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ERASE ERRATA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s always a bit off-putting when a band’s influences are so transparent–if it’s already been done once (and well), why bother doing it again? But though Erase Errata, four ladies from Oakland, share a frantic, crunchy postpunk sensibility with half the bands on the west coast right now, the similarities stop at the sound: while Glass Candy & the Shattered Theatre do their coy imitation of Siouxsie and Le Shok ape the Fall, Erase Errata have worked out their own unique interpretation of the herky-jerky....

While still in his 20s, influential Czech modernist Karel Teige (1900-1951) turned from painting to book design, theoretical writing, and the editing of avant-garde journals. Influenced by cubism, expressionism, constructivism, and surrealism, he was a Marxist who believed everyone could be an artist–who wanted to end the idea of “art with a capital A.” But as the current retrospective at the Smart Museum demonstrates, it’s not easy to document his work: books in cases can’t really be examined, there are many labels to read, and an installation illustrating his architectural ideas, including a floor plan and furniture made for this exhibit, is more informative than affecting....

Half a century before Vince McMahon’s silicone-cushioned vixens packed arenas for the WWE, platinum blond grapplers with names like Gladys “Killem” Gillem, Diamond ‘Lil, and the Fabulous Moolah stripped down to their swimsuits and wrestled each other on the carnival circuit. It was the 1940s and ’50s and some states, including Illinois and Indiana, were so scandalized they passed ordinances banning men from audiences. The women’s fights, staged in venues such as Andersonville’s Rainbow Arena, were attended by old ladies in big church hats who stood on the sidelines screaming “Kick her!...

When Mary Neff first saw the William Reid mansion in the mid-60s, all of the Prairie Avenue millionaires were long gone. The near-south neighborhood had become a red-light district, though it was starting to turn around as R.R. Donnelley & Sons expanded, buying up vacant lots for its factories. Neff, a lawyer for the communications giant, often handled its real estate transactions. Two years later she did. She’d had to fight with the administrator of Nedwick’s estate, but she had the backing of R....

There’s this guy who comes in here every night without fail. He sorta smells like cabbage that’s sat around too long. He comes in and sleeps. We call him Sleepy Joe. He’s like the slowest man on earth–glaciers move faster than he does. It’s easy to miss him because he’s not very active. He’s kinda short, kinda chubby, but I think he wears like three coats. Sometimes he’ll flip through a book like the Kama Sutra–I was shocked–it was one of those scenes that you see and you sort of shudder to yourself....

uBung (Practice) There was a time in my life when I saw an old man in the face of every baby and a little girl in every elderly woman. I was pregnant, and this compulsive perception wasn’t pleasant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where I saw that glass as half-empty, Belgian writer-director-performer Josse De Pauw sees it as half-full in uBung (Practice). A three-year-old piece developed under the auspices of the Belgian company Victoria and performed here in Chicago for the last time ever, it features actors between the ages of 13 and 15 delivering the dialogue onstage for De Pauw’s black-and-white film, projected on a screen behind them....

“PLEASE WARM UP, little raconteur,” began the item in the “Missed Connections” section of the Reader’s Matches ads for January 14, 2000. The cryptic 50-word poem was followed in subsequent weeks by similarly arcane postings: “HANDSOME, 26 Y.O….relatively minute but possessed of Tatlinesque love. Eats iron, breathes perfume. Seeks young revolutionary willing to cut a few hearts.” “BABY-BLUE SLEEPER, I watched you on the Northbound red. All silence. The walls rung down across the bell of the light....

A few years ago Jason Ohlberg, founding artistic director of this six-year-old troupe, left town, putting Anna Simone Levin in charge. Now she’s taking a yearlong sabbatical to study choreography in Amsterdam, and the group is being headed by Jeffery Hancock (former artistic associate), Joanna Rosenthal, and Katherine Saifuku. Sometimes artistic turnovers aren’t good, but Same Planet Different World has managed to maintain continuity and artistic quality. For one thing, they still have a relationship with Ohlberg, who’s setting his Gloria on the troupe for this concert–a Chicago premiere....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having seen The Amen Corner by James Baldwin at the Goodman Theater [reviewed April 6], I found the most disturbing part of the play not onstage but in the program booklet. In over two pages of biographical text covering Baldwin’s childhood, family, religion, career, influences, and politics, there is one oblique reference to Baldwin’s “sexual feelings that he had largely repressed....

One of the most quietly innovative multidisciplinary performance workshops in the United States, the Field has for years yielded a rich crop of new work from choreographers, playwrights, other spoken-word artists, and intriguing hybrids of the above. Started in New York, this artist-run organization now has branches in 11 other cities, including Chicago. The idea is for performers to support and enhance the work of their peers through constructive feedback and cross-pollination of genres....

I recently was sent this interesting story by an Internet friend. Is this true? “Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the prerailroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing....

Friday 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » GIL MANTERA’S PARTY DREAM On disc these two “brothers” sound like your worst electroclash nightmare, flaunting the kind of stiff, dinky beats and maudlin electronic flutters you’d expect to hear in a crappy eastern European discotheque. Onstage, though, their genuine post-gay nastiness saves the day. Maybe you’ve already seen a shitty male keyboardist in a gold lame G-string and silky gloves–but how about one who lights his pubes on fire, sticks a beer bottle up his ass, and then drinks from it?...

It was a cold and rainy October night at Tremper High School’s Anderson Field in Kenosha, but fans with plastic ponchos over their camouflage jackets waited in a long line for brats, and the home bleachers were filled with families. Knit Packers caps were de rigueur, though up near the top of the stands, a row of men wore hard hats emblazoned with the home team’s logo. They danced an ugly, irregular YMCA, pausing to dip various snacks into cups of warm cheese....

The Warlocks won’t exactly whack you over the head with their radical originality. It’s no challenge to pin down the source material for each cut on the California band’s second full-length, Phoenix (Birdman): “Stickman Blues” is very Stoogey; “Baby Blue” kicks off like the later Soft Boys; “Hurricane Heart” swaggers like AC/DC; and the monumental “Shake the Dope Out”–well, let’s just say that “Sister Ray” still has the riff that keeps on giving....

Though it consists entirely of students–undergraduates and graduates at New Jersey’s Rider University–the Westminster Choir has been one of America’s top choruses for close to six decades. The choir is in residence every summer at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina, and its 40 members also form the core of the 175-voice Westminster Symphonic Choir, which regularly performs with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and other major east-coast ensembles....

Windy City Sox Fans held their annual holiday party Sunday afternoon at Senese’s Winery in Oak Lawn. Senese’s is an old-school Italian restaurant where fake ivy spirals like a knuckleball around rustic white beams. Windy City Sox Fans are a rugged old-school group who enjoy spicy sausage and don’t care for knuckleheads. “I don’t take kindly to seeing entire groups of people insulted for nothing more than a feeble attempt at humor,” said Hal Vickery, a 53-year-old high school chemistry and physics teacher who lives in Joliet and attends about 20 White Sox games a year....

Wichita With Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Walter Coy, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Jack Elam, and Mae Clarke. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After the opening credits, for instance. They’re accompanied by Tex Ritter belting out the hokey title tune, which seems to recount the entire plot in advance–as good a way as any of making us feel we’re in familiar territory....

Changes of Scenery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six years ago, painter Didier Nolet’s wife, Nona, sat down in their Lakeview home for a good read. The book in hand was Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. When she was done, she looked up and said, “OK. Let’s sell the house and move to France.” Nolet, a French native who’d lived in the U....

More than any American composer since Leonard Bernstein, John Corigliano has an uncanny feel for the popular pulse. Proficient in a wide range of idioms, he responds to the nation’s shifts in mood rather than adhere to an orthodoxy. As if answering the prayers of concertgoers frustrated with atonal music, he’s written sonatas, quartets, and concertos in an updated Romantic style; his only opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, acknowledges postmodernism in its clever, self-referential pastiche, but never degenerates into an ironic joke....

MARCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brent Ritzel started his exhaustive Evanston-based Zine Guide in late 1997 as an alternative to the now defunct Factsheet Five. Currently in its sixth edition, the guide provides reviews and listings of over 1,000 independent magazines, zines, and broadsheets, as well as an index cross-referencing the bands, people, and topics they cover. Tonight and tomorrow, March 22, Ritzel, who also publishes the zine Tail Spins, and associate editor Alicia Dorr will host two nights of free Zine Guide-sponsored readings at Quimby’s, 1854 W....