CLUSTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Persistence and accessibility set the German duo Cluster apart from their fellow krautrockers. Can was more diverse, Faust more avant-garde, Kraftwerk more explicitly ideological–but they’ve all broken up or taken 20-year breaks between albums. Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, on the other hand, have been making electronic music that sounds warm and organic for 25 years now, and although not as well-known as their contemporaries, they’re every bit as significant....

LAR LUBOVITCH DANCE COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lar Lubovitch creates incredibly graceful choreography. His dancers glide across the stage like ice skaters–as if they no longer recognized gravity, or as if the natural friction between feet and floor no longer existed. His dances are so well balanced and elegant it seems almost impossible to criticize them. On the other hand, they’re so emotionally shallow they’re almost silly....

Dana Bryant But somehow the stars never came out. A few of the slam scene’s leading lights put out albums on major labels and toured rock clubs. The record store’s Spoken Word section, and later the cut-out racks, swelled slightly with the likes of Nuyorican vets Maggie Estep and Reg E. Gaines. Though she missed its buzz-bin days, Dana Bryant’s Wishing From the Top (Warner Brothers) is the best recording of the spoken-word renaissance, a brilliant fusion of poetry and music that qualifies as the real thing on both counts....

With his rawboned sound, his seamless melding of various rock offshoots and jazz, and his spectacular gift for abstract yet chiseled improvisations, John Scofield has had more impact on the modern jazz guitar than perhaps anyone else but Pat Metheny. That’s why their joint album of earlier this year, I Can See Your House From Here, made such a splash: like the “Tenor Madness” meeting of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins four decades ago, it matched the two prime architects of a single instrument’s future....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November in Orlando, Florida, a surveillance camera photographed a man robbing a bank. According to police interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel, he appeared to be wearing a fake-glasses-and-nose disguise. But when witnesses said the large nose was the man’s own, the Sentinel published his photo. Many people called the crime tips hot line and identified him as Chuck Newman....

The title of Paul Dresher’s new work, “Looking West to the East,” poses a paradox instantly soluble to anyone mildly familiar with art in the 90s–or for that matter the nature of the globe. By his own reckoning, Dresher has studied the music of south and southeast Asia for more than 25 years. The influence of those cultures–and of other Pacific Rim composers, including Harry Partch and especially Lou Harrison–has had at least a percolating influence on all of his music; with this new program of works by himself and other like-minded composers (including Harrison, John Adams, and Anthony Davis), he brings it to a boil....

By Ben Joravsky Rosen’s father, Sam, opened the family’s first tavern at Chicago and Ashland, not far from their three-room Humboldt Park flat. In the early 50s Sam moved the tavern to Yondorf Hall at North and Halsted. After getting out of the army, Rosen began helping his father run the business. That was in 1957; he’s been there ever since. “Lincoln Park was much different than it is today,” he says....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom “Mr. Smuggypants” Frank is obviously exercising his “inalienable American right to be ignorant of history” when he claims that the ironic phenomenon of counterculture-inspired corporate advertising has occurred “sometime in the recent past” [Capital Lies, June 23]. 7UP became the Uncola more than 20 years ago so that the Woodstock generation could reject the tyranny of caramel-colored drinks....

Two hefty men are cruising past the seafood counter at Byerly’s, a recently opened luxury supermarket in Highland Park, when they hear a voice calling out to them. “Oh sir, you’re in for some fun–as much fun as you’ve ever known,” Sanders tells him. Sanders chides another lady, “Why, you’ve been listening to everything I’ve been saying. You just can’t be at Byerly’s today if you pass by this table. All you have to do is come over for a taste....

“Amtrak Is like a ship without a rudder, drifting toward the rocks,” warns Pierre Loomis in RailGram (January). “Recently, a call to check on the arrival time of #6 (the California Zephyr) brought an interesting response from the ticket agent. In an attempt to explain why the train was 8 hours late (mechanical problems and locomotive failures), the agent drew an analogy between Amtrak locomotives and horses: ‘Look,’ said the frustrated agent, ‘if you were a horse and nobody fed or watered you for weeks on end, how well would you run?...

VIENNA SAXOPHONE QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One highlight of DePaul University’s new-music sampler featuring the talented Vienna Saxophone Quartet is Steve Reich’s 1985 New York Counterpoint, one in a series of intriguing works that have a soloist playing live with and against himself on prerecorded tape. In this rearrangement by VSQ’s Susan Fancher, a sax quartet (subbing for the clarinets originally intended) follows the minimalist strategy of segueing from opening pulses into sequences of rippling melodic patterns....

Waterstone’s Fights Back Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few of the city’s leading independent booksellers reacted with surprise to the possibility of more Waterstone’s stores in the market. “I can’t imagine where they would find a suitable neighborhood that isn’t already being well served,” says Barbara’s Bookstores co-owner Pat Peterson. But Waterstone’s plans in Chicago are consistent with what the company is doing in Boston: opening more stores in reaction to the competition....

Wilco’s Balancing Act Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I got a lot off my chest about spending my whole life playing music and being obsessed with it,” says Tweedy, who spent about 200 days on the road last year. “I know I can’t function that way anymore. To have a home life anywhere near normal I’m not going to be able to put so much weight on music, and to me that’s a good thing....

A panel of architects who might loosely be described as the local athenaeum of their profession are awaiting, anxiously, the next edition of the bimonthly journal that bears their names. The new publisher is Steven Polydoris, whose qualifications to take over a critical journal of Inland Architect’s stature seem to be these: he thinks it’s “a great magazine”; he already puts out four trade magazines–Real Estate News, Chicago Film & Video News, New Accountant Magazine, and the Chicago Development Guide; he presumably knows much more about selling advertising than the directors and he’s presumably correct when he promises new economies of scale....

They came alone. They came in pairs. They came in small groups. And they came by the carload. College students. Local celebrities. Artists. Professional athletes. Businessmen, a few of them shady. Suited up and dressed down. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the name, proof of bachelorhood wasn’t required. I noticed one guy with a tan line around the fourth finger on his left hand....

KEEP YOUR PANTS ON! Tight & Shiny Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Karge’s ability to find beauty in this seems distinctly European. His play is loosely based on the true story of a woman in the city of Mainz who assumed the identity of her dead husband during the Depression in order to keep his job and the income it produced. Usually gender switching is used as a premise for a good chuckle, but Karge avoids cliches and jumps headfirst into the issue of sexual identity, and the result is a play rich in paradoxes and poetic imagery....

Two PBS producers working on a documentary about American political culture visited City Council last week and needlessly wondered if they’d get good material. They got Alderman Dexter Watson, now two-for-two in screaming rants at council meetings this year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watson–one of the few black aldermen who doesn’t need to distance himself from Mayor Daley for election purposes since the gulf between them would already fit an infinitely expanding universe–screamed in support of an ordinance that would restrict the city’s ability to privatize services....

The Chicago pianist and composer has dubbed this gig “unplugged,” which signals the absence not only of electric guitar, which Simon usually employs in his bands, but also of his own electric keyboards. Simon has been reinvestigating the piano–unamplified, unreconstructed, and unforgiving. Over the years, in even his own estimation, Simon’s piano playing has taken a backseat to his compositional concerns; those, in turn, have led him to blend a fair amount of synthesized textures into his music....

GLEN? OR GLENDA? at Live Bait Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glen? Or Glenda?, Interplay’s current late-night offering, is strikingly similar in concept and execution, if not tone, to Some Mo’ Productions’ late-night hit of a year ago, Reefer Madness. That show’s adapter and director Sean Abley, stealing a page from Jill and Faith Soloway’s Real Live Brady Bunch, created a comedy hit by merely having his actors act out verbatim the cult antireefer documentary....

GOD’S TROMBONES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Take Sister Pinkson, for example. As played by Velma Austin she’s a bantamweight battle-ax who struts about when filled with the Holy Spirit, sings like a slide whistle (to the amusement of the choir), and displays enough self-possession to intimidate the archangels themselves. She’s a thoroughly ridiculous figure–until she recounts the parable of the Prodigal Son, dropping her clownish mannerisms to describe the corrupt city of Babylon so vividly that we can almost smell the sweat and perfume of the women “dressed in yellow and purple and scarlet / Their lips like a dripping honeycomb....