This bass-drums-guitar trio from Portland, Oregon, specializes in raucous punk/pop tunes rendered with artless boy/girl singing. In other words, they’re not much different than about 5,000 other alternative bands; however, like HŸsker DŸ and the Replacements, Hazel have that all-too-rare gift for seamlessly blending feral energy and potent melody. Their new sophomore LP, Are You Going to Eat That (Sub Pop), is packed with three-minute joyrides: almost every tune features solid hooks, interesting instrumental breaks, and giddily reckless playing....

Not bad, especially as an excuse to bring together many of the best Hollywood actresses around–Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Samantha Mathis, Kate Nelligan, Winona Ryder, Jean Simmons, Lois Smith, and Alfre Woodard–not to mention Maya Angelou in a cameo. Jane Anderson’s adaptation of Whitney Otto’s novel focuses on the summer a Berkeley graduate student (Ryder) spends with her grandmother and great aunt (Burstyn and Bancroft) while mulling over a marriage proposal from her boyfriend (Dermot Mulroney)....

Few events in Chicago’s musical history have attracted as much attention, or galvanized as much controversy, as the creation of the cooperative Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Through the European travels of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the individual efforts of such artists as Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams, the AACM came to emblematize a unique midwestern take on the issues of freedom and space that faced jazz in the 1960s; to many listeners around the world it represented the “avant-garde” at large....

Lead Story In Payson, Arizona, in a July pretrial hearing on a slander lawsuit, Judge Michael Flournoy permitted “testimony” from a man who’d been dead for 500 years. Channeler Trina Kamp took the witness stand and “contacted” the spiritual leader of the Church of the Immortal Consciousness, the late Dr. Pahlvon Duran, to “explain” that a local couple’s attack against the church was wrong. Judge Flournoy said later that he’d allowed the seance because he thought Kamp would drop the lawsuit once Duran’s testimony was heard....

Outrage is the most basic, but also the most limited, of political emotions. It can spur one to action–but it can also lead to a peculiar paralysis. We can gain a certain smug satisfaction in outrage, taking refuge in our own offended purity. This is why the literature of exposure rarely serves to eradicate what it exposes. The problem isn’t that people don’t know that evil exists. The real problem is that they don’t care–or that they do care but can’t see what can be done about it....

Getting Married Northlight Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two current productions focus on Shaw the wordsmith. Eschewing all but bare-bones setting and costume, Getting Married and Don Juan in Hell are both played as readers theater, with actors using scripts as they speak their dialogue from music stands. The lack of visual distraction doesn’t seem to bother the audiences a whit; finely crafted wordplay is as inherently theatrical as elaborate stagecraft....

Sneak Attack on Stagebill But even if Marcus finds a way around Stagebill’s contracts, some venues, such as the Theatre Building, aren’t inclined to make the break. “It’s not the way I do business,” says Ruth Higgins of the Theatre Building, which uses Stagebill and rents space to a number of small companies. Yet other major venues don’t have a formal Stagebill contract. One of these is the Ivanhoe Theater, though the three theaters in the Ivanhoe use Stagebill....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beyond that, why would anybody use Smashing Pumpkins or Soul Asylum as case studies to argue the beauty of a record company’s promo policies [Letters, January 6]? The Pumpkins’ album debuted in the top 5 and stayed in the top 20 for quite a while–the kind of action usually associated with bands that have built up a large, loyal fan base through touring....

MAD FOREST Remains Theatre at the Theatre Building Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Churchill went to Romania in 1990 to find that voice. She spent a month documenting the changes that were taking place there (long after the media–the American media at any rate–had tired of them), but what she brought back is a play that’s largely about silences. Greif seems to understand these miserable, enforced silences, and from the very first scene he allows them as much importance as any long speech....

A STAB AT FIXING Anyone who has taken a play-writing class knows that without conflict, there is no drama. Gordon Hoffman’s new play, A Stab at Fixing, overflows with conflict. In it two couples confront all the sordid details of their relationships, from simple jealousy to infidelity to physical abuse. All of this nearly leads to murder. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play begins as Larry (E....

The Improv Institute’s first home, a rented storefront on Belmont west of Western, wasn’t far from the rest of the off-Loop theater community, but it seemed like another world. You never saw anyone walking down the sidewalk, and even cars seemed to avoid this stretch of Belmont. The streetlights were always out, too, which meant that it was perpetually cloaked in sinister shadows. And what went on inside was unlike almost anything going on elsewhere in the city....

A Little Princess With Liesel Matthews, Liam Cunningham, Eleanor Bron, and Errol Sitahal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cuaron makes us feel the conflict between East and West visually as well as emotionally. In India the sand is the color of turmeric, the tropical air is spicy, “tigers sleep under trees,” ancient statues rise out of swimming holes like mythical creatures, children share the cooling waters with pachyderms, and “the sky is the color of a peacock’s tail....

Funding the Arts Doesn’t Cost, It Pays! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s well known that nonprofit arts organizations contribute a great deal to the state economy, but a study funded by the Illinois Arts Alliance Foundation has finally come up with a hard number: $880 million. The figure was calculated by the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand using data collected primarily from two sources: grant applicants to the Illinois Arts Council and a random survey of Chicago museum visitors....

FRIENDS WITH FIRE ARMS: A FAREWELL TO FEMINISM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maguire’s films, which usually alternate with Killen’s performance but sometimes run simultaneously, are a wonderful addition, acting almost as a visual percussion line to the story. Especially successful is a short film in which a child or children are beseeching their mother to get up and make breakfast: while we see an adult’s hand toasting and serving a frozen waffle, we hear on the sound track a child’s cries repeated and magnified into a deafening cacophony....

A sign on a tree by the front gate says Janice Taylor’s yard sale occurs “12 to dark. Sunday and ALL WEEK.” If you’ve just moved to Wrigleyville, Taylor will try to interest you in buying something, though it may not be exactly what you’re looking for. Today she has a variety of items on display in front of her white frame house on the corner of Cornelia and Sheffield. There’s a green-and-white owl-shaped ceramic lamp stand, a finished wooden box that she says “could be a stereo cabinet, a coffee table, or a computer table,” a fan, dozens of books, copies of Muscle & Fitness magazine, a tennis racket, a dartboard, a terrarium, various pieces of wicker furniture, some rugs and doormats, a plastic shark with a female torso in its mouth, a mini billiards table, a set of encyclopedias from the 1960s, a Lollapalooza T-shirt, ski boots, and a vacuum cleaner....

A classic jazz stereotype–a staple of the jokes jazzmen tell among themselves–pivots on the lack of musicianship among female vocalists. Kimberly Gordon changes, in fact defies, the punch line whenever she takes the stage. She thinks like a musician; instead of displaying that mentality in a series of scat improvisations, she prefers to apply her burgeoning skills in swing and phrasing to the melodies as written. This approach allows her to showcase her round, dusky, indigo voice; if sapphires could sing, I imagine they’d have a similar sound....

With all of the recent attention on Steve Albini, recording engineer (and Steve Albini, rabble-rousing Reader letter writer), his most important contributions have unfortunately gotten short shrift. With Big Black and later Rapeman, Albini set a certain standard for rock extremes. His musical achievements–adopting the brittle metallic guitar of Gang of Four’s Andy Gill and turning it into a wheezing, razor-edged, corrosive menace, then adding huge, relentless machine rhythms and bludgeoning bass lines–have inspired more mediocre copycats than anyone should have on his conscience....

** FORREST GUMP (Worth seeing) Directed by Robert Zemeckis Written by Eric Roth With Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, Sally Field, Michael Humphreys, and Hanna Hall. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Of all the forms of genius,” Thornton Wilder wrote in The Woman of Andros (1930), “goodness has the longest awkward age”; five years later he made this the epigraph for his Heaven’s My Destination, a novel about another saintly fool....

Sun-Times Sees Future: It’s Black Scores of Sun-Times reporters woke up last Monday never having heard of the American Publishing Company of West Frankfort, Illinois. In 1992 Black, who’s 49, was described in the trade magazine NewsInc. as possessing “a searing ambition, which has spilled out onto the world stage.” Hollinger already owns the Jerusalem Post, London’s Daily Telegraph, more than 280 daily and weekly papers in the U.S., and various papers in Canada and Australia....

THE CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s easy to see how a synopsis of the play, whose focus is the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, might have intrigued the folks at Interplay, where it’s receiving its Chicago premiere. Based on archaeologist Howard Carter’s expeditions in the late teens and early 20s with his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, and his sponsor’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, The Curse of the Pharaohs promises sophisticated entertainment on the order of an Agatha Christie novel, complete with dry British wit, romantic exchanges between Carter and Lady Evelyn, and of course the legendary curse....