Randee Ladden says her friends love to hear about the time she got an assignment from a manufacturer of containers used to collect bull semen. And then there’s the 30-by-40-inch painted cross-section of a penis she was hired to do by a man involved in a malpractice lawsuit. But the cocktail-party story Ladden’s probably been telling most lately is about designing the poster for The Road to Wellville, the Alan Parker movie based on T....

In the ceaseless war against senseless parking laws the rebels have found a new and most unlikely ally. “My meter had not expired, that’s the key point, but they’re saying it’s illegal to do what everybody does, which is feed the meter so you can hold a space while you run errands,” he says. “I told a police officer about this and he said the law stinks. They don’t like it ’cause they don’t want to be harassing shoppers and discouraging people from driving downtown to shop....

Big League Tax Break Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Acting as a group, the commercial producers–including the Nederlander Organization, the Royal Group, Jam Productions, Michael Leavitt/Fox Theatricals, and Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada–and representatives from large commercial venues like the Chicago and Auditorium theaters retained the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt to handle the City Council fight. Sources say the group has already paid the firm approximately $40,000 and that the final tab could hit $100,000....

One of the original members of country music’s outlaw movement, Billy Joe Shaver penned all but one of the songs on Waylon Jennings’s classic 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes, and since then his songs have been recorded by everyone from the Allman Brothers to Elvis Presley. A veritable handbook of badass existence, they’re rife with hard drinking and hard loving and other details of a rough Texas life. Shaver’s own solo career produced a few hits in the 70s but fizzled out long ago....

Jellyeye’s drum performance Blood Lotus–carefully choreographed chaos for eight drummers, ten drums, and three movie screens–is a sort of moving mandala that can transport the audience to another spiritual plane. On a good night watching Jellyeye flail their arms, kick up their legs, and invoke their odd, intense rhythms can cleanse the emotions: slowly but steadily they draw you into their strange, rhythmic world. But the world they create is a fragile one, and filmmaker Ariana Gerstein and her assistant Kathleen Kirka are given free rein with the images they put on the screens....

Over the course of a ten-year career, the Blue Aeroplanes haven’t been a band so much as a large, freewheeling musical co-op. Generally working as a three-guitar sextet, they’ve endured countless personnel changes, and their records have incorporated up to a dozen regular guest artists. The only remaining member of the original band is lead singer/lyricist Gerard Langley, whose beat-influenced verbiage appears on all their records. Like many English bands the Aeroplanes have an unabashedly arty sensibility....

What is the New Year if not a time of hope, of rejuvenation? Cut back on the booze, take brisk walks, try to view life afresh. So why not mark this time by shucking off all weary prior knowledge of Bob Greene? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bob begins with a Scottsdale dateline, talking about how football is popular there this time of year....

Friday 8 Looking for some unusual gifts? The state is holding an auction of the unclaimed contents of 39,000 safe-deposit boxes. Overseers say most of the material is what you’d expect, but there are some oddities, including tickets to the original Woodstock. Coins and stamps will be auctioned today at 11, jewelry, watches, and silver tomorrow at the same time. There’s no admission charge. The sales take place at Dunning’s Auction Services, 755 Church Rd....

Jeff Stitely couldn’t have asked much more of 1993, which brought the release of his quartet’s debut album, critical acclaim, and even a brief European tour. Blame it all on hard work, and on a matter-of-fact iconoclasm that keeps this band fresh but prevents mere trendiness. As an example, consider the JSQ’s unusual instrumentation: no piano, and a front line featuring John McLean’s mercurial guitar and Ryan Schultz’s bass trumpet (which offers more bite and clarity than its sound-alike cousin, the trombone)....

There are no second acts in America, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said. Syd Arthur, comedian John Kapelos’s fictional alter ego, sets out to prove Fitzgerald wrong in a musical one-man tribute to himself. But as this rock ‘n’ roll wunderkind turned empty, middle-aged millionaire performs his evening’s worth of career hits karaoke-style, he proves that some performers don’t even get a full act. Their inspiration fizzles long before intermission, and only momentum and ego keep them going....

In February a large pane glass window was shattered at Papa Jin, a newish white-tablecloth Chinese eatery on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park. Keep Warm–Burn Out the Rich was spray-painted on the side of the building. This Way to Gentrification was stenciled on the sidewalk, with an arrow pointing to the restaurant’s door. Roberto Lopez, a Flat Iron Building maintenance man, isn’t really loafing. He’s keeping an eye on things, keeping his ear to the ground....

I don’t have much of the explorer’s instinct. I’ve never been out of the country–well, to Canada a couple of times, but that doesn’t really count. When I travel I collect unpleasant experiences the way some people collect postcards. I get migraines. I get nausea. The notion of traveling anywhere without adequate bathrooms makes me quiver. Hell, sometimes it takes some doing just to get me out of the apartment....

I always thought that paper (among other things) could be either “new” or “recycled.” Apparently, however, there are at least three categories of recycledness: new, recycled, and “postconsumer” recycled paper, which is what certain fast-food and greeting-card companies say they use in modest quantities. What is postconsumer recycled paper? How can recycled paper be anything but postconsumer? If recycled paper is not postconsumer, what is it and where does it come from?...

Tim Hagans hasn’t drawn the spotlight: he has issued neither controversial statements nor radical methodology, and consequently his name may ring no bells. But his trumpet work chimes and peals, proving in the process his grasp of both the instrument and its traditional leadership role in jazz. Hagans punches out his ideas with an unusual clarity that stems in part from his focused, slightly astringent tone and mostly from his subtle sense of modern, post-60s melodicism....

The White Balloon By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » En route to the store, however, she manages to lose the banknote twice, and the remainder of the movie, about 70 minutes, is devoted to her efforts to get it back again. If this sounds slight in terms of plot, it must be added that the film as a whole can be seen as both light and heavy–fun and easy to take as well as engrossing–though seeing it exclusively as light entertainment does it an injustice....

WALLACE RONEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The excellent trumpeter Wallace Roney has frequently expressed his annoyance with comparisons to the late Miles Davis, but his complaints don’t really wash: Roney has spent too much of his career suggesting such comparisons–and in ways that go beyond his stylistic homage to Davis’s long-lined phrasing, clipped articulation, and plangent melodic instincts. After all, it was Roney who appeared onstage with Miles–and played many passages in his stead–at Davis’s semiofficial farewell concert (captured on the album Miles and Quincy: Live at Montreux)....

It’s easy to dismiss Columbia, the album documenting the University of Missouri concert last summer that brought Alex Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens back together. Posies Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer sat in to replace original bassist Andy Hummel, who wasn’t interested, and key Chilton songwriting partner Chris Bell, who died in a car accident many years ago. Granted the album has some problems: the performances are less than full-bodied, and while Chilton’s front-man persona isn’t as haphazard as it can be, the energy it communicates is only faintly evocative of the virtuosic atmospheric control on the original group’s three early-70s albums....

By Jack Clark But I don’t remember ever seeing any of the other signs. They were probably gone long before I made it up to the north side in 1971. Not surprisingly, there’s also no sign to tell you which branch to take if you want to follow that arrow you saw a block back. But no matter how big your car is, standing on the roof on Ashland Avenue isn’t going to help you find the lake or the drive alongside it....

The word on Bruce Springsteen’s new album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, is that it’s Nebraska II–i.e., another stark and unadorned acoustic song cycle. That’s at once an over- and understatement. Nebraska, of course, was an accident: a bunch of demos for a proposed new 1982 E Street Band album that was finally released almost as an oddity. Tom Joad, by contrast, is a deliberate move, and, while quiet, it’s actually fairly well instrumentalized, with a host of supporting players and, particularly, dollops of that blanketing synthesizer that has become the distinctive Springsteenian touch of latter-day hits like “Streets of Philadelphia....

OCTOBER Bob Guccione’s bloated, absurd movie Caligula features over-the-top performances by Malcolm McDowell (as the incestuous, warped emperor), Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole interpolated with X-rated scenes. It’s been out of circulation since 1987, when all prints of it were destroyed; now Penthouse has made a new, uncut print of the two-and-a-half-hour film. The first theater in the country to get it is the Village Theatre, 1548 N. Clark, which is showing it at midnight Fridays and Saturdays through the end of January....