In the past, critics have accused the Mayor’s Office of Special Events and the Blues Festival’s all-volunteer advisory committee of adopting a cynical “book it and they will come” attitude: if almost anything that includes the words “Chicago” and “blues” will draw tourists to Grant Park like flies on sherbet, and if four days of free music and outdoor drinking is enough to entice throngs of Chicagoans to join them, then why bother being creative?...

“Just as Chicago provided school choice to students at only a portion of the eligible schools last fall, CPS [Chicago Public Schools] now proposes to provide parental-choice tutoring this year to children at only 13 of the 25 eligible schools, leaving 12 high schools out of the loop,” writes Alexander Russo in Catalyst Chicago (March). “However, federal officials have signaled that CPS may not get away with that. ‘Nobody has been given any special dispensation to serve fewer schools this year,’ says Melinda Malico of the U....

Dizzying thought of the day, from Paul Farago, writing in the libertarian Heartland Institute’s “Intellectual Ammunition” (May/June): “Money does not corrupt politics, as the reformers claim. Rather, politics corrupts money. When something of great value can be granted by officeholders instead of earned in the competitive marketplace, all roads lead to the Capitol.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where more jobs are. According to a Brookings Institution study based on 1990 census data and 1998-’99 interviews (“Meeting the Demand,” May 2001), suburban Chicago employers are more willing to consider hiring welfare recipients than central-city employers–but less likely to have actually done so....

FATBOY SLIM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the year or so following the release of You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, the second studio album Norman Cook recorded under the name Fatboy Slim, the man turned into a cottage industry: after the ubiquitous singles “The Rockafeller Skank” and “Praise You” came a whomping remix of Groove Armada’s “I See You Baby,” quick-buck compilations like The Fatboy Slim/Norman Cook Collection and Fatboy Slim’s Greatest Remixes, and belated U....

Like Boston’s Greg Kelley and Berlin’s Axel Dörner, Austria’s Franz Hautzinger is a trumpeter whose improvisations rarely, if ever, employ that instrument’s traditional tone. But with his formidable technique and close miking (placing the microphone in the bell of the trumpet to achieve distorted, supersaturated tone colors), Hautzinger might be the most extreme of the three, dismantling conventional musical notions with a zest and focus that would make John Cage grin....

As a hospice nurse, Patricia Tyson counsels people on the brink of death. But after work she’s become something of a private eye as she tries to get someone to fix up the Restvale Cemetery. “What’s going on at that cemetery is a disgrace,” she says. “I shouldn’t even call it a cemetery. It’s more like a landfill.” But she looked closer when she visited her father’s grave a few weeks later....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On November 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, just north of Lompoc, California, skydiver Ron Sirull (1,000 career jumps) performed at a military air show with his four-year-old dachshund, Brutus the Skydiving Dog (100 career jumps). Animal-rights activists protested, but Sirull claims skydiving “turns [Brutus] on” and says that both his vet and the Arizona Humane Society deem the jumps safe; the dog wears goggles and rides in a pouch strapped to Sirull’s chest....

When did your sex-advice column become a political column? That’s not why I read you. Please get back to peggers and piss drinkers. If I find anything about politics in your column next week, I’m done with you. I want info and entertainment on sex, not politics! –Joey M. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m sorry to say, though, that you’re going to read about politics in this week’s column–but only because I’m running your letter....

Livin’ Lovin’ Losin’: Songs of the Louvin Brothers Livin’ Lovin’ Losin’: Songs of the Louvin Brothers is the worst sort of tribute album: a casual listener will likely come away from it wondering why all the fuss over some post-World War II country duo. But there’s indeed good reason for a tribute, even if the 30 country pros assembled don’t quite prove it. Without Charlie and Ira Louvin’s close-harmony country songs, recorded in the 50s and early 60s, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris lose a crucial influence....

The Mousetrap, Broutil & Frothingham Productions, at the Theatre Building Chicago. Agatha Christie’s unkillable 1952 murder mystery could never have lasted half a century if she weren’t so adept at exploiting our fear of the unknown, capitalizing on our ambivalence about strangers who share the same shelter. And Susan Padveen’s taut, crackling staging casts a spell from the start, with set designers Jacqueline and Richard Penrod’s sepulchral Great Hall of Monkswell Manor....

In the mid-90s Jon Langford told me he envisioned the Waco Brothers as his Chicago bar band, and indeed back then these raucous country rockers were kicking up dust in some club every few weeks. (They’ve slowed down a bit since drummer Steve Goulding moved to New York a few years ago.) Though four of the six members (Langford, Goulding, mandolinist Tracey Dear, and bassist Alan Doughty) are British expats, they’re more committed to the American roots-rock ethos than most Yanks, honoring its down-home skepticism and acknowledging the mixed pleasures of booze....

Self Defense, or Death of Some Salesmen A serial killer is at the heart of Carson Kreitzer’s Self Defense, or Death of Some Salesmen, first produced in 2001 and now being staged by Rivendell Theatre Ensemble. Jolene Palmer is a slightly fictionalized version of Aileen Wuornos, subject of the 2003 film Monster. Wuornos killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 and was executed for her crimes in 2002. Where Monster paints a psychological portrait of her, showing how a mixture of bravado, fear, anger, neediness, and denial led her to kill, Self Defense offers intellectual arguments about cultural attitudes toward perpetrators and victims....

Henry Adaniya, who’s owned Trio since it opened in 1993, has stripped the room down, exposing the ceiling beams, painting the walls stark white, and throwing sacks of salt onto the mantel to create TRIO ATELIER, a supposedly casual incarnation of the former four-star destination. “It’s supposed to emulate a return to the basics in the decor as well as in the kitchen,” says Adaniya. But the simplicity seems forced, and the three flat-panel screens in the dining room, alternating between nature scenes and the restaurant’s logo, don’t help....

Conductor James Conlon made his Ravinia Festival debut in 1977, and he’s been back many times since. Recently he was appointed its music director, effective in 2005; he’ll replace Christoph Eschenbach, who, in the latest round of musical chairs among orchestra leaders, is moving to the Philadelphia Orchestra. The choice didn’t get a rise out of anyone–Conlon’s well liked by his colleagues, he’s American, and at 53 he’s relatively young. And he’s no stranger to Chicago audiences, having conducted the CSO downtown as well as productions at Lyric Opera....

The hype: “In the wake of huge power blackouts in 1999, an embarrassed and conciliatory John Rowe, chairman of Com Ed, said, ‘This will not cost ratepayers any more money….This is our problem. We’ll fix it ourselves.’” The facts: “However, two years later, during questioning at an ICC hearing, a company executive said that Rowe’s promise should not be viewed as ‘a literal commitment to the public but as a general conceptual statement for consumption and understanding in the media....

Writing about Deborah Butterfield, critic James Yood identified her subject as “a nostalgic trope–the stuff of revery and myth.” Her life-size horse sculptures at Zolla/Lieberman do indeed hark back to the preindustrial past, not only because the horse was a more common subject in earlier art but because hers appear to be made of wood. That’s not the case: she finds sticks, precisely casts them in bronze, then uses a variety of patinas to mimic bits of wood down to the tiniest detail....

Like most of the songs on the radio these days, most of the books about music that land prime placement are pure fluff. This season’s most hyped tomes include Kurt Cobain’s Journals (an ethically questionable release) and Bill Wyman’s tales of life as a Rolling Stone. But there are books out that provide history, analysis, and cultural context. You just have to look. (Times Books/Henry Holt) Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When a record release is only the third most significant event of the month for a band, things have definitely turned a corner. On September 14 Silkworm put out its ninth album, It’ll Be Cool (Touch and Go), but just three days before, guitarist Andy Cohen had gotten married–and ten days later, bassist Tim Midgett’s first child was born. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Silkworm continued to tour and record at the same rate for the next few years, but Midgett made time to complete his electrical engineering degree in Seattle, where the band was based for most of the 90s, and graduated in early 2001....

Love of Labor That’s a lot to extract from a content analysis–not only what the Tribune reports but why (its “set of assumptions”). When Bruno and his team of graduate students sifted through Tribune stories from 1991 to 2001, they had a hunch what they’d find: “The Chicago Tribune was selected…because its editorializing on labor relations has routinely communicated a conservative point of view and its assaults on organized labor have a long pedigree....

Me, the Devil and Other Friends, BackStage Theatre Company, at the Cornelia Arts Building. In Fannon Holland’s new play, hell is a bar where the patrons are actors and the barkeep is the devil. Constantly auditioning, the customers get roles that are supposed to help illuminate their lives on earth. So it is for Dude (Dan Wolfe), an “average white guy” in his late 20s content to drift through the play of his life repeating the same mistakes over and over....