Even in its summer-of-love infancy, psychedelia was more an attitude than a style. Musically the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets were miles apart, but they had one thing in common: they messed with sounds in order to mess with your mind. Three and a half decades down the road, these two San Francisco-based acts have the same goal....

To see James Turrell’s installation Rayna, I headed from the outdoors down a dark corridor. Inside the room, at first I could see nothing but the faint glow of incandescent bulbs and the silhouettes of two other visitors. Unable to determine the contours of the space, I was uncertain where the “art” was. And as curator Daniel Birnbaum has written in a piece on Turrell, “When your eyes get lost, your body falls....

Crack: We Are Rock is the brainchild of a fellow who calls himself King Riff; living in Kansas City a decade or so ago, he got into the habit of incorporating any weirdo willing to make a spaz of himself on drum or guitar into his “band.” In the mid-90s he left KC for San Francisco (nice weather, cheap flight) and in 1998 helped transform a rented storefront into the Clitstop, a now-defunct underground club known for booking and encouraging avant-‘tard acts....

Ambala Sweets With marble floors, mirrored walls, and glass doors with gold handles, Ambala feels like an upscale department store. Sitting tidily in its front window are stacked squares of green pistachio barfi, a milk-based dessert with a fudgelike texture. Other traditional sweets are heaped on the long, gracefully curving counter inside, under immaculate clear-plastic domes. The counter workers give out samples hand over fist, chatting with customers in Hindi, Urdu, and English and happily providing explanations to the uninitiated....

Every so often, no matter how far I stray, something will happen to remind me I still give a massive hoot about rock rock rock and roll. At least about those parts of it I still give a hoot about. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I signed on for the event mainly ’cause I had some things to read–a riff on ashes and the Ganges written when I heard George’s would be spilled there, some of them anyway, and a piece by a friend of mine ’bout her family’s Thanksgiving with George in 1970, when his strict vegetarianism couldn’t stop him from eating turkey served by her dying mom (he didn’t even wince): no way would this saintly s....

Director Rusty Nails went down to Park City, Utah, last year to show some of his work at the Lost Film Festival and soak up the scene at Sundance, which was going on at the same time. But his working holiday took an unexpected turn when, en route to a Sundance screening in a hotel, “somebody said that John Waters was there.” A fan of Waters’s films since seeing Pink Flamingos at age 15, Nails set out to find the director....

After the Quake other words, Murakami uses placid, pleasant language to describe a shattered world. In earlier novels, such as Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, his gentle, inven-tive touches were spread out across a larger canvas, but here the stories add up to less than the sum of their little shocks. And while you have to respect a work in which the most memorable character is a giant oracular frog, this supposedly haunted book doesn’t haunt....

In fourth grade at Evanston Lab School, Evan Ziporyn “really wanted to play the trumpet. That was what all the boys wanted to do. But my lungs weren’t strong enough, so I settled for the clarinet.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In high school his mentors introduced him to the music of Steve Reich, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Iannis Xenakis, and “tons of Ives....

Asim Salam wanted to go downtown by himself on February 6, but his father-in-law insisted on coming along. “You are new in the midwest,” Shahid Sheikh told him. “You don’t know it very well.” Salam was complying with the Department of Justice’s Special Registration program, which requires males over 16 visiting from designated countries–most of them, like Salam’s native Pakistan, predominantly Muslim–to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and account for their presence in the United States....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Miner’s recent column on “The Tribe Takes on the Trib” [Hot Type, November 16] was probably educational for some people about how Jewish Zionist organizations work to suppress expression in the media of anything other than knee-jerk support for Israel (as in the Sun-Times, owned by the same company which controls the Jerusalem Post). It’s not enough for these organizations that media such as the Tribune are pro-Israel in their spin 85 percent of the time–any analysis beyond the most superficial is dangerous to those who seek to maintain the Alice in Wonderland worldview of American Zionism....

Lead Story Latest Religious Messages Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this year, during filming in a remote area of Italy for the upcoming Mel Gibson film The Passion of Christ, the actor who plays Jesus was struck during a lightning storm, according to an October report in a supplement to the trade paper Variety. Also hit, by a fork of the same bolt, was assistant director Jan Michelini–whose umbrella had been struck by lightning a few weeks earlier at a shoot near the town of Matera....

Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, filmmaker Tom Silva spent much of his free time drawing comics and going to blockbuster movies. It wasn’t until he moved to the U.S. in 1984–to study business at Long Island University–that he was introduced to the likes of Antonioni, Bergman, and Fellini. “I didn’t realize these films existed,” says the 35-year old Andersonville resident. “When I saw them, I knew that was truly where my heart lay–that it was what I truly wanted to get into....

Although Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s landmark Farnsworth House is in the distant town of Plano, on the Fox River about 20 miles southwest of Aurora, it’s as much a part of Chicago’s architectural legacy as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House or Unity Temple. It was the first house Mies built in America, the forerunner to his great glass-and-steel towers (such as the 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive apartments), and the specific inspiration for Philip Johnson’s own landmark glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut....

The former Elliot Charles Adnopoz of Brooklyn, New York, is the guy the tall-tale tellers warned you about: the city kid who reinvented himself as a cowboy, the hobo who turned out to be a genius (oh wait, that was Harry Partch too), the young folkie who was mentored by Woody Guthrie in a way Bob Dylan was born too late to be, the shaggy Yank who arrived in England just as the kids there were discovering the musical wealth across the pond....

Sonny Rhodes, born Clarence E. Smith in Smithville, Texas, in 1940, played guitar and sang on street corners as a kid. In the late 50s, after joining the navy, he moved to California; there he met another native Texan, L.C. “Good Rockin’” Robinson, who taught him the lap steel guitar, the instrument with which he would make his mark. Rhodes has been recording since 1958, but most of his releases were on small labels with poor distribution until 1990, when he signed with the Florida-based King Snake....

ERIC IDLE 11/21 & 22, THE VIC It does my nerdy heart good to see one of Britain’s great funnymen booked here for two nights on his Greedy Bastard Tour, which he claims is a shameless attempt to cash in on past glories (it might also raise interest for Spamelot, his in-the-works musical-theater version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Idle and his three backup performers will run through a number of Python songs and skits; there’ll likely be reminiscences about the troupe as well, plus some Rutles numbers and stuff from his latest project, the comedy (and, arguably, music) CD The Rutland Isles, in which the “award-seeking” travel documentary maker Nigel Spasm (a mild dig at Michael Palin’s recent work?...

Sue Garner started making records under her own name in 1998, after playing bass for most of the 80s and 90s in New York art-rock bands like Fish & Roses and Run On. Her songs have often grappled with homely personal subjects such as her maternal longings and the difficulty of making art and paying the bills. But on her superb new album, Shadyside (Thrill Jockey), other lyricists help her expand her subject matter....

Forming a band is a perennial means of escaping a drab or painful existence, but for out ‘n’ proud lesbian Beth Ditto, who fronts the Gossip, nothing was going to make life in Searcy, Arkansas, bearable. So she headed for Olympia, Washington, that notorious bastion of punk-rock liberalism, and her future bandmates followed soon after. She addresses her great escape on the title track of the band’s new EP, Arkansas Heat, wailing, “Got my whole town sweatin’ me / Got the heat and the humidity / And it’s a wonder we’re alive…....

Black Milk And his Muscovites are no better. We meet two of them in Black Milk. Lyovchik and his very pregnant young wife, Poppet, are a pair of would-be sharpies who travel the provinces by train selling Malaysian-made “supertoasters” to the peasant “savages” at each godforsaken stop. Actually, they don’t sell the toasters, they give them away–but the delivery charge is 200 rubles. The villagers snap them up, less for the toast than for the taste of modernity....

In the early 60s my parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest. One story in there, just before JFK was assassinated, was about some Russian cosmonauts who were stranded in an expanding orbit around earth–they were slowly but surely pulling away from the earth and there was no means of retrieval. This was supposedly documented by some ham radio operators in the free world, who had picked up radio communications from the doomed cosmonauts....