TRICKY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I knew Tricky had signed to Hollywood Records for his sixth full-length, Blowback, but I didn’t realize he was actually going Hollywood until I looked over the album’s list of guest stars. Sure, he’s always enlisted big names, from PJ Harvey to Bjork, but his collaborators have usually seemed more attuned to his murky, introverted aesthetic than this batch: Three of the Red Hot Chili Peppers?...

A Soul Baby Grows Up Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month Johnson’s major-label debut, Chapter 1: Love, Pain & Forgiveness, finally hit the shelves. The young singer learned a thing or two in the intervening years, including how easily the minutiae of marketing can take priority over the music: the record was originally slated to come out in July 2000 but was delayed repeatedly as the label vacillated on what song to release first....

Plagiarism is journalism’s sin of sins, but not its crime of crimes. In court it’s a copyright violation, if that. Wendell Hutson is steaming mad because somebody else signed his work. Hutson’s gunning for legal satisfaction, but don’t count on him getting any. In the May 20, 2002, Illinois Real Estate Journal he found a roundup of Illinois business park developments. The segment labeled “Alton” began: “Twenty years after an Alton manufacturing plant closed its doors, the downtown site is now being developed into a potential 1 million square foot mixed-use business park with the potential for 1 million square feet....

Friday 1/19 – Thursday 1/25 Recently children from three city elementary school classes were asked to make two quilt squares–one based on the worst name they’ve ever been called, and another detailing their reaction to the affront. One fifth-grader, whose tiny N-word is upstaged by colorful buttons, wrote, “I feel mad when someone calls me a nigger because I know they’re not joking….I’d like to hit the person but I just walk away instead so I don’t get into trouble....

Last December, Museum of Contemporary Art education assistant Caryn Coleman and about ten of her coworkers put the word out to the 100-plus administrators, preparators, security guards, and clerks who slip through the employee entrance every day: “Send us your art!” “There are just so many staff members here at the museum who are artists–on the side or professionally–that we figured, why not bring all this together and show everybody out there how much a part of our lives this is?...

…where everyone is above average. According to a report issued by Northern Illinois University’s Center for Governmental Studies (“2002 Report on the Illinois Policy Survey”), 54 percent of Illinoisans believe that the financial condition of state residents is worse than it was last year, but only 23 percent report that their own personal financial condition is worse. Likewise, only 44 percent believe that Illinois public schools overall are good or excellent, but 63 percent believe that their own community’s schools are....

For over eight decades the Civic Orchestra has been the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s training ensemble, recruiting dozens of instrumentalists every year from leading music schools and putting them under the tutelage of CSO musicians and maestros such as Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, and Pinchas Zukerman. For next Monday’s concert the guest conductor is Roberto Abbado, a fascinatingly versatile Italian up-and-comer (and nephew of Claudio Abbado, the other candidate for the CSO directorship that went to Barenboim)....

No Brazilian musician has done more to popularize the sound of contemporary Bahia than Daniela Mercury. She’s long been a huge pop star at home, but over the course of a decade her frothy, high-energy music has gained some real depth, and that’s earned her broader respect. On 2000’s terrific Sol da liberdade (BMG U.S. Latin) she interpreted work by some of Brazil’s most sophisticated songwriters (Caetano Veloso, Lucas Santtana, Lenine), chipped in a few tunes of her own, and made the best recording of her career....

Artistic director Kevin Iega Jeff and co-artistic director Gary Abbott have come up with a second part to Move!, premiered just over a year ago, and will preview Move!–Movement Two at the company’s first engagement at the Dance Center of Columbia College. A piece that celebrates the vitality of movement, it runs the gamut from African-inflected boogying numbers to a small, pumping, angular, devilishly quick solo to a pointedly cool, sexy duet to a character turn by a nutty, seductive, eye-rolling female partygoer....

“It’s not like I was born a feminist and always knew that there was some problem with beauty pageants,” says Lisa Wainwright, an art historian at the School of the Art Institute. “I bought so many Barbies–I performed my femininity through my Barbie dolls.” And she watched beauty pageants on TV. “I liked the spectacle of it, the man in the tuxedo, this sweeping stage, and 50 girls–all my Barbie dolls come alive....

Graham Norton is a cheeky bugger–and proud of it. The Irish-born, openly gay British TV celebrity–host of the Channel 4 talk show So Graham Norton–could be Dame Edna Everage’s naughty nephew. Looking a bit like Elton John with his stocky build and short-cropped hair, he’s fond of shiny suits and scantily clad musclemen; the set of his TV show prominently displays a framed photo of hunky Miles O’Keeffe, star of the 1981 film Tarzan, the Ape Man....

I made a mistake on my way to Peter Pan at the Marriott Theatre. By way of introducing the story of Wendy and the Lost Boys to a carload of virgin viewers (ages three to eight), I hummed a bit of what I thought they were going to hear: a bar or two of “I’ve Gotta Crow” and the opening of “Never Never Land.” When we got there I realized I’d led them astray....

On a recent Saturday at 4:55, novelist Matt Segur escaped his bulky coat and claimed a small table at cozy Simon’s Tavern in Andersonville. He’d agreed to meet Brook Long, a musician friend from his undergrad days at Northwestern, for drinks at five, but he didn’t seem to expect Long to show up on time, because he went ahead and ordered a Knob Creek bourbon, neat. And anyway, as he worked on the manuscript, Segur was fomenting his own publication scheme....

I first came across Ira Sullivan’s name in a record review in my hometown newspaper in 1964. I showed the article to my clarinet teacher, calling his attention to the part that said Sullivan could play trumpet and saxophone with equal facility; my teacher patiently explained that this was impossible due to the different embouchures used on brass and reed instruments–perfecting one, he told me, would certainly ruin the other. All the same, this guy Sullivan could do this supposedly impossible thing–which impressed the hell out of me at 13....

In an interview posted on his Web site, artist and musician John Duncan asserts that he’s “not interested in provoking,” which may come as a surprise to those familiar with his confrontational early work. In 1976 Duncan channeled the emotions he experienced after being assaulted on a Los Angeles street into a performance piece called Scare, for which he donned a mask, knocked at the front doors of two different friends, fired blank rounds at their faces when they answered, and walked away....

Every shot counts in this drama set initially in Istanbul, where, writer-director Yesim Ustaoglu has said, “all the problems of Turkey exist in microcosm.” A night of danger solidifies a friendship between two men from opposite ends of the country: Berzan, a street vendor, is from a Kurdish village near the Iraqi border, and Mehmet, who works for the Istanbul water department, is from a tiny town in the west. Ustaoglu, once an architect, finds the incidental beauty in the industrial; with director of photography Jacek Petrycki, she composes the scenes of the characters at work and in transit as elegantly and emotively as she frames a sunset or the face of love....

Last May, Deborah Lynch shocked the city’s political establishment when she upset the incumbent and took over as president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Since then, operatives at City Hall and the Chicago Public Schools have nervously waited for the first sign that she would break from the conciliatory, get-along style of her predecessor, Tom Reece. It gets confusing, but the system has undergone two opposing revolutions in the last 14 years....

What do you get when you cross two certified geniuses? Variations on enigma. Mercy is a collaboration between two MacArthur fellows, composer-singer-choreographer Meredith Monk and visual artist Ann Hamilton. Monk, the older of the two by 13 years, was a member of the Judson Church group in the 60s but is better known now as a singer than a movement artist (she performed here last in 1996, in her solo show Volcano Songs)....

You probably get lots of E-mails from hopefuls wanting to become advice columnists, but I thought I would ask anyway: How does one become a successful advice columnist? I believe that I have something to offer. I give advice to friends and family, and I’m sure that there are many other people out there who would benefit from my advice. I am not interested in simply spouting my opinions: I am interested in helping people....

The CollaborAction showcase of 20 short plays (each under seven minutes long) includes world premieres by Warren Leight, Beth Henley, Wendy MacLeod, and others. The festival also features environmental design by Wesley Kimler and DJs between plays. “Summer Sketchbook” takes place nightly June 4-16 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Showtimes are Mondays-Thursdays, 8 PM; Fridays-Saturdays, 7 and 9 PM; Sunday, June 9, 7 PM; and Sunday, June 16, 5 PM....