Power isn’t only the ultimate aphrodisiac, it’s the ultimate hallucinogen–and satirist Paul Krassner has been talking America through the bad trips of its leaders for the last 40 years. A veteran stand-up comic, seminal figure in the underground press, and cofounder of the Yippie party, Krassner fuses absurd fact with freewheeling fantasy in his biting, sometimes bilious humor, which skewers the rampant paranoia, hypocrisy, delusion, and warped sexuality that infect public figures regardless of race, religion, or ideological orientation....

Formed by Moonshake’s former vocalist/guitarist Margaret Fielder, its former bassist John Frenett, and noted producer Guy Fixsen, Laika belongs to the swelling ranks of rock bands, mostly English, that immerse themselves in dance-music technology and deconstruct it: Techno Animal, Scorn, God, Ice, Chicago’s Tortoise, and the current lineup of Moonshake. On their striking debut album, Silver Apples of the Moon (Too Pure/American)–the title’s lifted from a work by electronic-music pioneer Morton Subotnick–Laika coalesce a mind-blowing array of hyperfrenetic rhythms, skeletal melodies, Can-like basslines, wafting fragments of flute lines, and various other floating sounds into music unlike much else recorded before....

Chris Pullman did not own a TV when he began his career as a designer in 1973 at WGBH, the Boston station that produces about one-third of prime-time PBS programming. At the time, Pullman, a free-lance designer, was teaching design at Yale University. New Haven lacked a public television station and WGBH’s signal didn’t reach that part of Connecticut. Although Pullman watched cartoons as a kid in Wilmette, his circle at Yale subscribed to the “vast wasteland” view of the tube....

Robynne M. Gravenhorst and Debra Levasseur Lottman The Crow bows to the audience, doffing his top hat, strutting across the ominously darkened stage. His ragged black suit makes his glittering red eyes bright as he repeats rounded gestures of lifting, cradling, and carrying so abstract he sometimes seems to be begging or inviting us to dance. But these are the gestures of a grave robber, one of les corbeaux (“the crows”) at the turn of the century pilfering bodies to be used in illegal dissections....

The bouncy, jouncy, jingle-belling, present-selling, plastic Christmas clamor in every store and shopping mall (how does anyone work retail at this time of year and stay sane?) is one of the best reasons I know for ordering gifts from catalogs. But when it’s carefully chosen and sparingly played, Christmas music can be one of the true joys of the season. Happily there’s a lot of good Christmas music available, and a variety of fine Chicago choruses have made recordings for the holiday....

Back in the distant 70s Ray Wylie Hubbard was among the first wave of Texas country outsiders, outlaws like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Billie Joe Shaver. But after Jerry Jeff Walker scored a hit with Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” Hubbard faded into relative obscurity, his name unknown outside of Texas. After nearly two decades of roughneck honky-tonks, hard drinking, and lots of drugs, he’s back and a changed man thanks to marriage and children....

Repressed Memories, Ruptured Families So Kate sued her parents and grandparents for $20 million. Her therapist, Douglas Sawin, backed her story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kate describes herself as a “survivor” of childhood, although precious little of her seems intact. When Bikel asks if the ritual abuse is more painful to contemplate than her mother’s indifference, Kate replies that the abuse was “just a fact of life....

There’s no mystery behind the consistently astounding talent and range of Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. Regardless of the situation–solo, quartet, with AEC–his performances bristle with thoughtfulness and intriguing ideas; they’re not always successful, but never for lack of trying. Mitchell’s somewhat infrequent Chicago gigs are always worth checking out, but what makes this one particularly noteworthy is the Chicago debut of the terrific New York pianist Matthew Shipp....

SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Tilson Thomas, for my money, is the best American conductor around. More consistently thoughtful and engaging (not to mention photogenic) than National Symphony Orchestra’s Leonard Slatkin or Baltimore’s David Zinman and more riveting a presence on the podium and more catholic in his tastes than Seattle’s Gerard Schwarz, Tilson Thomas is the logical heir to the legacy of Leonard Bernstein, to whom he’s often compared....

“When I started out fifteen years ago, it was almost like finding a baby on the doorstep, or seeing a wounded animal or a wounded person,” local Nature Conservancy prairie and savanna restorer Steve Packard says in one chapter of the new book Green Means: Living Gently on the Planet. “It just called to me. It said, ‘I need help.’ And I started working on this and trying to figure out how to bring these things back....

States we never expected to have a good word for. From the Kentucky Supreme Court’s September decision striking down that state’s anti-sodomy laws as unconstitutional: “‘Equal Justice Under Law’ inscribed above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court, expresses the unique goal to which all humanity aspires. In Kentucky it is more than a mere aspiration” (Civil Liberties, Winter). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Deja vu all over again....

Don’t call us “urbanites,” you reactionary. We’re “people in cities.” The Animals’ Agenda reports on the following resolution, among many passed at a 47-group “Summit for the Animals” held in Saint Louis in April: “We agree that the terms ‘zoo animals,’ ‘farm animals,’ and ‘laboratory animals’ will be replaced with the terms ‘animals in zoos,’ ‘animals on farms,’ and ‘animals in laboratories.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Equally positioned whites and blacks have highly unequal amounts of wealth,” report sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in their new book Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality....

THE LAST WORD ON CIRCUMCISION Cecil continues to get denunciations from opponents of routine infant circumcision (January 28, March 25) who feel that if you’re not adamantly against this procedure you’re in favor of it. Cecil despairs of making any headway against this attitude, but will say yet again that in his view, and so far as he can tell in the view of the medical establishment, no compelling argument can be made either way....

SALON DES REFUSES Thorne’s opening exhibit, “Salon des Refuses,” was advertised as open to any artist who’d ever been rejected in any way–by an art jury, by a lover. While some of the work (and some of the best work) came from friends who are fellow students or recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute, some was submitted by people who wandered in off the street. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Abraham offers a clear analysis of this nation’s two-tiered health system, one in which poor people have few avenues to primary or preventive health services and generally receive care only after it’s too late to effectively restore them to health. In the book, she describes Mount Sinai as the exception to the rule, accurately portraying our mission as a private hospital doing the work of a public facility....

Watchdog…and a vision like saint Paul’s, Infectious Productions, at Cafe Voltaire. This 1990 one-act explodes with the rage of ACT UP, the fearsome, now fragmented radical AIDS group. Playwright Madrid Saint Angelo, who directs this Chicago premiere, is an AIDS activist who was indicted for, but not convicted of, organizing a plot to kill the Pope. And you can taste his love/hate affair with the Catholic faith in this play. Joey, a 25-year-old HIV-positive man, is about to kill himself when he’s visited by Watchdog, a hate-mongering messenger from God in a hideous leisure suit....

Gustave Caillebotte: –Robert Louis Stevenson, 1871 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider The Pont de l’Europe (1876). There are no dancing daubs here, no luscious brush strokes. Everything is tight, controlled, exact. Caillebotte’s tunneling perspective, drawn in all likelihood from a photograph, sucks your eye forward along the monumental ironwork of the bridge, and just at the vanishing point is the head of the gentleman striding swiftly out of the picture....

The fest finishes off this weekend with performances by the Netherlands’ Dogtroep and Ireland’s Gate Theatre; also on the agenda are breakfast and lunch presentations, postshow discussions, and professional workshops. Performances take place at DePaul University’s Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E. Balbo, and the Navy Pier Skyline Stage, 600 E. Grand (at Lake Michigan); other programs will be held at the Columbia College Theater/Music Center, 72 E. 11th, and the Goodman Theatre Studio, 200 S....

Rebecca Morris Piper But does she want us to get hungry or nauseous? I think she wants us to get nostalgic. In all likelihood she grew up eating this stuff, preferred Quarter Pounders to her mother’s cooking, and maybe even celebrated a few birthdays in the McCheese party room. She got older, however, went to art school, experimented with vegetarianism, and read Noam Chomsky. She started to regard fast food served in brown, orange, and yellow packaging and buildings as cruel, corporate, and cholesterol laden....

Valerie Beller at Nomad Central, September 7-10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the opening weekend of the River North gallery season I discovered three abstract artists who incorporate images of the double helix in their work. Because my day job is editing manuscripts for the American Journal of Human Genetics, I paid attention, noticing especially how these artists seemed happily unaware of the debates over funding for the Human Genome Project, the ethical issues related to genetic engineering, and the elaborate, laborious procedures that advance this science, though journalists often suggest that progress is made at a terrific speed....