Though it’s often produced as a lavish spectacle displaying an overreacher’s doom, when Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus began life, 402 years ago, it was primarily a two-man show: Marlowe stressed the incendiary message over the traditional infernal fireworks. (For his better-known full-blown version, he supplied the usual hellish trappings.) Returning Faustus to its rhetorical roots, British director Steven Rumbelow 25 years ago created his two-person Dr. Faustus, under the aegis of the Triple Action Theatre, and has toured it off and on ever since, revising and recasting it at least five times....

Ask Steven Morvay what he thinks about Chicago and he minces no words. Morvay, senior vice president of marketing for Waldenbooks, calls Chicago a “murderous market.” The last few years have seen increasingly fierce competition among the major bookstore chains in Chicago. Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Borders, Coopersmith’s–if you can name the chain, you can find one of its stores here. Or, more likely, a few of its stores. Many of these stores have just arrived on the scene within the past few years....

Experimental Audio Research Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In E.A.R., Sonic Boom (aka Pete Kember) allows himself to fixate on the long, dusky soundscapes that merely streaked the music of his other projects, Spacemen 3 and Spectrum. There’s no heed paid to linear structure here; pieces flow more than they develop. But ambient in this case doesn’t necessarily mean high-tech: For E.A.R.’s two recordings–Mesmerised and the new Beyond the Pale–Sonic Boom recruited My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields, Techno Animal saxophonist Kevin Martin, and AMM percussionist Eddie Prevost (though he’ll be leading a different group for this performance)....

This seems to be a fairly desperate year for the Chicago International Film Festival. What makes me grit my teeth more than lick my lips at the annual prospect, especially ever since the loss of Marc Evans as festival programmer, is the sense of barely contained chaos–chaos in the selections, chaos in the programming, and chaos in determining a coherent vision of why we need this festival in the first place....

A tree-canopied gravel road leads to Valley View Recreation Club’s swinging metal gate, just 30 miles north of Janesville, Wisconsin, where a handful of club members clutching clipboards await visitors to the club’s annual car show. They collect $35 from each guest and give them ballots for selecting their favorite cars. The guests then check their courage and their clothing at the door. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About 20 of the club’s 55 acres are reserved for activities and dual 17-acre plots of soybean fields and woods buffer the naked from the clothed–or, as they call it at Valley View, “textile”–community....

Jerry Gonzalez Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The musical wiles of Nuyorican jazzman Jerry Gonzalez have captivated a growing number of listeners since his obscure debut as a leader more than 15 years ago (Ya Yo Me Cure, on Sunnyside and now on CD). Like Dizzy Gillespie, a mentor and onetime employer, Gonzalez plays both trumpet and congas; and if he (like almost every other trumpeter) stands in the shadow of Dizzy’s horn, well, Gillespie could have taken a few percussion lessons from Gonzalez....

We were three boys in a bed–me, my friend Jay, and Jay’s ex-boyfriend, Paul. Paul was passed out. Jay was not so sleepy. I was nervous. An hour before, crashing at Jay’s house seemed way safer than a wee-hour trek back toward home. But there are reasons why 25-year-old boys rarely do slumber parties, especially when one boy is straight, two are gay, and all three have been dancing cheek to cheek to cheek for most of the night....

Long considered a preeminent concert pianist, Ursula Oppens is adept both as a soloist and a chamber player, with a repertoire that stretches from Mozart to jazz composer Anthony Braxton. For more than 25 years she’s been on the road, averaging at least 50 engagements a season. But now she’s cut back her daunting schedule to become a music professor at Northwestern University. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oppens’s new position won’t put an end to her concert career, but touring no longer seems as important as when she was pegged as a promising newcomer and was expected to live up to the billing....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People With Too Much Time on Their Hands The Baltimore Sun reported in June that New York City artist Todd Alden recently asked 400 art collectors worldwide to send him samples of their feces so he can offer them for sale in personalized tins. Said Alden, “Scatology is emerging as an increasingly significant part of artistic inquiry in the 1990s....

Return of the World Tattoo Artist/entrepreneur/radio personality Tony Fitzpatrick is reopening the World Tattoo Gallery with a show and a way of doing business that are likely to create a stir in the local art world. Fitzpatrick plans to resurrect the gallery, which has been shuttered since February 6, on October 21 with a showing of work by three artists: himself, Wesley Kimler, and Ed Paschke, considered by some to be the city’s preeminent living visual artist....

Richie Havens was the perfect African American folkie for the 60s counterculture: he was gritty (and sexy) enough to be deemed authentic, topical enough to satisfy the obligatory “relevance” criteria of the times, and nonthreatening enough to be palatable to middle-class revolutionary wannabes. From anthemic chants like “Freedom” to introspective takes on Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey,” Havens fused liberation politics with a hip, vaguely psychedelic romanticism....

ROAD TO NIRVANA In a year-end review of the theater scene in PerformInk, WBEZ critic Andrew Patner compared Steppenwolf’s new space to a mausoleum. Then the company received an incredible amount of bad press following the cancellation of Frank Galati’s production of As You Like It. Several weeks ago New York Times reporter Bruce Weber gleefully revealed in his Friday theater column that Steppenwolf had had a run-in with the Dramatists Guild, which condemned what it described as the “substandard contract” the company had signed with The Song of Jacob Zulu playwright Tug Yourgrau to bring the show to Broadway....

“Not shaving was once important to me as an active statement of what I felt and believed,” explains Sheri Reda in Conscious Choice (May/June). “I declared my independence, asserted the natural beauty of the human form, and proclaimed that I was at once feminist, nonmaterialist, and brave….Keeping my leg and underarm hair made me feel very European, very sexy, very mysterious. (My parents thought it was gross, which was another plus....

With the right sauce I think I could. “The rhetoric of apology distorts animal rights discourse in many ways,” complains Karen Davis in a recent issue of the Animals’ Agenda. “Activists warn each other that the public will never care about chickens. Therefore, the only way to persuade people to stop eating chickens is to emphasize the effects of chicken consumption on human health and the environment. To accept this defeatist view, however, is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy…....

Zarzuela is the Spanish variant of operatic entertainment that originated in the royal palace in the 17th century and reached the peak of its popularity as middle-brow musical theater in late 19th-century Madrid. Numerous zarzuelas, ranging from frothy concoctions to large-scale dramas, were produced in the heyday of Spanish nationalism, and most of Iberia’s finest composers contributed at least one work to the genre. At its best a zarzuela can rival a Gilbert and Sullivan in biting social mockery or a Lehar in romantic tunefulness....

It was gratifying to read Adam Langer’s insightful review of the Goodman Theatre’s production of Charles Smith’s Black Star Line [February 2], confirming that we, at least, in contrast with the lack of interrogation from the Chicago dailies, had both witnessed the same missed opportunity for an enlightened inquiry into the complexity of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa Movement in the 20s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marcus Garvey’s messianic mission to create a homeland for the 400,000,000 black people in Africa was a monumental challenge to the European colonialization of Africa and the oppression of blacks in a racist social system of American apartheid....

The Chicago Ensemble, now well into its third decade, has undergone a number of personnel shake-ups over the years, but founder and pianist Gerald Rizzer is a survivor. The various incarnations of his group have lacked neither skill nor interpretative acumen, but for some reason the group hasn’t been able to excite its audiences, to involve them in the music making the way top-notch performers like the Juilliard Quartet or cellist Yo-Yo Ma habitually do....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In order for women like Miner’s wife to have both careers and children (and to live in a nuclear unit in their own house)–a demand of middle-class mainstream feminism–it is economically necessary to underpay a person–almost invariably female–to care for their children while they perform work more highly valued by capitalism. This same class of women, 20 years ago, were advocating the radical notion of being paid for their own domestic labor in their own homes, a proposition that never materialized due to capitalism’s dependence on unpaid female labor....

GREGG BENDIAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his work with a number of free-improvisation giants, spectrum-spanning drummer Gregg Bendian has demonstrated that he can both float like a butterfly–as while accompanying the abstractionist guitar player Derek Bailey on last year’s Banter (O.O. Records)–and sting like a swarm of bees, as in his work with the ferocious pianist Cecil Taylor. His new and excellent Counterparts (CIMP) gives full vent to Bendian’s chattering postfreedom swing: his drumming simultaneously keeps the pulse while placing imaginative patterns up in the quartet’s front line....

If ever there was an organization fighting upstream, it’s the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Abolishing capital punishment was hardly a popular idea with the general public in 1975, when the coalition was formed, and it’s even less so today. The approaching execution of mass murderer John Wayne Gacy, scheduled for May 10, doesn’t help matters. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Even people who are personally opposed to capital punishment are reluctant to speak out or support a group like ours,” says Patricia Vader, president of the coalition’s board of directors....