At the moment my new house is only an eight-foot-deep hole lined with concrete. But over the next two months, as the wooden frame goes up, I’ll be asked, after 43 years of apartment life, to make decisions about such things as sillcocks, gas lines, light valances, backsplashes, sizzle strips, upgraded padding, and 42-inch-high cabinets. So, I figured, in the interest of good fortune and well-being, why not invest in the Latin School’s two-hour course in feng shui, the 3,000-year-old Chinese philosophy that says the floor plan of a dwelling, the layout of a room, and even the arrangement of furniture can affect one’s career, wealth, reputation, and family?...

Dear Ms. Jepsen: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This letter is in response to your article in the July 12 issue of the Rock, Etc. column “Pasture-ized.” I am just wondering why you think it’s cool to try to emulate the already overly bitter ranks of the Reader’s rock critics. Please, tell us something we don’t know! As someone who attended the first four Lollapaloozas, I can tell you that to most people like myself, it has been a widely accepted fact that Lollapalooza “sold-out” basically as soon as the second year, and definitely by the third year when “alternative” became a marketing buzzword and Q101 trashed the Chicago music scene....

“This is my Charlie’s Angels lunch box,” Amy Seeley tells me, placing the metal box on the table between us. On its side are pictures of the two dark-haired angels battling the forces of evil–personified by two badly dressed men with awful haircuts–while the blond angel, tied to a stake, is beaming, obviously grateful to be saved by her sisters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past six weeks Seeley and Kirkland have been working on their own postfeminist action story, Beaver Hunt!...

Decades of scientific research now confirm that mom was absolutely right: vegetables really are good for you. They play a key role in warding off killers such as heart and arterial disease, many forms of cancer, plus dozens of other ailments–to say nothing of their ability to slow down the aging process. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hall Laboratories has actually come up with a line of “phytochemical” pills that purport to encapsulate the chief nutrients in foods such as broccoli, garlic, spinach, and tomatoes....

LILYS 7/15, EMPTY BOTTLE This Philadelphia combo is part of a sizable cadre of east-coast bands that openly admire My Bloody Valentine, as one listen to the recent A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns (Spinart) would tell you: pummeling, distorted drum spray is cut by slamming, off-kilter guitars while slack-jawed bubble-gum melodies percolate underneath. The problem with some of these bands is their ridiculous self-referentiality; the Lilys’ song “Jenny, Andrew & Me” refers to two members of the D....

Dance for Life Grows Up Fast Dance for Life was started by Keith Elliott, a dancer for nine years with the now defunct Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre. Elliott came up with the idea in the summer of 1991, when the Holmes company was on hiatus and Elliott was looking for something to do with his free time to benefit the AIDS cause. “I hate being bored,” he says. The first Dance for Life, held at the Organic Theatre, raised about $18,000....

“I hate funerals!” “Man, I’m sellin’ my place and movin’ to Kansas or somewhere. Why not? I got it all set up–some guy tried to fuck me on it but don’t worry, I’m gonna fuck him back. Shit, there ain’t nothin’ like this anywhere. Me and my crazy partner might as well just get the hell outta Chicago and go live off the land, just be left alone. There ain’t anyplace left where people understand life like they do here....

By Ted Cox Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sox remain one of the teams that have been most hurt by the 1994 baseball strike, one of the teams most in need of a public-relations boost and a new compact with the fans. Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf seems to recognize this; after the team’s woeful opening day performance at the turnstiles he staged a personal PR blitz, turning up everywhere on the radio dial from the Score, the all-sports station, with midday hosts Mike North and Dan Jiggetts, to the Sunday-morning discussion program At Issue with John Madigan on WBBM AM....

Victims of Duty Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Choubert pontificates about the lack of evolution in drama, he’s soon embroiled in a detective story himself: a mysterious, unnamed gumshoe calls and asks for help tracking down a man named Mallot. Choubert’s quest to find the missing man turns into a voyage of self-discovery as the detective urges him to delve endlessly into the “mud” of his memory and dreams: if he doesn’t come to understand who this Mallot fellow is, at least he’ll better understand himself....

One of the greatest powerhouses of Egyptology–the study of the history, language, and culture of ancient Egypt–and other ancient Near Eastern studies is the Oriental Institute, established in 1919 as an arm of the University of Chicago. It’s been a leader in archaeology and epigraphy, the study of inscriptions, and its museum, which is now being expanded and improved, is a major resource for anyone with an interest in the field....

The second installment (1992) in Eric Rohmer’s “Tales of the Four Seasons” centers on a young Parisian woman, aptly called Felicie, who fluctuates between two suitors–a pensive local librarian and the owner of a chain of beauty salons who’s moving to Nevers and wants her and her young daughter to come live with him. But in the back of her mind she’s holding out for the return of a former lover, the father of her daughter, whom she lost track of after they spent a summer holiday together; she accidentally gave him the wrong address when he moved away and she never heard from him again....

The Misanthrope The official explanation for why Court Theatre paired The Misanthrope and Travesties for its spring repertory package is that artistic director Charles Newell wanted “two plays as different as possible that use the same number of actors,” a spokeswoman told me at last weekend’s marathon opening day. Still, several common elements link these two serious comedies–the first, by Moliere, dating from 1666, the second being Tom Stoppard’s 1993 rewrite of his 1974 hit....

ARI BROWN QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a soloist Ari Brown provides plenty of individualized excitement, but he also sustains and helps to expand Chicago’s postbop tenor tradition. He fills the room with the brawny sound, intrepid lyricism, and rhythmic elasticity that mark Chicago saxophonists from Von Freeman and Gene Ammons through Johnny Griffin, Joseph Jarman, and Ed Petersen. Like the rest of them, Brown plays with power and a rough-hewn grace....

Digable Planets charmed most of the known world in 1993 with their ultragroovy rap single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”; that song and its accompanying album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), combined sweet melodies and daring, bebop-based instrumentation with a pretty devastating upbraiding of gangsta rap through gentle moods, delightful wordplay, and hooks hooks hooks. Not only were the Digables not as big and tough as the big bad gangstas, they were admittedly insects, the band’s three creators blithely naming themselves Doodlebug, Butterfly, and Ladybug....

EDDIE HARRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Eddie Harris appeared as a guest-artist-cum-godfather on Hand Jive, the hit 1994 disc by John Scofield, it helped confirm the extraordinary impact Harris’s music has had on two generations of jazz players. You hear Harris in the music of Scofield and his contemporaries, musicians who grew up listening to almost as much rock and funk as jazz; you also hear it in the acid-jazz players intent on tacking a 90s perspective onto the jazz funk of the 60s and 70s–an idiom that Harris helped patent....

Rock ‘n’ roll’s unforgiving codes work in mysterious and sometimes shocking ways. Consider the disdain with which Elvis Costello is widely held outside of the too-respectful mainstream rock press. That disdain has to do with the fact that over the past five years he’s firmly established himself as the first punk geezer–a symptom not of age but of attitude. The once neurotic, spitting-mad symbol of emotional angst is now just conventionally prickly, hanging out with the likes of Paul McCartney and Jerry Garcia and getting mad when people suggest he’s just buddying up to the Hall of Fame crowd....

The 1993 debut of New York’s Madder Rose, Bring It Down (Seed), made them out to be indistinctive, almost slavish adherents to indie-rock mores. With Billy Cote’s half-formed pop tunes, Mary Lorson’s forlorn, lethargic vocals, and Lorson and Cote’s flat, muddled guitars, Madder Rose were a fine example of a young band pushed by label execs into trying for a big score before they were ready. Yet on their surprisingly strong follow-up, Panic On (Atlantic)–Seed is just Atlantic’s faux-indie, credibility-gaining shill–the band have taken the de rigueur wispy-vocals-set-to-blasting-guitar further with real success....

As a comedy team Jesse Dienstag and Kirk Pynchon are still finding their feet: they’re too alike in appearance (thin, mid-20s males), demeanor (hopeful, wary, sorry, grateful urbanites), and comedy style (kinda hip, kinda silly) to be a classic comic duo. Still, they’re very funny people–energetic, with a quick, wicked wit–and they have the chemistry of two buddies struggling together through the neon wilderness. In ManCard, which they both wrote and perform, they explore the comic travails of sensitive heterosexual single men with grace, intelligence, and surprising originality....

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum It was the breathless prose in my AAA guidebook that finally reeled me in. My wife, Kim, read out loud about how we could see the Sun studio gear used by Elvis Presley, the psychedelic Porsche driven by Janis Joplin, the Cub Scout uniform worn by Jim Morrison–these are as close as we get to the relics of saints in these godless times!...

We are always most comfortable when the events of our lives fit into a clear and meaningful narrative, when we can assign significance to the inexplicable. When the facts are lacking, imagination steps in. The ancient Greeks explained natural disasters as a kind of collateral damage caused by the ongoing squabbles of the gods. Even today it’s religion, not science, that for most people provides answers about the meaning of life and the mystery of death....