Traditional music tends to crystallize people’s everyday experiences. Cajuns, the French-speaking minority in Louisiana, historically have had a pretty rough time of it; along with poverty they’ve long faced the deliberate suppression of their language and culture, and more recently the general homogenization of American culture has threatened their survival. Cajun music, with its stock of songs about heartbreak and death, acknowledges despair even while banishing it with driving dance rhythms....

SOUND OF THE TRAIN–VARIATIONS ON A GENERATION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nobody likes to be called names, especially a name that’s both ambiguous and sinister. When the media started referring to people in their 20s as “Generation X,” naturally they became defensive. I myself don’t take kindly to a label that implies aimlessness, dissolution, and overdoses of MTV. And Sound of the Train–Variations on a Generation, a new comedy revue, is a direct reaction to such pigeonholing....

Robert Breer has been making animated films for 40 years. His films are all short and unpretentious, their subjects mostly drawn from daily life, and they have none of the cuteness of much prizewinning animation. Nevertheless they offer pleasures as intense as any work of art can. His latest, Sparkill Ave!, combines still photos of his home and environs in Tappan, New York, with hand-drawn images of ordinary objects and scenes–a disposable razor, a parade, a basketball going through a hoop....

NEW BOMB TURKS 2/11, VIC These deliberately lowbrow Columbus bohunks deliver a hyperreductive strain of raunchy garage punk that’s most concerned with brutish male pastimes like getting fucked up (with beer as the chosen method) and getting fucked. Their unparalleled eloquence with three chords and well-channeled grunts and shouts is on a bill with Cyclone Temple and the exceptionally awful Mighty Mighty Bosstones. ROCKET FROM THE CRYPT/RODAN 2/11, LOUNGE AX Kings of San Diego’s overhyped punk rock explosion (Trumans Water, Drive Like Jehu, aMiniature, Fluf, etc), Rocket From the Crypt exploit a good-timey grind replete with fat sax honking to forge a never ending onslaught of charged, anthemic fist-shakers without a cause....

The other day we were thinking about sex. Not much new there, you may think. But this time we got to wondering how this charming custom got started. How did a little sexless critter split into two new critters, one with an archeolingam, the other a protoyoni? [Primeval reproductive apparatus, for you rustics. –C.A.] Wonderful new body bits, and a new type of cell division, getting up and running to do the nasty in a single generation seems like an awful long shot to us....

GEOGRAPHY IS DISCOVERY: EXPLORING THE WORLD THROUGH CHILDREN’S ART This last ability is especially evident in “Geography Is Discovery,” a traveling exhibit of works selected by a jury from over 10,000 entries, cosponsored by the National Geographic Society and Paintbrush Diplomacy, a San Francisco organization hoping to foster “international communication through the language of children’s art and writing.” Most of the kids represented here were between 11 and 17, but a few were as young as 6....

** EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES Sissy Hankshaw, born with oversize and decidedly phallic thumbs that inspire her to become a compulsive and virtuoso hitchhiker, never stopping anywhere long enough to pitch a tent, works occasionally as a model for a decadent New York queen known as the Countess, who uses her in feminine-hygiene-spray ads. He wants her to appear in a commercial featuring a flock of whooping cranes that periodically migrate through his dude ranch and beauty salon, the Rubber Ranch, and he sends her there, not realizing that the cowgirls running the place are on the verge of seizing it and turning it into a radical feminist collective with a different set of priorities....

Drummer-songwriter extraordinaire Vinx, whose real name is Vincent Dejon Parrette, says he’s been infatuated since his Kansas City childhood with sounds he could make with his mouth and hands; he got his first set of bongos when he joined a church youth group. But after that his musical career took a rather circuitous route. A track-and-field athlete, Vinx was all set to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but the U....

By Harold Henderson People seem to like the arrangement. “We started advertising on the radio four or five years ago, and we heard from our customers. They said, “Please stop! We don’t want other people to know about you!”‘ MARBLE SLABETTES. Marble bases with small imperfections. But hey, who among us doesn’t have a few? Made from a beautiful white marble, they were intended as trophy bases but can be used to display art, small science projects, etc....

I met Tom Herrera on May Street in Pilsen, relaxing in the shade with his brother Joe and his dog Mama. That was in the summer of 1991, and he and I have been friends ever since. It was Tom’s thoughtful, sensitive personality that drew me to him; be likes to share everything. When I visit his place he worries that his dishes and things are not clean enough for me, though in fact they are very clean....

We men have always lived lives of quiet desperation. Only in the last 20 years or so have we been allowed, under certain carefully controlled, socially sanctioned circumstances–talk shows, sitcoms, performance pieces–to publicly discuss our desperation. Even then one runs the risk of being called a wuss, a wimp, or, worse, Phil Donahue. Which is why I’m so taken with west-coast performance artists Ernie Lafky, Sten Rudstrom, and Stokley Towles, who’ve put together an evening of individual and group performances comically exposing the most injurious aspects of the male mystique: the mixed messages (be good/be strong, go for it/wait your turn), the damaging dating rituals, the constant confusion–of sex with power, power with love, love with sex....

The 12th edition of the annual festival of black independent film runs from Friday, July 30, through Friday, August 20, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, and at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Tickets are $5; tickets to the DuSable screenings may be purchased in advance at the museum, but tickets to Film Center screenings can be purchased only on the day of the screening....

It’s no surprise that this year’s American Music Festival at FitzGerald’s includes Canadian band Blue Rodeo in the lineup. What’s border crossing got to do with it when you’re talking about the big picture of American music? Blue Rodeo’s rocking amalgamation of country, blues, and pop recalls lots of folks. The tracks on Lost Together, their fourth and most current album, are rife with chiming Byrds guitars, snarly Stones fretwork, keyboards and accordion a la Garth Hudson’s signature work with the Band, and Marshall Tucker’s twangy sweep....

When she was seven years old, artist Lindsay Obermeyer almost died. She had stomach cramps for a month, and then her godmother noticed a lump on her back. The next day an aunt became concerned because Obermeyer wasn’t eating. She was taken to the hospital and, after a series of tests, the lump was diagnosed as Wilms’ tumor–kidney cancer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Obermeyer, now 29, miraculously beat the odds, but also speaks of how damaging doctors’–and society’s–responses to illness can be....

Girls start having menstrual periods at about age 12, when they begin to ovulate monthly. This is menarche, the beginning of the fertile period of the female human. Women continue to have regular menstrual cycles, interrupted by pregnancies, until about age 50, when they stop ovulating. Fertility declines from the late 30s, and menopause is its end. Women produce less of the female hormone estrogen in their 40s and much less after menopause....

JAZZ SISTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here at the end of the century we’ve reached the tertiary level of feminist awareness in jazz. First the place of women in jazz (mostly singers) was established and then the standing of women instrumentalists; now comes a program designed to remind us of the women behind those women–the women who write the songs. Sponsored by the midwest branch of American Women Composers, the concert actually has a dual purpose: it simultaneously celebrates Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March) by concentrating on women jazz composers....

Red Kite Theatre, at Cafe Voltaire. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Atlanta playwright Rob Nixon clearly cherishes all those galumphing tinsel town cliches. Though his play, set between 1931 and 1934, contains several glaring anachronisms–the film noir title, songs that were written later, slang like “egghead,” and wigs from the 1940s–Kiss It All Goodbye pays left-handed homage to the early talkies and to assorted La-La Land stereotypes, from A Star Is Born to Sunset Boulevard....

Philippe Genty’s shows, which so deftly combine puppetry and dance, have always been filled with dreamlike imagery–billowing sheets, waltzing performers who suddenly shrink down to nothing, tiny armies of office workers in identical suits and bowlers. But Genty’s latest work, Voyageur immobile (“Motionless Voyager”), is not merely dreamlike–it is a dream, plucked from Genty’s head and thrown onto the stage in all its irrational mystery and power. Re-creating his fantasy of wandering through the world stumbling on one sight after another, Genty creates one astonishing spectacle after another: a man’s head is served up for dinner, four fetuses cavort in cardboard-box wombs, a man in a tutu gives birth to dozens of children at once....

New Dance Troupe Leaps Onto the Scene Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ballet Theatre of Chicago isn’t the first ballet company De La Nuez has organized. In 1991, when he was with the Cincinnati Ballet, he formed Summer Flight, which tours Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky for eight to ten weeks every summer. De La Nuez describes it as a “small-budget company” with a “wide-ranging” repertoire of traditional and new ballets....

Lead Story After a state legislative candidates’ forum in Wentworth, North Carolina, in October, the wife of the Republican challenger tore into the incumbent, Representative Bertha “B” Holt, after accusing Holt of “smiling and making fun of my husband” during his speech. The wife, Cathy Miller, said, “I’d like to pull every white hair out of that [deleted in original story] head.” Her husband said, “I think my wife is like any other female in a similar situation....