Liz Phair sayss:he decided some years ago that her first record would be a double album; having heard that Exile on Main St. was a fine example of the form, she immersed herself in it. The title of her eventual debut, Exile in Guyville, is a grateful salute. (The rest of the title is a sardonic nod to the Wicker Park band scene dubbed “Guyville” on the last Urge Overkill album....

It’s November, and I’m sitting in the cozy confines of the Chicago Dramatists Workshop at Milwaukee and Chicago avenues. I’m here to review one of the first performances of Terry Abrahamson’s comedy-musical The Brat Race, but the concept, as they say in Yiddish, is nicht fur mir. Four couples, one pair each of yuppies, African Americans, WASPs, and lesbians, are struggling to get their children into prestigious private schools. Through songs and short scenes, Abrahamson’s musical delves into the angst of writing applications for a three-year-old, trying to convince the schools’ snobby arbiters that you’ve produced the next Albert Einstein....

Some free music has the impact of a knockout punch: it swells and explodes with ballistic intensity. Joel Futterman approaches the piano with precisely this pugilistic power, but he does so with real dexterity, like a giant gently cradling a baby. You can hear this gentle thunder on his recent solo outing, Silhouettes (Progressive), where his years of merciless practicing pay off. Based in Virginia Beach, Virginia–far outside any free-music scene whatsoever–Futterman is a Chicagoan by birth, and he came up playing with bandleader Gene Shaw....

Spring was dry in eastern Iowa this year. Sandbars lay exposed in the channels of rivers that last summer were inundating whole towns. Farmers were hauling away the logs, tree roots, and sand left by last year’s flood. Long dust plumes marked the movement of tractors putting in the corn crop. The Corps of Engineers has been fighting a battle against the Mississippi for the past century. The battle escalated in 1936 with the passage of the federal Flood Control Act....

By Scott Berinato At the front of the barge two Swedish hydraulic cranes droop out over the river. Eight levers in the pilothouse control the cranes–rotating them, swinging them at the elbow, extending their arms up to 28 feet, spinning the buckets. The buckets look clumsy, but they can snatch up branches that are caught between rocks as well as haul 2,000-pound limbs from beneath the water. “Probably a good bowler who bowled a 98 that day....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recent newsworthy works of art: a toilet brush, soon to be available for around $30 in the U.S., from the noted French designer Philippe Starck, who calls the work “the apotheosis of my career”; a cage of spiders, snakes, scorpions, and frogs devouring each other as a testament to a Darwinian world, from Chinese artist Huang Yon Ping at a show in Paris last November; and a poem about U....

Blue Humans Arthur Doyle Plays and Sings From the Songbook Volume One Rudolph Grey (Agaric) Donald Miller The Blue Humans’ Live–N.Y. 1980 is a period piece from a New York scene that wasn’t well documented. In 1980 downtown New York was in a sorta post-Contortions funk. The no-wave and post-no-wave bands were never popular, and their development had come to a standstill. But there was some interesting crossbreeding with and appreciation for the post-Trane jazz players of the second loft era....

Snowplows clean the streets. Cars whiz down Lake Shore Drive. Shoppers parade past the Water Tower. Garbage gets picked up and people play touch football in the park. Airplanes take off, boats sail on the lake. There are baseball stadiums and museums. It’s all set to peppy music and intercut with shots of Mayor Daley shaking hands, smiling, speaking in public. These are the opening credits of Chicago Works, the public-access cable show produced by the mayor’s press office....

On the surface they couldn’t be more different: Jack Smith, the flamboyantly gay director-actor best known for his 1963 underground sex film Flaming Creatures, and Roy Cohn, the right-wing power broker who denied being homosexual up to the day he died of AIDS. But as actor Ron Vawter and director Jill Godmilow reveal in this film, Smith and Cohn were both performers playing absurd roles. Vawter, a superb actor whose one-man stage show is the basis for Godmilow’s movie, portrays Smith and Cohn in two separate monologues....

The sound of Trace, the first release from Jay Farrar’s Son Volt, is the sound of the other shoe dropping on the demise of Uncle Tupelo. Tupelo fans–whose devotion to the country-rock ensemble led by Farrar and Jeff Tweedy made up for their lack of numbers—seemed partial to Farrar’s big broad voice and passionate, mournful songs. But Tweedy, whose band Wilco bowed earlier this year, surprised with dense and deep songwriting and an unexpected pop openness....

Don’t assume anything. This isn’t a story about some down-on-his-luck street musician who doesn’t have what it takes to make it big. Levie Ball doesn’t have to play in this tunnel if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t rely on your spare change to make ends meet. And just because he plays here eight hours a day doesn’t mean that he can’t get a gig. He’s played jazz with Bill McFarland....

Listening to on aging diva perform has its hazards and its rewards. When Maria Callas gave her farewell concerts, for example, audiences were treated to the spectacle of a voice post its prime trying to recapture former glories. There was pathos in the legendary soprano’s seeming acknowledgment of her decline, yet there was also poignance in her attempt to assert her superb artistry. The Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles, by most accounts, still has her remarkable voice at age 70....

BIGFEET During the 80s Royce stopped acting. She wrote movie-of-the-week scripts and projects for such corporate clients as Quaker Oats, McDonald’s, AT&T, and Allstate. She was the quintessential woman of the 80s: a high-powered, dress-for-success baby boomer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Judging from the stories she tells in Bigfeet, as Royce makes her transition into the 90s the catch phrase will be “messed-up but still hoping....

If you thought the families in Twister and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape were dysfunctional, take a gander at the two families of infantile fruitcakes in the first English-language movie (1993) by Bosnian-born Emir Kusturica (When Father Was Away on Business, Time of the Gypsies). An orphan (Johnny Depp) who works for the New York Department of Fish and Game is asked to serve as best man at the wedding of his uncle (Jerry Lewis), an Arizona Cadillac dealer who’s marrying a Polish woman (Paulina Porizkova) less than half his age....

By Cara Jepsen House plants, hanging baskets, fruits, herbs, vegetables, wild flowers, shrubs, annuals, and perennials will be on sale at this weekend’s garden fair in Hyde Park. Street gardeners who want to beautify public areas in Hyde Park and Kenwood may apply for $30 worth of free plants, which they’ll be expected to tend throughout the growing season. The fair is sponsored by the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference and takes place from 9 to 6 today and 9 to 4 tomorrow at 55th and Lake Park....

CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the preeminent classical ensembles in the country, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, under the aegis of director David Shifrin, has stayed true to its 1969 charter by presenting the full extent of the chamber canon. The roster of this exclusive collective has changed a few times over the years. One trait of the current crop is youthful brio; most of the members who’ll show up for this Ravinia recital are under 50, and at least one, bassist Edgar Meyer, is noted for his freewheeling style and crossover bent....

There’s nothing very remarkable about the Blue Rider space–it’s just another storefront theater with exposed brick walls, a few inconvenient metal structural supports, an industrial-looking security gate over the door to the alley, a weird balcony like some kid’s urban-style tree house. But somehow Nana Shineflug, in her new Crash and Burn, makes this space seem a metaphor for all the harsh conditions of contemporary life, as four dancers from her Chicago Moving Company and Krenly Guzman (borrowed from Mordine & Company Dance Theatre) hurl themselves at each other, at the walls, at the security gate, and cling for dear life....

John Mendelssohn Critic John Mendelssohn does his best to bear this prejudice out with a purposefully ridiculous scene at the start of his autobiography, I, Caramba, a combination book and CD just released by Rhino Records. His band Christopher Milk is being mobbed by fans on the way to play before a crowd of 17,000 in his hometown of LA. It’s a fantasy of course, though Christopher Milk did put out a couple of albums in 1971 and ’72....

To make his short Film Feedback, Tony Conrad set up a camera, fast-processing apparatus, and projector in close proximity so that a continuous unexposed reel was processed right out of the camera and then fed directly into the projector to be refilmed by the camera. The result is a series of receding rectangles: black inside white, then white inside black, and so on. Like the images reflected in two parallel mirrors, the smaller rectangles get fuzzier and fuzzier, and after 15 minutes, as the film approaches cinema’s limits of resolution, it ends....

Fruteland Jackson is an earnest young bluesman bent on an almost heroically difficult mission: to fuse the cadences, harmonies, and eloquently simple musical stylings of the southern folk-blues tradition to a late-20th-century lyric sensibility without compromising the integrity of either. Jackson’s musical vision is still developing: he’s capable of fusing disparate traditional influences–ranging from the vaudeville-laced melodicism of Blind Willie McTell to the searing slide of the Robert Johnson-Elmore James lineage–into a pretty coherent whole; sometimes, though, he loses direction and attempts to cover with a twangy, folky humming and strumming that detracts from the blues feel....