Dear Ms. Vanasco, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First off, although I am perhaps “tedious” and “self-indulgent,” neither my life nor my show has ever been “billed as a parody,” unless of course Webster’s Dictionary has replaced the definition of “parody” with the definition of “tragedy.” Secondly. Referring to my singing voice “like a chain-smoking Doris Day”? I know firsthand that Ms. Day, or DeeDee as I used to call her, never smoked....

Chef and restaurateur Jennifer Newbury–who most recently was the private party planner at Blackbird and a decade ago ran two restaurants, Chez Jenny and Sole Mio–has resurfaced with the new Italian venture FORTUNATO. She seems to have all the pieces in place: the room has stylish appointments like a silver-leaf backsplash behind the front bar, a large exposed kitchen enclosed in glass (which minimizes the clank while allowing for full viewing), and nicely spaced tables....

Beetle Bailey MIA Yes, you say, but 52 years later Beetle Bailey is old and lame, and those Miss Buxley gags stopped being funny three waves of feminism ago. Maybe, maybe not. In late 1998 the Tribune asked its readers to vote on which comics they liked, and males of all ages among the small, self-selected, arguably meaningless sample of readers who responded put Beetle Bailey first. Among men and women 18 to 34 years old it was down in 18th place, so it obviously was extraordinarily popular with older guys....

Generating a stream of noise with a keyboard and a bunch of effects boxes is no great feat, but San Francisco sound performer Jake Rodriguez–one of the founders of the Clit Stop, a now-defunct underground venue that played host to the local cardboard-and-electronics scene–can shape that noise into something sophisticated, even cerebral. The music he makes in his nine-year-old solo project, the Bran (…) Pos, is mostly manipulated vocals: wearing a gas mask rigged with a mike, he uses a ton of nifty pedals and processors (and one synth) to turn his syllables into shimmery, gurgling blobs of sound that jiggle in the background or burst into shrapnel....

Darrell was warned. If he didn’t stop dealing drugs at the corner of Karlov and Maypole, he was going to get shot. “He just blowin’ smoke,” Darrell scoffed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Darrell’s boys started talking revenge. So on the Friday after the shooting, CeaseFire held its weekly midnight barbecue across the street from the scene of the attack. On September 13 Kerr was standing catty-corner from the shooting scene, a vacant lot spread out under the Green Line tracks....

Sometimes your very favorite albums aren’t the ones you play the most. I’ve always loved Diamanda Galas’s early work, like Masque of the Red Death and The Litanies of Satan, but those discs were never something I’d slap on just ’cause they were lying around. When Galas pours it on, her phantasmagoric opera-trained voice can generate such an intense spiritual vortex that I only really feel adequate to it during certain cosmic conjunctions–like Albert Ayler, she demands a lot of you....

Rules for Good Manners in the Modern World Trap Door Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lagarce’s play (performed here in a translation by Andrew Berg and Marion Schoevaert) focuses on baptisms, weddings, and funerals. This U.S. premiere by TUTA (The Utopian Theatre Asylum)–staged as part of Playing French, the citywide festival of contemporary plays from France–accentuates the script’s tripartite structure by dividing the piece among three actresses....

Murdered lovers, courtship from beyond the grave, exorcism–all are part of the libretto, based on Gypsy folklore, for Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo, a piece he composed in 1915 for flamenco artist Pastora Imperio. Its violence and passion and otherworldliness make it the perfect vehicle for Spanish dance, and indeed many choreographers have re-created the piece over the years. Now it’s Ensemble Espanol’s turn. Based in Chicago, the company has enlisted Juan Mata and Ana Gonzalez of the National Ballet of Spain to choreograph the first, traditional part and choreographers Timo Lozano and Manolete to create the cuadro flamenco final wedding scene, something of an innovation for this dance opera....

The Unlimited Sunshine tour is one of the more peculiar and stylistically diverse packages assembled in recent memory. It’s not all good–Cake headlines–but it looks smart on paper. On Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Brothers), their long-anticipated follow-up to the kaleidoscopic The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips continue to grow, but it’s not their most consistent work. Swaddling their rickety organic psychedelia in Technicolor electronica creates a nice tension, but sometimes the electronic elements just call attention to themselves....

Soprano Dawn Upshaw has been a New Yorker for almost two decades, but still regards Chicago as her hometown: she was raised in Park Forest and went to college at Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington. This summer, in fact, she’s returning for two concerts–one on Friday with the Grant Park Orchestra and another in August with the Borromeo String Quartet at Ravinia. In the 18 years since her Metropolitan Opera debut, where she had just two lines, Upshaw has established an unassailable place for herself in American music....

Every city worth its salt has plenty of terrific musicians working just under the typical concertgoer’s radar, which only tends to pick up the big stars. Like many such players, tenor saxist Mark Colby spends most of his time teaching (at Elmhurst College and DePaul University), performing in public too rarely for my taste. His music reflects an appreciation for the ageless virtues exemplified by Stan Getz: a hooded tone, velvety in the lower register and diamond hard in the upper; pinpoint technique, so that his phrases crackle and pop; and a love of melodies that verge on the voluptuous....

The 14th annual Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, presented by Chicago Filmmakers, runs Friday through Sunday, November 15 through 17, at Columbia College Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan, and Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark. Tickets are $7; for more information call 773-293-1447. Program 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For better and for worse, the nine films and videos I previewed from this program of twelve, most of them in black and white, qualify as “studies,” though an earlier and artier generation of visual artists might have called them “etudes....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility to Chicago’s downtown theater district. Love Pollution: A Tekno-Popera...

When Don Kramer was offered the chance to open a restaurant in the landmark Humboldt Park boathouse in early 2002, he had only two years’ experience in the food business. The owner of Puerto Rican restaurant La Palma on nearby Homan Avenue, Kramer had responded to an open solicitation from the Park District, which was finishing up a multimillion-dollar restoration of the boathouse. The Prairie-style open-air pavilion–built in 1907 overlooking the park’s large lagoon and long a neighborhood destination for picnics, concerts, and other public gatherings–received landmark designation in November 1996....

Sausage Is Murder Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joe Perl’s seemingly delightful advocacy of sausage [March 30] is literally a malignant propaganda campaign glorifying animal genocide, agricultural pollution, and the costly waste of energy affiliated with the meat industry’s egregious barbarism. This conveyer of sausage is an innocuous pawn of corporations directly responsible for virulent transgressions against sentient creatures, clean water, and the environment....

SHINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The various incarnations and imitations of the Nuggets anthology have made it crystal clear that just about any band can come up with one great song. In fact, boxes of these fortuitous moments, captured on seven-inch vinyl by bands I’ve forgotten the names of over the course of the 80s and 90s, are taking up the floors of most of my closets right now....

Slackers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ska craze of a few years back has gradually subsided, and no one who loves the music would call that a bad thing: now that the true believers have the scene all to themselves again, a good band has nothing to negotiate but its own creative arc. For the Slackers, a seven-man combo from Brooklyn that opens for Mustard Plug and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones on Sunday, the parade has definitely gone by: they debuted on the New York-based Moon Ska label in 1996 and were snapped up by Hellcat Records the next year, as the genre was peaking commercially, but they’ve never earned the big bookings commanded by Less Than Jake and the Bosstones or the critical respect accorded to Hepcat and the Toasters....

Ken Loach’s 2002 feature about a poor 15-year-old boy living in a seaside town in western Scotland is a real heartbreaker; like The Bicycle Thief and Rebel Without a Cause, it confronts the tragedy of someone trying to be a good person who finds that the world he inhabits won’t allow it. Liam (played by teenage soccer pro Martin Compston) has a mother in prison; his sister loves him but can’t understand why he gets into so many fights, just as his mother’s lover can’t understand why he refuses to slip drugs to his mother....

Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty) delivers his most interesting and powerful film to date, though it’s also his most unpleasant and disturbing. Set at a small college, it concentrates on the evolving relationship between a shy nerd (Paul Rudd) and a brazen artist (coproducer Rachel Weisz), as well as his best friend (Frederick Weller) and the latter’s fiancee (Gretchen Mol)–and the less said about the plot the better....

What’s the deal with suttee? For years I’ve been hearing that in India, widows are routinely thrown on funeral pyres alive. Is this just propaganda? And if not, is it just unpopular widows that it happens to? Since most men die before women, do all children burn their mom alive as a matter of course? Hindus seem so peaceful! –Mugg Mellish, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now....