Portishead Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What had seemed like a mess became brilliant once I realized its inherent cohesion thrived on looseness. Wolf’s early recordings for Sun achieved the same stunning qualities with an even more glorious gutbucket sound. Since that moment of recognition–the beauty of both imperfection and spatial dynamics in music–I’ve been drawn to gritty stuff. I like noise a whole lot, but I really appreciate it when someone does something interesting with it: contextualizing, reshaping, destroying it....

The random bite of the media got a hard grip on Michael Jackson last week. The subject: some allegedly anti-Semitic lyrics on his new album, HIStory. The offending words, from the song “They Don’t Care About Us,” are: There was glorious if predictable weirdness during Diane Sawyer’s live 40-minute talk with Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley two weeks ago: Jackson’s infantile behavior; Presley’s utter vapidity; a wedding video that basically confirms suspicions that the pair’s kiss on last year’s MTV video awards was their first; and the flat statement from Jackson that he intends to continue his dalliances with prepubescent boys....

THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION Pillar Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steve Pickering’s The Screwfly Solution, in its world-premiere production at Pillar Studio, is ultimately crippled by its length and by its numbing obsession with detail. What might have been a tremendously compelling one-act has been padded out with tiresome exegeses and a 25-minute intermission. (I once met a playwright who told me that he’d written a half-hour play, “But with a 15-minute intermission, it runs 45 minutes....

A month on earth is scant proof of staying power. Yet so fresh, so screwy is the concept behind Chicago’s newest free weekly that all this column’s doubts are swept before it, including grave ones about distribution, profit potential, and suitability for reading without poking out an eye. I suggested to Asher that he’d designed himself into a dead end, that serious growth, the kind of growth most founders of free weeklies pray leads to early retirement, was pretty near impossible....

With his ambitious third album, With These Hands (Rykodisc), Alejandro Escovedo breaks through the powerful but painful testimonials of his first two solo outings. While he’s come to grips with his estranged wife’s suicide and happily remarried, he hasn’t necessarily opted for lighter subject matter. The gritty “Little Bottles” tells how a self-absorbed loser destroys a relationship, while the soaring chorus of “Put You Down” belies the obsessiveness of the tunnel-visioned narrator....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Kramer states that the idea of someone being fired because they have AIDS is so illegal that the movie’s basic premise is “ludicrous.” On the front page of January 17th’s Tribune is the story of a Schaumburg mortgage company’s ex-assistant V.P. who is suing in U.S. District Court, alleging that he was fired for having AIDS....

This annual showcase features work by generally unknown pro, semipro, and student directors, who offer their interpretation of scripts ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material. Each night presents a different program consisting of two or three one-acts, as shown in the listings below. Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 883-1090. Through August 14: Mondays-Wednesdays, 7:30 PM. $8 per program. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The future of the Encyclopedia Britannica may depend on what’s happening in two small rooms. One’s located within the gray tower at 310 S. Michigan that houses the company’s world headquarters. The other is 2,000 miles away in an unremarkable office building in La Jolla, California. The two rooms contain little more than tables piled with computer gear. But within the metal casings in both locations is a version of the encyclopedia that’s not only more accurate than the 1995 version of the print set, but already contains far more information—well over 1,000 more articles—than any future printed Britannica will ever hold....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Turn-of-the-century Chicago physician Emile Grubbe was one of the first Americans to experiment with X rays. Unfortunately he had a habit of using his own hand to test the strength of the X ray, so he was also one of the first people to experience radiation poisoning. Grubbe underwent 93 operations to repair the self-inflicted damage, but he still lived to be 85 years old....

The third feature of the wild and weird Guy Maddin, the brilliant independent Canadian filmmaker (Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Archangel) based in Winnipeg whose poker-faced period extravaganzas all suggest early, scratchy talkies. This 1992 film is his first in color, but that means various subdued pastels in some spots, lush tinting of black-and-white footage in others. The typically outrageous plot–set in a remote alpine village where everyone has to speak in whispers to avoid setting off avalanches and where other forms of everyday repression result in diverse cases of deranged incestual lust–seems characteristic of Maddin in its dual nature: in part a hilarious satire about Canadian timidity, it also comes across periodically as a formalist gem about nothing at all....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not everyone has settled their beef with Com Ed. The Challenger (January), newsletter of the Labor Coalition on Public Utilities, says that “according to Standard & Poor’s ratings, if Edison were to sell power on the open market today [rather than in a market regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission], its annual revenues would fall by $600 million, or more than 26%....

When Commonwealth Edison installed a transmission tower along the old railroad yards just southeast of Garfield Boulevard (55th Street) and the Dan Ryan, it wasn’t cause for alarm. That was in March, long before people in the neighborhood knew much about electric and magnetic fields or the damage they might cause inside the body. But south-side residents who live along the lines are not convinced. “No one wants to live next to an electrical line,” says Sandra Johnson, who lives around the corner from one of the newly erected towers....

Tania Leon’s twangy, distinctive music draws heavily on the Afro-Cuban and Latin influences that make up her cultural heritage. She received her musical training first in Havana (her birthplace), then in New York (her adopted hometown). While studying composition at NYU and conducting at Tanglewood in 1968, she met up with Arthur Mitchell, and together they founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem. The musical establishment was slow to accept her, and until 1980 her collaboration with Mitchell was the chief outlet for her energetic and rhythmically fascinating music....

The Meters and the word “funk” have been virtually interchangeable in New Orleans since the mid-60s, when the band came sauntering onto the scene with a sound that fused soul music’s heat with a signifying swagger. They’re best known for their hits “Cissy Strut” and “Sophisticated Cissy,” but you’ll find their essence in the stripped-down aggression of lesser-known classics like “Hand Clapping Song”: a lurching rhythm track, hypnotically repetitious melody lines, and tough-minded improvisation combine to fuse melody and rhythm into a seamless danceable whole....

Lead Story In July a supervisor of road construction crews in Minneapolis issued a directive that workers on duty stop “eyeing,” “staring at,” or “ogl[ing]” women. In a subsequent clarification, the official said sneaking a look would be OK, and added that men, as well, should not be ogled. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April the National Endowment for the Humanities announced that it would award a $559,500 grant to the American Association of Community Colleges to answer the question “What is an American?...

Several gallstones rattled out of Larry Hagman during his liver-transplant surgery this year. Hagman intends to donate those stones to an artist who will use them in a sculpture. This may seem tacky in comparison to the lifesaving gift Hagman received, but don’t think his mental faculties were affected by the operation. He simply knows that America is fascinated with celebrity giblets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And this year America feasted on liver....

A classic, observed Mark Twain in his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, is “a book which people praise but don’t read.” That definition unfortunately fits Pudd’nhead itself, which is known mainly as the source of some of Twain’s most biting aphorisms. So bravo to Steppenwolf Theatre for bringing to general audiences this potent story-theater piece, created last spring for school groups in recognition of the book’s publication 100 years ago. Director-playwright Meryl Friedman’s uncompromising adaptation (featuring credible traditional-style spirituals composed by Friedman and arranged by Douglas Wood) recounts one of Twain’s most bitterly ironic tales: the story of a mulatto slave who switches her fair-skinned baby for her master’s son, then suffers as the boy grows into a murdering bully who would sell his own mother–and does....

RAPOON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zoviet France emerged from England’s industrial scene in the mid-80s and immediately set themselves apart from power electronics geeks and the now-laughable pre-Wax Trax industrial-disco pack. Mixing abrasive, texture-heavy noise with a hypnotic, almost soothing repetition suggestive of Middle Eastern and North African trance music, the mysterious group–its members aggressively maintained anonymity–packaged its distinctive sounds in gorgeous, often handmade artwork....

SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Dardi McGinley is a physically daring dancer. A tall woman with powerful legs, she seems to love to throw herself into movement, pitting herself against its difficulty. In Venus Envy, a dance for five women, the movements that repeat–a turning stag leap, a push-up in which a dancer throws herself to the floor, her feet straight up in the air, balances for a moment on her hands, then pushes herself back onto her feet–require a dancer’s sense of center and an athlete’s daring....

This young trio of sax, guitar, and drums has chosen an appropriate name for its endeavor: performing a repertoire of classic and original jazz tunes with this rather unorthodox instrumentation is a strange pursuit indeed. But on their recent debut, The Zone (Red Hook), they prove their obvious musicianship and an even more obvious commitment to this rarefied sound of theirs. Think of the band as a chamber-music trio for the postmodern set....