The hyperrevved throttle of Archers of Loaf’s catchy punk rock is nothing new; their progenitors and fellow Chapel Hillers Superchunk first pumped Husker Du-ish tunes full of unparalleled ear-splitting pop some four years ago. And while the bulk of their debut album, Icky Mettle (Alias), consists of similar, traditionally structured, guitar-crammed, hook-laden nuggets, it’s the sheer exuberance of frontman Eric Bachmann that sets this foursome apart from the tedium of indie rock “slacker” centrism....

In 1982 Julia Fish was painting mostly abstract pictures. Then she did a drawing of a tree. She thought she’d created it entirely in her imagination, but later discovered a tree that looked just like it in a garden that she often walked by. Realizing she’d unknowingly drawn it from memory “was probably the most troubling thing that’s ever happened to me as an artist,” she says, because it “belied what I thought about myself and my capacities to invent....

The Bop Shop celebrated “guitar month” in February, and the picks continue to fly into March with the arrival of Bob Ferrazza, who brings his Cleveland-based quartet (sax included, no piano) in for one night. You can think of Ferrazza as the “strong and silent” type–or, if not silent, then at least diffident. A solid player in the postbop vein, he doesn’t waste a lot of notes; his well-crafted solos, as well as his unpretentious compositions, trade flamboyance for straightforward communication and unhurried swing....

CALM DOWN MOTHER, Yugen Theatre, at Cafe Voltaire. Perhaps the spacious auditorium at the Halsted Theatre Centre is what made the last Chicago production of Calm Down Mother, in 1992, such an inchoate mess. And maybe the restrictive quarters of the Voltaire basement are responsible for the way Yugen Theatre focuses audience attention through economical movement and a minimum of oratory. Or perhaps there was a misunderstanding in that 1992 production of the “transformation” exercise employed by playwright Megan Terry, in which the final action of one scene becomes the initial action of the next....

Chance Dance Fest Live performance gives us the opportunity to stare, to judge a person solely on his or her looks. And more than other performances, the annual Chance Dance Fest at Link’s Hall is laid-back, a lazy August showcase we’re invited to take or leave: stare or don’t stare, it makes no difference to these artists. The show I saw was made up of Bob Eisen’s dance New Quartet, which will be shown on every evening of the fest, and a solo performance piece by Jeff Dorchen, which will not....

Kevin Kline may have lampooned the idea in the movie Soapdish, but two of the world’s great theatrical innovators actually staged one-man versions of Hamlet last year. Texas-born Theater of Images guru Robert Wilson premiered his Hamlet at Houston’s Alley Theatre in May, while Quebec’s Robert Lepage (star attraction of Chicago’s last International Theatre Festival with his hypnotizing Needles and Opium) opened his Elsinore at Montreal’s Monument National in November. But Lepage, unlike Wilson, is headed our way....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The twisted legislation of the Sherman Act doesn’t make any actions illegal; only results are illegal. What’s the “blockbuster issue” that “may” suggest Ticketmaster’s monopoly is illegal? It’s the practice of profit sharing with venues, promoters, and artist managers who sign on to long-term contracts. Is this act illegal? Evil? If Joseph Alioto feels that this act is a form of “commercial bribery,” would he be against an upstart competitor using such an arrangement to gain contracts with the industry?...

Michael Jordan and I go way back. At least as far back as my first Wheaties box. So when my editor asked if I could spend a Sunday morning interviewing the man himself, I said I’m your girl. I showed up on time, picked up my sticky photo of Number 23 labeled “media,” and reported for duty. I had assumed it would be me and Michael, one on one, for 20 unadulterated minutes....

Over the last ten years Miriam Socoloff has helped build an arts program at Lake View High School that’s one of the best in the city, if not the metropolitan area. Working within a small budget and scavenging supplies, Socoloff and her two colleagues have trained dozens of students who went on to college and given many more a lifelong appreciation for art. The school, at 4015 N. Ashland, is beautifully decorated with the paintings, murals, and sculpture her students have created....

Lead Story In the Lorestan province of Iran, where celebratory gunfire is traditional at weddings, a wedding guest named Rasool lost control of his automatic weapon, killing 6 people and wounding 14. In Champion, Ohio, in January Reverend Thomas Gillum, who was presiding at the burial of a Korean war veteran, was accidentally shot in the face when the local VFW honor guard fired a four-gun salute. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Joel Hall Dancers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That doesn’t mean Hall can simply wiggle his hips and create a new holiday tradition. Nuts & Bolts has enormous potential: when grand old ballet shares the stage with cool modern jazz, just about anything can happen. Hall pokes fun at the contrasts, and the result was charming. (To the kid across the aisle–and kids are the ultimate arbiters of holiday dance specials–some movements were downright funny....

“My mouth fairly watered, for a piece of an indian to broil! And I continued to look out sharper for one, than for any other game,” wrote J. Goldsborough Bruff in his journal on April 8, 1850. Lured west by the California gold rush, Bruff had gotten sick and been forced to spend the winter in the northern California mountains. He was near a Yahi Indian settlement but had no contact with them....

On February 16, 1993, in the Juvenile Court of Cook County, a frustrated judge pleaded for more information about the case before him. “Would somebody simply summarize what this case is about for me and give me an idea why you’re all agreeing to this before I approve it?” he said. “I have never read a more upsetting police report,” says Ann Marie Lipinski, the new managing editor of the Tribune....

One of the bard of Avon’s last works, and short on the rich poetry of its successor The Tempest, The Tale of Cymbeline is second-rank Shakespeare–but in the hands of Shakespeare Repertory it’s first-class entertainment. Revived from several seasons back, the production is stylishly directed by Barbara Gaines, who knows how to have fun with the play’s romantic extravagances without making fun of them. A verbally eloquent, physically vigorous cast wittily enacts this wonderfully twisty tale of innocence betrayed (the plot features a handsome hero unjustly exiled, a faithful bride deceived by a wily seducer, a pair of princelings disguised as “rustic mountaineers,” a wicked stepmother with a sleeping potion, and a visit from Jupiter)....

However keen the competition, the foremost innocent prisoner sitting on an American death row seems to be Illinois’ own Rolando Cruz. 60 Minutes has done Cruz, ditto Unsolved Mysteries and A Current Affair. The Washington Post, New York Times, and LA Times all examined this travesty of justice. The Reader ran a piece just last week. At last count Zorn had published 13 Chicagoland columns arguing that prosecutorial zeal, not guilt, is the reason Cruz was sentenced to death in 1985–and again in ’90 after a retrial–for the 1983 rape and murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville....

Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The situation is a birthday party being celebrated by a rich but insecure British family–but surrounding this center-stage real-time story are simultaneous scenes set in the same restaurant that spiral back into the past or forward into the future. Heading backward, the feckless younger son finds a love he’ll soon lose; in the future the older brother reaches the same bleak impasse with his wife....

The theme music is garish–an obscure Bob Dylan and the Band song (“This wheel’s on fire / Rolling down the road”) done Donny and Marie style. The scene is equally disturbing: three women trapped in a room. One, Edina, is a child of the 60s, successful but ridiculous looking–a middle-aged mess with a four-inch headband. Her best friend, Patsy, is an aging model type who spends her time spewing venom toward the third woman, Edina’s daughter, Saffron, who’s prim and repressed compared to the other two....

The fest, which runs through June 19, wraps up with performances by the Netherlands’ Dogtroep in Camel Gossip III, Ireland’s Gate Theatre in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and American monologuist Marga Gomez in two pieces, Memory Tricks and Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty and Gay. Also on the agenda are various breakfast and lunch presentations, postshow discussions, and professional workshops. Performances take place at DePaul University’s Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E....

Walking the Dead Film historian Thomas Waugh contends that “melodrama has…a privileged relationship with gay men, situated as we are, like women, if not outside patriarchal power, in ambiguous and contradictory relationship to it.” For Waugh, “that much-stigmatized genre” stands opposed to “the male genres of effective action and rationality in the outside world, from the western to the whodunit.” Melodramas focus on the emotions and their attendant bodily responses (they’re called tearjerkers for a reason)....

JULY An explicit short called The Operation–featuring up-close-and-personal doctor-patient sex filmed with an infrared lens–will be screened at 8:30 tonight as the second annual Chicago Underground Film Fest gets under way. The fest continues with dozens of films and videos through Sunday at the Congress Hotel, 520 S. Michigan. You can pick up a full schedule there or at various bookstores and clubs on the north side. General admission is $5, though a couple of special programs cost more....