GOD STREET WINE 2/10 Metro Blues, boogie, funk reggae, African, fusion, rap, rock, and more crammed into one impossible whole, God Street Wine operate from the dreaded H.O.R.D.E axis, producing one of the most irritating all-genre amalgams I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing. If your desert island disc selection includes the Allman Brothers, Steely Dan, Chicago, Spin Doctores, and Bruce Hornsby, this combo will give you your world in a blender; if not you’ll recognize GSW as a primo nonalternative demographic distillation preprogrammed for consumption by affluent whites....

Ecstasy Clumps of actors slouching about, scratching their ears and “acting natural,” are about as common on Chicago stages as gobs of spit on subway platforms. But sometimes spit can fascinate, refracting light intriguingly, bubbling unexpectedly, offering up mysterious bits of matter you simply wouldn’t encounter anywhere else. Bad naturalistic actors, on the other hand, are typically about as beguiling as a glass of distilled water. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Nearly two months have passed since the Park District board voted to keep a statue of Puerto Rican nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos from being erected in Humboldt Park, but the case just won’t die. The imbroglio is rooted in contrasting interpretations of Campos, a man few Chicagoans had even heard of. Campos was born in 1891, just seven years before U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico. Over the next 50 years the island evolved into a commonwealth of the U....

In the old days when a young tiger’s thoughts turned to love he’d sniff around for a similarly inclined young lady, stalk into her territory, grab her by the neck, and have at it. But all that is so very old school. These days there’s not much left in the way of territory. In fact, there’s not much left in the way of Siberian tigers. A scant 250 roam the wild....

Trib’s Capitolist Attitude “The network might well be a better fit for the Gingrich model of local funding and control of programs in which the federal government now plays a role.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a very narrow sense Locin was right about federal aid. Nobel doesn’t receive a penny of it earmarked specifically for the Safe Schools Network. But far from fitting a “local funding” model, Nobel receives half a million unearmarked dollars a year from Washington, plus $800,000 from Springfield....

It’s hardly the news of headlines and front pages, but for the last few years some of the city’s most prolific and profound teenage poets have come from Lane Technical High School, a north side public school best known for producing football players and engineers. Bates’s secret, say the students, is that he takes the intimidation out of poetry. He teaches them irony, symbolism, and alliteration, and encourages them to write about things they can see, hear, and feel on any corner of the city....

By David Witter Then Gator got a job at a major downtown trading office and became convinced that in the haphazard world of trading it couldn’t hurt to practice a little voodoo economics. He asked Steele to build him a voodoo altar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gator opened a can of black paint and began painting the top of the altar black. Steele worked on the sides of the altar, using gold paint and stencils to reproduce the patterns of sigils, the intricate symbols of the spirits they would solicit....

4-Play, Bailiwick Repertory. Why juxtapose a comedy about a trendy couple’s crisis of conscience over eating meat with a harrowing Harold Pinter drama about a man forced to drink liquor after his tongue has been cut out? Yet that’s what this showcase of one-acts does, and the effect is, well, tasteless. As it happens, Pinter’s One for the Road, solidly staged by Pat Acerra, is the only thing here worth an audience’s time and money....

ALEXANDER, MICHAELS/FUTURE MOVEMENT His opening piece, Facades, Facets, Phases & Dreams, is a sentimental attempt to explore the inner lives of three people. We’re supposed to know them by their clothes, I guess. One woman wears a fur coat and sequined evening gown: she’s the sad rich lady. She dances a solo that vaguely suggests loneliness and longing. Another woman wears a bright yellow blouse and a purple skirt; from her movement, it seems she’s the overworked executive....

“Ain’t Yo Mama on the Pancake Box?” asks the title of a red-and-black satin wall hanging lined with gold-and-black print fabric from Senegal. Two tar-black “darkie” caricatures grin out from the middle of the piece, above a photo transfer of a 1920s Sunlight Soap ad with a black baby hovering over the phrase “so clean and white.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You try not to accept stereotypes, not to believe them, and that takes work,” says artist Venus Blue....

Chip Rowe started the pop-culture zine Chip’s Closet Cleaner in 1989 when he graduated from Northwestern’s journalism program. “In college I had this yearly ritual where I would clean out my closet. So when I graduated, I filled a newsletter with a lot of cartoons I liked and articles I’d saved and sent them to my friends.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A chance trip to Guild Books led him to FactSheet5, which reviews zines from around the world....

Club Fever Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other bands were playing Saturday night, of course, but that’s what was happening at the city’s more carefully booked venues. All of these figures exclude guest lists, which can account for as many as 100 more heads per show. That means that at least 1,700 to 1,800 people were out late–Saturday headliners don’t go on ’til 12:30 or later–to see rock and roll, and fairly obscure rock and roll at that....

We met Chris Latas behind the counter of Chris’s Hot Dogs on North Halsted. His bright uniform seemed prepared to fill the service industry’s standing order for deep-fry and quick-serve. But our Quality Control Fashion Inspectors had a few questions for the man in the paper hat. Was this outfit able to deliver service with a smile, or was it mixing up the orders? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

SEANCE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sitting at Randolph Street Gallery last weekend, its performance space transformed into a cabaret complete with tables and candles, I couldn’t help but think of Lower Links. Not that the Links regulars on parade–Joan Jett Blakk, Gurlene Hussey, Cheryl Trykv, Paula Killen, Pat O’Donnell, and the dancing faeries–haven’t all grown more polished as performers. It’s just that at Seance, RSG’s opening salvo in this year’s “In Through the Out Door” series, the ghost of Lower Links seemed to dominate, for good and for bad....

Little Things Mean a Lot Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On her perfect 1994 album, My Life, describing such unsexy things as childhood memories, the transcendence of songwriting, and personal maturation, Iris DeMent accomplishes more through personal observation in one song than any anguished Alanis can hope to in a lifetime. She understands the layers of meaning hidden in small things. She’s no candidate for Up With People, but the small, poignant affirmations she draws from life’s everyday travails far outweigh the narcissistic whining of today’s teen angst pop star, for whom every betrayal is a personal affront and a cause for painful catharsis....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am incredibly angry over Matt Besser’s letter to the editor in the July 7th Reader, in which he portrays himself as a victim of “taunts and threats of drunken sports fanatics.” I did not know Mr. Besser by name until the printing of his letter, but I did know him from numerous encounters where I, my fiancee, and other Cubs fans were “taunted” by him....

When the lords of gangland gathered here last fall under the benevolent gaze of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Dr. Benjamin Chavis, executive director of the NAACP, their vows of peace and love found few takers. To those who have to pass through metal detectors every day as they attend school or make their way into the housing projects where they live, the promises sounded fatuous, if highminded; to anyone else with a good memory, they were simply absurd....

I’m 48 years old. A few months ago a small growth appeared on the upper side of my left forearm. It looked like a wart, but I went to a doctor recently and had it excised and biopsied. It was a squamous-cell carcinoma. The doctor told me there was almost nothing to worry about since squamous cell is one of the least dangerous forms of cancer. Still, it’s hard not to stress about this....

THE WIZARDS OF QUIZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A sort of 20th-century revenge tragedy, The Wizards of Quiz purports to tell the true-life tale of Herbert Stempel, the disgraced former champion of the 1950s quiz show Twenty-One. After nine weeks of spectacular winnings–nearly $70,000–Stempel lost big, and intentionally, to Charles Van Doren, scion of a scholarly WASP clan. Later determined to vindicate himself and his intelligence, Stempel denounced “the wizard of quiz” as a fellow fraud who had been coached on the questions....

Braveheart With Gibson, Sophie Marceau, Patrick McGoohan, and Catherine McCormack. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Braveheart has a gut-wrenching, bone-breaking, sword-thwacking verve. Like Wallace, Gibson seems charged with blood lust. This is manly, maximum-impact movie-making, full of brawn, brawls, decapitations, castrations, and men bleeding the ground red. The variety of weapons is astonishing, from buckets of bubbling pitch for burning skin to balls on chains for crushing craniums; from deer antlers for gouging eyes to gigantic spears for impaling cavalry horses....