Her Highness (American), the third album from LA’s Medicine, finds bandleader Brad Laner easing off his My Bloody Valentine fixation just a bit, matching wispy pop melodies, mostly sung by chanteuse Beth Thompson, with a sturdy rhythmic wallop and an almost gentle pastel swirl of guitar feedback and clanging noise. The band’s basic MO isn’t perceptibly altered, but the result is a bit more distinctive. A tune like “Farther Down,” for example, employs a vaguely twangy riff at its core, and glosses it over with a catchy but hushed male-female vocal twine....

Dracula’s daughter–and more specifically Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936)–comes to Manhattan’s East Village in a quirky, lyrical independent feature by writer-director Michael Almereyda. It’s shot in luscious, shimmering black and white, with prismatic, pointillist interludes shot with a toy Pixelvision camera (also used by Almereyda in Another Girl, Another Planet, his previous feature), transferred to 35-millimeter without letterboxed framing. Produced by David Lynch, who turns up in a cameo, this offbeat horror item works much better as a dreamy mood piece with striking poetic images and as a semicomic appreciation of a few quintessential low-budget actors than as straight-ahead storytelling....

MX-80 Hard Attack/Big Hits Angel Corpus Christi A good place to sample the various flavors of MX-80 is on Das Love Boat (Atavistic), which reissues a band-assembled compilation of instrumental tracks recorded between 1975 and 1990. This album is sequenced in reverse chronological order, devolving through several drummers and distinct strata of musical sophistication. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Less concerned with the generation of good cheer is Bruce Anderson’s Brutality (Atavistic), which collects a variety of material issued on cassette throughout the late 80s....

Fluxfilm is a 40-minute reel of playful short films by members of the 1960s Fluxus art movement, Yoko Ono among them; some are slight, a few are quite fine. The other films to be shown are serious and concentrated meditations on the nature of cinema that invite the viewer’s reflective participation. For the whole length of Hollis Frampton’s 30-minute black-and-white 1972 film “Poetic Justice,” the camera focuses on a small table that has a pile of pages from a script on it; the image changes only when a new page is laid on top of the others....

Like many in the state from which she hails, native Texan Rosie Flores has been playing what folks in the biz call alternative country (or more recently, Americana) for years. It’s too uppity for country radio, too twangy for rockers, but Flores has embraced her cross-pollinated idiosyncrasies proudly. Her latest album, Rockabilly Filly (Hightone), delves into one of her many passions, as made clear by its title. From unfettered barn burners to swinging honky-tonk to weepy ballads, Flores, despite a less than accommodating voice, gallops through exuberant musical retrogression with aplomb, focusing on a fine driving, hiccupping beat....

If I have my wipers on intermittent, will I only be fined $37.50? A new state law, according to Secretary of State George Ryan, requires drivers to turn on their headlights “at times when rain, snow, fog or other weather conditions make it necessary to turn on the windshield wipers.” The fine is $75. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hi honey, I got our financial problems all worked out–took out a home-equity loan to pay off the groceries!...

Spin Alternative Record Guide Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no turning back. For better (punk’s democratic ethic gets broadcast to the masses) or worse (can you say Ticketmaster?) a little record called Nevermind changed everything. The ambitious Spin Alternative Record Guide (subtitled “The Essential Artists and Albums of Punk, New Wave, Indie Rock, and Hip Hop”) sets out to map the post-Nirvana universe, inhabited by ancestors like the evil genius Lou Reed and descendants like the brain-dead poseurs Stone Temple Pilots....

French Kiss With Meg Ryan, Kevin Kline, Timothy Hutton, Jean Reno, Francois Cluzet, Susan Anbeh, and Renee Humphrey. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The same principle applies to the way we commonly perceive other national traits. Ask an average American to name something typically Chinese and there’s a fair chance you’ll be told fortune cookies, an American invention smiled at in Asia. The French term for “French kiss” is baise anglaise, which means “English kiss....

In her last one-woman show, This Girl I Knew, Marcia Wilkie pretty much pushed confessional monologues to the limit. Eliminating any shred of artifice in her act, she performed her sweet, funny autobiographical stories in a style so comfortable, relaxed, and off-the-cuff it was hard to believe the show was scripted at all. Most of the tales in Are You Happy? take this trademark form, though the material is slightly darker and richer: Wilkie discusses her panic attacks on the road, her love of women’s rugby, her fear that she’s lost her self in the bustle of modern life....

SEPTEMBER Aside from his smug prose and Kmart cynicism, the most irritating thing about conservative political writer P.J. O’Rourke is his belief that his work somehow goes against the popular mores of the time. This from a writer who rose to prominence in the Reagan-Bush era. The Republican lapdog talks at 6 tonight at the Rizzoli Bookstore, on the third floor of Water Tower Place, 835 N. Michigan. It’s free. Call 642-3500....

DARK OF THE MOON Though it’s likely the Theatre Guild never regretted its choice, Dark of the Moon did open in New York in 1945 and enjoyed its own success: an extended Broadway run and a long life later as a favorite with amateur and college theaters. This production by Chi-Town Revelers is more amateur than Broadway, and wildly uneven. The first act makes you wonder why the play was ever produced, but in the second the many merits of this delightful folktale come through....

Defending Otakar “Reporters from both major Chicago newspapers were present before, during and after Richard’s custody surrender,” the Sun-Times confessed on its editorial page. “What business did they have there? None. But how could they refuse? Both sets of parents invited reporters to protect and project their own self-interest in the public domain. This has been a shameful case, and many people were used. But none more than Richard, the innocent child whose public suffering we were compelled to witness....

By Kim Phillips Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But on Thursday, May 9, Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle intended to introduce the Chicago Jobs and Living Wage Ordinance in the City Council. Its mandate is simple: any business in Chicago receiving assistance from the city worth more than $50,000, or a contract from the city for more than $5,000, must pay its workers at least $7....

The crab apple tree in the parkway by Wax Trax Records had me baffled. All winter this particular crab has thousands of fruits that cling to the branches through strong winds and ice storms. On days when the red berries are capped with snow and set off against a blue sky, the tree is spectacular. They created the great fruit trick. Trees grow fruit for only one reason: to manipulate animals into spreading their seeds around for them....

From Jane’s Addiction to Perry’s Indulgence Nothing’s shocking Farrell–because of the pressures of fame, drugs, whatever–broke up the band shortly after they headlined the first Lollapalooza. Two years on, he’s back with a crudely named Jane’s wannabe outfit called Porno for Pyros. Over three albums Jane’s Addiction recorded a lot of powerful rock ‘n’ roll, but nothing like a pop song: the band, said Farrell, was an art project, and it was a good one....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This letter is in reply to your bashing of National Public Radio [“How Do I Hate NPR?,” June 25]. Among other disturbing things about your article is the curious fact that the identical story appears in the New York Press of May 28, 1993, so I may assume that the Glenn Garvin byline does not represent the work of a local writer, information which should have been made clear....

Raul Ortiz grew up in public housing in Uptown. With the help and advice of a local priest, he attended Saint Benedict’s and then the University of Illinois at Chicago. At UIC he overcame his upwardly mobile Republican tendencies and even joked about being “too radical” for the campus Society of Hispanic Engineers. Instead he became president of the Confederation of Latin American Students (CLAS). He organized volunteers for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, a Central America awareness week, and an outreach program linking UIC Latino students with their high school counterparts–all while studying engineering and working part-time....

Founded in 1976 in Bogota, Colombia, but now based in New York, the Quintet of the Americas specializes in folk and contemporary music of the Western Hemisphere arranged for woodwinds. The group has established a reputation for commissioning work by Latin American composers and often including the music of displaced people, from Sephardic Jews to Native Americans. The program for this recital–the first in a series while the quintet is in residence at Northwestern University this season–is indicative of its eclectic taste....

In my book, the perennially popular (and populist) tenor saxist Stanley Turrentine deserves his success. Grounded in the hard-bop jazz of the 50s, he managed to fuse the rigors of that idiom with the sweet yearnings of 60s soul music and its various pop heirs–no easy trick. This union finds voice in the falsetto yelps that punctuate his bright hard tone, and in his remarkably smooth and facile improvisations; you can hear it back on his late-50s records with Max Roach, on his soulful Blue Note dates of the 60s, and even on his projects merging strings (and later, dance rhythms) in the 70s....

It ain’t pretty but it’s real” sort of sums up Elizabeth Streb’s aesthetic. Some say that what she does isn’t even dance, that it’s too purely athletic, too little emotional or intellectual. But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like dance because you don’t know what it means, you may go for Streb’s Ringside in a big way. The props she uses recall gymnastics: a sort of jungle gym at the then State of Illinois Center for “Dancing in the State” in 1991, and on other occasions stationary walls, portable walls, glass walls, mats, harnesses for flying....