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K-Rad By Joshua Westlund Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike their forefathers, however, K-Rad have shown a surprising willingness to meet the club kids halfway. They compose entirely new music for every live performance, and tailor these compositions to the venue itself–a method that’s earned them gigs at progressively larger venues (in six months they’ve gone from playing experimental rooms like Nervous Center to trendy hot spots like the Dragon Room)....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week the city council of Palo Alto, California, will vote on a code of conduct for its meetings that forbids even nonverbal expressions of “disagreement or disgust” (rolling one’s eyes, smirking, shaking one’s head). According to the San Jose Mercury News, one councilman skeptical of the code has been adopted as a poster boy by its opponents, apparently because his large mustache makes it hard to tell whether he’s frowning or not....

I’m the female host of Hurry Date. There’s also a male host. Hurry Date is three minutes with each person. We have about 25 men and women tonight. The girls stay in one spot and the guys rotate–they follow the letters of the alphabet but the drunker they get the less they remember that. Everybody has an ID tag and a number. If you like ’em you just circle “yes” on their scorecard....

This is very close to my old apartment on Carpenter. I no longer live there. It was such an awful, dreary place, but we were young. It was our first year at UIC. My best friend Chris and I shared the apartment, and we decided to have a party to start off the semester. We had at least 200 people, and the cops came. Chris and I went down to talk to these two women cops....

“I’m not into sentimentality,” says Ann Filmer, a director, choreographer, and cofounder of the Aardvark theater collective. “I like more visceral theater, the kind of thing that affects me internally. And I’m not big on theater as storytelling. Books are for telling stories. Theater is about having an experience.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since its inception in the fall of 1995, Aardvark has specialized in plays that kick the audience in the gut....

This program of seven films and videos includes some of the very finest work of five giants of experimental filmmaking. Stan Brakhage had been planning a film inspired by Chinese ideograms for years; he made his unfinished Chinese Series in his dying months, scratching its marks on black 35-mm film. In its two haunting minutes, exploding lines flirt with the depiction of recognizable objects. The world premiere of Robert Breer’s What Goes Up… makes clear that he is still going strong as he nears 80: using his characteristic mix of photographs and animated drawings, Breer combines nudes, airplanes, images of himself, and tranquil nature scenes to create a quivering, transient visual field....

At 76, pianist Randy Weston is one of the last true bebop-era legends. But the composer of jazz standards like “Hi-Fly,” “Berkshire Blues,” and “Little Niles” has never been one to rest on his laurels. Back in the 50s he expanded on the individualistic accomplishments of Thelonious Monk, adopting his tricky rhythmic phrasing and jagged harmonies with a rare understanding. In the 60s he became one of the first jazz musicians to investigate the music’s deep links to Africa; the recently released Randy Weston’s African Rhythms on the French Comet label collects a pair of obscure quartet albums cut in Paris in the late 60s that nicely summarize the collision of bebop and African rhythms in a slew of tunes written earlier in the decade–“African Cookbook,” “Marrakech Blues,” “A Night in Medina....

ROSIE FLORES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Early in Rosie Flores’s career, she seemed to want to be a bad-girl rocker and a honky-tonk angel at the same time. In the 70s and early 80s she cut her teeth in rockabilly and cowpunk bands in southern California; her 1987 solo debut, Rosie Flores, was produced by Dwight Yoakam’s guitarist, and the single “Crying Over You” made some noise on the country charts....

I am a straight male in an exclusive relationship. My girlfriend and I have been together for two years, and her need for sex has dwindled. Any attempt to discuss this leads to tears and blame, i.e., “I am not into sex because you…” or “Everything would be fine if only you would…” My most recent attempt at arousing her interest–taking her to her favorite chic eatery–came to an end when she passed out on the couch in front of the TV....

Joining the gospel sweepstakes with Black Ensemble Theater’s Somebody Say Amen is this somewhat slicker musical, a Passion Productions import from Cincinnati Playhouse. Expanding the definition of godly music to include reggae, soft rock, R & B, and blues, a terrific quintet–backed by a cooking combo and well coached by Donald Lawrence (who contributes 10 new songs to the show’s 20 numbers)–achieves awesome harmonies in the title tune and hits the heights with “I’m Just Holding On....

This was the year when the corporate cancer that afflicts all major sports almost succeeded in overwhelming the Super Bowl finally and for good. The National Football League title matchup was itself a sign of the problem, a game played between nomadic teams moved by fat-cat owners to take advantage of sweetheart deals. The Tennessee Titans, previously the Houston Oilers, had been moved by Bud Adams to a smaller market where greater profits were waiting, while the Saint Louis Rams, previously settled in Los Angeles, had been moved by Georgia Frontiere to exploit Saint Louis’s desperation after it lost the Cardinals to Phoenix....

Lenny Bruce was a comedian before he was a chapter in the history of American obscenity law. Because so much of his myth is wrapped up in matters that weren’t cause for laughter, it’s easy to forget this. We know him as a free-speech martyr, as a man wrongly persecuted for offending the powers that be, as a pioneer pushing Americans to talk freely about sex, religion, drugs, and race. His name’s still invoked every time somebody gets in trouble for “objectionable” comedy....

Mr. Skin stands at the window of his River North condo, gazing out over the ass end of the Rainforest Cafe frog. With one hand he holds a cordless phone to his ear; his other hand is tucked into the elastic waistband of his basketball shorts. It’s 9:52 AM, three days before Thanksgiving, and he’s waiting to go on the air in Joliet. He’s already done three radio shows this morning, and he’s anxious to leave for a session with his personal trainer....

The Queen’s Black Nightmare, Mom and Dad Productions, at the Viaduct Theater. In all three one-acts on this program, the worst thing that can happen to a character inevitably does. In Peter Shaffer’s 1965 Black Comedy, a struggling sculptor steals the furniture of his finicky gay neighbor in order to impress his fiancee’s father and a potential patron. Not only does the apartment building have a blackout–represented by a brightly lit stage (when the lights are on, the stage is dark)–but the neighbor comes back and the sculptor must secretly return the furniture in the dark....

A gentle feminist, Margi Cole has made dances about women’s experiences since she started her company eight years ago; only 2001’s Reel to Real, which featured tape measures and a voice-over about disguising female figure flaws, was remotely strident. Now, in a new trio called Passages Freed From Soil, Cole takes a look at Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte. Set to the third movement of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the piece is a departure for Cole–she says it’s intentionally “slow, deliberate, and simple....

JANUARY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One hundred years ago, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk: “Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line....

MARCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York-based experimental filmmaker Su Friedrich has suffered more than her fair share of medical problems–over the last several years she’s had a 13-pound cyst on her spleen, an abscessed ovary, polyps on her uterus, a torn ligament in her knee, and an intractable hormone imbalance that clogged her breast ducts. Her struggle with illness is the centerpiece of her latest film, The Odds of Recovery (2002), which combines first-person narration with documentary-style footage to explore aging, mortality, and Western medicine....

ERIK FRIEDLANDER & TOPAZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the space of its two recordings, jazz cellist Erik Friedlander’s quartet Topaz has provided a working definition of “leaps and bounds.” The subtle tunes on its eponymously titled debut showcased some promising tone poetry–especially in the interaction of Friedlander’s voluptuous arco work and Andy Laster’s wide-planed alto sax–but the album rarely caught fire, suggesting more possibilities than it explored....

The Beatles Let It Be…Naked (Apple/Capitol) The new set–which includes a remixed Let It Be and a bonus disc, Fly on the Wall, that strings together dialogue from the sessions–has touched off yet another wave of Beatles nostalgia, but even critics of the retooling have largely ignored the proprietary controversy in the middle of the musical one. On paper, the stripping away of Phil Spector’s 11th-hour production on the 1970 original was supposed to result in a purer, more faithful document of the Beatles’ acrimonious and ill-fated sessions for “Get Back” (the album’s working title)....

You’re going to see the Harlem Globetrotters at the United Center, and you’ve been excited for days. You’ve told friends and relatives, all of whom are envious. “Do they still chase each other with the bucket?” “Do they still jam the ball under their jerseys?” “Do they still stick the ball under their opponents’ jerseys?” “Do they still have opponents?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’re taking the kids, of course, and you leave early because there’s a photo session and a “chalk talk” with the players, and you want to catch everything....