To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My second idea first: Back when I was a brave new voter, the Libertarian Party was what Lyndon LaRouche’s outfit called themselves, and they spouted the current libertarian line: “We want to get government off our backs and out of our wallets.” (I paraphrase Ms. Miller.) However, to abate or reduce government, as opposed to making it more responsive to citizens, is to leave a power vacuum....

John Carter John Carter’s powerful abstract wood constructions seem divided against themselves. Midway between painting and sculpture, each of the nine works now on view at Belloc Lowndes Fine Art contains flat painted surfaces, but most also have gaps, geometrical “holes” really, between the different pieces of wood. The geometrical figures the 53-year-old Briton paints recall minimalism, but the “perfection” of minimalism’s “ideal” forms is undercut by Carter’s tactile surfaces. He mixes marble dust into the paint and later sands it by hand to create jewellike pinpoint reflections amid a finish that’s irregular and splotchy overall....

Roy DeCarava Street photographers–and DeCarava has been among New York’s most talented for half a century–are not known for exceptional printing. Theirs is an aesthetic of coincidence, of the uncanny in casually observed moments of urban life shining through an unobtrusive technique. But DeCarava’s prints–soon moving on to Los Angeles, one of eight destinations for the show, which originated at New York’s Museum of Modern Art–are remarkable for two breaches of the traditions of black-and-white printing....

Rick Rizzo, Since the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, the electric guitar has dominated the musical landscape above all other instruments. But hegemony can be followed by stasis and decay, and there’s no denying that electric guitars are now used to make a lot of cliched music. Guitar-based grunge, punk, and speed-metal styles can sound staid and conservative compared to music made with samplers and other electronic instruments that push sonic boundaries....

HOT BUTTERED ROLL, Rococo Rodeo, at Live Bait Theater. A frustrating curiosity from 1963, Rosalyn Drexler’s play is intensely performed in this Rococo Rodeo production but dramatically inert. In Hot Buttered Roll, a poor man’s American Buffalo, three lowlifes plot, then perpetrate a kinky scam against a rich, paralyzed old geezer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play is intriguing only in its origins....

The smell of patchouli and the sound of Parliament’s “Aqua Boogie” greeted me as I stepped through the door into Savage Instincts. The walls were painted a deep blood red and were adorned with photographs of San Francisco street scenes. Near the back hung a four-by-five flamenco tapestry, and at a small counter sat Sue Savage, a petite woman with gray-streaked dark-brown hair. When she saw how I reacted to the Parliament tune, which was coming in over the radio, she broke out a Parliament CD and filled the place with it....

On Chicago’s west side, Mount Sinai Hospital cares for sick people who live in overwhelmingly poor African American and Latino neighborhoods. Many of the people here have no medical insurance whatsoever; and to obtain some reimbursement for the expense of treating them, the hospital has assigned six full-time employees to the task of trying to place these patients on Medicaid. This unenviable record of high cost, inequity, insecurity, and spotty performance can easily be explained: the United States is the only industrial country (except for South Africa) without national health insurance....

Where is the cave where the wise woman went And tell me where is all the money that I spent? I propose a toast to my self-control See it crawling helpless on the floor Someday there’ll be a cure for pain And that’s the day I throw my drugs away —Morphine, “Cure for Pain,” 1993 Stack of 20 20s on the kitchen table. Too fucked up to go out and cop....

Michael Hurley is one of America’s few genuine oddball geniuses, a ragtag troubadour who delivers weird bits of wisdom nonchalantly, as cranky afterthoughts. Deliriously eclectic, he’s a folkie only by default: ignoring stylistic purity, he’ll amble from a lazy blues to some raw old-timey tune without pause. He favors acoustic guitar–though he also plays banjo, fiddle, and piano–and ranges from charming, simple down-home songs to knee-slapping funny ones to gorgeous, touching ballads....

Lead Story In May in Toronto the Toronto-Dominion Bank went to court to recover the $3.5 million that Edward Del Grande had borrowed for his businesses. Del Grande countersued for $30 million, saying the problem was that the bank had loaned him too much money. Del Grande charged that if the bank had been more prudent, his companies could have survived the down market in real estate. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Robert Adams Adams’s images were first widely exhibited 20 years ago, at the influential “New Topographics” show at Rochester’s George Eastman House in 1975. These were minimalist studies of suburban tract houses around Denver, near where he lives. With their balanced large-format compositions and full scale of grays, they echo the neutral promotions of architectural photography but deliver a scathing rebuke of these bland emblems of conformity: the West is no place for this, they suggest–it deserves better....

It was about three years ago that Muna Tseng and Tan Dun first started talking about paper. Tan, who emigrated from China to New York in 1986 to pursue a doctorate in composition, had been experimenting with creating sounds from unlikely natural materials; Tseng, a Hong Kong native who’s been part of the east-coast dance scene since the late 70s, was moving toward conveying “tactile sensations” in her choreography. In fact, Tseng recalls, “both of us had just emerged from our “water’ phase....

The elements of PJ Harvey’s second album, Rid of Me, are similar to those of the first, 1992’s Dry: scabrous, highly dramatic song settings for leader Polly Harvey’s utterly lacerating commentary on debilitating relations between mutually horrified, blood-engorged life-forms—what you or I would call boys and girls. Rid of me, produced—I’m sorry, “recorded”—by Steve Albini, is for the most part even sparer than the aptly titled Dry: the sound of each instrument is severely separated in the mix; instances of musical adornment rarely occur....

Predictions of Fire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Benson has avoided the pedestrian approach of most art documentaries in his 1995 film about the Slovenian arts collective NSK–which includes a rock band and painting and theater groups–and instead has made a brilliantly nutty view from the inside that captures the spirit of NSK’s over-the-top provocations. Mixing the iconography of fascism and Stalinism, two of the ideologies that governed Slovenia in this century, NSK reveals similarities between these repressive systems, but one can infer from the near-anarchist spirit evoked by the film that they’re also suspicious of all governments....

I really enjoyed the cover story on the police brutality in the Area 2 headquarters [“Town Without Pity,” January 12]. I couldn’t believe all of the wrongdoings that are going on in the Chicago police force. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I agree with you 100 percent. We should do something about the leniency that we give officers that we find out used brute force to get a confession out of someone or just trying to get off for the night....

HOW THE MOON AFFECTS YOU, by Arnold L. Lieber, M.D. (Hastings House, $14.95). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Representative Quote: “In my psychiatric practice I often will ask myself what phase the Moon is in. In my work with geriatric patients especially, I have noted times when these people do not do well. I have been able to correlate these times with one or another atmospheric disturbances, be it sunspots, coincidence of cosmic cycles, or a new and full moon....

Winifred Haun, whose daughter Athena is now six months old, calls one of her new pieces “the baby dance.” But that’s not its official name (it didn’t have one when I saw a rehearsal), and characteristically she describes it as not about babies at all: it’s an abstract suite based on four very roughly connected movement ideas. Only one of the sections, a solo, looks like a baby’s movement, but here the baby is an elegant, long-limbed dancer whose pigeon toes and slow progress on her cheek across the floor, butt hiked in the air, are wonderfully precise....

LORNA SIMPSON: FOR THE SAKE OF THE VIEWER Consider Three Seated Figures (1989), composed of three Polaroid prints of a black woman seated on a stool or table. The plain white background, the bright, even lighting, and the frontal pose employed in each bring to mind identification photos or mug shots. But, unexpectedly, all three are cropped just above the woman’s chin and below her knees, giving us few clues about her situation....

BABY THAT’S ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, THE SONGS OF LEIBER AND STOLLER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frankel should be pleased with Baby That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll (the generic-sounding name is offset by the subtitle The Songs of Leiber and Stoller). Virtually the whole show’s a medley, a slickly staged stew of golden and moldy oldies penned by the most successful pop team of the 50s....

A potent and highly engrossing documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about a 1990 murder trial in New York State that attracted national media attention. The case involved the death of one of the four illiterate Ward brothers, all reclusive and eccentric bachelors who inhabited a two-room shack without running water on their dairy farm. Bill was found dead in the bed he shared with Delbert, who confessed the same day to suffocating his ailing brother in a mercy killing, but later retracted his confession and implied he was being framed....