Salt-n-Pepa walk thin lines between all sorts of things: pop schmaltz and gangsta vacuity, female independence and female stereotype, substance and preachiness, self-determination and manipulation. That they’ve done all this and remained rap’s most successful female group is important. They’ve never put out a coherent album and probably never will; but they have created great singles (“Push It,” “Expression,” “Let’s Talk About Sex”) and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, particularly since their latest–the steamy sex romp “Shoop”–was written and produced without their longtime semi-Svengali Herby Azor....

Secure at the Trib Are you taking your quiz along? I asked him. Acts of Terror Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The newspapers of Friday, April 21, 1995, are curiosities. By then the front pages were beginning to make sense of the bombing two days earlier of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Sketches of John Does I and II stared out from these pages, alongside details of the mounting death toll and FBI manhunt....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twenty years or so ago I met Mrs. S. As the old saying goes, “we hit it off,” in an immediate liking of one another. It was my first contact as a chaplain with a person with lung cancer. She was in her late fifties. One lung had been surgically removed. She still could not stop smoking cigarettes....

David Nash is an electronics whiz, born with a genius for fixing car stereos and speakers. He will tell you this much if you ask. He will also, in all likelihood, give you the best deal he possibly can, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a conventional one: in the past Nash has installed a car stereo in exchange for two iguanas and has traded a VCR for a 22-year-old human skull....

Meet me in the middle. According to the Census Bureau, in 1970 87 percent of married men and 41 percent of married women were in the labor force. In 1990 men were down to 78 percent and women up to 59. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why you didn’t finish that last long article. “Most people have figured out by now that print is the medium of intimidation, expropriation and threat,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in the Nation (October 11)....

SOCK MONKEYS With their newest pieces the Sock Monkeys hit the mark nearly as often as they miss, which isn’t bad. None of the three pieces presented–Fish Tales and Links Plays, performed live, and The Destination, a collaborative film with Blair Jensen–comes together as a whole, and the fragments within each piece range from banal to sublime. Overall, the simpler the image and the less effort that seems to go into its creation, the more effective the communication....

We packed up the wife and child and dutifully marched off to the Cubs game last Sunday in observance of Father’s Day, but there was something very pro forma about the whole affair. The five-year-old didn’t clamor to see batting practice, not even with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Mike Piazza in town–unlike us as a kid when the San Francisco Giants were visiting and we’d make sure to get there early to watch Mays and McCovey....

Chairs Plus Sofas Full Moon Over Lincoln Avenue Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a faint whisper of magic in these monologues about the “inherent challenges of communal living” by Beau O’Reilly, Colm O’Reilly, Kate O’Reilly, Radar O’Reilly, Jenny Magnus, Ann Magnuson, Magnus Magnusson, Paula Killen, Paula Poundstone, Paula Jones, Lisa Buscani, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Frank Galati. Also: Bryn Magnus premieres his newest play, The Startling Ascent of Mr....

The opening of the Double Door, a new midsize live-music club at Wicker Park’s ground-zero intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, both furthers the area’s transformation into the new Lakeview and provides more evidence that the local club scene is going crazy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Wicker Park’s growth as a hipster hangout has been ferocious over the past five years, the Double Door is the first upscale live-rock venue at the area’s central intersection: the Czar Bar, at Wood and Division, books neighborhood bands and hosts the Homocore series, and the friendly, well-liked Empty Bottle in west Ukrainian Village has a knack for pulling in the occasional very hip show....

Marlon Riggs, who made the controversial Tongues Untied, was dying of AIDS while working on his last film, Black Is …Black Ain’t. His crew completed it after his death. Shots of an ill Riggs speaking to the camera add poignancy to images, presumably taken earlier, of him running nude through a forest, proud, independent, alone. Those shots provide a clue to the film’s central theme: Riggs’s insistence on defining himself as he wished, free of all labels....

** LITTLE BUDDHA With Keanu Reeves, Chris Isaak, Bridget Fonda, Alex Wiesendanger, Ying Ruocheng, Jigme Kunsang, Raju Ial, and Greishma Makar Singh. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bertolucci has been grappling with contradictions of this sort ever since the 1977 1900, when he tried to sell communism to the masses with Hollywood-ish, Gone With the Wind trappings. Before that he’d deliberately turned away from the art cinema that nourished his best early features, the still exciting Before the Revolution (1964) and The Spider’s Strategem (1970), to direct the highly profitable, highly influential retro fashion show The Conformist (1970) and the psychosexual melodrama Last Tango in Paris (1972)....

DAVE MADDOX & TIM KEENAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saxophone-percussion duets first gained prominence in the later music of John Coltrane and soon became an unsurprising format in the jazz avant-garde. But they still ain’t everybody’s cup of tea, triggering many nomadic explorations filled with austere musical symbolism and a high noise-to-note ratio. Enter the Chicago duo of saxophonist Dave Maddox and drummer Tim Keenan, who perform what they call “The Lineage Duets,” a collaboration celebrating “the art of the story” and “the art of melody....

It’s late morning at the Cook County Circuit Court Building in Skokie. In one of the small courtrooms along the broad center hallway a few people sit quietly in clusters on wooden pews, waiting for their cases to be called. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Near the front of the room a black Chicago cop is lying back in his seat, legs stretched out, arms crossed....

Dubious Debut Director Peter Sellars’s nearly four-hour-long The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theatre may not be great theater, but it has certainly left its mark. On opening night, an evening when audience members–most attending for free–are usually the most respectful of what’s onstage, about a third of the crowd left early. Two of the first people to boldly head for the exit were Goodman’s honorary board chairman Stanley Freehling and his wife, Joan, who made their way from the center of a row during the first act....

On a sunny Thursday afternoon in late September Robert Hibbs stands on a steel girder at the edge of the Ardmore pier, hooting at a bunch of salmon. Hibbs is 33, a roofer by trade. At Ardmore he prefers to go by Babe Wolf. Friends of his who fish at Ardmore include Burnout, J.J., Jim, Blair, and No Neck. “Get the net, Sam!” “How ’bout that? Yeah.” He laughs. “Honey, what’s the matter with you?...

To the editors: Moldy figgery forever!, it seems. Michael Solot is entitled to his opinions about free jazz, but he shouldn’t let them let him indulge in falsehoods and misrepresentation [“Reading: It’s Really Gone, Man,” May 7]. The political consciousness that Solot says made free jazz a vehicle for hating the white man was–according to David Rosenthal in the very book, Hard Bop, Solot was supposed to be reviewing–already at work in hard bop....

Adapted from a successful play, this tense and effective 1992 Venezuelan political thriller follows the story of a nun who decides to shelter a fugitive from armed rebels during a civil war, the ambivalent cooperation she elicits from another nun, and the price they both have to pay for their courage. Directed with craft and discretion by Alejandro Saderman, the film sticks to the claustrophobic feeling I assume the original play had while conveying a detailed sense of the surrounding community, from mayor to bishop to shopkeeper....

Congratulations to Erin Hogan for sticking to her guns through her Kafka-esque experience in the American legal system, a world of incompetence, dishonesty, disrespect, and an overarching belief that legal advocacy is a war game. The fact that the word “intimidation” is apparently considered a legitimate courtroom tactic speaks volumes about the disintegration of a system that is, ideally, about fair punishment and rehabilitation. It sucks that a victim cannot press charges without being manipulated and intimidated by defense attorneys, chewed out by judges, ignored by the supposed advocates of the state’s interest, and made to feel guilty and foolish for pursuing her case....

As always, Ben Joravsky is all a journalist should be: unbiased, impartial, fair. It is virtual wizardry that he can get the people on opposing sides to believe the article was written from their viewpoint. Mr. Joravsky has worked his magic in presenting a balanced report of almost mathematical precision in his article entitled “Hard Lessons” (Neighborhood News, April 26) about the local school council elections at Walt Disney Magnet School....

It’s hard to believe that more than three years have passed since school reformers ushered in Ted Kimbrough as the general superintendent who would turn the system around. Of course things didn’t work out that way. In January Kimbrough’s many squabbles with activists and board members caught up with him. The board bought out his contract, and many of his erstwhile allies hollered good riddance. Now school leaders are conducting another national search for superintendent....