To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thirty-four blocks west of State Street, catty-corner from Garfield Park (Jens Jensen), near the Garfield Park Conservatory (Laredo Taft), just around the corner from the fabulous 3400 block of West Adams, the former Roentgen elementary school on the west side is developed into live/work space for artists. Not good enough. The west side doesn’t “register as one of the ‘preferred areas for artist live/work development....

I came to Cole Porter’s songs late in life, in part because I’d immersed myself in the lieder of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms during my graduate-student days. Like most people, I’d heard some of Porter’s signature tunes in elevator-music arrangements, and as a movie buff I’d enjoyed Marlene Dietrich’s world-weary rendition of “The Laziest Gal in Town” in Stage Fright as well as Barbra Streisand’s triumphantly gleeful “You’re the Top” in What’s Up, Doc?...

Gay Riseborough has been a portraitist for most of her career, faithfully rendering the real world. She still does that to pay the bills, working in her Evanston studio. But about seven years ago she also began painting scenes that exist only in her head–symbolic, autobiographical images rendered in a dark, old masters’ palette. Take, for example, Sunset at the Family Tree, in which Riseborough perches high above a city skyline on a tree limb that’s about to be chopped off by a masked man and a woman wearing a British flag dress....

Love With Arthur Lee We set the record spinning on Greg’s turntable–a Zenith Circle of Sound, state of the art in 1972–and the music that came out was just as hilarious and befuddling as the cover. We were hip, or thought we were; we listened to Hendrix, the Doors, and the Beatles. This stuff was amateurish, underproduced, and positively dorky–I don’t think any of us ever listened to more than two or three cuts....

Pushing the envelope has yielded fantastic results for Neutrino, one of the longest-running Harold teams at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade. Its eight members have a reputation for pulling off stunts: they disrobed in the middle of one infamous performance. And tireless experimentation within the Harold form led them to their biggest epiphany last spring: videotaping a fully improvised 25-minute Harold performance on New York City streets, then editing and projecting it (with a three-minute delay) in a theater....

After dating this woman for a couple of months, I began to suspect that she was a bed wetter. There was the occasional smell of urine in her bedroom, and she was reluctant to spoon with me. After changing my sheets the other day I noticed an unwelcome stain on my bed. She was obviously embarrassed by the situation, and being sensitive to that I said nothing. Is adult bed-wetting more common than one would imagine?...

On October 7 Alderman Mary Ann Smith and officials from the Board of Education went to Senn High School to tell students, teachers, and parents about their plan to turn a third of the school into a naval academy. They were greeted with hoots and howls. “It was not a productive, open-minded session,” says board spokesman Peter Cunningham. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Arai is in the 46th Ward, and the alderman, Helen Shiller, didn’t want a military school in her ward....

The XFL is football for mooks, to the point where it probably should be considered a different sport. Don’t call it football; call it mookball. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The XFL (the league reminds the media that the name is not an abbreviation but the marketing trademark in its entirety; the X doesn’t stand for Xtreme any more than the league itself stands for quality) is marked above all by two characteristics: its high-tech, made-for-television production values and its fondness for scantily clad cheerleaders, both of which endear it to the mook market....

Terrorist by Association “They were not from the southwest side of Chicago, not from the big Arab-American concentrations in Detroit, not from our communities,” Abunimah continues. “They were people who came from outside and it seems were deliberately trying to be undetected. It’s possible they felt they would have been more vulnerable to being detected among people who shared their cultural background and who might have spotted their devious and evil intent....

Winter 1995: Cafe Avanti on Southport His father, Barry, widens his very brown eyes behind his wire rims. All of us have brown eyes, as does their mother. Seth is reading Maus, Art Spiegelman’s nonfiction comic book about the Holocaust. The Jews are portrayed as mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans are cats. “Do you know what he looked like?” he asks. Jesse falls off his chair. They are pliable Saint Bernard puppies in down coats, playing too roughly with the sweetener packets at the center of the table....

The Infidel But it’s as a playwright that he’s shown perhaps the greatest precision. In his first play, The Actor Retires–actually a monologue with a few supporting characters–he fired a quiverful of barbs at the hypocritical, self-aggrandizing world of professional theater. In his recent The Vanishing Twin, which he also directed for Lookingglass, he laced a deliciously indulgent satire of gothic horror with rock and roll, staging the whole outrageous two-hour affair so scrupulously that it flew by in no time....

Rock, Pop, etc. NICHOLAS BARRON Free performance. Thu 6/7, 7:30 PM, Starbucks Coffee, 932 N. Rush. 312-951-5436. NEKO CASE, SALLY TIMMS, JON RAUHOUSE perform at a 16-millimeter film screening. Sat 6/2, 8 and 10:30 PM, Chris & Heather’s Record Roundup, 2034 W. Montrose. 773-271-5330. DJs WARP, LSE & CHRIS WIDMEN perform at a group exhibition entitled “Disco.” Sat 6/9, 3-6 PM, Arena Gallery, 311 N. Sangamon. 312-421-0212. MARK FEDERIGHI Free in-store performance....

Mother-and-daughter team Guadalupe Castellanos and Maria Huerta have taken over the cozy North Avenue dining room that used to belong to Dinotto, decorating it with folk art as an offshoot of their Lake Street restaurant, Barro. At BARRO CANTINA they depart from traditional Mexican food and focus more broadly on South American-influenced cuisine, offered in small portions. There are more than a dozen hot tapas: Picaditas surtidas are homemade masa rounds topped with the wonderfully contrasting flavors of sweet plantains, creamy guacamole, and salty soft cheese....

Your Opinion or Your Life! “Carlos Libro,” guerrilla reviewer, was the hook. “Sunglasses, beret, camouflage T-shirt, cargo pants–your stereotypical guerrilla motif,” says Cox. After about five shows he decided he needed more than books to fill half an hour, so he started interdicting strangers outside video stores and multiplexes and asking them to talk about the movies they were watching. But the book segment remains the heart and soul of Guerrilla Reviews....

Apart from the groundbreaking Sherman’s March (1986), this is the best entry yet in Ross McElwee’s ongoing autobiographical saga: it’s funny, profound, and beautifully organized, and for once the southern documentary filmmaker seems fully in control of all the inherent ironies. McElwee learns from his second cousin, a movie buff, that the Gary Cooper vehicle Bright Leaf (1950) may be a fictionalized portrait of their great-grandfather, who developed the Bull Durham tobacco brand in North Carolina in the late 19th century but was driven out of business by cigarette pioneer James Buchanan Duke....

Benny Golson plays tenor saxophone like he speaks–in a mellifluous tone, with superb pacing and a large vocabulary to draw on. As the years pass, he’s increasingly recognized as one of the most luminous tenor players in jazz: clever but not too clever, poised even at a jackrabbit tempo, and able to hold your interest even on a tune he’s played a gazillion times. He improvises like a composer and vice versa, writing tunes whose strong contours and rhythmic vitality lend themselves to coherent variations....

OCTOBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You could spend Halloween getting shit faced at a club. Again. But why spend ghouldom’s night of nights too numb to feel a shiver? (Anyway, bars are nicer on All Souls’ Day, when the other drunks are in bed sleeping it off.) Instead you could wallow in the roar and creep of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, and Bach’s Toccato in D Minor, all played on the Music Institute of Chicago’s 1913 Skinner organ....

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists at Empty Bottle, February 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What makes Leo’s literate, edgy pop even more compelling is that a decade earlier he would have sneered at the concept. He spent the first half of the 90s playing in the hardcore bands Citizens Arrest and Animal Crackers; in 1995 he formed the fantastic, mod-influenced Chisel, whose 1996 album, 8 A....

25th Hour With Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Tony Siragusa, and Levani. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 25th Hour is Lee’s best feature since Do the Right Thing, and part of what’s so impressive about it is the way it gets us to think as well as feel–about things we’re almost never asked to consider, such as what it means to send drug dealers to prison....

It seems like a lot of the new brutal-prog bands switch things up all the time just to fuck with you–they’ll let you settle into the warm, cozy jamming, then peel out in some unpredictable direction, leaving you shivering and wondering where you are. But with Hella, who’re as chops-heavy and rhythmically nomadic as any of them, the gear changing seems less like a power trip and more like obsessive compulsion; they noodle because they have to, but you’re encouraged to follow along....