MARCH Friday 26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Could the current proliferation of sci-fi shows on TV–two Star Trek shows, a time-travel show called Time Trax, and one about an immortal alien who likes to sword fight called Highlander, to name a few–mean the genre is becoming more fashionable these days? Judge for yourself at today’s Cy-Fi Con, a convention sponsored by several area SF clubs that runs from 10 to 10 at Christopher House, 2507 N....

The 13th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival runs from Friday, November 5, through Sunday, November 14, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division, and the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets are $4 or $5 for most matinees, and $5 or $6 for most evening shows. Tickets go on sale a half hour before the first show; advance tickets for all programs can be purchased at Chicago Filmmakers the day before the scheduled screening....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Patrick Griffin’s antismoking article [March 18] is a splendidly written and temperate piece, making it quite a change from the journalistic masturbation practiced incessantly on this topic–and the screeching of advice columnists who will tolerate any manner of sexual misbehavior as long as the participants refrain from lighting up a cigarette. Also absent from Mr. Griffin’s argument is the question of why, since he admits that smoking is centuries old, it has been only in the last 40 years that hysterical outbursts condemning the practice have proliferated....

When he was a kid Richard Dyer spent a lot of time at the movies. But unlike his peers who readily identified with the hard-boiled superdicks played by Humphrey Bogart and William Powell, Dyer found it easier to relate to the villains and supporting characters like Clifton Webb’s prissy Waldo in Laura and Peter Lorre’s scented sissy in The Maltese Falcon. He figured they must be homosexuals–just like him. Unfortunately these pansy portrayals didn’t do a whole lot for his self-image, especially at a time when positive gay role models were virtually nonexistent and the public’s ideas about homosexuality were heavily influenced by Hollywood....

A few years ago guitarist Johnny Dollar was one of Chicago’s most popular and ubiquitous younger bluesmen. Lately he’s been less visible outside of his west-side turf, but he’s still among our finest. He can grind out the obligatory raw boogie patterns and fire off crowd-pleasing leads of slice-your-throat intensity, but he’s also capable of a sophisticated funkiness that shows his debt to modern jazz-pop crossover artists like George Benson. His voice, which used to be one of the more seductive sounds in town, has become somewhat rheumy, but his stage presence remains the same: he can seduce you with his charms one minute then set you back on your heels with his crudity and street-tough signifying the next....

“I really don’t know if this is a good idea,” Mathew Wilson confessed to me a few weeks ago: he and Eduardo Martinez-Almaral were gearing up for their second seven-day, 24-hour-a-day performance collaboration at the Blue Rider. Last year, armed only with two hours of prepared material and a few simple props (including an electric organ neither performer could play), the pair voluntarily incarcerated themselves for their weeklong Tragedy. The result was an impromptu masterpiece, a tragicomic portrait of a spiritually atrophied America: Wilson and Martinez showed a genius for creating essential experiences seemingly out of nothing and for maintaining focus for hours at a time, all the while acknowledging the absurdity of their minimalist experiment....

Rex Martin doesn’t like to toot his own horn, but he believes he’s got a whopper of a composition for his fellow tubists to huff and puff this Saturday. “I asked my friend Amnon Wolman to write something for tubas,” explains Martin, who, like Wolman, is a professor at Northwestern University. Wolman wrote Right Lane Must Turn Right, which is believed to be the first piece ever composed for several hundred tubas....

For all of John Cassavetes’s concern with acting, this 1977 film is the only one of his features that takes it on as a subject; it also boasts his most impressive cast. During the New Haven tryouts for a new play, an aging star (Gena Rowlands), already distressed that she’s playing a woman older than herself, is traumatized further by the accidental death of an adoring teenage fan (Laura Johnson). Fantasizing the continued existence of this girl as a younger version of herself, she repeatedly changes her lines onstage and addresses the audience directly, while the other members of the company–the director (Ben Gazzara), playwright (Joan Blondell), costar (Cassavetes), and producer (Paul Stewart)–try to help end her distress....

Paternity Suit Actually, this anonymous rumor mongerer was pathetically behind the times. “Rumor has it,” he confided, “that Joan is pregnant and perhaps the child is not hers [sic] and perhaps the child is a race other than her husband’s!” But Esposito’s pregnancy had been reported in the local press back on March 19. And five days later a local radio personality had mongered the rumor all over town. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The ads for Ray Brown’s appearance call him the “world’s richest bass player”; if that’s true (and it may well be), no one would deserve it more. Brown still displays such remarkable control of his instrument–unflappable time, precision-tuned technique, and a tone solid enough to hang your hat on–that it’s hard to believe he’s a senior citizen (one month shy of 67). And he has played so well for so long that most of us take him for granted, easily overlooking both his place in jazz history and his present-day achievement....

The biggest problem for bands that revolutionize the milieu that spawned them is that their fans expect the revolution to go on forever. Sonic Youth offer a perfect example of a band shackled by their early innovations. The New York quartet’s transgressive formal and tonal experiments in the mid-80s on landmark albums like Bad Moon Rising, Evol, Sister, and Daydream Nation paved the way for countless bands who’ve attained considerably more celebrity, sales, and recognition–from Nirvana and Pavement to White Zombie....

DIONNE FARRIS 3/3, DOUBLE DOOR Initially saddled with the tag “former Arrested Development vocalist,” New Jersey-bred Dionne Farris has quickly and easily beaten back that limiting identifier. On Wild Seed–Wild Flower (Columbia), her fine 1994 debut, the soul singer glides effortlessly between soaring ballads, funkadelicized grooves, smoldering torch songs, spirited pop tunefulness, and lush a cappella crooning, capping much of it with a jazzy lilt. Rather than relying on a single genre for consistency, Farris identifies herself with her supple, powerful voice....

Located on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin’s southwest corner, Cassville is probably best known as the retirement haven of the state’s first governor, Nelson Dewey. A Democrat, Dewey represented Grant County in the territorial legislature in the 1840s, and, as Robert C. Nesbit wrote in Wisconsin: A History, “had two unexceptional terms as governor during which he did nothing to advance his own career.” In 1851, after his second term ended, Dewey built a mansion on some Cassville farmland....

Tom Verlaine Scenes–dramatic, romantic ejaculations of zeitgeist–have been all the rage ever since Sir Thomas Malory decided that King Arthur’s court might have been a really cool place to hang out. There are those who dream of smoking opium with Byron and of being there when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare, of jouncing along in that big ol’ beater down Route 66 with Jack and Neal. Boiled down to the raw bones of legend and art, stripped of hunger and hangovers and all those days when nothing much happened, it all seems more exciting than our own lives–and easier and safer than creating something memorable ourselves....

GRANT PARK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hugh Wolff, back for his third summer at the helm of the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, is one of those all-American baby-boomer maestros destined to take over a major orchestral post. Meanwhile the Paris-born, Harvard-educated Wolff is biding his time getting familiar with contemporary classics and the basic classical repertoire. Judging from his performances with the Grant Parkers and his recordings with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra–his regular crew–he certainly knows how to pump up the excitement....

Guitar Shorty’s claim that he was Jimi Hendrix’s original role model is debatable, but there’s no denying that the veteran fretman’s explosive showmanship and ear-splitting sonic attack are firmly in the Guitar Slim/Buddy Guy/Hendrix mold. Until recently he was primarily a cult figure–he cut a few discs in the 50s for such labels as Cobra and Pull, and he opened shows for stalwarts Otis Rush, Sam Cooke, and Guitar Slim himself during this period....

The whole of Europe was infatuated with castrati. Elevated to the position of stars throughout the 18th century, they raised the art of singing beyond human limits….They were idolized as much as today’s androgynous rock stars such as David Bowie, Prince or Mick Jagger. In fact, 18th-century ‘groupies’ went so far as to wear medallions bearing the portraits of their favorite castrato, a fashion not dissimilar to the pins and T-shirts fans of rock stars wear today....

JOHNNY FRIGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I really don’t know how much time violinist Johnny Frigo spends on his painting, or his poetry, or on cashing his royalty checks for such songs as “Detour Ahead” and “I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out” (both enjoying revived interest for the past few years). If he’d just concentrate on his music, there’s no telling what he might accomplish in his 80th year....

The guitarist who started his career backing up Wilson Pickett, made his mark on records by Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, and served a stint in the Jazz Passengers makes a rare Chicago solo appearance. Ribot, who plays with an acidic, decaying, gutbuckety tone, opts for off-kilter phrasing regardless of the context: foaming sound on a recording of Allen Ginsberg, a jagged free improvisation on a performance of John Zorn’s Cobra....

Lead Story Recent deaths: Gladys Louise White-Black, in Austin; Hallelujah Amen Lee, in Kasilof, Alaska; Kevin C. Tombs, in New York City; Thomas C. Angst, a 31-year-old lawyer who committed suicide after a Pennsylvania Supreme Court disciplinary-board investigation closed in on him; and Eleven Hopson, 74, in Columbus, Ohio, the last of Mary and Thomas Hopson’s 11 children. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People in the Wrong Place...