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GEORGE STRAIT WISCONSIN STATE FAIR, AUGUST 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Strait has an image problem. Dwight Yoakam’s cowboy duds have just the right touch of ripped-jean cool, but there’s no irony in Strait’s creased Wranglers. In 20 years Strait will be roundly acknowledged as the great country artist he currently is; right now he’s too young to overcome the superficialities of style....

FRIDAY 2 Who’s got time for tractor pulls and monster truck rallies when the U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association is in town? Regional champions from Texas, Montana, California, and Ohio will be competing in the national championship today at Hawthorne Race Course, 3501 Laramie in Cicero. Gates open at 11 AM, but races don’t begin until 1, when the jockeys mount their muscle mowers (with cutting blades removed for safety) and hit the track....

FEBRUARY According to one British film writer, the late Curt McDowell’s 1975 underground porn classic Thundercrack “starts out on a dark and stormy night with a group of strangers stranded in a remote Victorian mansion. . . . A crazed hostess [has] her husband pickled in a jar and her monstrous son locked in a spare room. From there on it is a series of test situations which manage to get everyone together, sexually and socially, before dawn brings everything to a rousing conclusion....

“The quality of an idea or a technique or even a piece of equipment that attracts me,” the British guitarist Derek Bailey has stated, “is its malleability.” His own ideas and techniques, and even the contexts in which he makes music, bear this out. His guitar style is a primer on “extended technique”: the inclusion (and frequently the invention) of unorthodox practices to obtain sounds outside what we expect to hear from a given instrument....

One of the world’s most versatile clarinetists for over two decades, Richard Stoltzman is finally breaking into the ranks of true celebrity. Last year one of his CDs, Concerto!, won a Grammy nomination, and a TV special featuring him playing works by Bernstein and Gershwin received an Emmy. Another CD, Dreams, furthered his appeal as a crossover artist, demonstrating his hallmark blend of virtuosity and intelligence. Newly orchestrated by Sid Romin, one of the Bernstein pieces–the Sonata for Clarinet, written when the composer was a 23-year-old upstart in residence at Tanglewood and under the influence of Paul Hindemith–will be given its American premiere on this weekend’s Grant Park Symphony Orchestra program....

By Michael Miner Someone at the Lerner chain of community papers didn’t do that last week, and management wasn’t happy. A day before Lerner could formally announce that it was moving its editorial offices out of rented space in Lakeview into the corporate headquarters in Lincolnwood, a rival north-side neighborhood paper broke the story. “It’ll make it harder for us to do our jobs,” an anonymous employee grumbled to Inside. “Many of us do not have cars and travel to and from our coverage area will be a problem....

Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince is a thoroughly old-fashioned operetta whose catchy tunes have outlived its hoary plot. When the work premiered in 1924, the tale of a dilettante prince who poses as a college student and falls in love with a local wench captured the public’s fancy. But in this day and age, the story’s chivalrous aspects make it hopelessly passe. Hugh Wheeler, known for his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, addresses this problem in his 1970 update of the book–which this production uses....

GHOST IN THE MACHINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though he reveals key clues as shrewdly as any suspense novelist, Gilman never answers the questions he raises; in this intellectual/metaphysical whodunit, the audience is never sure exactly what was done, not to mention by whom. Answers, after all, are a form of reconciliation; and Ghost in the Machine is about irreconcilable differences–between the sexes, between generations, between values, between cultures....

If you’ve been befuddled by Michael K. Meyers’s cryptic ensemble pieces over the years yet charmed by his naive, evocative texts, you’re in luck. This weekend Meyers performs his newest piece, In the Sky Above Prague, with uncharacteristic straightforwardness, standing alone onstage and reciting three simple stories. In each he muses on the romantic parallels between his life and the life of Franz Kafka. Kafka was “interested in women,” Meyers says, and “spent his time trying to marry them,” only to find his own perfectionism getting in the way....

Lead Story In an April interview with the Vancouver Sun, lawyer Russ Stanton complained about winning only $53,000 in damages for a client whose ovary was mistakenly removed during surgery. He cited a case in which a man received $80,000 for a testicle removed by surgical error and said, “In my view, one ovary has got to be worth one testicle.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April a judge in Montreal acquitted Henri Daviault of charges that he raped a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound woman while he was drunk....

Tarika is Malagasy for “the band,” inviting a not entirely fatuous comparison to the American group of the same name. The Band strove to blend traditional North American styles (blues, country, gospel, R & B, etc) with contemporary pop music. Tarika integrates musical styles from Madagascar’s 18 distinct tribes, and in its original songs it expresses a deep concern for preserving traditions threatened by imported Western ways. The quintet is by no means tradition-bound; a rarity among Malagasy groups, it’s led by two women (sisters Hanitrarivo “Hanitra” Rasoanaivo and Tina Norosoa “Noro” Raharimalala) who do not hesitate to confront sexism in their songs....

This is Toni Kukoc’s life: with cops and security surrounding him, he leaves the cozy solitude of the VIP lounge and enters a cavernous room filled with sports fanatics. For an instant, no one notices him. Then a kid calls his name: “Toni.” A camera flashes. “Toni.” People come running. “It’s Toni Kukoc!” Within seconds he’s engulfed by a giddy mob of men and women, girls and boys. “Let us through,” the cops command....

Blues legends like John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and J.B. Lenoire are often cited as the closest thing to Ali Farka Toure, but at the core of the Malian guitarist’s music is a sumptuous beauty that is beyond comparison. Last year’s stunning Talking Timbuktu (Hannibal/World Circuit) paired Toure with producer Ry Cooder and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and uncompromisingly mixed American blues with Toure’s music, illuminating an often discussed but rarely palpable common ground....

You almost can’t go wrong with a lineup like Bill McFarland’s: a potent, hard-driving outfit that matches his throaty trombone with a beef-stew saxophonist (in this case Hank Ford) and a fluent, octave-stretching trumpet ace (Kenny Anderson). This kind of three-horn sextet first appeared in the 1940s, as a bebop miniaturization of the big bands that had dominated the swing era. It disappeared for most of the next decade–in part because of the paucity of trombonists able to handle the technical demands of bop–but it reached its zenith when Art Blakey expanded his Jazz Messengers to a three-horn line in the 1960s....

When the 13-year-old freshman confidently strode into the classroom at Orr High School, coach Tom Larson knew he had a great one. What’s remarkable about Orr’s success at chess is that the school’s not known for academic excellence. Over 80 percent of its student body scores below the state averages in reading and math. “These chess players are shattering all the stereotypes about our school and its students,” says Larson. “Chess is a complicated game....

Friday 10/25 – Thursday 10/31 The events surrounding this year’s two political conventions that didn’t make the news are documented in two videos: Breaking Conventions, produced by the Los Angeles Alternative Media Network, looks at Republican National Convention protests at the Mexican border and such interest groups as Bikers for Gingrich. CounterMedia Chicago’s Off the Record chronicles community dissent and police response during the DNC. The two videos will be screened tonight at 7 at the New World Resource Center, 1476 W....

** THE WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL (Worth seeing) Directed and written by Ray Muller. It would be wrong, therefore, to insist that Muller’s documentary is simply a puff piece–that it’s like Stephen Schiff’s rhapsodic Riefenstahl profile in Vanity Fair a couple of years ago, or John Simon’s equally uncritical and unscholarly front-page review of the Riefenstahl autobiography in the New York Times Book Review last fall. But even with a running time of slightly over three hours, the film is far from the definitive, multifaceted portrait it aspires to be....

Wasting no time on frivolous matters, the City Council started last week’s meeting with a resolution honoring the Northwestern football team for its impending Rose Bowl match, the first in 47 years. Alderman William Beavers had an ingenious suggestion for capitalizing on the Wildcats’ success: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alderman Ed Smith noted that Northwestern’s success is having “very far-reaching effects. If you notice, the U....

Last week’s City Council meeting threatened to turn into a Leo Buscaglia seminar, with aldermen hugging and pumping hands after the recent primary. Even close Daley ally Charles Bernardini, a big winner, warmly shook hands with arch Daley enemy Dexter Watson, a big loser. Then Alderman Robert Shaw revved things up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shaw introduced a resolution against Republican state senator Walter Dudycz’s bill to eliminate affirmative action in Illinois....

More and more, I keep hearing from people who just want to stay home and quietly wait out the New Year’s hoopla. But if the calendar shift still shouts “party” to you, the pairing of trumpeter Clark Terry and the alto-tenor man Red Holloway–which has turned into something of a tradition at the Jazz Showcase–is probably just the ticket. An early idol of the young Miles Davis, a refreshing force in Duke Ellington’s band of the 50s, and the mealymouthed scat “mumbler” of Tonight Show fame in the 60s, the septuagenarian Terry packs a lot of jazz history....