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No contest. Charles Wheeler III writes in Illinois Issues (February) that “in only 17 Senate and 53 House districts [in Illinois] did both major parties field candidates. In the other 42 Senate and 65 House districts, only one party’s hopefuls are on the March ballot.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Relocation, demolition, and redevelopment activities [at the Chicago Housing Authority] continue to outpace the services available to support families in transition,” write Robin Snyderman and Steven Dailey II of the Metropolitan Planning Council in a recent report on CHA relocation activities (fact sheet number three, February)....

Not until the second act is Dame Edna: The Royal Tour transformed from very funny drag show to brilliant conceptual comedy. First Australian writer-performer Barry Humphries wins his audience over with a barrage of ribald jokes and campy give-and-take–standard stuff at female-impersonation nightclubs. Playing housewife turned self-invented “megastar” Dame Edna Everage, Humphries then presides over an inventive, sometimes outlandish update of the classic English pantomime, a traditional Christmas entertainment in which men play elderly females, or “dames....

Gwen Avery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vocalist Gwen Avery was raised in a tiny town outside Pittsburgh, where she spent many happy hours in her grandmother’s speakeasy, listening to the jukebox–or to whatever bluesman was passing through that night. She likes to invoke her childhood in her publicity material, portraying herself as a rough-hewn traditionalist, but her current style is actually an urbane, meticulously crafted blend of contemporary blues, light jazz, and pop....

Highly informative and thoroughly endearing, this 1991 documentary by Rachel Liebling chronicles the “high, lonesome sound” and its legendary performers against the backdrop of a changing America. Created by Scotch-Irish settlers in the Appalachian Mountains, bluegrass gradually infiltrated the mass media, incorporating outside instruments (the mandolin) and styles (from syncopated African-American work songs to rock ‘n’ roll). The music’s journey is embodied by Bill Monroe, whose career began in the Kentucky hills in the late 1920s and ultimately took him around the world; among the other players on hand are Ralph Stanley, Earl Scruggs, and newcomers like Alison Krauss, none of whom minces words about the commercial compromises (electric instruments, the singing-cowboy phenomenon) and cultural forces (network TV, the Vietnam war) that have changed mountain music....

J.G. Ballard is often quoted as saying science fiction died around the time editor, writer, and anthologist Judith Merril left New York for Toronto. “I remember my last sight of her,” he recalled in 1992, “surrounded by her friends and all the books she loved, shouting me down whenever I tried to argue with her, the strongest woman in a genre for the most part created by timid and weak men....

Invisible in the City, Infamous in the Burbs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After the first few hundred angry calls, reaction to the painting has split just about evenly, according to museum officials. And with CNN and the BBC paying attention, attendance is up tenfold: from the usual weekday average of ten people all the way to a hundred. Meanwhile the city museum, booted from the soon-to-be-condos Ward building last April, is thinking about finding another high-visibility downtown home....

Nova Scotian playwright Daniel MacIvor based the screenplay of this powerful Canadian feature (2002, 90 min.) on his play of the same name, and it has all the virtues of fine stage drama: narrative economy, honest emotion, and characters so closely defined that the most pedestrian encounters between them are revelatory. Three sisters from a devout Irish Catholic family reunite to be with their alcoholic mother as she succumbs to lung cancer, and the rebellious middle child, herself a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, insists on bringing her home from the hospital to die....

I was intrigued but not impressed by the Orion Ensemble in their early days. Their unconventional mix of instruments–violin (Florentina Ramniceanu), viola (Marlise Klein), cello (Judy Stone), clarinet (Kathryne Pirtle), and piano (Diana Schmuck)–allowed for flexibility in repertoire, and their all-female lineup was something of a novelty a decade ago. But they didn’t always play with cohesion and balance: the piano sometimes overwhelmed the other instruments, and the violin intonation was errant....

Originally from Sacramento, now based in Brooklyn, this instrumental five-piece sure has lousy taste in titles. Exhibit A: S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D., the meaningless pseudo-acronym with which they encumbered their debut for the local Kranky label. (Though just plain “Street Dad” wouldn’t have been much better.) The names of their songs are even worse: “Hair Dude, You’re Stepping on My Mystique,” “Dad, There’s a Little Phrase Called Too Much Information.” But they do have a way with the postpunk funk....

I read Neal Pollack’s article “Everybody Shut Up!” in the February 28 issue of the Reader. While it might be slightly entertaining, it is certainly in bad taste in the shadow of a real war for our country. I find it in extremely poor taste. It is also an insult to not only all U.S. poets and writers who are making a real effort and actually trying to do something about it, but to all the outspoken activist poets and writers throughout the world who have been imprisoned and tortured for speaking out and taking a stand against oppressive governments with military inclinations–a stance our own government is unfortunately headed in with the current deterioration of civil liberties....

[Dan Savage is on vacation this week. Here is “Classic Savage Love,” a column that originally ran in June of 1957, the year he won his first Pulitzer Prize–Eds.] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether you realize it or not, NYPD, those desperate dolls were doing you a favor. By making it obvious they were on marry-and-mate missions they tipped you off and you were able to flee before things got serious....

The 11th annual International Exposition of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art brings 90-some dealers in ceramics, furniture, jewelry, and other three-dimensional media to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, 600 E. Grand. Special exhibits focus on wood sculpture, fiber art by Ed Rossbach, work by artists living in Israel, and work by artists associated with Maine’s Watershed Center for the Arts and the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Each exhibit is the subject of one of the following talks, which are free with general admission; tickets cost $12 per day, $10 for students and seniors, or $20 for a three-day pass....

It felt like my lungs had suddenly filled with cellophane. All the unwrapped, crumpled up, mayo-smeared, mustard-smeared, meringue-cream-pie-smeared cellophane of the world crammed into my lungs. An army of purple spots gathered at the periphery of my vision and marched in toward my pupils. I didn’t really need the wristwatch. The spots always appeared 10 or 20 seconds before I lost consciousness. I called it the purple fizz. I looked at my watch anyway and saw the second hand ticking....

My favorite Eric Rohmer features are mainly his period films–Percival, then The Marquise of O (despite its emotional toning down of the Heinrich von Kleist novella), and now this fascinating antirevolutionary take on the French Revolution. Inspired by the memoirs of Scottish royalist Grace Elliott (beautifully played by Lucy Russell), it centers on her relationship with Philippe Egalite, erstwhile duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who brought her to France in 1786....

A bent and rusted Coca-Cola sign hangs on the unevenly plastered white wall at Jambalaya, the Wicker Park po’boy shop. “I tore that off the side of a closed, run-down old country store near my hometown,” says owner Craig Cameron, who hails from Waveland, Mississippi, 35 miles east of New Orleans near the Louisiana border. On another wall is a framed poster from the 2001 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and in the center of the small room a black pole supports two street signs marking the fictitious intersection of Bourbon and Tchoupitoulas streets....

When more than four years elapse between releases from a steadily gigging artist, it’s natural to expect some significant changes, but Oh, the Stories We Hold (Undertow), the new album by Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel, isn’t too different from 1999’s Things to Come. The local Filipina-American singer-songwriter has sharpened her skills somewhat, but the album is dominated by the same middle-of-the-road country rock, and there’s even a Latin-tinged torch standard (“Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps,” a hit for Doris Day) to follow the cover of “Besame Mucho” on the last release....

To the editors of the Chicago Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He seems to conflate a secularism/religion divide with a science/religion one. His claim that “half a millennium of scientific advances have shredded one tenet of faith after another–and confirmed none,” ignores the fact that the basic, defining tenets of the major faiths have never been debunked by science. By “defining” tenets, I mean those core articles of faith that separate believers from nonbelievers, rather in the same way that place of birth separates a U....

Friday 4/13 – Thursday 4/19 “It’s a flaming arrow aimed at the circled wagons of American justice,” says former National Geographic staff writer Harvey Arden about Leonard Peltier’s 1999 memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance. Arden edited the book for the imprisoned American Indian Movement activist, who was convicted in 1977 of killing two FBI agents during a 1973 shoot-out and whom Amnesty International and others consider a political prisoner....

Herbert Hoover lives! “In the short run, the Republicans hope to win in 2004 by running as tax cutters against tax-and-spend Democrats,” writes David Moberg in In These Times (June 16). “In the long run, Republicans plan to starve and thus drastically shrink federal government, especially spending on social programs. As budgetary crises resulting from the tax cut unfold, the only solutions will be devastating cuts in programs– including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid....

Last year was a dark one for the big auction houses, with the economic slump and September 11 hitting an industry already rocked by the Sotheby’s and Christie’s price-fixing scandal. But according to Richard Wright, his young West Loop auction house is on the upswing. “Our business has thrived, while Sotheby’s closed the Chicago location,” he says. “I just see that there is a place for someone who is not a multinational corporation....