By Cara Jepsen Today’s the last day of the spring conference Stopping Gender Violence on Campus, sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Sexual Violence Prevention Resource Center. Paula Kamen, author of Feminist Fatale and the article “Acquaintance Rape: Revolution and Reaction,” will discuss how social activism has revolutionized sexual attitudes on campus and provoked a conservative backlash in the process. Kamen speaks from 3:30 to 5 at the Social Sciences Research Building, 1126 E....

Vice President Al Gore shared the billing at this week’s City Council meeting with Alderman Lorraine Dixon’s dog control ordinance. The dogs were considerably more interesting. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gore became the first sitting vice president ever to address the council. He bored everyone to tears with a speech that took some shots at Republicans and proved that his staff can drop names of Chicago neighborhoods into a canned lecture....

Composer Easley Blackwood had a brief fling with modernism when he was a teenager, but by the time he graduated from Yale four decades ago, he was enamored of turn-of-the-century French symphonic music. The pendulum of his aesthetics swung leftward in the 60s and 70s, when he experimented with revisionist serialism and other radical ideas, but in the early 80s the pendulum changed direction again. His Cello Sonata (1986) and Fifth Symphony (1990), with their strong echoes of Mendelssohn and Schubert, wouldn’t sound at all out of place in 1840s Vienna....

I was thoroughly disappointed by Shane DuBow’s recent presentation of the rave scene and of Mr. David Prince [“Mud, Drugs, and Speaker Hugs,” June 21]. Being an attendee of the first two Furthurs, I too know firsthand some of the surrealities of this scene called rave. I’ve seen the blow pops held puckered tight by the lips of the young x-ed out faces, and the overwhelming lack of racial diversity among those faces....

One ancient Roman poet described it as “lascivious loins in practiced writhings,” but we call the age-old art form “belly dancing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the visitors to the world’s fair, Cargill was bewitched the first time she saw a belly dancer 30 years ago. “It was in a Greek nightclub on Rush Street,” she says. “The movement was beyond anything I had seen before, so fluid and so essentially feminine and mysterious....

After his own first two albums failed him commercially, James House got a major boost from Dwight Yoakam’s 1993 recording of his beautifully plaintive “Ain’t That Lonely Yet.” That song–which House copenned with country tunesmith Kostas–earned him a Grammy nomination, and recently his tune “In a Week or Two” became a hit for Diamond Rio. Now on a new label, House plants himself stylistically somewhere between those two songs: his upcoming album, Days Gone By (set for an October release), for the most part deftly balances his Hal Ketchum-like folk leanings with an intelligent pop accessibility....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’ll remember, in the last fun-filled episode Sarah Goldman–a ditzy New Age young woman–hired a goyish actor, Bob Schroeder, to play her perfect Jewish boyfriend to please her parents, and wound up falling in love with the goof. In the follow-up to this heartwarming farce Sarah’s brother Joel–a sweetie-pie nebbish–fears telling their parents he’s gay. So once again Bob comes to the rescue, donning an outfit out of La Cage aux Folles to play Joel’s perfect, if somewhat butch, Jewish girlfriend....

Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre has three casts for Bill T. Jones’s romantic duet Soon–a man and a woman, two men, and two women. Everyone involved agrees that the male-female duet was easiest. “We have hundreds of years of history of how men and women should dance together,” says Arthur Aviles, the Jones-company dancer who’s teaching Soon to the Holmes troupe. The women’s duet also came together easily, according to Aviles, though initially it was too soft and flowery....

JULI WOOD QUARTET with MELvin RHYNE & BOBBY BROOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Juli Wood didn’t invent the idea of the singing saxophonist–the Glenn Miller band of the 40s featured Tex Beneke, who sang with the same buttery insistence he brought to the tenor, and by the early 50s Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson had gained renown not only as a jazz altoist but also as a mean blues vocalist–but she works hard to uphold the tradition....

LADY BRACKNELL’S CONFINEMENT at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Written in 1987, this 45-minute one-act is a perfect vehicle for would-be Dame Edna Everages. Like that female impersonator, a star on British TV, Lady B. never doffs her female disguise (though she admits early on that she’s really a man), and as with Everage’s routines, much of the humor in Doust’s play derives from a single running gag: a man playing not just any woman, but a pretentious one....

Maurice John Vaughn is an exciting younger-generation blues guitarist determined to hold onto tradition while blazing new trails through the multiple genres and influences that permeate today’s blues and R & B scene. Vaughn’s career reads like a primer in musical eclecticism: he started out as a drummer in grade school, later switched to woodwinds, and by the late 60s was gigging around town in various soul aggregations. It wasn’t until the early 70s that he picked up the guitar....

ZEPHYR DANCE ENSEMBLE Jazz-dance companies have often absorbed concert dance forms as well: ballet and modern. The excellent technique for which the Hubbard Street and Joseph Holmes companies are known comes from daily ballet classes. Yet the works they perform are often modern: Hubbard Street has been focusing on Daniel Ezralow and Twyla Tharp, while Joseph Holmes grows its own talent, like choreographer Randy Duncan, through regular classes in Graham technique....

The most rockin’ song on Neil Young’s new Sleeps With Angels is “Piece of Crap.” Over one of those stomping, gloriously unsubtle backing tracks the stolid Crazy Horse excels at grinding out, Young bellows an everyman’s chant: It’s a piece of crap Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most Young fans can relate to the sentiments, particularly if you’ve shelled out cash for the product he’s proffered over the last decade and a half, from early-80s stinkers like Everybody’s Rockin’ and Trans to mid-80s works like Landing on Water, Life, and Old Ways to some of his more recent offerings like last year’s Harvest Moon and Unplugged sets....

To the editors: After returning from vacation this week, I had the opportunity to read your December 11 Hot Type regarding Colette Holt. In the article, Park District Associate Superintendent Holt claims that I participated in the Park District’s handling of personnel matters involving her and that this conduct was politically motivated. Nothing could be further from the truth. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Had I been interviewed prior to the writing of this article, I would have made two points....

The distinction between jazzy Latin bands and Latin jazz bands is less subtle than you’d think. In any case, percussionist Poncho Sanchez exploits it for all it’s worth in his terrific conjunto, wherein the repetitive rhythms and exhortatory vocals never subsume such fundamental jazz virtues of swing and improvisation. Like most Latin jazz leaders, Sanchez spices the African-derived rhythms of Cuba with bits of Puerto Rico’s salsa tradition. But unlike the rest of them, the Texas-born Sanchez traces his heritage to Mexico; he learned such rhythms as the montuno and guajira growing up in Los Angeles....

For the past 20 years filmmaker John Waters has supplemented his income with public appearances and articles about, for instance, LA and Pia Zadora (whom he anointed “the star of the 80s”) in magazines like Rolling Stone and National Lampoon. In person, the man with the trademark slicked- back hair, pencil-thin mustache, and contemptuous smirk conducts a freewheeling, free-form show, part lecture, part stand-up act, part press conference. A sardonic and masterful raconteur, Waters has delivered pointed quips about current events, recalled his first meeting with Divine, told how he financed his first film (the star, who worked in a camera store, stole the film), and divulged how exactly he got Divine to eat that dog doo in the notorious epilogue to Pink Flamingos....

Taking a Page From the Post The only odd thing about Mark Hornung’s op-ed column in the Sun-Times on March 24 is that 85 percent of it was lifted virtually word for word from a Washington Post editorial that appeared the day before. The editorial sounded like Hornung, it thought like Hornung; Hornung, you might say, wouldn’t have changed a word of it. His farewell column last Friday announcing his resignation does a poor job of explaining what happened, but perhaps that’s because no explanation could have made sense of his disaster....

A few years back trumpeter Terence Blanchard reached the remarkable decision that he needed to completely remake his embouchure–the set of the muscles in and around the mouth that produce a musical instrument’s sound. This was remarkable for a couple reasons. First, the sound of the instrument constitutes the most personal aspect of a musician’s style, and most musicians would undertake such a reconstruction only in the event of physical injury....

It’s occasionally tempting to dismiss England’s Tindersticks as a bunch of dour stuffed shirts. But if you allow the sextet’s second album–called Tindersticks, like their debut–to sink in, their originality and sweeping vision become clear. The dark, quavery vocals of front man Stuart Staples evoke the emotional torpor of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen without their self-pity. During the lengthy, disturbing “My Sister,” the narrator’s bored spoken vocals are set against an incongruous breezy backing as he tells the story of his sister’s ruined life....

On a list of City Hall’s recent decisions, allowing a 100-foot cellular-phone tower to be built in Ravenswood would have to rank near the bottom in terms of controversy. City Hall has known about the tower since November, when Cellular One requested a construction permit from the Department of Buildings. The proposed site was next to the commuter train tracks just east of the entrance to Rosehill Cemetery, whose intricately crafted gates are historical landmarks....