This San Francisco quartet makes beautiful sense out of chaos, its collision of sounds creating a weird, hyperactive dance music. On the 2001 release Other Animals (Troubleman) drummer Bianca Sparta and bassist Ellie Erickson lay down a numb postdisco throb as guitarist Sara Jaffe dispenses slate gray chords and fractured licks; on top of it all Jenny Hoysten shrieks, whoops, and yodels–a beguilingly slippery style that teeters between yammering and song–and contributes the occasional unholy blast of trumpet....

Bobbie Townsend vaguely remembers the first time the Board of Education shut down the Dyett Recreation Center’s indoor swimming pool. “They said it would be closed for a little while so they could make some structural repairs,” says Townsend, a south-side community activist. “At least I think that’s why they closed it. That was a long time ago.” Part of the difficulty stems from the way the rec center was funded back in the early 1970s....

On his most recent album, Scar (Mammoth, 2001), Joe Henry examines the lingering marks that love–or at least the quest for it–can leave. Though his lyrics are as elliptical as ever, his subjects are clear enough: people who can’t get enough from lovers and people who simply give too much. In “Struck” the narrator asks, “Should I love you more than I do? / Or pray to love you less?,” while in “Rough and Tumble” he laments, “You left me with everything / Knowing it would never be enough....

Early on a cool July evening several Wednesdays ago, sunlight streamed into the front room of Danny’s Tavern in Bucktown. Around the bar, small knots of people sipped their beers and chatted with the bartender, who rang up their pints on an old-fashioned register that responded with a satisfying clatter. In the darkened back room, candles in little glasses flickered yellow, barely illuminating the low stools and ottomans, a pair of turntables, and a large speaker covered with neat piles of the free literary broadside The2ndHand....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barry and Rhonda Conrad filed a formal complaint against Hendricks Community Hospital in Danville, Indiana, in February for mishandling the body of their stillborn son last April. The grieving couple wanted to view the body and have it examined before it went off to the funeral home, but hospital employees mistakenly left it in with the dirty sheets, and by the time the Conrads were able to see the body it had been washed, bleached, and dried....

Religious Interlopers For those of your mostly north-side readers who walk to church on Sunday and don’t know what a commuter church is, it’s a church, usually in the inner city on the south and west sides, whose parishioners don’t live anywhere near the church, if they ever did. Thus, they come in from outlying areas in cars. Thousands of cars. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The more parking lots these churches provide, the more people drive in....

Four years ago, in a much ballyhooed move bannered in the pages of both downtown dailies, the Board of Education created Jones College Prep, a high school in the Loop for high achievers. And ever since, the board’s been making the lives of its teachers, students, and staff difficult. The plan was to simply convert Jones Commercial High School, a vocational school with a long history of preparing juniors and seniors for jobs in downtown businesses, into Jones Prep–a plan that showed Vallas at his best and his worst....

Late last year, I wrote a letter to your publication regarding Jonathan Rosenbaum. The letter questioned how Rosenbaum could utterly excoriate Shadow of the Vampire for its near-slanderous portrayal of F.W. Murnau when only a few weeks earlier, in his review of Quills, he had stated, in no uncertain terms, that historical accuracy wasn’t really important so long as the film is entertaining. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m referring to his mini reviews of Kate and Leopold and The Majestic from your December 21 issue....

A disgusted newspaper columnist listened to a debate by the Democrats who wanted to be governor and discovered only one “with the guts to oppose the idiotic Peotone airport boondoggle.” That was Michael Bakalis, and Bakalis would later drop out. A third of the passengers at O’Hare and Midway are traveling 300 to 500 miles–making them the market for a proposed nine-state high-speed rail network that would have Chicago as its hub....

ANNUAL SEA SHANTIES FESTIVAL 11/15-16, SAINT PATRICK PERFORMING ARTS CENTER; 11/17, ABBEY PUB Tired of songs with meaningless lyrics, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing? Well, few genres celebrate narrative detail as lustily as the sea shanty. Gathering performers from the United States (which has a proud maritime history) and Poland (which, well…doesn’t), this three-day festival honors the memory of “the last shantyman,” Stan Hugill, a sailor and painter who passed on ten years ago....

The a capella vocal style known as cantos a tenores has existed untouched in the relative isolation of central Sardinia for several thousand years, and the Sardinian quartet Tenores de Oniferi performs this rarely heard music in its traditional form. Lead vocalist Francesco Pirisi chants each melody in a piercing nasal tone marked by subtle melisma. The other members of the group (two of whom are his brothers) answer in thick harmony, made thicker by the technique of overtone singing–also used in the music of Tuva and Tibet–in which each voice sings a low fundamental note and, at the same time, one or more harmonics above it....

Rock, Pop, Etc. BEYONCE, BOW WOW Fri 12/19, 6:30 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison. 312-455-4500 or 312-559-1212. CHICAGO GAY MEN’S CHORUS performs “A Sassy, Brassy Christmas.” Fri 12/12, 8 PM, and Sat 12/13, 5 and 8:30 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport. 773-296-0541. ANNA FERMIN’S TRIGGER GOSPEL Free in-store performance. Sat 12/13, 3 PM, Borders Books & Music, 830 N. Michigan. 312-573-0564. HARBOR LIGHTS Free in-store performance. Sat 12/13, 3 PM, Borders Books & Music, 2210 W....

Rock, Pop, etc. COMMON Free in-store performance. Fri 12/13, 5 PM, Crow’s Nest Music, Chicago Music Mart, 333 S. State. 312-341-9196. MAURO FROSIO Fri 12/20 and Sat 12/21, 10:30 PM, Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland. 773-384-0494. DAVE MATTHEWS BAND Fri 12/13, 7 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison. 312-455-4500 or 312-559-1212. PATRICIA MUSKER performs “Roxy Bellows & Friends.” Fridays and Saturdays, 9 PM, Noble Fool Theater, 16 W. Randolph. 312-726-1156....

On the morning of Thursday, January 23, Woman Made Gallery’s new space in the Acme Artists’ Community was a mess. Water dripped from a mysterious pipe coming from the heating unit, frigid air poured in through a hole in an outside wall, a row of track lights hung precariously from the ceiling, and wiring was visible through round holes in the drywall. Paint splatters and white dust covered the floor. One of the two galleries lacked a thermostat, so staffers were turning the heat on and off at the fuse box....

Women in the Director’s Chair International Film and Video Festival Five short videos by local artists. In the moving autobiographical meditation Another Clapping, Chi-jang Yin uses fragments–voice-over, printed titles, phone messages, and old photographs, some with her father’s image cut out–to tell the story of a family fractured by domestic violence and the forces of history and to explore the ambiguous feelings between mother and daughter. Footage from the Cultural Revolution, including shots of kids humiliating an old man, forms an eerie parallel to the daughter’s alienation....

As Jacqueline Edelberg spent time with her four-year-old daughter and three-year-old son in the Wendt play lot, at 667 W. Roscoe, she says, “I found myself asking the old question: Where are you going to send your child to school?” Other mothers watching their toddlers were asking the same thing. None of the mothers took seriously a fourth option, Nettelhorst, at 3252 N. Broadway, which Edelberg passed every time she went to the play lot....

ARAB ON RADAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are no doubt a lot of depraved blokes out there who have a hard time reconciling their perversion with the way society demands a gent behave, but none articulate their dilemma so eloquently as Arab on Radar. These four self-hating berserkers apparently live in a perpetual state of sexual frustration–they don’t get any and they bitch about it, or they get some and it’s not good enough–and it’s all mommy and daddy’s fault....

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 18th year, runs Friday, October 26, through Sunday, November 4, at City North 14 and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $6 for children and adults, $4.50 for Facets members; various discounts are available for four or more tickets. Professional actors will be on hand to read subtitled films. For more information call 773-281-9075 or 773-281-2166. Programs marked with a * are highly recommended....

Mapping madness. Writing in Illinois Issues (May), Ryan Reeves notes that because of the way redistricting lines have been drawn, the tiny town of Illiopolis (population less than 1,000) will be able to command the attention of 3 of the state’s 19 congressional representatives. It “will be represented by the 17th District, a seat currently held by Democrat Lane Evans, from the northwestern Illinois town of Rock Island; the 18th, currently represented by Republican Ray LaHood of Peoria in west central Illinois; and the 19th, currently represented by Democrat David Phelps of Eldorado in southern Illinois....

“It’s clear to us that there are some less than sane things coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue right now,” says editor Jason Kucsma of his cohorts at Clamor, the award-winning bimonthly magazine he founded with longtime underground zinester Jen Angel in 1999. Advocating social awareness without sermonizing, Clamor was created, says Kucsma, to promote resistance to such insanity–“to make it possible for people to think there’s a better way for us to be living right now....