If you liked Uncle Tupelo, you’ll love the Bottle Rockets: singer Brian Henneman was the former’s roadie and fill-in guitarist, and the groups share a producer and even stomping grounds on the outskirts of Saint Louis. Most important, the Bottle Rockets come across the way Uncle Tupelo does: as a bunch of punks with a clear-eyed love for the tense emotions and decrepit forms of country and western–with the songwriting and performance chops to back these feelings up....

To the Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was glad to read Michael Miner’s and his correspondent David Peterson’s characterization of Sun-Times columnist Dennis Byrne as a raving “right-wing lunatic” [Hot Type, January 6] because the increasing dominance of religious right editorial views at the Sun-Times is troubling. Amazingly, Byrne has written that he has “always thought [he] was pretty liberal,” and as recently as November, of his resentment at being “called a conservative....

I ‘m sure that all nine regular readers of the dance listings already know about Dance Chicago ’95 at the Athenaeum, but the rest of you may not realize that the biggest, most varied exhibition of homegrown dance talent hitherto presented is about to begin. Fittingly, the opening-night performance (1 of 14 programs involving 38 companies and individuals) is devoted to the work of six independent choreographers–toilers in the vineyards of modern dance, so you know they’ve struggled....

Before he became an author and a professor of political philosophy at DePaul, Bill Martin was just another Maoist longhair working the graveyard shift at a convenience store. One night in 1982 business was dead; he was killing time at the counter leafing through a copy of Soldier of Fortune and stopped at an article titled “Weird Warriors of Peru.” It was about a small band of commie guerrillas called the “Shining Path,” and though the writer described them with a kind of grudging respect, he hoped somebody would go down to Peru and wipe them out....

In 1925 a tornado ripped through Griffin, Indiana, midway through a 219-mile-long killing spree. There’s some question today whether the tornado was a single twister or a series of them, but 689 people died that day and thousands more were injured–so if it was one tornado it was certainly the worst ever recorded in U.S. history. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With tornado watches and warnings flashing onto the television regularly every spring and summer, my parents established that the safest spot in the house to wait it out was underneath the staircase in a triangular space where the camping gear was stored....

I’d been on a long, sweaty driving trip for two weeks, and when I started noticing come-ons for the World’s Largest Buffalo 100 miles west of Jamestown, North Dakota, I understood immediately that it was my destiny to visit it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Almost everything is strange about a 26-foot-tall, 60-ton cement buffalo with a bad paint job. That someone had the idea to build such a thing and was able to persuade the town council to allocate a significant amount of money for it is mind-boggling....

When my sister went to college in California, she promptly became a vegetarian and wrote me long letters expounding the evils of meat. Everybody assumed she’d grow out of this phase much the way she grew out of Rick Springfield and 90210. Instead she progressed from no red meat to no meat of any kind to no seafood and, finally, to no dairy products. To top it off, during her senior year Kiki fell in love with a butcher at the local grocery store....

Vivisections From the Blown Mind Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alonzo D. Lamont Jr.’s Vivisections From the Blown Mind, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Goodman Studio, is the sort of play that looks great on paper. Topical, explosive, and politically correct, this critique of hip hop culture promises a savage behind-the-scenes look at the destructive forces within the rap-music industry that are artistically bankrupting the African American community....

LARRY GARNER & HIS BOOGALOO BLUES BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baton Rouge native Larry Garner was rejected by at least one American record label for being “too blues,” but judging from the music he’s putting down these days he’s far from being a purist. Garner infuses elements of funk, R & B, and tinges of post-Hendrix fretboard madness into the countryish southern Louisiana swamp blues tradition....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His cover story of February 17 (“The Cost of Living”) is no exception. Based on Henderson’s own account, Don Coursey’s study of race and hazardous waste siting may well have potentially serious methodological problems. There is nothing particularly political about this claim, nor need it emerge from the “effect” of the study on anyone’s “agenda,” as Henderson worries....

Jethro Burns Burns’s new album has just arrived, and it is among the best of his career. The only problem is, Burns is dead, and has been for six years. The irony is that this disc would never have been made if he were alive. Burns was considered a musical giant long before he died, but his impending death was the catalyst that brought about the sessions that have recently been issued as Swing Low, Sweet Mandolin on Acoustic Disc....

Q TWO Razor’s Edge The most common thematic concern in these works is love and romance, the very things that historically have been withheld from gays and lesbians. (Then again, these themes are also the most common among heterosexual artists.) Insecurity, abandonment, and isolation are recurring motifs. In Cindy Caruso’s delightful “Some Love,” two women sitting in a lesbian bar forge an intimate friendship based on people they both hate. When one moves to a different city for no particular reason, the other is left stranded and alone....

The advantage of being a one-man band is that you answer to no one but yourself. On his 1993 full-length Julius Caesar, and on the new six-song Burning Kingdom (both on Chicago’s own Drag City Records), Bill Callahan–aka Smog–lays bare an idiosyncratic sensibility that is as disturbing as it is engaging. In the homespun, lo-fi style of the high DIY era he helped instigate, Callahan spins tangled yarns around his sundry preoccupations....

“The number of murders in [Chicago] ebbs and flows with little respect for gun control laws,” argue Daniel Polsby and Dennis Brennen in the Palatine-based Heartland Institute’s policy study number 69 (October 30). “For example, the number of murders in the city started falling before passage of the city’s 1982 gun control ordinance. Five years later, the number of murders in the city began to climb steadily. By gun control’s tenth anniversary in 1992, the number of murders in the city was back where it had been a decade before gun control....

It would appear that many of my colleagues have been trashing this powerful and moving look at friendship among the homeless in New York–directed by Tim Hunter (River’s Edge) from a script by Lyle Kessler (Orphans) and starring Danny Glover and Matt Dillon at their rare best–simply because of its subject matter and authenticity; apparently, contemporary man-made tragedies are inappropriate topics for the big screen, unlike ghosts, dinosaurs, mythical serial killers, and former holocausts....

What exactly is meant by “anal retentive”? I think I am that. I saw a T-shirt that said “You are anal retentive if you wonder if there should be a hyphen.” I wondered if there should be a hyphen in anal retentive. I have looked some of this stuff up at the library but got tired. I would appreciate your help. –Collyer, Honolulu, Hawaii Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Do you think it’s possible to write a love letter with the word “telecommunications” in it? –Modern Man, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a warm, sunny day and here I am, stuck inside, slitting open envelopes and finding letters like this. Not that I don’t appreciate your sense of humor. I know you probably need an outlet and that writing letters like this to guys like me is probably all that keeps you from becoming a serial killer....

Dear Sirs: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the thinly disguised homosexual privileges ordinance passed in city council, there were many who accurately predicted that it would eventually be used for purposes well beyond the original stated intent. Now we have people using the ordinance to bash the Boy Scouts, a group that has done more good for America than 99 percent of the organizations in the country, and which has never spent any of its time or money spreading antihomosexual rhetoric or actions....

Dear Leah [Eskin]: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You proudly display your ignorance in your very first sentence. You’re not an “adherent” of depression. Gee. I’m not an adherent of brake failure at high speeds, either, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can never happen to me. Your word choice, which I trust was carefully executed, implies that one can choose whether or not to subscribe to the conditions of depression....

TINY DIMES Tiny Dimes takes all that’s yucky about yuppiedom, chops it up, throws it around, then glues it back together in an absurd collage of hilarious, believable stereotypes. But this play by New York writer Peter Mattei, produced by Famous Door Theatre Company, doesn’t just spoof the people caught up in the 80s money game. It spoofs their struggle. And it comes up with the conclusion that such struggles are absurd, meaningless, and basically stupid....