Ever since the dadaists first mocked the mechanical rationality of industrialized man, performance art has provided a critique of technological society. No other performance group in Chicago, however, has immersed itself in technology as consciously and completely as the Loofah Method. This three-person collective–musician Mark Messing, performance poet Cin Salach, and cyberpunk artist Kurt Heintz–has always crowded its shows with special effects, from video images to synthesized sounds to computer-enhanced graphics, even a giant photo plate developed before our eyes....

ANN & ABBY: OFF THE PAGE AND LIVE ON STAGE! Annoyance Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given that statement, what you’ve got here is a couple of quick-witted, zany women with big cardboard wigs on their heads who sing and dance their way through a couple of whiz-bang numbers and then try to offer advice to the audience. The first half of this production, conceived, written, and performed by Michele Cole and Teria Gartelos (with Randy Herman playing piano) comes off as a clever parody of that Mitzi Gaynor/Bob Hope-style sentimentality and false morality that went out of style in the late 1950s....

Cafe Aggravation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Murray and Zartman an entrepreneurial adventure in Lincoln Park wound up being an exasperating exercise in dealing with a bureaucracy that, rightly or wrongly, was more concerned with its own rules and regulations than with helping two eager young businesspeople build a successful restaurant on Park District property. When Zartman and Murray took over the cafe in 1992, a series of lackluster managements had failed to make much of an impact....

Tim McCann’s first feature (1995), made at a cost of $27,000 and distributed by McCann himself, bears absolutely no relation to the Jack Kerouac novel of the same title. Come to think of it, this disturbing and persuasive critique of machismo, which refuses to restrict the blame to one or two individuals and ends up indicting a whole milieu, is also very unlike anything else in recent American filmmaking. A young blue-collar worker (Michael Rodrick) returns to Brooklyn after a short trip to discover that his best friend (Peter Bassett) has raped his girlfriend....

Film Offices Sponsor Screenplay Contest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » submitted by November 15 and choose 50 for further evaluation. On the basis of creativity and marketability a second jury will narrow the field to five winners, who will be announced in June 1995. Before the scripts are submitted to Hollywood film executives, the authors will polish them up with professional screenwriters. Kellet says that of course no film deals are promised, but at the least local writers will benefit from the industry exposure....

Hassan Hakmoun traveled to New York with a troupe of Gnawa musicians in 1987 and never left. Held in sway by the city’s excitement and bristling multiculturalism, he’s subsequently followed the path of assimilation without losing sight of his roots. On his stunning 1993 album Trance (Real World) he and his group Zahar transplanted the mysteriously powerful trance-out grooves of Gnawa music into a vital, contemporary sound without watering down its primal spirit....

The Trib report on the closing of Maxwell Street ends with these words on a sign stuck up on the site: A new show on cable features a theme song that sounds familiar: Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs is the severe, almost wholly unapologetic memoir from John Lydon, onetime Sex Pistol and more recently a fading modern-rock star. The book at once reanimates the band’s concussive celebrity and also, almost accidentally, puts it in perspective....

LEIPZIG STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The string quartet is arguably the most tenacious format in Western classical music, with a viable repertoire that extends from the beginning of the 18th century right up to today. Since forming in 1986 the Leipzig String Quartet has distinguished itself as a young ensemble that commands attention. Unlike the Arditti String Quartet–the greatest interpreter of contemporary string music, which rarely reaches back before the turn of the century–the Leipzig Quartet moves about liberally in the history book, easing its way between classical, romantic, and modern eras....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October officials at Calgary Correctional Centre in Alberta discovered that a 20-year-old man due to be released in mid-November had used newspapers to compile a list of more than 150 homes he intended to burglarize once he got out. And in November, the Minnesota Department of Corrections discovered demographic data on girls aged 3 to 12 in the computer of a convicted pedophile....

I read, reread, studied, and outlined your novella on Quona the cross-dresser [May 20], searching in vain for the article’s message. It was like looking for something likable in John Starks’s “just-fouled-out” mug. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the intended message was: here was a kid who had courage despite being “marginalized” and crammed into confining cultural subcategories, I think you kicked the traditional notion of “courage” in the teeth....

JIM NUTT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hardly unknown, Nutt’s work is wonderfully, startlingly inscrutable. One might make the same claim for abstract art generally or the conceptual conceits of Mike Kelly and his kind. But the “difficulty” in Nutt devolves, in good measure, from his ongoing transmogrification of the human figure. What about de Kooning’s vehement women and the livid flesh of Lucian Freud?...

The atmosphere in the Bulls locker room was anything but ecstatic after their 111-94 victory over the Sacramento Kings last Saturday. Throughout the first half of the season, the Bulls prided themselves on being a well-coached and efficient team, but they were now so out of sync that not even a 17-point win could hide it. Over in the corner, B.J. Armstrong was almost despondent, even after scoring 16 points. “I think for the guys who’ve been here five years this is–not to sound spoiled–this is a situation many of us haven’t been in before,” he said....

Wedge is an unassuming quartet of local veterans led by Hugh Hart, who in the 80s fronted the new-wave contenders the Odd. It’s part of the great midwestern pop-rock tradition that spawned bands like Cheap Trick, the Replacements, and countless 60s garage hooligans. While many groups today are tagged as purveyors of “classically” tailored rock ‘n’ roll, few are as worthy of the term as Wedge. Hart does more than string together a few catchy guitar riffs, slap on some perfunctory vocalizing, and call it a song....

By Ben Joravsky Johnson’s endeavor stems from a lifelong obsession with basketball. “I wasn’t good enough to play on my high school team, but I played all the time,” says Johnson, who grew up on the near west side. “Isiah Thomas, Mark Aguirre, Darrell Walker, Doc Rivers–I’m proud to say I played them all.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He graduated from Gordon Tech in 1978, earned a degree in criminal justice at Texas Southern University, and then came home to Chicago, where his mother, Sally Johnson, once an aide to Mayor Washington, owns and operates Chicago Architectural Window, a window-installation company....

Taking its name from the Tower Building at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, which once housed the Coyote Gallery, this annual Wicker Park event includes a sizable theater and performance component–and this year’s is bigger than ever, boasts coordinator Jonathan Pitts. Running September 7 through 10, the sixth annual Around the Coyote features 37 different theater and performance-art productions–that’s more than 125 performances in four days, at various locations both indoors and out....

Friday 21 Saturday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five historians from around the country discuss their work on the Pullman community today in a free seminar. Writing About Pullman, which kicks off a day of activities sponsored by the Newberry Library and the Historic Pullman Foundation, begins at 10 at the library, 60 W. Walton. The day also includes lunch at 1 at Pullman’s Hotel Florence, 11111 S....

Everybody was talking about zebra mussels when I left Chicago in the fall of 1993, but you generally had to look underwater to see any. By the time I returned early this year the presence of those tiny, alien mollusks was apparent to anyone paying any attention at all. Gobies are a varied bunch–only one other family of fish has more species–but they tend to be small. Only a few species reach a foot in length....

It is a pleasure to watch a choreographer learn to express intense emotions kinetically. Mary Johnston-Coursey’s dances from a few years ago, when she was working in Chicago, were often about intense emotions that threatened to overwhelm the dancer. After dancing forcefully along a straight line, a dancer would suddenly stop, a leg and opposite arm reaching out yearningly in the direction she was going while the rest of her body pulled back in the direction from which she had come....

“Your penis is on my hand!” the actress is screaming. “The book” is The Master and Margarita, a bizarre absurdist epic written in the 1940s by star-crossed Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. Originally a doctor, Bulgakov is considered one of his country’s premiere 20th-century authors, but his life story is a sad one. His writing career fatefully coincided roughly with Stalin’s political one, and his brand of passionate and sarcastic parody was exactly the wrong sort of thing to be creating in those days; he was harassed by Soviet authorities his entire adult life....

Local Singles Roundup The second single from this Chicago threesome pairs a respectable bit of bashy pleasure with a B-side sleeper. The ostensible A side, “Ronnie’s Pants,” is based on a just-this-side-of-lethal guitar pulse over a song that has something to do with “safety in numbers.” Fueled nicely by singer Wes Kidd’s howling delivery, it’s catchier and more substantive than the band’s first single, “Revved Up,” but ends up being overshadowed by the conceptual tour de force on the flip....