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At one point in his latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Al Franken asks deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz how he feels about the job “the Clinton military” did in Iraq. Wolfowitz’s simple response: Fuck you. He’s probably kidding, Franken allows–but “kidding on the square,” which is to say, not really. This noxious bit of jargon, as reappropriated by the humorist-turned-firebrand, neatly sums up the method and message of this attack on today’s yellow media, the myth of its liberal mainstream counterpart, and the radical-right agenda both serve....

Current artistic director Judith Jamison wrote in the New York Times last December that her new piece Here…Now, about the accomplishments of Florence Griffith Joyner, evolved from “an idea of dancers and athletes as both similar and different beings.” She came up with four areas of overlap–speed, strength, style, and heaven (meaning reaching one’s goals, among other things)–and then Wynton Marsalis, who composed the score, added a fifth: pain. “So often the public sees the beauty and power of artists and athletes,” Jamison remarked, “but not the discomfort and anguish they endure in becoming the best....

Anna Weiss, Boxer Rebellion Theater. In a healthy American culture (if you can imagine such a thing) the “recovered memory” phenomenon of the late 80s and early 90s would have been laughed off as a particularly bizarre bit of psychosexual kitsch. One more way in which we turn anxiety into sex into TV. But a nation gets the pathology it deserves, and so it wasn’t laughed off. People–the overwhelming majority of them young women–went on talk shows to tell how they finally got to the bottom of their eating disorders when they underwent hypnosis and recovered the deeply repressed memory of their fathers, mothers, neighbors, and/or family friends practicing the most horrific perversions on them, subjecting them to sexual abuse and torture, often in the context of satanic rites....

Format Thematic Concerns Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Celebrating the prophetic powers of Pez dispensers, the backsides of old ladies, nude performances of Shakespeare, and anchorwoman Jackie Bange. George: Well, this here is General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s foreskin. A: That’s too bad. In its original condition this foreskin is probably somewhere around one million dollars. But with the ArmorAll on it, it’s probably somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to eleven cents....

If you went to the theater a lot in the late 80s and early 90s, you probably saw Jenny Bacon at Remains, Lookingglass, and the Goodman, rising from small parts like a milkmaid in Puntila and His Hired Man to starring roles in The Arabian Nights and Dancing at Lughnasa. But as a student at the University of Chicago’s Lab School in the 70s, Bacon was so terrified of attention she would do everything she could to blend into the background....

Guitarist Chris Bell’s training reveals few clues that he’d eventually become a bluesman: while majoring in art and music at UMass Amherst, he took a jazz workshop with tenor sax outcat Archie Shepp, and later studied guitar with prog rocker Tony MacAlpine. But since the early 90s he’s been living and playing in California, and by now he’s a mainstay on the Los Angeles-area blues circuit. Born in 1962 in Washington, D....

You’d think a guy who’s spent a winter or two in Chicago would see the sense in staying south for the holidays. But saxist Ed Petersen, who moved to bayou country in the mid-90s, braves the elements every year to hook up with his friend and mentor Von Freeman in what’s become a yuletide tradition. Billed as a “Battle of the Saxes,” this meeting of like minds is anything but: it’s collegial and playful, an embodiment of the players’ mutual respect and admiration....

The turning point in Frank Borzage’s magnificent The Mortal Storm (1940), one of the first Hollywood films to condemn Nazism, is a scene in which a professor in southern Germany, Roth, witnesses a book burning. Alone in his study at night, he sees the light from the fire dancing on his walls and goes to a balcony to watch the scene below. From street level, we see a young man denouncing the writers whose books are being thrown into the flames....

Forever Tango Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you like your dance tarty, slick, and a little violent, this is the show for you. Last seen here in the summer of 1996 at the Royal George Theatre, Forever Tango returns with seven dancing couples, 11 musicians (including 4 bandoneon players), and a vocalist; together they put a high gloss on the raunchy form of the tango, which began in the brothels of Buenos Aires in the 1880s and evolved into its current form in the 1920s, when the craze spread to Europe....

Even before he picked up a guitar and learned to play the blues, Eddie Taylor Jr. knew he was different from his west-side peers. “I was an old-fashioned guy from the get-go,” he says. “I never could dance. I wanted to be a rapper, but I never could be one.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “First thing I heard was blues,” he says, remembering the music Eddie Sr....

Veatrice Watson used to joke that if the board of education kept up its snail’s pace she might not live to see it build a new Simeon high school. Sadly, she was right. On January 6, the south-side activist, a key member of the West Chatham Improvement Association, died following a brain hemorrhage. She was 44 years old. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But it was as a community activist that she made her mark, and for the past few years her primary cause was Simeon Career Academy....

“Chicagoans are not renowned for their fashion sense at all,” says Evelyn Buckley-Browne, who hopes to open a store of local fashion designers’ wares in the weeks before Christmas. But she thinks we have potential. She remembers the early days of the Design Centre, an incubator and outlet for Irish designers that set up shop in her hometown of Dublin 20 years ago. Dubliners aren’t known for sartorial elan any more than we are, but that didn’t turn out to be an obstacle....

Help on the First Rung Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There hasn’t been anything like it in Chicago since Cinestory left a few years ago,” Brooks says. (Cinestory, which now operates out of Idyllwild, California, and is about to move to Austin, Texas, was headquartered in Chicago from 1995 to 2001 and conducted script readings in partnership with Second City.) Anyone with a screenplay and some pocket change can submit: ScriptWorks charges $15 to read full-length scripts of up to 120 pages, $7 for shorts (up to 60 pages)....

In 1905 Elizabeth Frendreis’s grandfather bought the two-flat on Nelson Street in Lakeview in which she now lives. Last month she got a property reassessment notice from the county that made her wonder whether she’ll be able to stay. “My reassessment was 70 percent higher than it was last time,” she says. “Last time it was 72 percent higher than the time before. Each time my taxes go up. I can’t afford this....

En Mortem Last year, when Graney wrote his first play, he resolved his continuing struggle to release truth through fakery. In The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide he imposed the pageantry, the huge passions, and the declamatory style of Greek tragedy on a band of contemporary ten-year-olds supposedly performing a play written by a classmate who killed himself. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Graney intended The 4th Graders to be performed by children, an idea as preposterous–what do fourth graders know of murder, suicide, and obsessive love?...

Gioia Diliberto became enthralled with the John Singer Sargent portrait Madame X when she was living in New York and working on her first book, Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier (1987). On the way home from doing research at the New York Society Library, she’d often stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the painting. “I just loved it,” she says. “It has a brilliant design. It’s very classical and very Old Master-ish in tone and color....

It’s been five years since the Pat Metheny Group recorded at full force–that is, as a sextet with trumpet, extra percussion, and wordless vocals. In the interim the lineup has undergone an overhaul. Not only has longtime drummer Paul Wertico left to concentrate on his own fire-breathing trio, but Metheny has brought in two of the more distinctive personalities in modern music: Cameroonian bassist and percussionist Richard Bona, who’s also an angel-voiced singer, and Vietnamese trumpeter Cuong Vu....

Rules of the Game On May 29, 1979, “Maximum John” Wood, the presiding judge in Chagra’s trial, was shot in the back and killed in San Antonio. “Chagra’s case was…declared a mistrial, the defendant went free, and young Oscar Goodman’s reputation was made in the bargain.” Charles Harrelson was sentenced to life in prison. But “admissible evidence that a hit had been authorized?” McManus told us with studied vagueness. “None.”...

I was disturbed to read Kristina Kallas’s story “Yiayia Sisterhood” (July 11, 2003). I find it unfortunate that she expresses such prejudices toward men and toward married women. I also find it unfortunate that she sees difficulty with bureaucratic processes as specific to her agenda. I would like her to know that I had just as much trouble licensing my car when I moved from Colorado to Illinois as she did changing her name....

In the summer of 1974 or ’75–no one’s quite sure of the exact year–Jon Seidman organized a softball game at Bent Park, in the northwest corner of Evanston. He’d come home from college for the summer and was looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon. He called friends and friends of friends, and soon had enough guys to play. Paul Thompson, another mainstay, says, “I came to Chicago from Oklahoma in about 1970 or 1971, and not long after that I met Jon....