CHICKS ON SPEED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the back of their first album, Will Save Us All! (Chicks on Speed), the three members of Munich’s Chicks on Speed bury their names in the album credits, demolishing any hierarchy of performer and producer–hell, even their Web mistress gets equal billing. It’s not that Kiki Moorse, New Yorker Melissa Logan, and Melbourne native Alex Murray-Leslie are so staunchly egalitarian–it’s that the whole point of Chicks on Speed is to highlight the manufacturing process that produces modern pop music, in which their role is that of paper-doll front women....

A businessman with no memory, an ecologist who hates people, a homicidal/suicidal explorer, and a field guide with no sense of direction team up to climb a rumbling volcano, shepherded by an earth mother who tends to everyone’s emotional needs. Noted Paris playwright Victor Haim’s “fable” is a tough nut to crack, especially given his penchant for squeezing philosophy from every stone (“There will be disagreements when you’re climbing volcanoes,” one character muses)....

A Cellarful of Motown Motown actively discouraged stylistic variety–it was official company policy to follow up a hit with as close an imitation as possible, and only a few successful hit makers like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder ever gained creative control. Cellarful offers not just another look at Holloway’s career, but a new lens through which to view Motown’s familiar history, defining the label by what it did not release as much as what it did....

Diary of a Mad Secretary I entered the secretarial profession in true 90s style–I signed up with a temp agency. Every morning I’d huddle under the covers, hoping they wouldn’t call me with an assignment. When the inevitable call came, I’d drag my carcass off the futon and into my pathetic thrift-store imitation of office wear. The holes under the arms and the masking-taped hems didn’t really matter, because once I’d get to whichever glass tower I’d been consigned to, I was pretty much invisible....

By some lights, the purpose of improvised music is to reflect the moment–not only the current moment in the improviser’s life but also his historical moment, his time and place. And by that standard, French jazz trumpeter Erik Truffaz’s latest disc, Mantis (Blue Note), succeeds wildly. Though he now lives in Switzerland, Truffaz came of age in Paris, and his music retains that city’s cosmopolitan style and unique mix of bustle and insouciance....

By Michael Miner The AdviceLine was heavily promoted beforehand on the Internet, and the handful of calls that have arrived give us an idea of what it might be good for. One was from an editor of a southern paper who’d been asked to give a speech on ethics and needed help. The other five all involved quandaries. As the Tribune’s Casey Bukro, another founder of the service, puts it, “We’re getting real professionals calling with real problems....

The fourth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, February 16 through 22, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Admission is $7, $3 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-443-3737. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended. Pandaemonium Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) directed this 2000 BBC chronicle of the intense, uneasy friendship between romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth....

The title of this French drama is figurative, but director Anne Fontaine (Dry Cleaning) approaches the psychological labyrinth of fatherhood with the cold and imperious eye Hitchcock brought to Shadow of a Doubt. Charles Berling plays a wealthy gerontologist in Versailles who’s orbited by a warm and ravishing wife (Natacha Regnier), an attentive Greek mistress (Amira Casar), and an obedient younger brother (Stephane Guillon). But the center of gravity shifts when his elderly father (70s Claude Chabrol regular Michel Bouquet) suddenly reappears, having abandoned his family more than 20 years earlier to practice medicine in Africa....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a letter about midwifery, Michelle Breen of Chicago Community Midwives wrote that “Illinois Masonic has announced the closing of its hospital-based alternative birthing center.” This statement is completely false. Advocate Illinois Masonic’s Alternative Birth Center (ABC) offers low-risk pregnant women a comfortable homelike setting to experience natural, noninvasive childbirth. This type of unit requires a separate staff of nurses trained to attend women in this environment....

In Michael Sokoloff’s parable, which pays tribute to Jean Genet’s prison-yard cosmos, two jailbirds seek to enslave a third by invoking the specter of Mustapha. Never seen during the play, he’s the ruler of this brutal kingdom behind bars and a symbol of all the threats ever used by the ruthless to intimidate the weak. The three players in this staging by the Aggravated Assault Ensemble, based in Iowa City, stumbled a bit on opening night, and their late-night production is playing amid the scenery for another show in the same space....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month the Washington Post quoted documents from a chemical-safety organization alleging that executives of the Monsanto Company actively hid the danger posed to residents of Anniston, Alabama, during the 15 years the company routinely dumped millions of pounds of deadly PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills and local rivers. The company’s own research found the pollution so deadly that fish in the rivers died bloody deaths ten seconds after initial exposure....

Some work friends and I went on a happy hour. The guys had been talking about how they had to take their clients to strip joints. I said I’d never been to one before, so we got into a cab and went to Scarlett’s as a dare. The girl behind the counter was in a glass box and said, “It’s $20,” and I told her, “It’s just a dare,” and she said, “Dare or not–it’s 20 bucks....

Tom Dudzick’s play, about a working-class Catholic family trying to make it in the 50s, is a lot better than it has to be. Packed with references to the way things were in pre-Vatican II America, Over the Tavern could have coasted on jokes about nuns, learning the catechism, and the inevitable clashes between hormones and sexual puritanism. Instead Dudzick fashioned a moving comic drama that wins laughs without sacrificing its deeper purpose, exploring with eyes wide open the myriad, subtle ways that alcoholism–even the relatively mild alcoholism of a grandparent–damages a family....

I’m a 19-year-old guy with a big problem. I have an 18-year-old sister who is very nice and very good-looking. We have been in love for two years. Our parents do not know. My problem is that she might be pregnant. If she is, we want to get married. Do we hide this from our parents? How will our parents react to this news? –PLEASE HELP! My sister dated a guy for one month in high school and it didn’t work out....

With America going to glory in combat, I decided to put my personal spin on the quest by going to the Chicago Golden Gloves. For years I’ve planned to attend the Gloves–a legendary training ground for boxers and an annual fixture at the Saint Andrew gym on the north side–yet somehow I never made it until the prospect of another night watching bombs drop on Baghdad drove me out last Thursday....

The Importance of Being Earnest, City Lit Theater Company. After one of Algernon’s wisecracks, his best buddy, Jack, asks him, “Is that supposed to be clever?” To which Algernon replies, “Well, it is perfectly phrased!” And therein lies the secret to City Lit’s rendering a play so frequently performed fresh and funny. The very eloquence of Oscar Wilde’s satirical farce often sabotages stagings by young artists: dazzled, they stampede through its intricate harmonies....

Where did the attempts to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel come from and has anyone successfully done it? –Anonymous, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel was once the archetypal daredevil’s feat, but it’s hardly the only stunt ever attempted there. The first glory hunter was Sam Patch, who leaped into the churning waters at the foot of the falls twice in 1829, the second time from a hastily built ladder more than 100 feet high....

Since its inception two years ago, the producers at Free Street Theater’s PANG (Producing Arts for a New Generation) program have steered clear of presenting work that’s overtly teen-centric. But they made a welcome exception in choosing Real People Theater, a student company created by Stephen Haff, a teacher at Brooklyn’s Bushwick High School, whose students are mostly black and Latino. The troupe’s calling card has traditionally been classic plays like Romeo and Juliet recast in contemporary street vernacular, and it’s been successful enough to be adopted as the youth company in residence at New York’s prestigious Wooster Group....

The best baguette in Chicago is made by a 33-year-old woman who has been in business about six years. Her name is Nancy Carey, and her company is called Red Hen Bread. When she started, in 1997, she imagined it as a retail bakery, a little store in Wicker Park with some display cases and a counter and a cash register to sell the breads and light pastries she’d make in back....

A Million Miles Away Recktenwald says his SIU students are less like the Medill students he observed back in Chicago than they are like the journalists in Tanzania. “Our journalism school is filled with kids who aren’t from the upper class,” he says. “They’re nice, hardworking kids who are eager to learn, and they listen to you. There’s a difference between a person who works his way through college cleaning toilets and one who comes from a place where he doesn’t have to worry about cleaning toilets....