Friday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight at the Uptown gay bar Big Chick’s proceeds from an unofficial cover charge go to Queer Nation, the radical group that calls attention to gay rights through “direct action,” i.e., high-profile, sometimes controversial stunts. It’s from 8 to 11:30 tonight, though the bar’s open till 2; the donation can be much as you want. Big Chick’s is at 5024 N....

Longtime Reader contributor Andrew J. Epstein took this photo for a 1973 interview with tattooer Cliff Raven, who at that time operated out of a storefront on Belmont Avenue. Raven talked about drawing political cartoons for the Seed, his love of science fiction, and the government crackdown on tattoo parlors in the early 1960s. He took pride as one of a younger generation reviving a moribund skill, infusing their work with borrowings from the Art Nouveau fad and psychedelic art....

The 20-member Cathedral Singers, a youthful choir founded four years ago by composer Richard Proulx to record a wide variety of choral music, has already released ten CDs on the Canticum label that demonstrate a versatility and assurance usually associated with veteran ensembles. The fluidity and clarity of the group’s singing can also be heard on its latest CD, Baroque Music From the Bolivian Rainforest (on Tech), a typical theme-oriented compilation....

DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, Touchstone Theatre. The elms are missing in Touchstone Theatre’s well-wrought revival–but not the desire. Eugene O’Neill’s 1924 barn burner seethes with elemental emotions: lust for land, for power, and for another’s body and soul. If it seems larger than life, that’s because life has shrunk. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The setting–a farmhouse in stony 1850 New England–has hardened the Cabots, whose lives are disrupted when Ephraim, the septuagenarian patriarch, brings home a wife half his age, Abbie, to bear his heir (and cut out his sons)....

The anarchistic and unpredictable English director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker) goes bilingual in this 1992 Mexican picture, spoken in Spanish throughout. In some ways it’s his best work to date–a beautifully realized tale about the life of a Mexican highway patrolman who’s neither sentimentalized nor treated like a villain: he takes bribes, but has a sense of ethics. Wonderfully played by Mexican star Roberto Sosa, he’s a more believable cop than any Hollywood counterparts that come to mind....

More than 20 years into their career Los Lobos radically revamped their approach to roots rock, twisting it inside out and becoming America’s best rock band. This year’s brilliant Colossal Head (Warner Brothers) got a creative jolt from the Latin Playboys side project, and now it seems the east LA quintet can do no wrong, even when performing on a package tour headlined by a bunch of post-Grateful Dead projects, the Furthur Festival....

Loud Lucy Makes a Racket Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the fireworks would have been less interesting had Lane not seemed to have absorbed the verities of 90s pop-rock so effortlessly and naturally. Without sounding imitative, he efficiently manipulates a Cobainesque musical palette of light and dark colors: soft, sometimes lilting verses that suddenly burst into roaring emotional choruses. His lyrics avoid self-conscious artiness and concentrate instead on conveying youthful emotions–love, hurt, anger–simply and straightforwardly....

New Moves From Nederlander Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The theater itself is a 40,000-capacity accident-waiting-to-happen tucked away in the chainsaw massacre country of southern Wisconsin. Dobbs has been watching the facility for some time. Since 1984 the theater’s been legally protected against county interference by a zoning clause grandfathered in when Walworth County took over jurisdiction from the nearby town of Lafayette. But conditions finally got so bad that in 1990 the county actually got a state statute changed to allow it to use its police powers over the site....

Lead Story William and Tonya Parker filed a $10,000 lawsuit in December against the Holiday Inn of Midland, Michigan, after an employee walked into their room without warning while they were having sex on their wedding night. The couple said they now suffer posttraumatic stress syndrome and that their sex life has become dysfunctional. A Holiday Inn spokesperson said the intrusion was an accident and that the couple should have hung the Do Not Disturb sign on their door....

Everybody knows that country and blues gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s a whole other thing to have witnessed the birth firsthand. Ronnie Dawson’s been playing rock ‘n’ roll since he was a teenager in Waxahachie, Texas, in the 50s. In 1957 he worked his way up to a regular slot on Dallas’s legendary weekly music showcase, the Big D Jamboree. Seminal rockabilly artists are largely relegated to the fringe of the rock world these days, but that hasn’t knocked the wind out of Dawson....

Hey, Faggot: The only risk you’re running, actually, is the means to your end: specifically, that shower-attachment anal doucher. You need to be very careful about the amount of water pressure you’re putting on your guts; you don’t wanna burst ’em. While those cyborg-douche shower attachments look dramatic, they’re not the safest way to get water up your butt. Low-tech enema bags are easier to control, and you’re not going to bump the faucet and increase the pressure accidentally....

A 17th-century heroine in a book from 1850, Hester Prynne has escaped both eras to personify all victims of the sexual double standard. Acknowledging the plight of his bold sinner in the conclusion to his novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne argues the need for a “surer ground of mutual happiness” between men and women. The prime targets in Lookingglass Theatre Company’s bold but uneven adaptation by ensemble member Thomas J. Cox are New England hypocrisy at its most mean spirited and the sex fears that fuel it....

Some time ago I came upon this little tidbit of info: that during the debates over the United States Constitution in the 1780s, disgust for the British was so intense that a proposal was advanced to ditch English and adopt some nice pseudodead dialect as the new nation’s official language. Is this true? If so, can you confirm that Hebrew was seriously considered as a replacement but came one vote shy of being adopted?...

William Parker High Wire Though he’s technically dazzling, with remarkable power and finesse honed under masters like Milt Hinton, Richard Davis, and Jimmy Garrison, it is his extraordinary selflessness that has become Parker’s trademark. Developing incisive, expressive music and interacting with other musicians is what drives him. Glory does not. For this he’s been sought out to play on nearly 100 records. On two rather different recent recordings, one with Parker as leader and the other with him supporting alto saxophonist Rob Brown, he demonstrates both the versatility and the generosity of his playing....

3D TV There is nothing in the least satiric about Twenty Nothing. The premise is so pat and trendy–a Chicago apartmentful of Generation X-ers of both sexes deals with life in the big city–it could pass for a real sitcom. Leiber has nothing to add to all the tiresome discourse about Generation X. And the problems the characters face in Twenty Nothing–how to ask a girl out, how to deal with a pushy roommate, whether or not to have a Valentine’s Day party–are trivial compared to those faced by my dispirited, broke, underemployed 20-something friends....

BUTLEY Center Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the first moments of the play, when Butley blows into his office, throws his raincoat carelessly over his paper-strewn desk, takes a smashed banana out of his coat pocket, and sits down at his office mate’s utterly clean desk to eat it, he’s clearly a man in great pain. But LaMorte doesn’t stop there....

Julio Revolorio didn’t open the Tres en Uno cafe to make a profit, which is fortunate, because he isn’t making one. At the end of May he was ready to close for good, but an impromptu silent art auction netted him $2,800, enough to pay three months’ back rent, gas, and electric bills. The cafe had to close one day this month because the power was cut off, but Revolorio was back the next day, using a generator....

This three-week showcase of clowning, cabaret, stage magic, dance, and other odd bits of entertainment features performers from around the U.S.–New York to California and Minnesota to Hawaii, not to mention plenty from Chicago–as well as artists hailing from Russia, Brazil, and Canada. Produced, as it was last year, by John T. Mills and James Ellis, the Fringe Fest runs June 6 through 23, with shows six days a week–as few as 3 on weeknights or as many as 21 on weekends....

Dyanmite Fun Nest This generation appears to have found its therapy in improvisation classes, which teach etiquette and cooperation onstage, if not in real life. Charna Halpern and Del Close of ImprovOlympic have often been called “gurus” of improv comedy. Like the charismatic leaders of religious cults and “I’m OK, you’re OK” support groups, Halpern and Close boast loyal followers who claim to owe their newfound confidence and inner peace to them....

Little Odessa Writer-director James Gray’s Little Odessa is a dark movie–so dark you can’t see a thing. Not only is the cinematography somber and moody, the screenplay is opaque. No illuminating artistic vision casts any light into the shadows clouding our understanding; the film ends with the sense that things are still being hidden. It’s not as if we’ve witnessed something beyond comprehension–it’s more like Gray is withholding information, perhaps because he never had it in the first place....