Cloud Tectonics Jose Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics, a magical-realist romance, is set in this apocalyptic LA of the mind, with its long nights of speeding cars, gunshots, and screaming sirens. But in this beautiful, moving play Rivera is after something more resonant than yet another glib commentary on America in the last decade of the last century of the second millennium AD: he uses the psychically charged world of LA as a lens through which he can examine the deeper workings of the soul....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » George Lucas’s blockbuster movie trilogy that combined old-time serials, dime-store Freudianism, throwback humor, and lots of thrills and chills–we’re talking about the Star Wars saga here–is being given a rare screening this weekend at the Village Theatre, 1548 N. Clark. All the money from ticket and concession sales goes to the Children’s Memorial Medical Center. Star Wars shows at midnight tonight and noon tomorrow; The Empire Strikes Back–that’s the one with Billy Dee Williams–at 2:30 PM and midnight Saturday and noon Sunday; and Return of the Jedi–the one with the little bears and Jabba the Hutt–at noon and midnight Sunday....

The jazz diva of the 90s makes a much-anticipated return to Chicago. With her dusky timbre, her melismatic swoops and glides, and her ability to maintain artistic control while seeming to lose herself in the music, Cassandra Wilson stands out–even among the crowd of excellent young jazz singers who’ve emerged in the last couple years. (But Wilson doesn’t really belong to that crowd anyway; her newer converts are surprised to learn it’s been eight years since her first album....

Chris Isaak is many things to many people: a dumb man’s Harry Connick, an even dumber man’s Lyle Lovett, a real dumb man’s Elvis. The San Francisco-based crooner manque has spent his now-seven-year-long recording career waiting expectantly for the multiplatinum seller that his manager, his friends, Bay Area journalists, even his record company told him was going to break any minute. It never has and never will, because he’s a shallow warbler whose attempt to marry Sun Session-style rock ‘n’ roll to heavily reverbed 80s studio sheen is such a misbegotten–nay, monstrous–undertaking....

All that talk about Mayor Daley coveting the governor’s office is a lot of hooey. Daley has much bigger plans: a complete takeover of the federal government, with himself as president and the City Council replacing Congress. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This time, performer Eartha Kitt was the catalyst for unmasking Daley’s scheme. The council honored Kitt with a resolution, and after the laudatory speeches, she spoke:...

In 1984 Chicago pianist and songwriter Dave Gordon released a distinctive late-fusion date called Green Things. He waited more than a decade to make his next album, Turn (Southport Records), which certainly lives up to its title. (No surprise there: any musician who hadn’t turned from the fulminant excesses of fusion would have a tough time in the post-Marsalis era.) As he did in the 80s, Gordon works with the fluent saxophonist Brian Gephart, and he’s added another in Dave Zielinski; together they give his music a dueling-reedmen lineup that places the album squarely in the jazz mainstream....

Formed in Frankfurt 15 years ago and now based in the North Sea port city of Bremen, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie is a self-governing, largely self-supporting ensemble well on its way to fulfilling its promise of unorthodox collaborations; the youthful multiethnic orchestra of 30 players has performed with the Kronos Quartet, John McLaughlin, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, among others. When the group visited Chicago in the winter of 1991, backing up violinist Gidon Kremer, local reviewers noted the aggressiveness and cohesion of its playing....

Pere Ubu’s bizarre pop odyssey, now in progress for more than 15 years, continues on their new album Story of My Life. It’s been fascinating to watch this unsightly, off-kilter ensemble retain its art-rock street cred even as it has slowly learned to make radio- and listener-friendly records. At the same time the world itself has graciously sidled over to meet it: Pere Ubu doesn’t sound weird on the radio anymore....

Thailand began its culinary conquest of Chicago more than 20 years ago, starting innocuously with a few storefronts on the north and northwest sides. A place in Andersonville called simply the Thai Restaurant may have been the city’s first, though its output was all quite mild and Westernized. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lee, one of the original owners of the now-shuttered and sorely missed River Kwai on State near Hubbard, started a second Thai Touch last fall on Halsted Street’s hot restaurant row in Lakeview, which runs from North to Belmont....

Dear editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am neither an animal rights activist nor a vegetarian, but Mike Ervin’s story cries out for a few comments. First of all, Mike, you should really read Diet for a New America by John Robbins–it would cure you of the notion that a cow with a six-inch gaping hole in its haunches is “the envy of all the herd....

SMOKEY JOE’S CAFE: THE SONGS OF LEIBER AND STOLLER, at the Shubert Theatre. First developed at Chicago’s Royal George Theatre a couple seasons back, this anthology of 1950s and ’60s hits by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (called then Baby That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll) came off as a glorified show-lounge revue. Now, in a revised Broadway-scale version, it comes off as an industrial show–slick, sleek, and soulless. When Broadway hit doctor Jerry Zaks stepped in to retool it, I’d hoped he’d give it more dramatic substance; instead, he’s made it even more generic, eliminating all but the most superficial connections among the nine polished singer-dancers....

CONCERTANTE DI CHICAGO First on the program was one of the very early efforts that established him as a prodigy to watch. For a bit of juvenilia–he was 16–the Serenade in E-flat Major for 13 Winds (1880) is quite remarkable, showing a clever, nimble mind still under the sway of late classicism. Not at all surprisingly, this one-movement andante loosely follows the contour and spirit of Brahms’s serenades, while its sonority has the bravura of Schumann’s Concertstuck for Four Horns....

I trust you a lot more than I trust Ann Landers. I was wondering if you can give me the straight dope on the following letter that recently appeared in her column. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Dear Ann Landers: I am a 17-year-old high school senior. I accidentally got my girlfriend pregnant. Here’s the catch: We never actually engaged in sexual intercourse. As a matter of fact, we are both virgins....

Journalist Joe Klein caused a furor this year by denying that he’d written Primary Colors, his undisguised fictional account of the Clinton campaign. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curiously, there was no outrage directed at Klein’s writing–even though his fictional world is populated by racial, sexual, ageist, and regional stereotypes. Misogynistic descriptions dominate the book. Klein’s female characters are considered with a hypercritical eye: clothes first, physique second, a few facial features last if at all....

When I started the job I had no intention of making trouble. The job involved “microform scanning.” This meant that I was checking microfilm records of various legal documents. I’d scroll along a spool of microfilm to make sure the document in each frame looked square. If it wasn’t square, that meant it was crushed or folded and had to be redone. Square: good. Squiggly: bad. That was it. Eight hours a day....

Gordon Matta-Clark When the institute’s fellows saw it, they were appalled and had the windows replaced and Matta-Clark’s photos removed in time for the opening reception. Only the eight photos survive; they’re mounted in a grid, also called Window Blow-Out, which constitutes one of the 60 Matta-Clark works now on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Matta-Clark, conventional buildings were too separate from the outside world–one of his goals was to open them to light and air....

Liz Phair Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Liz Phair is one of the most prominent victims of this phenomenon. Her short career has been successful (she’s made the cover of Rolling Stone and her first album, Exile in Guyville, topped the 1993 Village Voice poll), but Phair doesn’t play by the rules. She sings candidly about sex and has a self-designed public persona, which, coupled with her legendary stage fright (her private persona?...

A recent article about pedophiles called the Internet a “masked ball,” a godsend for those who prefer to conceal their true natures. That premise is half right, since cyberdisguises often work. But like the aging pervert rouging his cheeks to appeal to youth, sometimes trying to conceal flaws only draws our horrified attention to them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CyberBob certainly looks happier....

The Chinese title of Dai Sijie’s semiautobiographical 1989 feature, filmed in the French Pyrenees with a nonprofessional cast of Chinese and Vietnamese emigres, means “bull sheds,” or rehabilitation centers. In a small town in China in 1966, at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a 13-year-old boy momentarily disrupts the local propaganda by playing a pop record–actually a love song from the classic 1937 Shanghai film Street Angels–as a way of flirting with a girl in the courtyard below, and as a consequence is sent to a remote labor camp in the Mountains of Eternal Life....

You wouldn’t have known it from watching or reading the news, but 1st Ward alderman Theodore Mazola picked exactly the right moment to get into a wrestling match with 27th Ward alderman Dexter Watson. It was during the City Council meeting on April 13. The council was debating whether to sell the land on which the Maxwell Street market operates to the University of Illinois at Chicago; Mazola observed sarcastically that none of the aldermen objecting to the sale had welcomed the market into their wards....