To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Second Amendment, as interpreted by the NRA, promotes the responsible ownership and use of firearms. The NRA strongly supports proper training in the safe handling of these very powerful tools. Gun ownership by, and proper training of, women is encouraged. Firearms are “the great equalizer” enabling those who are smaller or weaker to protect themselves against those who are larger or stronger....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just a short note to Jill Blardinelli regarding the opening sentence to her review of the Offspring show at the Vic [Rock Etc., November 11]. Where on earth does anyone get off calling the Offspring the Fugazi of the 90s, or comparing the utterly pathetic Green Day to the Replacements?!!! As anyone with a pulse should know, Fugazi and, well, Paul Westerberg at least, have continued to make music in this decade that puts the stuff of both younger bands to shame!...

L.Frank Baum’s Oz was inspired by the shining towers of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The city by the lake also inspired a funkier fantasy in Daniel Pinkwater’s 1976 novel Lizard Music–about a suburban kid from white-bread McDonaldsville who travels to gritty Hogboro in search of a band of musical lizards he thinks can save the world from “pod people” (starting with his sister). After hearing the singing saurians on late-night TV, geeky 12-year-old Victor journeys to their floating island home in Lake Mishigoo, guided by a mysterious mentor called the Chicken Man....

Tony Berlant A five-year-old at Klein Art Works during one of my visits to the Tony Berlant exhibit immediately asked a key question: “Why are these paintings full of nails?” While from a distance Berlant’s Night’s Light No. 41 seems filled with pale stars, from closer the stars seem gray, and from closer still it’s clear that many tiny brads are punctuating the surface. For the truth is that, though these 24 recent works use the vocabulary of abstract painting, they’re actually constructions of metal Berlant salvaged from thrift shops–TV trays, wastebaskets–printed with brightly colored designs....

New Art Fair Forms John Wilson’s annual New Art Forms Exposition, focusing on 20th-century decorative and applied arts, is one of the most popular events the local art magnate has produced. But despite the fair’s success Wilson is calling it quits–at least temporarily. This fall his Lakeside Group will present in its place the Chicago Latin American-Iberian Exposition of the Arts, scheduled for October 6 through 9 at Navy Pier....

Never mind her bad-girl stance and her somewhat emotionless public mask: Chrissie Hynde has had what in a rock ‘n’ roll way has to be considered a storybook career. After the requisite unhappy childhood in Ohio, she took off to Europe, ending up in London just in time to watch a scruffy Kings Road shop owner make a rock ‘n’ roll star out of a vile child named Johnny Rotten. (Rotten came within a whisker of marrying her to give her British citizenship; instead he sent Sid, and Hynde balked....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was walking down Grace Street toward Broadway. In front of me was a 30-something couple wrapped up in winter gear followed by two large dogs, a brownish setter mix and a white Airedale. The two dogs didn’t have leashes on them and I was amazed that they knew not to run out into the street. The foursome came to an intersection and the two people began to rush across the street, in a hurry to get out of the cold, I assumed....

The Silver Images Film Festival, sponsored by the Chicago-based documentary production and distribution company Terra Nova Films, concludes on Friday and Saturday, May 19 and 20, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $5, $3 for seniors (62 and over). For further information call 281-4114 or 881-8491. Shorts Program I Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three 1994 videos under the heading “Gay and Lesbian Issues”: Ronit Bezalel’s Canadian When Shirley Met Florence, Vickie Seitchik’s Queer Son, and Jeff Benzow’s Clyde’s Strange Love....

Tango Steps Back Into Town Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, Forever Tango’s move to the Royal George means curtains for I Hate Hamlet, which has limped along for six months after receiving mixed reviews. Royal George owners Perkins and Jujamcyn Theatres spent heavily on advertising to sustain the play during a long, cold winter, and two-for-one ticket promotions seemed to become the norm to bolster humdrum business....

THE SLEEP OF REASON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bestial, uncompromising black paintings depict with expressionist intensity a catalog of horrors: damned monks, killer cats, the Fates as agents of evil, the primitive god Saturn devouring his son headfirst, Judith beheading Holofernes, two Spaniards ready to detroy each other with clubs, and a witches’ Sabbath that exudes abject stupidity. Perhaps Goya’s bitter adage–“The sleep of reason produces monsters,” included in an etching–helps to explain the savage paintings and his own possible mental illness....

Why does the United States Surgeon General appear in a military uniform? Have they always done so? Is it because they are leading the nation’s battle against disease, smokers, and ill health in general? –Jon Komatsu, Pearl City, Hawaii Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The surgeon general wears a uniform because the organization of which she is the chief, the U.S. Public Health Service, is a uniformed service....

There’s something eerie about puppets, however cuddly: rationally we know Kermit and Kukla are just souped-up dolls animated by hand, but they seem so alive it’s hard to get past the illusion. And when the puppets are life-size and made to look as real as possible–as they are in the Belgian Compagnie Nicole Mossoux & Patrick Bonte’s moody Twin Houses–they’re downright threatening. Which is the point of this troubling solo piece, directed by Bonte, in which Mossoux–who both plays a character and works the mannequinlike puppets–encounters various malevolent entities: knife-wielding women, aggressively affectionate lovers....

The faddish days of like-instrumented ensembles–tuba trios, kazoo quartets, Casio quintets–are hopefully now past. What’s left are a few resilient ensembles, especially those still at work in the fruitful saxophone-quartet genre. Given the variety of tonal, rhythmic, and textural possibilities open to reed players, it’s easy to forget that a sax quartet operates on one basic ax, particularly when the pads are hot under creative fingers in quartets like ROVA, World, and 29th Street....

Victor/Victoria The 1982 film Victor/Victoria attempted a solution to the dilemma. Inspired by First a Girl–an English film musical that starred the great Jessie Matthews and was released in 1935, the year Andrews was born–Victor/Victoria cast Andrews as a sexual impostor, and a double agent to boot: a straight woman posing as a gay-male female impersonator. Because this role put Andrews’s on-screen artificiality to work for her, Victor/Victoria–written and directed by her husband, Blake Edwards–was her most successful vehicle since the 60s....

MAY The Old Town School of Folk Music’s Dylan tribute class performs the songs of Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal tonight at the school’s monthly “First Friday” party and concert. The affair kicks off with a song circle and jam at 6:30; the Dylan songs come at 8 PM, and an open “strumathon” follows. It’s at the school, 909 W. Armitage; admission is $4. Call 525-7793 for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Made up of Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel Michel, a pair of Haitian refugees–hence the moniker–and New Jerseyite Lauryn Hill, this hip-hop trio has been saddled with the stupid label “alternative rap” merely because it doesn’t espouse casual violence, sexism, or misogyny. The Fugees’ syllable-cramming, dancehall-inflected rap style ain’t that far off the genre’s well-beaten path, but fused with their musical fusions it manages to sound distinctive. Their muscular grooves are colored by unusually complicated arrangements (horns, guitars) and flashes of reggae and rock, and sometimes they even dispense with drums altogether, as on “Vocab,” a song employing only acoustic guitar (a la Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”) from their debut Blunted on Reality (the title of which cops to their proweed sentiment)....

Twenty-five years after Chicago’s first sparsely attended, little-noticed gay-pride parade celebrating the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, June has turned into a monthlong festival of gay and lesbian awareness–and nowhere more than in the theater scene, whose support of gay material has been strengthened rather than weakened by the AIDS epidemic and its political fallout. Troupes that program gay material year-round, like Bailiwick Repertory and Zebra Crossing, mount special pride series, while other companies (including some formed for one-time efforts) trot out a slew of plays about coming out, dealing with parents, fighting AIDS, etc....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, WNUA doesn’t really have to play any jazz. That they do is certainly their acknowledgment of the debt owed to the jazz art for their appropriation of the sophisticated air attached to that musical genre. WNUA plays jazz-based and popular instrumental music, which is exceptional in that the jazz-based instrumental format is a marked departure for a commercial radio station....

From the moment he came on the scene in the mid-50s, Kenny Burrell established himself as the guitar voice of hard-bop (the earthier and less confrontational form of jazz that evolved directly from bebop). Known for an exceptionally full tone and a rangy harmonic vision, he improvised with speed and power, distilling the complexities of bop into straightforward melodies that could fit in with the music of such widely divergent stylists as John Coltrane, Gil Evans, and Jimmy Smith....

The first third of this 1995 Iranian film, directed by Ahmad-Reza Darvish, is one of the most effective evocations of war I’ve seen. Set near the Iraqi border at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq conflict, the story begins with the protagonist Reza trying to find safety for his pregnant wife. Abjuring the usual war-movie tactic of following one or more principals while the secondary characters are killed, the film shows us a succession of characters, almost all of whom are captured or killed....