Picture Perfect Despite the name of the series–photos of which were shown recently at the Mars Gallery and are currently on view at the Mashed Potato Club–Meltzer doesn’t really shoot guys in the buff. “I think the show was called that to capture attention and excite an audience,” she says. “People were excited when they saw that they weren’t nude.” Meltzer has done a couple of butt shots, but she’s much more interested in “elegant poses, beautiful muscled bodies, and no frontal views....

With hip-hop entering its third decade it’s amazing how many artists continue to downplay live performance. While the studio wizardry of producers like A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip and GangStarr’s DJ Premier admittedly doesn’t translate very well, there are plenty of meat-and-potatoes hip-hop crews that could produce live but don’t. Considering how important freestyling–improvised rapping–is to the form, you’d think performance would serve as the genre’s proving grounds. Philadelphia’s Roots are an exception to the puzzling norm, so much so that it wouldn’t be a stretch to label them a live band first and foremost....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, STF: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What can you do to prevent farts? You could mix Beano in with your lube or get a cosmetic colostomy, but not even these extreme measures will fart-proof your ass. It is an ass, after all, and despite our best efforts to eroticize the rear end away from its other natural uses, the butthole remains attached to the digestive tract’s terminus, eliminating poop, gas, undigested kernels of corn, and condoms filled with heroin, as need be....

Hey, Faggot: This letter really doesn’t describe the extent of how far out of control I feel this situation has gotten, and although I’ve discussed the way these brief encounters make me feel, I don’t see that a compromise is near. Am I being selfish? Do you have any input as to what I should do? –T.S.M. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey, TSM:...

It’s hard not to slide right into the impressive grooves this New York foursome constructs upon the funky, shuffling drums of Yuval Gabay and the fat double bass of Sebastian Steinberg–an excellent bassist who’s worked previously with Joe Morris and Marc Ribot. While these two will occasionally bring hip-hop beats into their dense rhythmic stew, it’s the creative sampling of Mark De Gli Antoni that gives Soul Coughing the hip-hop pedigree they don’t actually deserve....

LOW 9/22, METRO On its second album, Long Division (Vernon Yard), the spartan Duluth trio Low doesn’t do much to alter its brand of post-Galaxie 500 somnambulism. As on last year’s nicely catatonic debut, the soothing voices of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker haunt the band’s pin-drop musical evocations like drifting ghosts. From its incessant gentleness to its creeping tempos, Low’s music constantly flirts with disintegration, but some strange alchemy holds it in suspended animation....

ROSE CHRONICLES 5/6, SCHUBAS This Vancouver foursome practice a lightweight pop led by the wispy, swooping vocals of Kristy Thirsk, who sounds a lot like fellow Canadian Sarah McLachlan. The blend of her dreamy whine with the effects-laden but consistently wan guitar of Richard Maranda recalls mid-80s 4AD twaddle like This Mortal Coil or Modern English; Rose Chronicles have just replaced the flaccid melancholy with a firm but undistinctive rock drive....

THE LIVING Artists have always helped us see our world anew; we need such vision now more than ever. Fortunately some of our most perceptive and ingenious social critics–Douglas Crimp, Paula Treichler, and Simon Watney, to name but a few–continue to reframe the AIDS crisis, reimagining our contemporary world partly through their insights into history, showing how ideas of contagion, sexuality, immorality, and criminality have been intertwined in Western culture. Anthony Clarvoe, whose historical drama The Living is subtitled “a parable for our times,” enters this company like a toddler entering a marathon....

The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, Green Highway Theater, at Urbus Orbis. She’s back and she’s pissed! Playwright Carolyn Gage has brought the Maid of Orleans onstage again to annihilate our image of Holy Joan sainthood. In this one-woman play she boasts of how she staved off puberty through anorexia (“There are no eating ‘disorders,’ only eating strategies”), how she invented her so-called divine mentors out of her own need for “role models,” and how her success was founded solely on self-confidence....

Columnist with Conviction Rentschler, who’d been Richard Nixon’s Illinois campaign chairman in 1968 and campaigned for his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate two years later, called himself Thompson’s “showcase Republican.” Insisting that business associates ran the timber venture into the ground while he was running for office, and that no one took more of a financial battering than himself, Rentschler declared, “I really think we’ve seen a little bit of Hitler in this part of America....

CRAZY FOR YOU Auditorium Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George Gershwin was famous for playing songs from his forthcoming musicals at parties–so much so, George S. Kaufman once cracked, “that the first night audience [at a new show] thinks it’s at a revival.” Crazy for You, playing in an eye-popping, tap-happy touring production at the Auditorium, is both a new show and a revival: premiered on Broadway in 1992 under the direction of Mike Ockrent, it’s a broad reworking of the 1930 Broadway hit Girl Crazy, which Gershwin wrote with his lyricist brother Ira and playwrights Guy Bolton and John McGowan (capping a string of lightweight comedies by the Gershwins before they turned to more serious fare like the satiric Of Thee I Sing and the tragic Porgy and Bess)....

Discovered Memory Who? we said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pendergrast told us he’s hired a press agent out of his own pocket. “I’ve never written anything more important,” he said, with some anger in his voice. “Reading this book can save people’s sanity. It can save them years of therapy. They should be aware that the whole idea that your unhappiness in life, your ambivalence toward your parents, can be explained only by the idea you’ve been sexually abused by your parents and then forgot about it is being thoroughly discredited....

The Museum: The Art of Communication Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I started my exploration at the Barbie booth, officially called Richard Stasewich & Friends. Stasewich (who first created Barbie scenarios in his front yard, as the Reader reported about a year ago) has set up a green-carpet croquet lawn, with Barbie dolls as wickets and heads of Ken dolls as balls. Each wicket tells a little Barbie story: Indian Maiden Meets Space Cowboy, Barbie Gets a Spanking, and Catfight Barbie were my favorites....

Idlewild, Michigan, the once booming resort for black vacationers, is a ghost of its former self. Now a small colony of summer homes clustered around a small lake, it has no nightclubs, taverns, restaurants, or even hot dog or barbecue joints to give a taste of its past glories. Biking also is good, since traffic is light and there are lakes, woodlands, and dunes galore to break up the flat, monotonous stretches of farmland....

JOHN PRIMER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist John Primer’s list of musical influences reads like a Who’s Who of postwar Chicago blues: he cut his teeth at Theresa’s under the tutelage of Sammy Lawhorn, one of the finest fretmen the Memphis-Chicago blues connection ever produced; he played in Muddy Waters’s last touring band; and since the early 80s he’s provided an anchor for Magic Slim’s house-rocking ebullience....

Henry Threadgill Very Very Circus Plus Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Threadgill was an early member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (he played in Sunday’s reunion of the Muhal Richard Abrams Experimental Band, ostensibly the first AACM group), and perhaps no one has adopted the organization’s motto, “From the ancient to the future,” with as much vehemence as he has....

Partly through association with the Beastie Boys–they’re on the Beasties’ label Grand Royal, they’ve toured with them, and drummer Kate Schellenbach originally played with the Beasties–Luscious Jackson continually get mislabled as “white female rappers.” In reality, as their terrific full-length debut Natural Ingredients quickly shows, they’re a funky pop band with savvy to spare. Employing hip hop’s technology–sampled riffs and break beats–while ignoring its vocabulary, attack, and general minimalism, the quartet sculpts liquid, seductive, hooky tunes from a percolating swirl of underplayed funk, insinuating melodies, languid guitar/keyboard sprawls, and relaxed but street-smart vocals–dig the subtle but insistent melismatic strain that floats through “Surprise....

With the possible exception of Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) is the greatest living Japanese filmmaker. Unfortunately, the U.S. distributor of most of his early work has made very little of it available on video, which means that most Americans’ knowledge of the modernist Japanese cinema doesn’t include Death by Hanging, Boy, The Man Who Left His Will on Film, The Ceremony, and many other Oshima masterworks....

FELD BALLETS/NY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The body Feld clothes is music, and in the 26 years he’s been making dances he’s clearly developed an instinct for choosing cleverly and concealing and revealing cunningly. Take his approach to Bach’s Brandenburg concerti in Common Ground (1991). This is beautiful but familiar music, a kind of god in the pantheon of “classical” works and firmly identified with the 18th century....

The classical saxophone quartet is becoming as ubiquitous as its string counterpart. More popular in Europe than here, this combination has inspired countless works from composers of various ideological stripes. Its ringing, voluptuous sounds and sharp rhythms are suited to baroque chorales as well as serialism, and in the hands of the best of the quartets–those that can control the sax’s tricky intonation–the music often sounds as fascinating and emotionally complex as that for the string quartet....