Every year the Haile Selassie I Birthday Celebration offers rolling reggae rhythms and spicy Caribbean food beneath fluttering red, gold, and green Ethiopian flags. This year, after 17 years as one of the biggest reggae festivals in the midwest, the two-day celebration is attempting to return to its spiritual foundation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We want to have it more cultural this year,” says Isiah Ferguson, a founder and organizer of the event....

If you’re going to be onstage by yourself for an entire evening, you’d better be ready to be a lot of people. Margie Gillis is. With her flowing hair, strong limbs, and delicate but lively torso, she’s both rooted and airy, a plastic creature. In Bloom she’s the famous Molly, dancing the world’s most famous monologue for a woman written by a man–as prim and as angry, as hobbled and strong, as earthbound and yearning as James Joyce’s original, capturing all Molly Bloom’s quicksilver shifts second by second....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Department of Housing’s inability to employ $23,000,000 of federal HOME Investment Partnership Program funds allocated to the city in 1992 was not, as Mr. Joravsky states, because we “couldn’t process the forms in time.” In point of fact, all of our forms were processed. However, despite streamlining initiatives, training programs, and a substantial increase in staff dedicated to underwriting loans to developers of affordable housing–which led to a threefold increase in the number of dollars committed in 1992–we haven’t yet found a way to process applications which aren’t in a state of readiness to be processed....

Playwrights Wronged Local actors/playwrights Carrie Betlyn and Peggy Dunne are noising it about that they’ve been wronged by Arthur Miller. Their bid for sympathy turns on their own enthusiasm, idealism, and obscurity, and the spectacle of a great man hiding behind not just an agent but contract law. Aschenberg went on to say that stock and amateur rights to Miller’s play were controlled by Dramatic Publishing Company of Woodstock, Illinois....

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH through November 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ten Thousand Years contains the outline of an elk Smith took from a 10,000-year-old Siberian rock drawing. Painted broadly and in various colors–red, green, and white, often at the same time–the figure seems almost to vibrate, as if alive, suggesting an icon. Just above the head is a cutout print of leaves and flowers placed as if sprouting from the antlers, as if the elk were connected to, and even a source for, other natural life....

“I ruined my life with drinking, bad wives, taking pills and cursing / Rock and roll you crucified me, left me all alone / I never should have turned my back on the old folks back home.” Those lines, howled with sarcastic, fuck-all glee by Shane MacGowan, are the spiritual center of his first solo record, The Snake. Spiritual? Indeed: the song itself is called “The Church of the Holy Spook”; it’s a suitable introduction for this record, a devotional song cycle about the fermented grain that’s the primary thing MacGowan cares about....

OUR LADY PEACE 4/21, DOUBLE DOOR On their debut, Naveed (Relativity), these hit-bound Canadian exponents of the Pearl Jam sound set the vocals of Raine Maida–which can sound either overwrought or passionate depending on how generous you’re feeling–amid rippling hard-rock guitar textures and a solid rhythmic foundation, but it’s time to start asking the question “Isn’t Eddie Vedder expressing enough ennui for the whole continent?” They’ll be back in town next weekend opening both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant shows, apparently at the serendipitous request of the latter....

In response to T. Miller’s August 5th letter in which he or she assails cartoonist Heather McAdams for failing to include the Paul Bunyan restaurant in her gallantly jam-packed two page double-truck travel issue cartoon entitled “Hester Duzz Da Dells” [July 1], I’d like to say: If T. Miller spent more time on his or her own art (“I can draw about as good as Heather . . .”) and less time criticizing the cartoonists in his or her local free paper, maybe T....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago, child of politics. “These new western towns depended on government assistance for their very survival–no place more so than Chicago,” writes Donald Miller in City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. “The federal government had removed the Indians from the area and given land to the state of Illinois to dig a canal....

Strapheads Graduate school does funny things to people’s minds. To celebrate my 23rd birthday my friend Stuart and I–both graduate students at the time–spent an evening making stupid faces in the mirror. Gradually we added dopey voices, costume pieces, dramatic lighting, and even background music, improvising elaborate melodramatic scenes for hours. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Strapheads isn’t about much except the characters themselves....

GUNS FOR ASSASSINS, CONTINUED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article Dan saw appeared in the June 1995 issue of Modern Gun, which hit the streets maybe 15 minutes after my column claiming no nonmetallic (and thus undetectable) guns were currently available. It was headlined “The CIA’s Glass Gun.” Clearly an agency plant to make me look bad. However, I stand by my column....

Winter Adds to Pier Pressure Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pier’s marketing manager also has no real sense of how many locals have visited the pier and how many tourists. “We are still trying to find out who our ‘real’ guest is,” says Malick. (No doubt because of his many years at Disney, Malick invariably refers to pier visitors as “guests.”) “A certain number of people go once because it’s new, and they just want to see what’s there,” says Malick, who’ll soon begin passing out surveys to collect some hard data about who’s coming to the pier, why they’re coming, and what they think of the facility....

Her Or maybe not. This is the puzzle of Her, and its most promising aspect. Yaged weaves the experiences of Serena at ages 8, 15, 22, and 29 into the relationship she has with Ariel at 22 and 29. Without playing into cloying inner-child stereotypes, Yaged shows the natural curiosity and sometimes despairing eccentricity that drive Serena even as a child. As a young woman, Serena’s promiscuity and erotic manipulations are challenged by Ariel’s monogamy and needy moodiness....

ANGELS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stuart Allen is author, director, and star of Angels–and, according to his publicity, an “HIV-positive recovering crack addict.” While this may render his credibility unimpeachable, it does not automatically render his writing flawless. The journey to mend Doris’s and Allan’s broken hearts offers too many side trips poking fun at easy, overworked targets: new-age mystics, exploitive bosses, homophobic fundamentalists (whose pious declarations reveal a secret craving for sodomy), and assorted authority figures....

Luciano Berio is one of those postwar modernists who’ve injected folk elements into their compositions for the sake of political posturing. His Folk Songs From 1964, to be performed by Concertante di Chicago and mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon, were compiled and transcribed when the Italian avant-gardist was in residence in the Bay Area. Based on folk tunes from, among other places, America, Sicily, and Armenia, the songs reflect the concerns and idealism of the counterculture movement....

Playing by the Rules Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rod Dungate’s bleak, seductive, well-crafted play about English street hustlers bluntly stages the commodification and exploitation of boys in the sex trade. Plainly described gay sex and plainly presented gay romance give this tale about the dehumanization of love an uneasy tension, a restlessness that defines and traps all its characters. Everyone is always moving: dancing, fighting, running off to a trick, fading into the shadows, reappearing from a corner somewhere, wired and wary....

Just in time for the cool weather, guitarist Kenny Burrell hits town, and you almost wonder if it’s just a coincidence. Burrell has taken an essentially cool approach to his instrument from the moment he came on the scene in the mid-50s and established himself as the guitar voice of hard bop. He seemed to have arrived at this stance by building up from the foundation of his exceptionally full, dark tone; to this he applied a rangy but unhurried harmonic curiosity and an ability to distill the complexities of bop into speedy, straightforward melodies that could fit such widely divergent styles as those of John Coltrane, Gil Evans, and Jimmy Smith....

An Orchid Show, like a vacation in Hawaii, is something everyone should try at least once in a lifetime–and, like contemporary Hawaii, an Orchid Show combines exquis ite beauty, Miami vulgarity, and unabashed camp. The appeal lies in Brigid Murphy’s rapidfire pacing and simultaneously luminous and goofy presence onstage as Milly May Smithy, as well as her sage curatorial choices. Here she uncannily joins the sublime–Na Pua O Hawaii, genuine Hawaiian hula dancers and drummers–with the absurd, the Wall of Sound Cadets Marching Band, a gathering of local rock musicians who re- create marching-band favorites with a twist....

Lead Story Saundra Lewis, a convenience-store clerk in Durham, North Carolina, who was held up by a man in February, says the robber almost couldn’t stop apologizing. He said he was sorry when he began the holdup, again when he rejected her plea to think about what he was doing, and again as he fled. A few seconds later he returned and said, “I’m sorry–really, I’m sorry.” Nevertheless he kept the money....

Chicago artist Ted Garner recalls listening to David Bowie’s Space Oddity when it first came out. He was in his grandparents’ house–a log cabin–on a reservation. This sort of “surreal cultural assemblage is part of the state of being an American Indian,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Garner grew up with American Indian art objects collected by his anthropologist parents and was exposed to modernist metal sculpture while working as an assistant for Mark Di Suvero....