on several lesser charges related to the crime; in response Harris taunted him, saying, “Are you sure you don’t want to quit while you’re ahead?...

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an August report from the Associated Press, several insurance companies in France now offer policies to compensate parents of bullying victims, covering eyeglasses that might get slapped off a kid’s face and trendy designer clothes that might inspire beatings. One Born Every Minute I Don’t Think So Least Competent Criminals Adesmeytos of Athens, Greece, reported on August 13 that, because so many people had left town for a national holiday, it had no news worthy of putting on the front page…....

SCOTT FIELDS ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few guitarists have taken up the challenge of free improvisation, at least relative to saxophonists or drummers. And because there have been correspondingly few masters in the field, emerging artists tend to veer toward one of only two canonical styles: the jagged, brittle abstraction of Derek Bailey or the equally fervid (but relatively linear) postromantic lyricism of Joe Morris....

StreetWise Boss Feels the Heat The divide between Oliver and his staff had been widening for months. At the urging of board president Pam McElvane, a weekend retreat was held last fall at the home of editor in chief Jalyne Strong, but it settled nothing. Staffers remember with some bitterness that the “facilitator” was Oliver’s friend Sharon Allen, whom he subsequently hired as an executive assistant. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Fritz Lang’s first real blockbuster was this 1924 two-part silent epic–Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge–based on the 13th-century German legend that also inspired Wagner’s Ring cycle. In part one, Siegfried (Paul Richter), the son of a Norse king, wins the hand of the beautiful maiden Kriemhild (Margarethe Schon) and uses a magic sword to battle a fire-breathing dragon in the forest. Part two occurs after the death of Siegfried, when his widow accuses her half brother Hagan of murdering him....

I have an Armchair University degree in English linguistics, and I was thinking about the “l33t5p33k” we see on the Net these days, as well as the Princification of the language, the replacement of “you” with “u” and “to” with “2,” etc. Is this just bad English, or is this the next step? Will the English language in 100 years look like the rantings of a 15-year-old hacker as we see it now, and will numbers become letters (1 = I, 2 = to, 3 = E, 4 = for, 5 = S, etc)?...

Entertaining Mr. Sloane Next Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are sharp differences between the two plays. What the Butler Saw is a frenetic, frothy farce-cum-burlesque about sexual shenanigans in a madhouse whose operators are crazier than their patients (the operators’ playmates turn out to be their own teenage offspring). Entertaining Mr. Sloane is a dark comedy about a young drifter who exposes repressed desires and suppressed secrets in a middle-class family....

Even if Ute Lemper weren’t a dazzling vocal technician, a powerful and erotic dancer, and an imaginative and chameleonic actor, the sheer range of her repertoire would set her apart from every other singer working in cabaret, musical theater, and pop. On past recordings she has radically reinterpreted material by European giants like Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender and contemporary British and American rock artists like Elvis Costello and Tom Waits....

More than any other jazz musician since Sun Ra, saxophonist Wayne Shorter embodies mystery. He conjured spacious siren compositions for Weather Report in the 1970s, and for Miles Davis’s quintet before that. Even as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the early 60s, when he wrote lapidary hard-bop tunes like “Ping Pong” and “Lester Left Town”–many of which remained in the band’s repertoire for a quarter century and now constitute a sort of lingua franca among jazz musicians under 50–he imbued his music with a sense of the unknowable....

It’s hard to put a name to what Eric Dean Spruth does for a living. His business card says “expressive therapist.” His master’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago is in art therapy, and during his 11 years working with prisoners and detainees through Cermak Health Services (which serves Cook County Jail) he’s initiated and coordinated dozens of therapeutic exercises in art, poetry, music, and story writing. But his latest project isn’t art in the strictest sense–it’s horticulture....

Mrs. Mackenzie’s Beginner’s Guide to the Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mrs. Mackenzie’s Beginner’s Guide to the Blues likewise recognizes the issue of cultural appropriation, the intertwining of love and theft, while engaging in it itself. Now receiving its Chicago premiere in Jessi D. Hill’s exceptional production at Stage Left, the play is about a white high school music teacher in Minnesota who falls in love with one of her white students in part because they share a passion for Delta blues....

Rocket to the Moon At the end of the 1930s the great democratic experiment that had swept Europe and America 150 years earlier seemed poised on the brink of failure. The “free economy,” which had long promised independence in exchange for hard work, was revealed as a jury-rigged system that favored capital at the expense of labor. Roosevelt’s support for reforms like social security, the minimum wage, and collective bargaining began to be perceived as nascent socialism....

C.M. VON HAUSSWOLFF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even electronic-music minimalists like Ryoji Ikeda or Pan Sonic augment their tones with the occasional oscillating pulse or pounding beat, but Swedish sound artist C.M. von Hausswolff is almost always content to work on a single hum. Recordings like the aptly titled Basic (Table of the Elements, 1998) and the forthcoming Strom (Raster) are meant to zero in on what von Hausswolff has referred to as “ghosts living in the currency flows of normal electricity and computer frequencies....

The second annual edition of this showcase of sketch comedy, presented by Posin’ at the Bar, features more than 50 local and out-of-town ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints. The festival runs through January 25 at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont. Performances are Wednesdays-Thursdays at 7:30 and 9 PM, Fridays-Saturdays at 7, 8, 9, and 10 PM, and Sundays at 4, 5:30, 7, and 8:30 PM....

Coo coo ca-choo, Arthur Andersen Like everyone else at Arthur Andersen, Terry Flamm could see it coming. For two months leading up to his layoff April 5, he waited for the ax to fall. Still, after seven years at Andersen–three as a temp and four as a full-time staffer (editing Andersen’s client services directory)–it was hard to get a grip. He and his fellow employees at the Chicago headquarters alternated between gallows humor and dread, making friends with the TV crews parked outside the door, quizzing each other obsessively–“What have you heard?...