The first six years Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My daughter is two, and her father crashes the party and sprays green foam-string stuff all over the red decorations I’ve carefully hung with my friends. An older toddler blows out the two candles and screams out in anger when we relight them for the birthday girl. “Two is this,” my daughter tells me, holding up her little fingers in a peace sign....

The Pharcyde Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to groups like the Roots, Spearhead, and the Fugees, innovative and diverse hip-hop isn’t so rare anymore. While hip-hop has evolved, the Pharcyde has managed to stay ahead of the pack with amusing, street-smart rhymes and creative samples. The most serious issue the band addressed in its first album, Bizarre Ride II, was women “passing them by....

MAY If you happen to be out strolling on the near west side tonight and notice phantomlike apparitions on the pavement or the walls of an abandoned factory, don’t panic and call Sightings. You’re probably just seeing the work of local filmmaker Ines Sommer, who will be projecting three different continuous film loops from a loft space at 312 N. May as part of an ongoing project called Don’t Slam the Door on Your Way Out....

Donna Summer Unlike previous transitions from one era of American pop to another, the move away from disco was hostile and abrupt. This, I believe, had to do with one major factor: disco delivered to the mainstream a delicious multicultural blend of sensual funky rhythms wrapped in the showmanship of urban gay extravagance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Summer ran the risk of creating an embarrassing parody of her music and self....

Fontella Bass’s torrid “Rescue Me” on Chess Records’ Checker subsidiary in 1965 established her as a major R & B figure, despite her relatively brief tenure in the limelight. All in all, Bass charted seven times for Chess. After leaving the label in 1968 she toured Europe for a while with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which included her then-husband, trumpeter Lester Bowie. By the early 80s she’d returned to the spiritual music of her youth, but not until this year’s No Ways Tired (Elektra/Nonesuch) has she had the opportunity to embark on a solo project dedicated entirely to gospel....

Jazz has always exhibited a serious machismo: consider how often such attributes as speed, endurance, and propulsion shape the music and our discussions of it. No instrument has embodied these elements more than the trumpet, and few Chicago trumpeters have funneled them into music as splendidly as Guy Fricano. Fricano has an expansive, almost blowsy tone, and he throws it around with no little swagger: you can hear that he loves meeting the challenge of a tricky theme; driving through a tune at high speed, as the rhythm section bears down hard, he looks to be having the time of his life....

Jad Fair is the godfather of a legion of bedroom rockers, amateur musicians, and primitive punks. With his band Half Japanese he’s mapped a territory that bands as disparate as the Pastels, Yo La Tengo, Nirvana, and Some Velvet Sidewalk have devoted their careers to exploring. Jad’s brother David best described that territory in his instructions on how to play guitar: “It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it....

I was interested to read Michael Miner’s column on new Tribune columnist Linda Bowles, the ultraconservative from California [Hot Type, January 26]. I have a theory about Don Wycliff, who edits the editorial pages, and that is that he really doesn’t want to have any conservative columnists but feels like he has to pretend to be fair. I don’t think he really likes women columnists either since the Tribune’s only local one is Joan Beck, older than the hills, who he probably was stuck with....

To reach Nauvoo, escape Chicago on Route 80 heading west to Princeton. The 300-odd-mile drive should take no more than five hours, but add a few during the summer festival of road construction. All routes south and west from Princeton are equally indirect, so take your pick. If your appetite for Icarian history has been stimulated, you might want to stop at the library of Western Illinois University, at Macomb (follow Route 41 south from Galesburg), home of the largest collection of Icariana in the country....

“This is going to be about the not happy ending,” Sandra Gilbert says. She has just stepped to the podium at Roosevelt University’s O’Malley Theatre and the audience for her Chicago Humanities Festival lecture is getting its first good look at her: a middle-aged woman with dark, bobbed hair squinting into the spotlight. The seating in this small theater is steeply pitched, and the 50 or so people who’ve come to hear her see her from above–a small figure in a black well....

Dear Reader, On the subject of Brain Death [January 28] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Father Quay knows where he wants his argument to lead and is willing to get it there by any route. First, he “doubt[s] that brain death is the same thing as death.” Fine! Next, he “doubt[s] that physicians have good criteria for determining when someone is brain dead....

“My dad let me stay up and watch The Day the Earth Stood Still and that was it for me,” says 41-year-old Steven Martin, recalling how he became interested in the theremin. “I just ran around the house making sounds like that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The theremin was originally intended for concert-hall recitals, not for cheesy 50s science fiction flicks. In the late 20s Leon Theremin’s Carnegie Hall performances garnered headlines like “Soviet Edison Takes Music From Air” and “Hands Create Radio Music....

She never should have mentioned the blow job, I’m thinking as I feign interest in the bartender’s love life. Her nervous banter continues. This cop she’s met–“the kind of man you want to give a blow job”–should be here any minute. It’s after midnight; his workday just ended. The bartender can’t stop moving. As she leans over the bar to talk to me, her fingers peck around in a basket of popcorn, her jaw snaps up and down vigorously while she chews kernels, her eyes periodically shift to the front door....

It’s doubtful that anyone has had a more troubled relationship with Nashville than Steve Earle. After dropping out of high school and moving there from Texas in the early 70s, he fell in with legendary outsiders like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, perfecting his distinctive songwriting and developing a penchant for hard drugs. He eventually hooked up with MCA and in 1985 released Guitar Town, a harbinger of “new” country’s return to the music’s roots....

STRIKE UP THE BAND Fresh in its impudence as well as unfamiliarity, this little-known quatrain is one of several discoveries offered by the recently restored stage musical Strike Up the Band, a vastly different animal from the film. A collaboration between songwriters George and Ira Gershwin, playwright George S. Kaufman, and producer Edgar Selwyn, this antiwar operetta epitomized Kaufman’s famous dictum that “satire is what closes Saturday night”: despite critical admiration, it was a commercial flop in its Philadelphia tryout and never made it to Broadway....

Theater Virgin Plans a Big Wedding Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the production opens on May 13, Tomaska hopes to attract as many as 225 people per performance, at a hefty $45 to $55 a ticket, to witness the staged nuptials and join in the subsequent dancing and dinner of lasagna, salad, and wedding cake. He is mounting the show with the help of 20 investors, mostly from New York and Chicago, who could get back their investment in as few as ten weeks if the show plays to capacity early in its open-ended run....

At a time when arts education is considered a luxury and building prisons is regarded as the only practical response to crime, a company like the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit does double duty. It not only provides talented, eager, disadvantaged kids with increasingly rare writing, directing, and performing experience, it also provides a clear-eyed view of lower-class life that’s in marked contrast to the Minicam melodramas of local news and the rhetoric of politicians....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have occasionally wondered whether Bill Wyman writes some of the things he does just to add spice to the Letters page. The trashing of him in those columns is evolving into an advanced art form, while Wyman himself appears to be devolving into a lower life form. His comments on Jerry Garcia were the latest evidence [Hitsville, August 25]....

Let’s start with the bad news, which also happens to be the good news. With the erosion of state funding virtually everywhere and the concomitant streamlining of many film festivals toward certifiable hits–basically what an audience already knows, or worse, what it thinks it knows–there isn’t a great deal of difference anymore between the lineups of most large international festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, and even Chicago. By and large, the critics at Toronto last month, myself included, who thought it was an unusually good festival were those who hadn’t made it to the previous three big festivals....

Late October 1991 The plane bumps and rolls on the landing strip. Rice paddies are still outside my window. The monsoon is dumping sheets of water on the taxiing plane. In the aisle a group of Taiwanese wheeler-dealers in garish shoes and wide ties are being told to remain seated. I stare out, looking for something profound. An abandoned B-52 or a wrecked tank or a bomb crater would be great....