Ken Shipley of the Numero Group likes to say that the company presents an alternate version of music history–one written by the losers. Back in February 2003, when he and co-owner Tom Lunt decided to start a reissue label, Shipley already had good reason to sympathize with dreamers who’d come up short. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lunt, now 52, was likewise at loose ends: he’d just returned from a difficult year in Warsaw, where he’d overseen Polish marketing efforts for McDonald’s as a creative director for DDB....

= highly recommended Skating fearlessly on the edge of tastelessness and sentimentality, Oasis is another strong, provocative film by Lee Chang-dong (Peppermint Candy), an edgy tale about a dense jailbird and a woman with cerebral palsy who grimace, grunt, and thrash their way toward an awkward but affecting last tango in a dingy Seoul apartment. As it ranges through harrowing melodrama, discomfiting comedy, bitter jabs at bourgeois hypocrisy, and sweet, fleeting fantasies, Oasis demonstrates the tonal elasticity and moral elusiveness that characterize much of the new South Korean cinema....

The Ribbon Factory This thought came to mind as Mad Shak Dance Company premiered Molly Shanahan’s The Ribbon Factory, an ambitious piece that runs a full hour–an eternity in dance, with its convention of brief selections separated by pauses. At a certain point, no matter how original the movement, there’s just too much of it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The evening’s final image provides the clearest example of “overwriting....

WHITE STRIPES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » White Stripes front man Jack White was reportedly fired from his guitar-playing gig in the Motor City rawk-revival outfit the Go, but don’t shed any tears for him: while his old band still hasn’t released a follow-up to its 1999 debut, his duo with his ex-wife, rudimentary drummer Meg White, is the toast of indieville and just released its third album in three years....

The second installment of Bailiwick Repertory’s 2003 showcase of emerging directors focuses on new productions based on other sources. (The first segment of the festival, “Chicago Works,” ran in February; a gay- and lesbian-themed series is planned for June.) “In Adaptation/Translation” runs through April 23 at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. Performances take place Monday-Wednesday at 7:30 PM; each evening features four short plays. Tickets are $10 per evening; a pass costs $25....

Two defining experiences color the music of Bright Sheng. One was the hardship he went through during the Cultural Revolution in the early 70s, when he was sent to the Tibetan border as a pianist in a folk-music and -dance troupe. The other was his exposure to Western music, first through recordings of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and then under the tutelage of the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Hugo Weisgall. Sheng came to the U....

In 2002 freelance writer Cari Lynn had a couple friends who made decent livings as traders, so rather than hustling for assignments and hounding publishers for late payments, she thought she’d give the trading floor at the Merc a shot. She donned a polyester clerk’s jacket and with no previous interest or experience in the markets waded into the famed pits. What she found there shouldn’t surprise anyone: a testosterone-riddled, predatory, sweaty, stinky, frenzied atmosphere ruled by, in her words, “good old Fear and Greed....

Who wants to be a farmer? A lot of Chicagoans would get the choice if Ken Dunn of the Resource Center had his way, reports Holden Frith in Conscious Choice (October). “The time has come for Chicago to commit to the idea of urban agriculture on a citywide scale. Chicago has 6,000 acres of unused land, which he says would support 42,000 full-time jobs if all of it were cultivated.”...

Lisa Krivacka’s show at Aron Packer, “Open House,” includes 27 small paintings inspired by the real estate ads she ran across while looking for a home in upstate New York. Printed on the paintings are owners’ typical optimistic descriptions, which also often serve as the titles, but the sensuous colors and personality she gives these scenes make them more than reproductions. In Designer Decorated Townhouse, depicting a bathroom with red towels and a jagged wallpaper design in red and pink, the nearly pastel colors are much gentler than those found in glossy circulars....

Jack Levin was 16 when he picked up his first WLS Silver Dollar Survey of Top 40 singles. It was July 29, 1966, and the number one song on the yellow card was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.” There was also a blurb promoting overnight DJ Don Phillips and an ad on the back for Canfield’s short-lived Cherry-Ola Cola. Levin, who collects and sells music magazines and works for a paintball-gear distributor, still has the card–and most of the ones that came before and after it....

HFOB-N-Tempest, TriArts Inc. and Adult Swim Ensemble, at Stage Left Theatre. This commedia dell’arte adaptation of The Tempest accomplishes something that hardly seems worth doing: presenting Shakespeare’s play stripped of its language. Few would claim that the plot is what makes The Tempest a marvelous work, and commedia is an unusual taste in any event. Though this is fare intended for adults, its masks, pratfalls, and gags have all the subtlety of a Punch-and-Judy show: the style might have amazed and amused unlettered peasants, who benefited from having every joke spelled out and every key line underscored, but offering it to a contemporary urban audience seems willfully backward....

Ten years ago Jeb Bishop’s trombone gathered dust in his parents’ North Carolina attic while he played bass in rock bands and matriculated as a philosophy grad student; now it’s the textbooks that gather dust, and he’s become one of the most ubiquitous horn players on Chicago’s creative-music scene. Bishop moves effortlessly between swinging rhythms and free forms, and he makes especially eloquent use of muting and multiphonics, the techniques that bring out the trombone’s vocal qualities....

In your City File column of December 15, under the heading “Ralph Nader’s Still Wrong,” you quote Dave Moberg as saying that “Attacking the Democrats will undermine progressive political forces at a time when there seems to be a chance of rebuilding a popular movement critical of corporate power.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Democratic Party supports NAFTA, IMF, and WTO. It wants increased military spending, including the preposterous “Star Wars” missile defense system....

Here’s what it looks like on the ground, if you think you can handle it. During 1999 and early 2000, Italian TV documentarians Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Alberto Vendemmiati lugged their video cameras through the snowy mountains and barren valleys northeast of Kabul, following an Italian surgeon and a British nurse as they tried to build a hospital for casualties of Afghanistan’s 20-year civil war (or jung). This 2000 video, receiving its Chicago premiere, records frontline skirmishes between the Taliban and the mujaheddin soldiers of the Northern Alliance, and though the latter are portrayed as popular heroes (including the recently assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud), Lazzaretti and Vendemmiati go out of their way to fathom the cruelty and religious fanaticism of the Taliban....

MINDERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For much of their career these bedroom Anglo-poppers from Portland, Oregon, have been buoyed by the tidal wave of hype about the Elephant 6 Recording Company, a loose aggregation of home-recording enthusiasts led by Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo. Schneider lent his flower power to the Minders’ first single back in 1995, when they were based in Denver, and SpinArt Records snapped them up in 1998, after scoring with the Apples’ Tone Soul Evolution....

John Vanderslice Or serious and complicated ones. The theme is even more universal than you might think: Pink Floyd’s bombastic use of English postwar imagery camouflages their heartache over the loss of their partner Syd Barrett (the ostensible subject of both The Wall and Wish You Were Here). The Who’s Tommy is about love on many levels: the love Tommy’s mother betrays when she thinks her seafaring husband is dead, the blind love of the disciples for their messiah–and yes, the love of a boy for a pinball machine....

I’m 22 years old and I am not ashamed of who I am. I’m just afraid. I know my parents love me, but on more than one occasion, they have made their dislike for “fags” rather obvious. I’d hate to see their reaction if they were to discover that their only son was one. I have never even been out on a date with another man for fear that my folks will find out....

Since their show premiered in 1969, Scooby-Doo and his faithful human companions Shaggy, Thelma, Daphne, and Fred have proved amazingly resilient, retaining their popularity despite a change of networks in 1976 and the fact that there have been no new shows since 1986. What accounts for this longevity? Beats me. It doesn’t hurt that Scooby and his friends, like so many other Hanna-Barbera creations, are fully realized, well-rounded comic characters. (Hanna-Barbera compensated for notoriously cheap corner-cutting animation with good writing....

Weezer In the ladies’ lounge two girls about 16 years old breathlessly discussed their rock star crushes. “You know, we should go stand in that certain area right now,” said one, “so that we can see that one person.” Weezer’s set was still hours away. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Claiming floor space is important to a girl like her. The closer she is to the front, the greater her chances of enticing her love object....

Christina Hansen still recalls the smells from her Polish grandmother’s kitchen: freshly made potato pancakes, or perch frying in a pan, caught that day in Lake Michigan by her grandfather. Berry picking was one of her grandparents’ favorite summer activities, and their kitchen would be filled with the bounty, ready to be made into pies and jams. And “I’ll never forget my grandma’s bow tie cookies,” Hansen says. “She’d store them in huge roasting pans in the closet because there was nowhere else to put them....