Nick Colionne, Herb Walker & George Freeman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bop Shop’s annual December Guitar Series–a community-chest operation that grants you half-price admission if you bring a Christmas toy as a charitable contribution–lacks the pizzazz of last year’s proceedings, but you can still count on some fireworks. Nick Colionne hosts this Friday’s event; his band does triple duty by also backing Herb Walker (a longtime session man I’ve never heard) and George Freeman....

By Ben Joravsky “I think we’ve gone beyond the point of lunacy here–it’s less than a sliver, it’s a shaving,” says Ronald Litke, a friend of mine who lives in the condo building that’s about 18 inches from the new building. “Next thing they’ll be converting potholes here into condos. If this keeps up I’m going to sell the air rights over my parking spot, which may be a little bigger than the building next door....

In 1968 La Scala in Milan, the mother church of Italian opera, presented Gioacchino Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death. Philip Gossett–world-renowned musicologist, dean of humanities at the University of Chicago, and adviser to some of opera’s best-known impresarios and singers–thought the production was a travesty. The company made cuts in the music he calls “absurd,” and it hired Beverly Sills to sing the role of the heroine....

REBEL and When Edward flees to a deserted park after a quarrel with his wife, the last person he expects to see is a sassy southern belle in red leather chaps and four-inch spike heels. Rebel is a rock star who’s cut loose from her band to seek a fast fling with one of the locals, and even in a town supposedly as square as Bangor, Maine, you’d think a volunteer could be found....

Hey, Faggot: –Exhausted “Dom” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your husband is having trouble making, or maintaining, a distinction between your shared fantasy life and your reality lives. For submission to work, the bottom needs to feel like the top is imposing his or her will only while the SM sex scene is going on. Once it’s over–unless you’re living that glamorous leather lifestyle–it’s over....

There’s an odd bit of historical revisionism on the liner notes to the Band’s new release, Jericho. When the Band called it quits on Thanksgiving 1976, Martin Scorsese filmed the farewell concert, making it as official as any- group’s bust-up has ever been. But Stephen Davis, who wrote the Jericho liner notes and also coauthored This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, says Scorsese’s film, The Last Waltz, wasn’t the Band’s swan song but simply a send-off for guitarist-songwriter Robbie Robertson....

SLAVS! At the start of Angels in America: Perestroika, the second half of Tony Kushner’s two-part drama, the world’s oldest living Bolshevik addresses the Kremlin to protest the tidal wave of democratic reform sweeping over the Soviet Union. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Prelapsarianov turns up in Slavs!, Kushner’s one-act, 90-minute coda to the epic-length Angels. So does his warning–both in words (reiterated pretty much verbatim from Angels) and through example....

As an X-Files junkie and conspiracy freak, I was watching the blockbuster Independence Day, and I got to the part where everybody goes to Area 51 and there’s a big spaceship and Brent Spiner says they’ve been studying aliens there since Roswell. I thought, what’s the deal? Area 51 was on an episode of the X-Files, it’s got a video game, a band–what the hell do they have in there? Biological weapons?...

Cycropia The late-August fair at Orton Park in Madison is in some ways a typical small-town fair: booths strung along the park’s asphalt paths are selling barbecue, sweet corn roasted in the husk, and clothes. Big trees shelter a band, and a few couples dance in the parking lot. But some details suggest a midwestern college town: clothes made from politically correct Guatemalan cloth, and an unusually large number of men in ponytails and beards as well as women with the quiet, focused look of academics....

PJ Harvey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Following the Steve Albini-produced, de rigueur muted vocals on Rid of Me, Harvey’s singing became a primary focus on her latest record. Her voice navigates broader turf and is more powerful and assured in its pinpoint assault. Aglow with supreme confidence, her performance at the Vic last Saturday seized upon the strides made on the new album and blew them up larger than life....

Chicago Chamber Musicians Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A tribute to a major composer on a milestone anniversary should be an occasion for appreciation and discovery. But the Chicago Chamber Musicians rise only halfway to the challenge with this all-Schubert season opener, a bicentennial celebration of the Viennese composer’s birth. The program, a repeat of CCM’s inaugural concert a decade ago, features the “Trout” Quintet, the beloved and much-recorded piano quintet that has helped perpetuate Schubert’s cliched reputation as a sublime melodist....

Jeff McMahon grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in New York, but no matter how clearly he delineates real streets, neighborhoods, and events in his one-man performance piece City of God, somehow his community remains elusive. In his poetic, free-associative text he uses the pronouns “we,” “you,” “they,” “nobody,” and “everybody,” but after a while it’s clear he’s playing tricks on himself and us: no matter what he says, the truth is that he’s trapped in “I,” and nothing–not art, not love–can free him....

Nothing in its eight-year existence prepared the experimental performance troupe Goat Island for the reception it received in Croatia two months ago. Known for its eccentric, oddly structured pieces, the ensemble had performed its relentlessly nonlinear work How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies for the Eurokaz Festival. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What they got was a typical Goat Island pastiche of found texts, scenes taken directly from movies, and highly stylized movement pieces....

THINKING MODERN: PAINTING IN CHICAGO, 1910-1940 As early as 1910–the opening year for a historical exhibit at the Harold Washington Library Center, “Thinking Modern: Painting in Chicago, 1910-1940”–a young Chicago draftsman named Manierre Dawson was producing small abstract paintings. At that time very little advanced modern art had been seen here: it was in 1913 that the Art Institute brought to Chicago a smaller version of the famous Armory show, which had given New Yorkers their first real look at Duchamp, Matisse, and others....

Last month my wife and I walked to Cana Island. It doesn’t take supernatural powers, just a good pair of shoes and a willingness to be surprised. We followed a rocky isthmus a few yards wide from the Wisconsin mainland to the “island” and its private residence and lighthouse. Once there, a short woodsy path brought us to the buildings, which sat in the middle of an expanse of mowed grass and flowers, ringed by a stone wall and sheltered by bushes and trees....

Lead Story Maryland’s National Library of Poetry named Clifford Olson a semifinalist in its 1995 North American Open Poetry Contest, but disqualified him after it was revealed that he’s a serial killer. Olson, who was convicted of 11 murders in 1982 in Canada, wrote Success, which ends with the line “A life that is clean, a heart that is true, and doing your best, that’s success.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Redd Holt & Sons Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having never heard Redd Holt’s offspring, I’ll take a chance on this free show anyway–if only because Holt himself has sounded so grand whenever he’s appeared in recent months. Having earned his fame as a member of the Ramsey Lewis Trio in the 1950s, Holt later went on to enjoy some success with his bass-playing partner in that trio, Eldee Young....

I.K. Dairo and His Blue Spots Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Around 15 years later, on the same day that I went to see I.K. Dairo and His Blue Spots, I dug up an old ten-inch EP in a record store on the west side. Its cover has a photo of traditional African fishermen casting a net into the water, and says Catchy Rhythms From Nigeria....

70 Years, 14 Dining Rooms, and 500 Meals a Day Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By all accounts the fact that it’s a family business has helped the Como Inn survive the tortuous twists and turns any restaurant is sure to take over seven decades. “There is a more personal touch when a restaurant is passed through generations in a family,” maintains Carlucci. In 1924 Italian immigrant and former ice deliveryman Giuseppe Marchetti opened a tiny, unprepossessing 13-table storefront restaurant on the inn’s present site....

To the editors; Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to Bill Wyman’s suggestion in Hitsville [July 1], I tracked down the recent article about Steve Albini in the June 8-14 issue of New York Press, and was treated to another dose of Steve’s rigid rock doctrine. Then I came across a mention in the Tribune’s “Homefront” column of a new interactive CD-ROM game developed by Runandgun Inc....