The Contract With America is “an instrument to help repair a fundamental disconnection between citizens and their elected officials,” according to its Republican drafters. The 367 candidates who signed on last September thought their legislative agenda was in sync with the thinking of average citizens. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Chicago artist Mary Ellen Croteau wants to let them know otherwise. “They make it sound like the American public is in total agreement with it,” she says, “when in fact most people are not, if they even know what it is....

Led by programmer Geoff Barrow and singer and lyricist Beth Gibbons, the electronic-music group Portishead create something very close to ambient trance music, but with a dedication to drama and dynamics that neutralizes the music’s characteristic sameness. While synthesizers, samples, and programming are among their tools, they insert enough acoustic instruments–real drums, even a trumpet and a flute, though little in the way of guitar–to humanize the machinery. And they top this all off with the remarkable vocalizing of Gibbons: a Billie Holiday-ish wail of utter emotional devastation....

England’s Stereolab provide the perfect model for how a band becomes more than the sum of its influences. They combined the static, hypnotic grooves first crafted by the German band Neu, the churning strumfests of the Velvet Underground, the primitive, wheezing synthesizers employed by other important Krautrock outfits like Cluster and Kraftwerk, and an incongruous distillation of exotica (that 50s equivalent of easy listening) and boldly drove this idiosyncratic mix into pop terrain....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Were you shocked by the survey that showed (among other things) that less than one-quarter of Americans polled could name both U.S. senators from their state, and four of ten can’t name the vice president? Don’t be. Ignorance is chronic and hasn’t toppled the republic yet. Tucked away in the Washington Post National Weekly’s report on the sensational study (February 5-11) was this deflating fact: “Surveys indicate that Americans know about as much about politics and government today as they did during the 1940s....

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD A myth persists–in commercials for Country Time Lemonade and Pepperidge Farm cookies, in the songs of John Cougar Mellencamp, in the whimsy of Garrison Keillor–about the basic, pure goodness of our jerkwater hamlets. But there’s always been a dark side to this American dream. Lynch mobs, David Duke, and David Lynch suggest that lurking beneath the sweet smell of hot corn fritters is the stench of evil....

AN EVENING AT THE CAFFE CINO, Retro Theatre Company, at Cafe Voltaire. The Caffe Cino, a crucial place among the many tiny coffeehouse theaters that mushroomed in New York’s Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s, has been eclipsed in recent years by more enduring compatriots like La Mama. But Joe Cino’s little room was the first venue for many young playwrights destined to make names for themselves. And now, decades later in another bare-bones basement coffeehouse, Retro Theatre pays homage to those fledgling wordsmiths with an evening of three one-acts, two from the Caffe Cino’s repertoire and one contemporary work....

Friday 17 Local folks concerned about the pathology of the white overclass are getting together today from 9 to 3 for Ain’t No-Ways Tired: Renewing the Spirit, Continuing the Struggle Against Racism, a conference sponsored by the Anti-Racism Institute of Clergy and Laity Concerned. It features activist-poet Sonia Sanchez and native-rights advocate Esther Yazzie as speakers, along with panels on community radio, youth organizing, and coalition building as well as performances by the Funky Wordsmyths, Red Sands Drum, Voices, and the Pintig Cultural Group....

Ashes of Time Rating *** A must see Directed and written by Wong Kar-wai With Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Kar-fai, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia,Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, and Karina Lau. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact Stanley Kwan and Yim Ho are two of my three favorite Hong Kong directors (Yim Ho is perhaps best known for Homecoming and his work on King of Chess, a feature completed by Tsui Hark)....

In 1978 Jackie Chan launched his career as Asia’s most durable action star with Drunken Master, a martial arts comedy in which he portrayed turn-of-the-century Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung as a comically endearing upstart who overcomes villainy with a unique fighting style. But until now Chan’s never revived the Wong character. Reportedly he decided to make this sequel because his younger box-office rival, Jet Li, has appropriated the role in a series of movies–and because Li, a kung fu champion from China, has a high-kicking style quite different from Wong’s fabled technique of feigning inebriation to lull his enemies....

The label “progressive rock” didn’t always connote the overwrought, empty virtuosity of Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or King Crimson. Long before gongs became a staple for rock drummers, German bands like Can, Neu, and Amon Dul were pushing the envelope in risky but usually interesting ways that relied on ideas rather than technical overkill. More than any of the bands the British music press derisively tagged as “Krautrock,” Faust carried out their breathless musical experiments with staggering verve, energy, creativity, and success....

Driving south on Naper Boulevard from the East-West Tollway you’ll see a string of houses plopped on grass trimmed so short it hurts just to look at it. Grass, even Kentucky bluegrass, is humiliated by harsh mow jobs. It wants to grow tall, have flowers, have sex the same as any plant. But mowing prevents the messy sexual parts of the grass from ever forming. In his recent book Second Nature Michael Pollan jabs, “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death....

Jazz has always adapted its tools and elements to telling personal stories; when those stories stem from a largely self-contained ethnic community, all of jazz expands as a result. Pianist Glenn Horiuchi–like his contemporaries Jon Jang and Fred Ho–has become a leader in using jazz to express his identity as an Asian-American. Horiuchi’s best-known album, Oxnard Beets (Soul Note), delighted critics with its seamless hybridization of jazz and Asian music, much of it written in fairly traditional structures and all of it featuring the standard sax-piano jazz quartet; there he proved his command of a rangy keyboard style conversant with the rudiments of bebop as well as the vistas of free jazz....

Steve Badanes went to Princeton University in the late 60s to study architecture because he liked both art and carpentry, and thought this would be a way to unite them. Once there, he discovered that there was a division of labor. Architects were office-bound professionals in suits, sketching hypothetical structures on drafting boards. Builders were something else entirely: tradesmen in hard hats wielding hammers and bulldozers, following someone else’s rigid plans....

Prior to witnessing their remarkable live energy a couple times last year, I figured Dayton’s Guided by Voices were just another bunch of garage-bound lo-fi enthusiasts: 1993’s Vampire on Titus (Scat), their first widely available recording, sounds like shit, and finding the band’s compelling songcraft amid mounds of tape hiss, dropouts, indecipherable vocals, and often murky guitar-bass bleeding requires no shortage of patience. Headed by vocalist Robert Pollard, who writes most of the tunes, the prolific combo has tended to record at home on four-track devices, although the brand-new Alien Lanes (Matador) dares to dabble with eight-tracks, and on an album due out this fall the band employs a real studio....

HANSEL AND GRETEL This Brothers Grimm tale is grim indeed, full of images of starvation and gluttony. Hansel and Gretel live in a period of famine, and when they spill a pail of precious milk their stepmother plots to “lose” them in the forest so she’ll have two fewer mouths to feed. The bread crumbs they scatter to find their way home are gobbled up by a bird. But most striking are the witch and her gingerbread house, a vision of delight for the gluttonous and the starving–and children, who are often both....

Daniel Oliver In the central white space of Platonic are two silhouettes. On the left is an outline of a figure sitting in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker, though its smooth outlines indicate it is not a tracing of a photo of Rodin; in fact Oliver copied a reproduction of The Thinker in a way that makes it look like a kitsch imitation. This icon of modern profundity and interiority is contemplating the other figure: a large bunnylike toy, its rabbit ears ascending high above the thinker’s head....

Yvonne Welbon, a filmmaker who lived in Taiwan for six years, might have stayed on had it not been for a motorcycle accident that landed her in the hospital for a couple of months six years ago. “That was when I started thinking, Yes, I’ve had a great time, but what am I going to do with my life? Am I Wei Yi-fang [the Mandarin transliteration of her name], an exotic black American in Asia?...

The match seemed perfect: Northlight Theatre needed a permanent home, and National-Louis University wanted a well-regarded Equity company for its 600-seat auditorium. Or as Rene Roy, director of the university’s theater program, puts it: “They view [Northlight] as an amusement park. They see the whole thing as bringing Great America into Wilmette.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Northlight officials didn’t foresee this predicament. National-Louis’s address, after all, is in Evanston, a relatively cosmopolitan community with a supportive attitude toward the arts....

Alejandro the macho busboy still dreams of the night he was seduced by one of his customers, an Anglo performance artist. “We in the food service industry have a saying: Never sexually get involved with your clients,” he asserts. “Leave that to trained psychiatric professionals.” But Alejandro couldn’t resist: “She was so beautiful. And so incredibly blond–like a Spanish TV anchorwoman….I want to conquer her, she wants to conquer me. Which one of us is Columbus and which one of us is Mexico?...

Tribune’s Changing Tempo Tempo had already seen plenty of changes. Tempo editor Rick Kogan succeeded James Warren, who left at the end of 1993 to become the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief. Then Tempo’s staff was broken up last fall, scattering seven feature writers throughout the paper. The new plan called for groups of five writers drawn from anywhere in the paper to rotate in and out of Tempo in four-month stints, something this column called “sort of weird” at the time....