Phrenology Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Design Flaw’s performance was part of the second annual three-day Phrenology Fest, an unofficial progress report on the improvised music scene’s newest talent. This year, the stakes had been raised. Many players who laid the foundations for the current scene and attracted outside attention now rarely perform locally. Reedist Ken Vandermark and drummer Hamid Drake spend far more time on the road than in town....

One of Tim Rice’s dumbest lines in this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is Che Guevara’s assertion that Eva Peron “did nothing for years”–the next 150 minutes contradict it completely. Once again confusingly celebrated and condemned, the Queen of Mean returns, this time played by local heroine Kathy Voytko (who resembles Patti LuPone, the original Argentinean dominatrix). Staged by Larry Fuller under the supervision of the original director, Harold Prince, this political pageant uses busy newsreel projections to echo the onstage chaos....

The Bomb-itty of Errors Still, Chicago is becoming notable as a haven for hip-hop theater, a grassroots form that merges the rhythms of hip-hop with theatrical narrative and manages to transcend both. Not exactly a well-defined genre, it dances back and forth between crackpot experiment and marketable commodity. So the way is open for anyone and everyone, artists and audiences alike, to embrace it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Alan Yuen never thought he’d be on his hands and knees installing hardwood floors. Nor did he think he’d be buying produce at 8 AM and slaving over a hot wok well into the evening. But when his father, Yup Chi Yuen, died five years ago after running Friendship Chinese Restaurant in Logan Square for 18 years, Alan had a restaurant to save. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I grew up in the kitchen of my father’s restaurant, and as a child I really hated it,” he says....

The University of Chicago will show two programs of this excellent survey this week and the remaining three next week (Film Studies Center, room 307, 5811 S. Ellis). Many are technically dazzling, and most are very different from Western experimental films, de-emphasizing the idiosyncratic perceptions and emotions of the characters or filmmakers in favor of complex social visions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The nine films in Exploded States: War, Politics, and National Identity (120 min....

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-July, the Pink Nun is working the sidewalk in front of a tattoo parlor on Belmont between Clark and Sheffield. She’s dressed in a hot pink habit with a wimple, belted with a chrome leash that suggests bondage gear. At the curb sits her bright yellow pickup truck, adorned with hand-painted self-portraits, the URL of her Web site, the slogan “Don’t judge a nun by her color,” and muscle-car-style flames around the front wheel wells....

Howard Ehrman is among the many transit activists who’ve been called into the office of CTA president Frank Kruesi to hear his pitch: join the campaign to wrest more money from the state or there will be severe cuts in bus and train service. Ehrman won’t join. “It’s a ruse,” he says. “It’s a trick.” The CTA has two separate budgets–operating and capital. Operating funds come from the state sales tax and are used to run the system–paying employees, buying fuel, etc....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October a senior Vatican spokesman, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, repeated to a BBC radio audience the church’s claim that people in AIDS-ravaged countries should not use condoms to prevent the spread of HIV; contradicting widespread scientific consensus (and public statements by the World Health Organization), the cardinal insisted that the virus can pass through pores in the latex....

PINBACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A press release for this spacey San Diego project boasts that “in October of 2000, Urban Outfitters added the debut album to all 42 stores nationwide, and Blue Screen Life is similarly slated for seven months of in-store play rotation.” I’m not about to pontificate on the issue of indie cred, but this little promotional factoid did make me wonder whether anything besides the members’ backgrounds (guitarist Rob Crow with Thingy and Heavy Vegetable, bassist Armistead Burwell Smith with Three Mile Pilot) distinguishes Pinback’s cleanly produced, smoothly performed, gently propulsive tunes from such consumer narcotics as smooth jazz and easy listening....

This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists include Theater Oobleck, Jennifer Biddle LaFleur, Michael Meyers, Nomenil, Barrie Cole, Blair Thomas, and many other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 12th annual Rhinofest runs through October 7....

I recently went on a business trip cross-country. While there, I spent a good deal of time with a female friend I’ve known for over eight years. In all that time, I’ve loved this woman. I’ve had girlfriends in that time, but no one very serious for very long. She’s always had a long-term boyfriend, a much richer/more confident/better looking/more successful guy, and I would be remiss if I failed to admit that she’s somewhat out of my league because she’s also much richer/more confident/better looking/more successful....

The property tax bill that a guy I’ll call Joe recently received for his commercial building in Edgewater was quite clear as to how the $44,191.04 he owed would be spent. The Board of Education would get $21,630.96, the city $8,817.56, the county $3,242.82, and the Park District $3,127.44. The rest would go to, among other things, libraries, forest preserves, water-treatment operations, hospitals, pensions, and museums. It also had a line item for something called “TIF-Bryn Mawr/Broadway Ave,” but it said the TIF, or tax increment financing district, would get $0....

Dear editor: You bet. Professor Bailey’s “lots of similar cases” were a half dozen Hispanics he met in bars in Chicago. That’s it. He threw out of the “sample” the one woman who was working as a real estate broker rather than in the sex trades. Don’t let facts get in the way of the ST (remember: Silly Theory) that such people are motivated by sex, sex, sex. The “commonalities” are derived from biased samples, ignoring most of the evidence, the evidence for instance of personal testimony or common sense or accurate accounting....

About a year ago, Stage Two Theatre Company cast a wide net for new one-acts. The company planned to make preliminary evaluations of the plays, then invite its audience to vote, along the lines of a poetry slam, for the best in a festival of the half dozen that would get staged readings. The response nearly swamped the small company: “We got 300 submissions from all over the world,” says producer Tom Samorian....

When he was eight Ansel Deon was just like the other kids at the powwow, running around, tossing back Cokes, and getting in the elders’ hair. When he turned nine, he turned serious. He asked for lessons in traditional-style singing, and plenty of elders, starting with his father, were happy to teach him. “We call ’em our powwow dads, or uncles. There’s a bunch of them.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“I really want to write Mr. Stallone a letter and tell him how much I love his movie,” says Deb Sokolow. But, “it’s really Rocky I love. It’s not Sylvester Stallone.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Sokolow, a graduate student in fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute, sat down in early September to watch a videotape of Rocky–one of her favorite movies–she wasn’t planning on turning it into an art project....

Friday 2/18 – Thursday 2/24 Violent video games have been blamed for everything from declining attention spans to the Columbine killings. But is the problem the games or the kids–or both? Columbia College’s new multimedia exhibit Play examines the role of kids’ games and toys in contemporary society with digital displays of video games, a shooting-gallery game designed by students, and a collection of Star Wars action figures. Tonight’s free opening reception runs from 5 to 7 at the Columbia College Art Gallery, 72 E....

It seems like half of New York’s downtown jazz scene has dabbled in electronica these past few years, with varying results: drummer Jim Black’s adaptation of jungle rhythms was uncanny; trumpeter Graham Haynes’s use of frosty synth washes was not so gripping. The Claudia Quintet is one of several groups led by drummer John Hollenbeck (sideman to everyone from new-music stalwart Meredith Monk to big-band leader Bob Brookmeyer to edgy trumpeter Cuong Vu); the graceful, slow-moving melodies he writes create bristling tension with his hyperactive drum ‘n’ bass-derived rhythms....

A church with top-notch musicians among its parishioners is blessed indeed. Pianist Deborah Sobol, a founder of the Chicago Chamber Musicians, has been attending services at Saint James Cathedral for years, and this summer she started a free early-evening recital series called “Rush Hour” there and corralled many of her colleagues to take part. The impressive list of guest performers includes Chicago Symphony Orchestra flutist Mathieu Dufour and clarinetist Larry Combs, and the 45-minute programs range far afield from the usual chamber-music chestnuts: quartets by Faure and Dvorak as well as John Harbison’s rarity Book of Hours and Seasons have been performed so far....

Desperately Seeking Muckrakers Journalism’s help-wanteds are usually phrased more delicately than that. Thumbing through recent issues of Editor & Publisher, I find papers looking for someone “hard-hitting,” someone who “cuts through hooey,” someone who wants to head to an “intensely competitive” market or to “one of the most storied areas in the nation” (the Mississippi delta, if you’re wondering) and “make an impact.” But nobody’s being invited to–in so many words–bring a bucket and drain a swamp....