Fans of extremity in music–jazz, rock, classical, whatever–here’s your ship come in. Borbetomagus is perhaps the most devastating noise band on the globe, with an approach to building and tearing apart massive edifices of sound that makes similar attempts by Einsturzende Neubauten and Glenn Branca simply irrelevant. Comprising a three-man squad from upstate New York, the band features Jim Sauter and Donald Dietrich on saxophones and Donald Miller on guitar. At heart Miller is Hendrixian; if you pick him out of the intricate noise web you’ll hear a ragged distortion-washed 60s sound and frequent forays into feedback....

About ten times a month Rose Meyers will receive a letter from a stranger detailing what’s often a pretty weird problem. Each letter arrives with a check for $8 and the hope that Meyers one-woman Zeek Sheck Care Company, will alleviate the problem. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meyers lives in an old Schlitz tavern on the near west side. Tangled computer cables and disassembled stereos plucked from Dumpsters hang on the walls of her bedroom, which doubles as a recording studio where she considers her clients’ ills....

The Chicago Jazz Ensemble under William Russo’s direction has shaped itself into not only an excellent repertory orchestra but an occasionally groundbreaking one as well: when they performed such symphonic-length works as Ellington’s Far East and New Orleans Suites, for instance, it marked the first complete public performance of each piece. So it is with tonight’s premiere of Sketches of Spain, which remains the best known of the several recorded collaborations between Miles Davis and the peerless arranger Gil Evans....

EXIT THE KING Eclipse Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Berenger has so mismanaged his kingdom that it might not survive him. But then he almost craves such chaos–he’d take the kingdom with him if he could. Helping him to accept the end are his doctor and his first wife, Queen Marguerite, a woman of no illusions. Though their countdown to his death seems coldly efficient (“You will die at the end of the play”), it’s also practical and oddly comforting....

Joffrey Ballet of Chicago There are reasons the debt-ridden company has chosen Chicago as home instead of New York or Los Angeles: Gerald Arpino’s company’s been there, done that, and lost one life and a load of dough in the process. But it’s always bounced back from these and worse situations, and always stronger. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year, however, the bounce seems a little less high....

Of all Chicago’s cultural commissars, Lawrence W. (“Bill”) Towner was, until his death in 1991, perhaps the least known but the most nationally influential. Many people on the staff of the Newberry Library considered him a dictator when it came to policy, but no one doubted his scholarship, sense of purpose, or vision, which made the gloomy library into a shining example of independent scholarship. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

LOCUS SOLO DANCE Jeff Friedman seems to be an open, trusting man, and his dances seem to be nakedly emotional and filled with religious feeling and mysticism. But they fail to convey religious awe or much emotion. Friedman’s dancing is liquid and expressive, but he doesn’t trust his material, his audience, or even himself. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The evening’s first dance demonstrates the problem....

Jaap Blonk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether Dutch vocal contortionist Jaap Blonk is diving into his own work or Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate or works by fellow dadaists Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, or postmod Robert Wilson, he performs the meaningless with utmost seriousness and intensity. There’s nothing worse than soggy nonsense, and Blonk knows it: his glottals and gutturals are full-body assaults and he’ll deliver a mere tidbit of text–for instance, the word “brullt,” which he repeats over and over as hard as possible at the end of his CD Flux de Bouche (Staalplaat)–until he literally can no longer speak....

While the 18th annual Chicago Jazz Festival lacks some of the creative edge and conceptual savvy of past fests, there is nonetheless plenty of worthwhile music to be heard. In addition to these highlights, you can find Critics’ Choices for the Dizzy Gillespie big band tribute and the Carla Bley Big Band elsewhere in Section Three. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ARI BROWN QUARTET For years an indefatigable sideman with Elvin Jones, Lester Bowie, and Kahil El’Zabar, Chicago reedist and pianist Ari Brown has finally begun to collect his due....

LARRY GOLDINGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The acid-jazz movement has prompted a renewed interest in funky organ combos–witness the spate of Blue Note reissues by Big John Patton, Lonnie Smith, and Ronnie Foster–but there hasn’t been much in the way of important contemporary contributions to the tradition. Most acid-jazz organ combos either are vapid pop-based acts or fail to appreciate the necessary blues component....

M.O.T.O Redux You know it Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The song bursts out of the speakers. Unapologetically Ramones-styled guitars rumble; the singing–the lilt in the singer’s voice on “take a sip,” the wild wail on “tastes just like a milkshake”–is perfect; the production, rudimentary even in this lo-fi age, is coarse but thrilling. The performance is vintage Paul Caporino, aka M.O.T.O., the unchallenged master of the ineffable pop song about almost anything below the waist....

THE PINK: A PAPER RITUAL OF EROS The opening section of Muna Tseng’s evening-length The Pink: A Paper Ritual of Eros, based on a 16th-century Chinese erotic novel, contains many hints of what’s to come. Nudity. Foot fetishism, especially in the highly developed form fostered by foot binding. The essential vulnerability of human beings, and the equivocal nature of coverings. The paper that dominates the piece–there are paper costumes, paper musical instruments, and a paper set–was described by a dancer during a discussion afterward as a sort of conduit; press materials said Tseng uses paper “as the symbol for erotic tension....

Springfield is not usually thought of as a fount of the literary arts, but by some lights the denizens of that dreary capital are, as Dr. Johnson remarked about his college, a nest of singing birds. Springfield was home to the memoirist J. Edward Day, who grew up to become perhaps the only U.S. postmaster general to be reviewed in Saturday Review. It was home too to that master of prose, Abraham Lincoln; the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald (who lived there as a boy two blocks from the statehouse); and Benjamin Thomas, whose 1952 biography of Lincoln is good enough that other scholars have been stealing from it ever since....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrew Patner is right to object to the glib “Hey, Faggot” epithet that repeatedly infects Dan Savage’s column [Letters, January 12]. Clearly, Savage needs to take advice as well as give it out. If he thinks that he and his friends will somehow defang the word “faggot” of its power to hurt, he’s toking the wrong controlled substance....

It’s not every choreographer who’d devote an evening-length work to food. But with Mouth, a suite of dances examining the relationships between eating and the family, eating and sex, eating and our culture, Robin Lakes not only confronts the subject, she exhausts it. Happily she doesn’t take a programmatic approach–Lakes is just an intelligent person who has let her mind run free on a human need so basic that we hardly ever think about it, at least not in this metaphoric way....

The grass was way too high for a picnic. So drivers headed east from Gary, passing the vacant land along the south rim of the Indiana Toll Road that Saturday afternoon in early August, must have assumed they were looking out over some kind of grisly crime scene. Why else would a cluster of seven adults, two in vaguely military-style uniforms, be wading slowly through waist-high weeds, armed with clipboards, heads down?...

Arresting Images Curator Karen Indeck sought diversity, and she found one photographer, Nancy Floyd, whose subjects in an ongoing series, “Stopping Power,” are proud women gun owners. Carolyn Saul, Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum, and Bumper shows a smiling woman holding a large gun in a homey-looking living room, dog at her feet, TV and fireplace behind–a setting that reminds us that guns are accepted parts of many homes and lives....

The Video Fireplace Achy Obejas and Carmela Rago Chicago-based monologuist Frank Melcori invites similar musings. In his current show, The Video Fireplace, Melcori “plays” four characters–a man named Frank, Frank’s therapist, Frank’s best friend, and Frank’s girlfriend. Unlike Bogosian, however, Melcori is not known for his mimicry. In fact, Melcori plays all four in the same flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice. In theater, such lackluster acting would be a sign of weakness, but here it’s actually a strength: his strikingly unflamboyant style both disarms the audience–we feel we’re watching a somewhat gifted friend in his living room, and so have lower expectations–and disguises the true depth of this unassuming piece....

Singers’ press releases we were afraid to finish: “With a voice as wide as the barrel of a .357 Magnum…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They have their reasons. “DCFS is often criticized for not stepping in and removing children more often in order to protect them,” writes DCFS worker I. Richard Zemon in Illinois Politics (August). “We must not lose sight of a very fundamental aspect of human development....

A remarkably effective and provocative contemporary Chinese melodrama (1994), based on a recent murder case in mainland China (where much of the movie was filmed), and written and directed by the talented Cantonese filmmaker Yim Ho (Homecoming, King of Chess). Told mainly in flashbacks, the story describes what happens when a worker in his 20s turns up at a police station to report that his mother murdered his father ten years earlier....