STAR TIME *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Alexander Cassini With Michael St. Gerard, John P. Ryan, Maureen Teefy, and Thomas Newman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most appealing things about Star Time–an eerie independent American feature that satirizes some of these notions about “family values” and television (showing only at midnight on Friday and Saturday this week and next at the Music Box)–is that it hasn’t been discovered yet....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The FBI stalked Jamal from his early teens, when he was a founder of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party. Over 700 pages of recently released COINTELPRO files reveal a string of botched attempts to link Jamal to a variety of bizarre crimes, including the 1973 assassination of the Governor of Bermuda. Later, as a radio and newspaper journalist, Jamal earned the name “Voice of the Voiceless,” as well as the hatred of Philly cops, for his commentaries which tirelessly championed the oppressed in segregated Philadelphia....

Horning: Not Gone and Not Forgotten Management did not respond, and on March 31 Nicodemus reported to the membership on the guild bulletin board. He said the guild was making three points: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “(3) To permit the company-endorsed publication of such a column, followed by an offer of continued employment at an American Publishing Co. property here, displays a double standard on ethical conduct....

In early June, shortly after a drive-by shooting near Estes and Ridge, Rogers Park residents declared war on crime. But instead of targeting gang members or drug dealers they’ve gone after Marty Merel, a landlord who owns or manages about ten apartment buildings on the far north side. Residents blame Merel for everything from litter to crime, saying he doesn’t screen his tenants or properly maintain his properties. They’ve picketed Merel’s home in Skokie and complained about him to his mortgage holders–all in an attempt to force him to sell his buildings....

I’ve been thinking about gubernatorial candidates James Gierach [February 18] and Sheila Jones, who are being denied the opportunity to flex their political muscles in the televised debates. The two were described in a recent Chicago Tribune article as “minor” candidates. It sounds like they ought to have a curfew. “Now I want you to be in bed by the time the debates begin.” There is no such thing as a minor candidate....

MONSTERS III: THE EL RIDE Wells performs “When William Looks Down” by S.L. Daniels, about a man so plagued by insecurity that to compensate he has convinced himself he’s taller than everyone around him. Daniels places William on the el en route to a job interview, a situation that makes him doubly insecure–which in turn makes him babble on about his uneventful and pathetic life to the hapless strangers trapped in the car with him....

Chapman Thus the Unabomber becomes a symbol of crazed patriotic fervor standing against the forces of technology and commodification instead of a crazed, antisocial lunatic who can’t construct a sentence. Valerie Solanas, the attempted slayer of Andy Warhol, becomes a spokesperson for the disenfranchised instead of a profoundly disturbed megalomaniac. Roberto Zucco can be transformed from a serial killer into a poet and a prophet by French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes. John Hinckley and John Wilkes Booth are able to take their places alongside Georges Seurat as the subjects of a Stephen Sondheim musical....

MY FATHER’S DRAGON Just hearing the title of My Father’s Dragon was enough to send my three-year-old niece whimpering out to the lobby. In her first excursion to the theater, she was imagining “bad” dragons, monsters that she might be able to face in a book or on television but not in person. Unfortunately, she and her mother missed a thoroughly silly and kid-friendly play based on Ruth Stiles Gannett’s Newbery-winning book....

Of Mice and Men, Bog Theatre. Hard times seem to renew John Steinbeck’s Depression-era blue-collar tragedy celebrating the solidarity of supposedly useless people. More than a chronicle of male bonding, Of Mice and Men compassionately charts the friendship between George, a loyal dreamer, and his hulking pal Lennie, a childlike giant with a dangerous penchant for breaking bones. Sheldon Patinkin’s authentic staging for the new Bog Theatre in Des Plaines is equally rooted in the story, the setting, and the situation....

Dear Reader: Cycling to the day job at 10 in the morning down the lakefront path, at Fullerton I saw smoke on the opposite side of the Drive. Right in front of the sign for the North Avenue/La Salle Street exit, a small blue car was on fire. I stopped to watch, along with several joggers, rollerbladers, pedestrians, and overworked Park District employees. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

restaurants Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CHUCKY T’S–2025 Lincoln Park West. Home-style. Personal service distinguishes this supercasual outlet from Charlie Trotter, Chicago’s master restaurateur. Trotter, who’s married, has brilliantly re-created a bachelor’s apartment. Diners are invited to Trotter’s “home,” where they choose among seating opportunities in his kitchen, living room, walk-in closet/dressing room, and bathroom. Then “Chucky T” himself, clad only in an undershirt and plaid boxers, serves healthy takes on what he calls “lazy bachelor cuisine....

Chicago-based solo performance artist Lisa Kotin works in some of America’s premier blue-chip companies as a temp–a position that has given her enough material to create two witty shows based on her experience in corporate America. Her new two-act show, Temporary Girl: The Office Christmas Party, is a sequel to her 1992 hit, Temporary Girl, and is a multimedia endeavor in which Kotin plays five characters who are much like women all of us have met....

While the ten films on this program are a pretty diverse lot, “fun” more often than not means some variety of camp that toys with our gender expectations. What else to make of the tattooed drag queen in red high heels who takes “her” dog out for a walk in a film by Jeffrey Adkins and Tim Gleason, Frankie and Fudgie Go for a Walk? When the designer of the Rainbow Flag, in Mark Ewert and Josh Tager’s A New Flag, offers to design a personal flag to express the inner selves of two different drag queens, one replies, “I don’t think I have an inner self”–and seems moved when the result is a clear transparent banner....

Bril Barrett and his older brother Donnell Russell don baggy clothes and baseball caps and glide, flip, and spin to hip-hop. But they do it while tap dancing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A lot of young people weren’t into tap because they thought it’s only old people in tuxedos. So we brought hip-hop into it to bring tap into the 90s and give it a different image,” says Barrett....

Veteran keyboardist Detroit Junior likes to present himself as something of a novelty act: he sports outlandish turbans and glittery suits and grinds his hips and mugs for the audience. But beneath the showmanship lies savvy: he’s among the blues’ wittiest songwriters. His best lyrics (“If I Hadn’t Been High,” “Call My Job”) portray the singer as a lovable rogue who tries to live by the restrictions of respectable society but inevitably falls prey to his own insatiable appetites....

Cobra stands as the most accomplished of saxophonist/composer John Zorn’s “game pieces,” his series of fully improvised works shaped by preestablished but fluctuating “rules.” In these works a “prompter” (Zorn’s version of a traditional orchestra’s conductor) controls the general direction of the performance with visual cues that mandate stylistic shifts, various combinations of musicians, and other group interactions, and the performances have a reputation for great visual excitement. But the players are equally or perhaps even more important to a given performance’s end result than the prompter....

Like Patti Smith, Lois Maffeo was a rock critic before she was a recording artist. And like Smith she plays rock ‘n’ roll without catering to preconceptions about what women can or can’t do. But there the similarities end. Maffeo came up through the indie-rock ranks of the Pacific Northwest, writing for fanzines and deejaying an all-female radio show called Your Dream Girl for several years before she released her first single in 1990 with the acoustic duo Courtney Love (whose membership never included Kurt Cobain’s wife, though she and Maffeo once roomed together in Portland, Oregon)....

Radio Wars Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago’s morning rock-radio wars are something of a yawn. The new guy in town is Mancow Muller, who rules the roost from an AOR outlet that’s as undistinguished as its marketing name: Rock 103.5, WRCX. Muller has a flair for getting 13-year-old boys all excited, and by consequence is number one in the key ratings category. Howard–What was his name?...

If any proof is needed that the Japanese have done more than just imitate the West in the last 50 years, butoh is it. Butoh–or ankyoku butoh, the “dance of darkness,” as it was originally called–emerged in the mid 1960s as the most extreme of postwar reactions in art, a “scream against the sky,” to quote Yoko Ono. Imagine for a moment, in a society marked by conformity and exquisite etiquette, an explosion in the dance world: virtually naked dancers with bald heads and painted bodies writhing, often very slowly, defying any recognized form....

“I feel really torn and confused when I go to a store in Chicago that offers both organic and non-organic produce,” writes organic farmer Kimberely Rector of Angelic Organics in Farm News (August 5). “As a farmer, making about $1.50 an hour, I seldom have very much cash in my pockets. I normally don’t have to make a choice between organic and non-organic produce; I eat abundantly out of our all-organic garden....