You have to ring the doorbell for a long time at Jim Ellison’s new house, a cozy but unprepossessing affair in east Lakeview, before the sound penetrates the blasting sound of a rushing guitar solo–deedle deedle deedle deedle dweeeeeeee! Inside, Ellison proudly shows off a sparkly new Gibson (an SG Les Paul Custom, to be exact), the product of an endorsement deal for his band, Material Issue. A previous deal with another guitar maker didn’t work out: Ted Ansani’s bass kept breaking, and the company wouldn’t give the band the time of day....

When the Bottle Rockets’ second album, The Brooklyn Side (TAG/Atlantic), came out early this year, the band from Festus, Missouri, started a wave of terrific records by country-dabbling rock bands like Wilco, Son Volt, and the late Jayhawks. Many young rockers have adopted the same rural lyricism, earnestness, and twang, but no band has pulled them off as naturally as the Bottle Rockets. Sure, others have made records that were more solid, but when Brian Henneman and company play the best songs of their latest album–“Gravity Fails,” “Welfare Music,” and “1000 Dollar Car” to name a few–they may be the world’s greatest rock band....

Friday 16 Saturday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Greater Chicago Food Depository, which collects food for more than 500 local shelters, social agencies, soup kitchens, and pantries, is raising money today with its Walk to Fight Hunger. Channel Two’s Corey McPherrin will be joining hundreds of walkers this morning at the totem pole in Lincoln Park at Addison. Registration is at 8:30; the 5K walk starts at 9:30....

The painting on the cover of Bloodshot Records’ new CD, Hell-Bent: Insurgent Country, shows a stern, emaciated Hank Williams Sr. riddled with arrows. “We come to exhume Hank, not to canonize him,” proclaim the liner notes. “Unbury him . . . from beneath the mounds of gutless swill which pass for his legacy, the suffocating spew of the Nashville hit factories.” The words, in white, are superimposed over a sepia-toned 1940s-era photo of an ecstatic woman holding a snake at a religious revival....

Pizzicato Five Metro, March 3 The lyrics—sung either in Japanese or sweet, stilted English (sometimes combining the two)—speak the universal language of bubblegum: happy, sappy puppy love, self-absorbed nihilism, or trippy utopian fantasies. Pizzicato Five’s U.S. debut album, last year’s Made in USA (Matador), supplies English translations for all the lyrics. Not that American fans are missing any important semantic nuances when Nomiya sings about blue Afros and miniskirts, but the translations enable the listener to hear the irony in her Barbie doll delivery....

From most of the media coverage, it’d be easy to conclude that the only opposition to the CHA sweeps comes from some white guy named Grossman. And he’s adamantly against the sweeps. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pratt’s first encounter with the sweeps was in October 1992, after seven-year-old Cabrini resident Dantrell Davis was killed by sniper fire while walking to school. “After Dantrell was killed, I had a feeling the sweeps were coming to Cabrini,” says Pratt....

ALIVE at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nick Digilio and Mike Meredith’s Alive at the Factory Theater is one of the most wildly entertaining Tilt-A-Whirl rides about nothingness to hit the stage in quite some time, so gleefully paced that occasionally you can forget how depressingly empty the lives of its characters are. It’s like Beckett rewritten for MTV. This play succeeds where most other plays about disaffected jamokes in their 20s fail (see Generation Why?...

An aging but still spry star struts, skips, and sashays through hit songs from the 60s, cannily marshaling every physical resource–gritty growl, gangly physique, expressive arms, larger-than-life lips and eyes–for maximum effect over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour love feast for an adoring audience. Mick Jagger on his Voodoo Lounge tour? No: it’s Carol Channing, at 71 a legend who refuses to rest on her laurels. In her umpteenth tour of Hello, Dolly!...

This felicitous double bill served up by the highly regarded French period-instrument crusaders Les Arts Florissants places two Baroque masters of different nationalities side by side. Contemporaries Henry Purcell and Marc-Antoine Charpentier both made key contributions to late-17th-century music and eased the transition from modality to tonality, and both were half-forgotten for almost two centuries. Purcell’s revival came sooner; he’s now indisputably acknowledged as the greatest of all English composers. His only opera, Dido and Aeneas (1689), based on the doomed love between the Carthage queen and the Trojan prince, was exceptional in its time for its lyrical simplicity, delicate touch, and psychological intensity....

The numerous plot machinations in Handel’s opera Alcina, loosely derived from Ariosto’s epic verse Orlando furioso, are driven by search and revenge. The eponymous heroine is a seductive, evil sorceress with a penchant for turning humans into beasts who falls in love with the handsome Ruggiero. The maiden Bradimante, disguises herself as a man and goes off to look for her beloved Ruggero, only to be imprisoned on Alcina’s enchanted isle, and Morgana, the sorceress’s sister, becomes infatuated with the armored Bradimante....

OYVIND FAHLSTROM Near the center of Column No. 1 (Wonderbread) (1972) is an area shaped like a bread slice; the text inside states, “Helps build strong bodies in 12 ways.” Beside the text is a happy bodybuilder, but below the bread slice is a larger area with a text that lists the allegedly deleterious effects of Wonder bread. Beside this text is a nude man next to a load of bread, and sticking out of the loaf are guns that are shooting at him....

Something changed for me the day I walked into a certain crossroads country store on the way to my own country place in Wisconsin’s deeply rural Iowa County. I had long been both charmed and fascinated by the store’s existence in this remote, picturesque area of rolling cornfields and pasture along a ridge overlooking the wild terrain of Governor Dodge State Park. It’s a small, white clapboard building in need of paint, with a weatherbeaten sign in front that doesn’t exactly beckon to passersby....

The Front Page, Next Theatre Company. Never mind the plot (the pardon of a left-wing radical on death row is stalled by corrupt politicians hoping to profit from his execution). Never mind the richly detailed picture of 1928 Chicago as Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur knew it. Never mind the bomber-squadron camaraderie of a press corps no crueler or kinder than the world required them to be. No, what makes The Front Page a milestone in American theater, and the archetype of a genre that continues to this day, is the swiftness with which all these elements are spun out before us....

I read this as a tag line on the Internet, but it’s still a good question: why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets? –Matt McCullar, Arlington, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Correction, Matt. This is not a good question. This is a dumb question that appears to be a good question only until such time as you actually give it some thought. As anyone acquainted with aviation or basic physics knows, the pilot’s helmet has never been intended to provide protection against a crash....

My, Michael Miner is touchy these days (Hot Type, “The Lost Decade,” March 17, 1995). Miner’s spunky defense of The Brady Bunch Movie and its smug, self-referential stupor wallows in hapless generational cliche. Myself, I grew up in the 70s and, admittedly, a whole bunch of its pop culture detritus still warms my heart. Still, I won’t smear my adolescence by granting The Brady Bunch unassailable iconographic status. (Not talking about my generation....

Frustrated by the variable attendance and meager critical attention at their off-the-beaten-track loft space at 23rd and Michigan, Cook County Theatre Department truck their brand of precision deadpan mischief to the heart of Wicker Park for a two-weekend gig. An earlier version of Burlesque premiered at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Society in New York last July, but this intentionally lowbrow variety show has been reinvented and seems tailor-made for the Bop Shop’s nightclub stage....

The loft space that houses the New Art Examiner on South Wabash is pin-drop silent. It is not at all the scene one would expect at a magazine on deadline. In fact, the NAE has got two: the one for its 20th-anniversary October issue, which is several weeks past, and the one for its November issue, which is a couple days away. The three women who edit the magazine–Ann Wiens, Deborah Wilk, and Kathryn Hixson–agree, the situation is a mess, but it’s a mess they’re happy to be in....

Cynics might look at Hannibal Lokumbe’s 1990 African Portraits as a crowd-stirring, politically correct musical Roots for the 90s. No one, however, can dispute the earnestness of this ambitious 45-minute work by the multifaceted composer previously known as Hannibal Peterson (his name was changed last month after a tribal ceremony). Commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the American Composers Orchestra, African Portraits aims to be a grand, hortatory treatment of African-American history....

CHRIS DAHLGREN QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whenever a working band with a strong aesthetic makes its Chicago debut, it deserves mention–even if you’ve never heard of anyone in it. Chris Dahlgren, the bassist, leader, and composer for this quartet, gives a clear picture of what he wants from his music: a lean, sharply angled, at times noisy aesthetic. Dahlgren has constructed a surging, hard-edged front line featuring newcomer Peter Epstein on tenor sax and the rock-honed guitar of Ben Monder, who–on the yet-to-be-released album Slow Commotion–takes especially good advantage of Dahlgren’s carefully constructed compositions....

Thieves With Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Cote, Fabienne Babe, Julien Riviere, Benoit Magimel, Didier Bezace, and Ivan Desny. When was the last time you saw a movie that was truly for as well as about grown-ups? Whatever the virtues of Breaking the Waves, a mature point of view certainly isn’t one of them. The English Patient is at most a feature for dreamy young adults (especially those who consider it romantic for a character to become a Nazi in order to spend time with a former lover’s dead body), and even the good points of The Crucible and Ghosts of Mississippi don’t include the sort of insights that ought to come with age....