The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a terrible idea; if its founders want to honor forgotten stars, they should leave it at that. But the only people who can stop it are the stars themselves, and honorees almost always show up for the private annual induction ceremony. But quite a few were missing from the big public bash last Saturday celebrating the opening of the new Cleveland museum. Any concert that includes Chuck Berry, James Brown, Little Richard, Robbie Robertson, George Clinton, John Fogerty, the Kinks, Jerry Lee Lewis, Booker T & the MG’s, Eric Burdon, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop cannot be called a failure....

Juro Grau, Sabine Mohr, and Dieter Vieg The Near Northwest Arts Council’s Flat Iron Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of three artists from Kunstlerhaus in Hamburg, Germany, one of Chicago’s designated sister cities. Kunstlerhaus has been home to an artists collective since 1976, longer–it’s said–than any other building in Hamburg. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although the three artists, Juro Grau, Sabine Mohr, and Dieter Vieg, have created separate installations, these produce a surprising unity....

On the superb Viva Last Blues (Drag City) the rambling concerns of Will Oldham all seem to come together. Coherent but loose, he and the ever-shifting supporting cast of Palace (aka Palace Brothers and sometimes Palace Music) traverse lazy country rock, austere folk, and amped-up Neil Young-ish burners with a compelling immediacy that pays no mind to a flubbed note here and there. Oldham’s taken plenty of guff for his singing–peppered as it is with cracks, missed notes, cries, and other clanging vocal “mistakes”–but part of his coarse genius is blindness to technical perfection, which comes across as unfettered emotion....

He couldn’t take care of himself anymore. For the year and a half since the doctors had diagnosed his hard-core diabetes, family members had been giving him insulin shots every day. The living room had come to look like a hospital ward, with his IV bag hanging over his head and his bed covered with disposable linens in case he lost control of his urine while sleeping. Two days before, he’d had his third and worst comalike episode, slipping away but never quite making it over the edge before coming back to a life that wasn’t really life anymore....

On the big question of religion and marriage, Sylvia Telser and the Orthodox rabbis agree: mixed marriages are a threat to Judaism. The rabbi says he had no choice but to complain. “We could not condone the idea of counseling mixed-dating couples,” says Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz. “The only counseling one should give is that one should not mix-date.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Telser had over 20 years of counseling experience when she went to work for JFCS in 1986....

Guitarist Robert Ward was a seminal figure in several major pop revolutions in the 60s and 70s. In 1962 his band, the Ohio Untouchables, accompanied a gospel-drenched Detroit group called the Falcons (featuring an explosive young vocalist named Wilson Pickett) on a song called “I Found a Love” for the Lu Pine label. That record helped define the era’s burgeoning deep-soul style. The Untouchables went on to fame as the Ohio Players; Ward went on to Motown records, where he contributed his distinctive tremolo-laden guitar to recordings by artists like the Temptations....

JOOST VISSER 5/17, EMPTY BOTTLE This Dutch oddball once fronted De Artsen, the swell band that later became Bettie Serveert, but based on his superbly bent solo debut, Partners in Hair (Ajax), Joost Visser would probably be stifled by a regular band. Aided on some songs by members of Holland’s like-minded Furtips, Visser explores his idiosyncratic notion of pop, happily incorporating anything he stumbles upon. Between off-center acoustic ditties and the occasional shambling rocker, he cohesively splices in “field recordings” of marching bands and nonsensical lo-fi splatter, suggesting that sullied pop music has antiseptic perfection beat hands down....

Cute. Ann Wiens in the New Art Examiner (April) recalls a discussion last year in which “the panelists were artist/activists whose work addresses ecology and the environment. An audience member asked where beauty fit into their work. After a long, uncomfortable silence one of the panelists said, ‘It really isn’t a concern. Is there another question?’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, Chicago kids count, but can their advocates?...

The Convention Of course, political conventions have certainly had their moments of drama and dark humor over the past few decades. The honorable Mayor Richard J. Daley yelling “fucker” and “Jew son of a bitch” at Abe Ribicoff, who accused him of engaging in “gestapo” tactics for quelling political demonstrators in ’68. Harold Washington chewing out Ed Bradley on the convention floor, calling the CBS reporter “the lowest of the low....

Everyone is familiar with Teflon, that nonstick surface no self-respecting housewife can do without. If’n it works so well slippin’ and slidin’ yer flapjacks, how do they get it to stick to the pan in the first place? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A favorite question of smart-aleck drive-time radio hosts, and to tell you the truth it gave (and gives) the folks who make Teflon pans some trouble too....

THREE SOPRANOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A distaff version of that commercial monstrosity called “The Three Tenors” was inevitable I suppose. Fortunately, in assembling “The Three Sopranos” local impresario and Russophile C. Geraldine Freund hasn’t deferred to star power. Instead she’s recruited prima donnas from estimable Russian ballet and operatic troupes who are relatively unknown in the West. (Freund did try to snare Jessye Norman, perhaps the only female singer as recognized as Domingo and Pavarotti, but she balked at Norman’s high price tag....

Tricky’s prophetic debut album, Maxinquaye (Island), is an aural ripple unlike anything you’ve heard before. Emerging from the much-hyped if feebly named Bristol, England, trip-hop scene, which has also produced Portishead and Massive Attack, with whom Tricky (aka Adrian Thaws) first recorded, he sumptuously twists hip-hop rudiments into a slippery, dense collage of sound. On his radically reworked cover of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” for example, a live band deconstructs a sampled groove, spreading the tune wide open and transmogrifying Public Enemy’s pure rage....

Arto Lindsay Trio Painted Desert Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than the others DNA practiced their art with remarkable concision and power; their tunes rarely lasted much more than two minutes. Anchored by the freakish organ patterns of Robin Crutchfield and later the thick, churlish bass lines of Tim Wright, guitarist and vocalist Arto Lindsay and drummer Ikue Mori generated a madly unhinged skree that turned the stop-start funk of James Brown into an asymmetrical nightmare....

Two months have passed since Mayor Daley slashed the library budget, forcing libraries across the city to trim hours and lay off staff. A handful of activists and scholars protested the cuts, but few City Hall insiders figured the anger would spread, particularly since Daley had framed the issue as a choice between libraries and higher property taxes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daley blames the cuts on Governor Edgar, who slashed state library funds to the city by $3 million....

Reggae Sunsplash The rhythms of Africa run through reggae, but now reggae and African music appear to be heading in opposite directions. While reggae edges closer to commercial pop, African music still draws on such traditions as drumming and chanting–the roots of its sound. The difference was apparent at the recent Reggae Sunsplash and Africa Fete concerts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aswad was the first London-based reggae band to tour with legends Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and Bunny Wailer....

Dear Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know where Jeff Huebner (“The Panic in Wicker Park,” Aug. 26) learned of my affiliation with the Artemisia Gallery, because it was nowhere mentioned in my letter to the Chicago Tribune which he quoted from in his article. The “we” I referred to in the Tribune letter was NOT Artemisia Gallery or its members, but those whom I identified as “artists, writers, musicians, actors and independent business people of Wicker Park for whom public posting is the only form of advertising we can afford” and who were angered over Kenneth Corrigan’s “removal of posters from the light pole on the street in front of the store....

ATTACK OF THE KILLER B’S That success speaks volumes about Abley’s skills as a director, or at least about his skills as a builder of tight ensembles of talented comic actors capable of re-creating the look and feel of this lead-footed film–without this kind of cast Reefer Madness would be nothing. Abley’s so-called adaptation, after all, is little more than a transcription of the movie, which I’m sure is far less interesting on the page than on the stage....

Friday 8 Milk of Burgundy, the music and outre art club in Wicker Park, is presenting the latest in a string of video screenings tonight. Tape/lb. Projected Video Show #4 includes work on film and video from Carnival de Carnitas, RunandGun Video, James Warden, Ben Evans, and Mark Fergusen. It’s at 1937 W. North, at 10. Admission is $3. Call 667-4673. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Poet and professor Gordon Henry talks about Chippewa literature in a lecture called Oral Traditions in Contemporary Ojibwe Literature....

HAMLET The cast of Hamlet spends far too much time working hard. Which is a shame, because in those few scenes where craft supersedes histrionics, where the actors rely on the tools of acting rather than emotional displays, this production achieves a clarity and dramatic urgency rare in contemporary productions of Shakespeare. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, the first act of this Hamlet is perhaps the most successful 20 minutes of Shakespeare I’ve seen onstage....

Think of “Brazil” and “tenor sax” at the same time and you come up with the image of Stan Getz’s bossa nova years; go to hear the Brazilian tenor saxist Ivo Perelman and the imagery changes drastically. Perelman has nothing to do with the bossa nova, the samba, or the host of subsequent rhythmic fads in his native land, just as his impassioned, fulminating improvisations bear no trace of cool jazz or bebop....