Critic Attacked; Ice Cube Defended Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hitsville was surprised, at a recent panel discussion on gangsta rap, to find an extreme tolerance of anti-Semitism among what was otherwise a pretty smart assemblage of hip-hop-loving youth. The scene was the usual Guild Complex Wednesday session at the HotHouse; besides a few disappointed poets (there was no open mike that night) the crowd was mostly black kids interested enough in the subject to turn up on a cold night to hear owner of the Triple XXX record store Bobby Sox, writer Rosalind Cummings, rapper Duro, and me talk....

For more than a decade before he struck box-office gold and garnered critical hosannas with A Better Tomorrow in 1986, John Woo dabbled in a number of genres–martial arts, Cantonese opera, melodrama, comedy. But he showed a striking visual flair and a fondness for hyperkinetic editing early on. The slapstick comedy From Riches to Rags, made in 1980 and showcasing the sullen-faced Ricky Hui (Hong Kong’s Buster Keaton), had never been released outside Southeast Asia before this touring retrospective of 80s Hong Kong cinema curated by the Film Center’s Barbara Scharres....

Time has not been kind to the Gang of Four, a band whose angular and extraordinarily danceable instrumental attack and rigid polemicism utterly defined, for a while, the promise of postpunk. Their preeminence, for me, was enhanced by the fact that in the town where I lived at the time, the band’s first appearances were always in little-used venues; to us the unfamiliar, almost clandestine surroundings only increased the paranoid feel of Gang of Four’s wild, pitiless Marxism....

Outside it’s spitting rain, and the number-three buses are crawling in pairs along King Drive. Three stories up, inside a recycled parochial-school classroom, Levon Calhoun is about to hold a dress rehearsal. He’s a training specialist with the small, privately funded STRIVE (Support and Training Result in Valuable Employees, aka Chicago Employment Service). A dozen of his adult trainees–all unemployed, many on welfare, some homeless–stand in a row against the blackboard....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besides the offensiveness of assigning a “natural arrogance” to an age group (and defending it with an infantile parenthetical), Bill Wyman seems to argue for a critical middle ground, somewhere between “geezerism” and “overcomprehension,” a position he would pillory any musician for adopting. He also seems adept at eyeing the work of other rock “critics,” evidently, the same criteria that makes someone a good music critic also makes that person a good literary critic....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March a Washington state physicians agency filed charges of unprofessional conduct against county coroner Dexter Amend of Spokane. He’d allegedly halted the cremation of an AIDS victim to demand an autopsy of the rectum, and in another case had asked the mother of a 16-year-old girl who was shot to death whether the girl had ever been sodomized by gang members....

Pat Rushing with Willie James & the Maxwell Street Blues Band Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blues historians mythologize Maxwell Street for its virtuosos–Moody Jones, Robert Nighthawk, Big Walter Horton–but to taste the real soul of the market you have to experience someone like Pat Rushing. For years Rushing personified the street’s most uncompromising musical aesthetic. Grimacing and strutting like a deranged shaman, he’d roar out his lyrics in a guttural rasp that sounded alternately demonic and prophetic, and the sound he wrenched from his guitar–dissonant and undisciplined but utterly spellbinding–tore into you with an intensity that was almost brutal....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sitting inside the Starbucks on Broadway near Roscoe, two art students had tired of sketching people slushing through the two-day-old snow. After deciding which Melrose Place characters they were most like, one woman had an inspiration: “Let’s try to find the person whose shoes are the least appropriate for the weather.” A man in a ragged green down coat and a Jesus Is Coming button and carrying an oversized homemade clipboard sits down on a southbound Howard-Dan Ryan train and begins to draw a charcoal sketch of the woman in the seat next to him during rush hour....

SLUDGE 2000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Swiss guitarist Stephan Wittwer is a master of incongruity. He can generate blinding noise or subtle texture, jagged shapes or smooth melodies, swank jazz chords or blazing speed-metal sweeps. Wittwer first wowed Chicago audiences last November at HotHouse’s FMP Festival. With the all-star international ensemble the Cowws Quintet, he showed his abilities as a free improviser, skills he honed in the 70s when he made a pair of classic duet records with trombonist Radu Malfatti....

When Dulcie Gannett first stepped onto the campus of Fuller Theological Seminary in the fall of 1973, it didn’t occur to her that she would ever have any business teaching a man, any man, about Christianity. Raised in a conservative Presbyterian household, she knew little about what was then tagged “women’s lib.” But she knew plenty about the writing of the apostle Paul: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent” (I Timothy 2:12)....

Memory/Reference: The Digital Photography of Martina Lopez at the Art Institute, through January 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A deeper contradiction lies at the heart of Promising the Past, 1. In the background is a cemetery filled with monuments, and many of them resemble the ornate pillar, which seems tied to the man’s power and position. This too undercuts his force; the three figures are themselves a bit like cemetery monuments....

Man…or Astro-Man? It’s that kind of thinking that must have led the band of space-guys-marooned-on-earth called Man…or Astro-Man? to hit on their snazzy surf-rock MO. “How can we distinguish ourselves from all the other 21st-century guitar boys from Planet Q hanging around Auburn, Alabama?” guitarist Star Crunch must have asked bassist Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard. And maybe drummer Birdstuff, listening to terrestrial radio, cranked up “Wipeout” and voila, gimmick problem solved....

THE YOUNG ONE **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Luis Bunuel Written by “H.B. Addis” (Hugo Butler) and Bunuel With Zachary Scott, Bernie Hamilton, Key Meersman, Crahan Denton, and Claudio Brook. Ever since I first saw The Young One, in Paris in the late 60s, I’ve never been able to accept the public consensus. The film has been all but written out of film history–accorded scant attention in most studies of Bunuel, and even less notice elsewhere....

Friday 18 Saturday 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much has been made of the “glass ceiling” that prevents women from advancing in American corporations. But we didn’t know Americans working for Japanese companies often face the same invisible barriers to promotion. Author and “intercultural consultant” Rochelle Kopp discusses strategies for overcoming these obstacles during a signing for her new book, The Rice Paper Ceiling: Breaking Through Japanese Corporate Culture, at 2 PM in the Barnes and Noble bookstore at Old Orchard Shopping Center, just west of Skokie Boulevard between Golf and Old Orchard roads in Skokie....

Given enough discipline and good taste on the part of those assembling a compilation album, anything is possible, of course. But mostly the sloughs of tribute albums and sound-track albums one sees are a waste of aluminum plating. (One notable recent exception: the lucid and complex Singles sound track; but then Cameron Crowe used to be a rock critic.) Local band compilations are often the worst of the worst. Asking listeners to wade through ten or a dozen tracks of questionable quality by often justifiably overlooked local outfits is a serious request indeed....

DAVID GRISMAN QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It makes perfect sense for the group led by mandolin master David Grisman to open this weekend’s show by Bela Fleck’s Fleck-Tones. With the style Grisman calls “dawg music”–an ingenious and infectious concoction of jazz and bluegrass (that other “indigenous” American musical idiom)–his music preceded Fleck’s by more than a decade. Fleck has surrounded his banjo with heavy electronics in the rhythm section to arrive at his own all-but-inimitable sound; Grisman, on the other hand, has remained relentlessly acoustic, depending on ace bluegrass guitar pickers and occasional woodwind contributions to add variety and depth to his compositions and recordings....

Fool for Love Shepard begins the script with a terse directive: “This play is to be performed relentlessly, without a break.” In the original 1984 New York production, the cast obeyed to a fault–but then, Shepard directed. Attempting to prove just how tortured they were, May and Eddie, the pair of self-destructive lovers who give the play its title, spent most of their hour onstage literally flinging themselves against the walls of Shepard’s sleazy southwest motel....

For the past few weeks I’ve been spending as much time as I can afford studying the birds of the oak savannas of the midwest. This is a bookish enterprise. All but a few tiny, degraded remnants of our native savannas vanished before the end of the 19th century, so there is no place I can go to actually see a savanna and the birds that live in it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The reason we look forward to changes of season in Chicago is that the weather in each season is so awful that any change sounds like an improvement. I find myself looking forward to hearing about wind-chill indexes rather than heat indexes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We usually think of bird migration as part of the fall, but nearly all of what we have seen so far is really late-summer activity....

Like his fellow Texas troubadours Townes Van Zandt, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Robert Earl Keen, Joe Ely is a master of the road song: his terrific new album Letter to Laredo (MCA) is a collection of ephemeral, reflective, and sometimes sad correspondence from a variety of points on the map. Vivid descriptions of the southwest’s stark grandeur, melancholy reminiscences and musings on failed love, tales of hard living, freight jumping, driving expansive Texas highways with no destination: Ely’s highly literate lyrics have explored these subjects previously, but the conceptual framework he hangs them on–reinforced by a few well-chosen covers of tunes by Tom Russell and Hancock–is what stands out....