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KIT CLAYTON, STEWART WALKER, CHESSIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In electronic music, the how has historically been at least as interesting as the what, and it’s certainly a focus of this touring package bill. Kit Clayton’s music is a sort of minimalist instrumental analogue to Mad Professor’s jacked-up digidub–a laptop tinkerer from San Francisco, he tweaks very simple rhythms and short melodic sequences with the same fervor the Prof uses to scramble reggae’s eggs....

We are a M/F bisexual couple facing an ethical dilemma. We’ve been together ten years. He’s a gorgeous, well-built man with a strong sex drive. I’m a beautiful woman with a normal sex drive. I have also been HIV-positive for 12 years. He’s negative. We would really like to explore his bisexuality together and have been advertising for a bisexual male partner. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We ran a hot ad for a year that was open about my HIV status....

By Susan DeGrane At 8:25, Father George McKenna strips off his maroon windbreaker with “Airport Chaplain” printed on the back and pulls white vestments out of the wardrobe cart. During his quick change, the seats in the makeshift chapel fill completely, and about ten more people stand at the back of the waiting area. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last 13 years McKenna’s been celebrating mass every Sunday morning for a congregation of airport security guards, janitors, flight attendants, baggage handlers, executives, Chicago police officers, travelers, and even a few people from the neighborhood....

The fifth edition of this annual celebration of the art of improvisational comedy brings together performers from around the U.S. and abroad. (Chicago, of course, is heavily represented.) This year’s festival, the largest yet, is divided into several series–Mainstage, Showcase, Sketch, Solo, Duo, and Fringe–as well as an all-night improv session, an adult-oriented “Blue” show, a series of daytime Lunchbreak performances (presented in conjunction with the city’s cultural affairs department), and numerous special events, including forums and workshops....

The 19th annual Chicago Latino Film Festival, presented by the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, runs Friday, April 4, through Thursday, April 17. Film and video screenings will be at Association House, 2150 W. North; Bank One, Dearborn at Madison; Benton House, 3036 S. Gratten, second floor; Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th; Biograph; Columbia College Ludington Bldg.; Richard J. Daley College, 7500 S. Pulaski; Dominican Univ., 7900 W. Division, River Forest; Facets Cinematheque; I....

The biggest downside to convincing folks that you’re the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band is the likelihood that you are, in fact, not the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band. That’ll piss people off for real, and on first listen, the Hives’ new Tyrannosaurus Hives (Interscope) seems to justify the disillusionment of those who happily lapped up the hype surrounding the Swedish band’s breakthrough record, Veni Vidi Vicious. No longer is each song an explosive chain reaction in which Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist’s yelps detonate a string of guitar blasts that in turn trigger a flurry of drum conflagrations....

The protagonists in Jane Comfort’s Persephone and Underground River both travel to an underworld, an experience that comes across as simultaneously liberating and dangerous. But their destinations are very different: where Persephone of course visits Hades’ kingdom and becomes his bride, the person represented by four dancers in Underground River is a girl in a coma, trapped in her own psyche. The newer of the two pieces, Persephone, suffers a bit for its predictability, but 1998’s Underground River is a joyful, often hilarious exploration of a state we might not think of as fun....

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Lee Morris, the Mississippi-born, Chicago-honed vocalist who cooked up a remarkable fusion of R & B and hip-hop with soul and blues on Morris Code 337 in 1995 and Whip It on U in 2000 (both on the local Da-Man label). Morris spans generations and genres: in performance, his spins and twists recall the sensual athleticism that characterized the stagecraft of the soul era, but his vocal approach–blunt and aggressive, mostly unleavened by deep soul’s combination of worldly passion and spiritual uplift–is as unrepentantly modern as the synth-heavy backings he favors on his recordings....

Dear Reader editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been an avid reader of your paper for years. I’m writing to offer my opinion on the new format your paper introduced on Friday, September 17. I have specifically used your theater section for years as a comprehensive guide to plan my theater outings. I was really disappointed to see that you’ve removed the “Highly Recommended,” “Openings,” and “Closings” columns from your theater section (the “Short List”)....

By Ben Joravsky Johnson has been in Chicago for only about a year, so he’s written no plays set here–though he’s working on one. Most of the plays, including Hambone, are set in and around his hometown of Anderson, a midsize industrial city in the northwest corner of South Carolina. They also take up an old theme–conflict between fathers and sons–and make music a major focus. “My parents always said I had an old soul,” he says....

Sylvia Guido describes herself as a “restaurant nomad.” At 67, after nearly 50 years in the business, the owner of Bella Domani in Lincoln Square is operating her seventh food-related enterprise. She launched her first, a small grocery store in Cicero, at age 19. Both of her parents were Italian immigrants–her mother from Palermo and her father from Foggia, near “the heel of the boot.” Guido took what she’d learned in her family kitchen and began to supplement the packaged products she sold in her store with fresh food like pastas and sausages....

Has anyone ever bothered to seriously check the claims of TV producer Chuck Barris in his book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind to see if he’s a fraud or not? Also, could you personally investigate his claims? (I think he’s a fraud, but I don’t have the time to investigate myself.) –Russell, Sacramento, CA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ah, right, Chuck Barris. Barris is the showbiz entrepreneur who created The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show (the last of which he hosted), hits in the late 1960s and ’70s that were thought to represent the absolute low in schlock TV, at least until everybody got a load of Temptation Island....

I grew up in Dover, Pennsylvania, a suburb of York (of Peppermint Pattie, barbell, and air conditioner fame). I learned in school that York was the first capital of the United States (banners all over the city say so too). My wife grew up in central PA and never heard such a story. Has my hometown written itself a separate history for the sake of ego and (hopefully) tourism, or does it have a credible claim?...

Bjork may be Iceland’s best-known musical product, but the country also has a lively classical music scene. Violinist Gudny Gudmundsdottir and cellist Gunnar Kvaran, the married couple who formed Trio Reykjavikur in 1988, are among that nation’s most prominent musicians and teachers–Gudmundsdottir has been the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster for almost three decades. Their playing is warm and vigorous, in the central European style, and is set off wonderfully by the romantic, expansive gestures of Czech-born pianist Peter Mate, who joined them in 1996....

Hysterical Pastoral Mixer 03 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the “Hysterical Pastoral” show at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, nature and references to it are character-ized by a strange, often humorous displacement. Dan Attoe sets up tents in the gallery for three works he calls Tent; their curved forms evoke the curves of a landscape, making them seem weirdly out of place but reminding us how removed our urban world is from nature....

Playwright Charles L. Mee and SITI Company director Anne Bogart celebrate the life and vision of 20th-century pop artist Robert Rauschenberg by presenting them the way he most likely would: as a collage, giving this piece the same color, irony, and jagged edges the artist favored in the eclectic “combines” for which he’s most famous. This energetic arrangement of biographical tidbits, character sketches, chicken jokes, and poetry by the likes of Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman feels as American as Norman Rockwell....

Captured at www.todesstrafe-usa.de/death_penalty/voices_readme.htm Please use the address like you find it on the prisoner’s page. Very important is the inmate number. If you miss the number or it’s wrong, your letter will come back. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Start it slow. Don’t ask too private questions in your first letters and don’t ask questions about the case. For this a closer relationship basing on trust has to be built....

“From the 1940s until her death in 1984 Mabel Mercer was regarded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Leontyne Price as the definitive cafe singer, an artist who struck a deep personal chord in nearly everybody who came to hear her,” writes James Gavin in his chronicle of cabaret, Intimate Nights. The nonprofit Mabel Mercer Foundation, founded in 1985, honors her contributions with an annual high-profile showcase for her artistic heirs; this wingding is traditionally held in New York or San Francisco, but this year it comes here, offering local admirers of this fragile yet tenacious art form an unparalleled opportunity to sample its finest practitioners....

Why the government should be in the housing market. Government-financed housing units do increase the total number of housing units in a given place, write economists Todd Sinai and Joel Waldfogel of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper “Do Low-Income Housing Subsidies Increase Housing Consumption?” January), “although on average three government-subsidized units displace two units that would otherwise have been provided by the private market…....

The sixth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, March 21 through 27, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. Step on It Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evi (Henriette Heinze) is a waitress on the verge of a nervous breakdown in this 2001 film set in a swinging Austrian ski resort....