Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past several years, Grant Park has played host to the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, an outfit that in prestige and quality is just a notch or two below the Civic Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s training arm. (Ravinia, oddly enough, doesn’t have such an alliance even though the North Shore has one of the highest concentrations of teenage instrumentalists in the country....

DIRTY THREE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The effects of nonstop touring are palpable on the Dirty Three’s new album, Horse Stories (Touch and Go). In almost a solid year of performing, violinist Warren Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner, and drummer Jim White have struck a balance among the hypnotic grace, gorgeous lyricism, and tumultuous peaks that characterize their work. While they’ve retained the ability to descend into unhinged chaos, they’ve become a much tighter and more intuitive unit, and they’re at their best when they exercise restraint....

Striking a balance between her right leg and the prosthesis on her left, Emina Uzicanin, a five-year-old medical refugee from Sarajevo, stared blankly at an electrical switch on a table in front of her. Flanked by her older sister, their mother, and various other adults, she was poised to light a towering Christmas tree in the lobby of Chicago’s Swissotel. A small audience watched as a photographer, battery packs dangling from her Chanel fanny pack, fired a burst of flashes at the child....

With a Hi-8 camcorder strapped to his helmet, 31-year-old bike messenger turned documentarian Chip Williams spent the fall of 1992 crafting a 22-minute video that portrays a trio of his coworkers as eloquent peripatetics rather than two-wheeled vectors of disaster. Going beyond it-takes-one-to-know-one, Concrete Rodeo delivers the dizzy itineraries of messengers threading the Loop and offers insights into their maligned maverick subculture. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s a service industry,” explains Curt, a messenger who wears a red beret sporting a Boy Scout insignia....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago judge who said “depictions of subordination tend to perpetuate subordination” is absolutely right. I suggest that he along with other antipornography feminists sell their televisions, stop going to any movies, stay away from most magazines and books, and by all means stay out of the adult bookstores. There are many problems with the depiction of women in the media across the board, but just because pornography is an easy target aimed at by fundamentalists, politicians, and guardians of everyone else’s morality but their own does not mean that feminists must take aim as well....

SOULED AMERICAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a busy year for Chicago’s Souled American: they released their sixth and most distinctive album, Notes Campfire (Moll), toured Germany, and played in their hometown three times–and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, it was for Souled American, who’ve been practically invisible here for most of the decade. The ascent of twisted folk- and country-influenced renegades like Will Oldham and Richard Buckner has reopened a door for these obscure pioneers and, at least for now, they’ve decided to use it....

SOMEBODY ELSE’S HOUSE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In these texts–whose rhythms and tone color are unashamedly shaped by their author’s British background and by the influence of such writers as Dylan Thomas and William S. Burroughs–Cale dramatizes the pain of people who lack a sense of their own identity. The hero of “A Trace of Panic”–a brilliant absurdist piece, the theatrical equivalent of underground comics (and with his current short haircut Cale resembles cartoonist Robert Crumb’s early self-portraits)–thinks of himself as a canvas onto which he fastens pieces of other people’s personalities, turning himself into a walking collage....

By Tom Terranova Alderman Bernard Stone of the 50th Ward has a cameo in tonight’s performance of B.S., the Free Associates’ “so real it’ll make you sick!” spoof of TV hospital dramas a la ER and Chicago Hope. The alderman will play himself in this show, so it’s the perfect opportunity for anyone still pissed off about Stone’s Howard Street wall to heckle him. B.S. runs Fridays at 10:30 at the Ivanhoe Theater, 750 W....

Ya gotta have art. From a recent press release from the School of the Art Institute: “In his sculptural installation, Stephen Schofield transforms cloth membranes into crystallized mattresses by soaking them in boiling syrup and inflating them using vacuum cleaners whose air flow has been reversed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Women not welcome here. Sandra Namath tells Jane Easter Bahls about her labor-law class at the University of New Mexico School of Law (Student Lawyer, September): “The professor would ask a question....

End of the N.A.M.E. Game? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A former assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a recent graduate of the master in arts administration program at the School of the Art Institute, Sulyok admits the N.A.M.E. board didn’t paint a rosy picture when he applied for the job, but he says the situation proved even worse than he was led to believe....

Frontiers, which follows roughly 30 pioneer women in Kansas, around the turn of the century, is a celebration of women and their raw strength that’s never shrill, strident, or exclusive. What a pleasure to see a show about women that doesn’t sacrifice stagecraft and solid story telling to an agenda. However important an agenda may be, it’s rarely well served by characters who act only as mouthpieces or dialogue that’s thinly veiled rhetoric....

Gene is an amusing scrap of a band from England. Awhile back it seemed as if the Smiths’ lethal combination of affected vocals (basket case Morrissey) and blasting guitars (the obsessive Johnny Marr) would disappear without a trace; now suddenly here’s a band doing exactly the same thing. Only not as well. The Smiths were very good, so Gene isn’t necessarily that bad. Warbler Martin Rossiter is a bit shameless but sincere in his emotions, and he’s occasionally persuasive in his portraits of small-town cruelty (“Sleep Well Tonight”) and alienation (“Left-Handed”)....

The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here to-day, and elsewhere to-morrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced. Among the trees the air pools still and warm, though above me I can see the wind swaying the high crowns of the white oak trees....

One cofounder describes the Jazz Passengers as a synthesis of their own manic and depressive personalities. The group’s eclectic, at times hyperventilated range gives the band a gloss that verges on trendiness. And the bristly energy emanating from its front line–sax, trombone, vibes, and violin–has plenty of lower-Manhattan glamour but not much classic Manhattan romance. For all these reasons, the prospect of the Jazz Passengers In Love, as their new album on High Street declares, raises eyebrows; so does the presence of an unlikely bevy of vocalists, with performances that include the hermaphrodite stylings of Jimmy Scott, the street-gospel punch of Chicago’s Mavis Staples, and the icy symmetry of that old blondie Deborah Harry somewhere in the middle....

KARTIK SESHADRI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More often than not, the sitar is included in Western music for exotic, coloristic effect, to suggest, in a superficial way, Eastern beatitude. But the seven-stringed, lutelike instrument, which has been around in its native India for more than seven centuries, is far more versatile and sophisticated than its popular usages let on. Much of India’s classical repertoire–the thousands of orally preserved melodic patterns called ragas, whose ancestry can be traced to Vedic hymns–can be performed on it....

There are outlaws and then there are outlaws. The old-fashioned country kind, your Waylons and Willies, were a step or two above horse thieves, sure, but still rough-edged and not particularly spic and span hygenically speaking. Lyle Lovett, in contrast, is a white-collar criminal who’s living out his life in luxury. His newset, Joshua Judges Ruth, is a typically subversive country-pop-gospel comer that mixes his penetrating sardonicism with warm, impeccable production....

Montserrat Caballe doesn’t quite fit the stereotype of the fading diva who hits the recital circuit to rekindle her glory days. At 62 the Spanish soprano still retains much of the legendary pianissimo in her lustrous voice, and as a seasoned veteran of the most prestigious opera houses, she knows how to artfully cover her shortcomings, which these days include a lack of control in the top registers. Though her physical immobility often cramps her acting style, her vocal flexibility and energy remain impressive, allowing her to traverse emotional extremes....

The Insistent Subject: The three very different self-portraitists have all received much critical attention, and their work is interesting enough to reward careful viewing. But the meaning of their pictures is dependent on the fact that they’re self-portraits, a fact that also insulates the work from some kinds of criticism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Coplans, ex-painter and former editor of Artforum, makes large black-and-white images of his aging body, photographed with a clarity that proclaims each millimeter of his skin worthy of attention....

At the center of this high-tech policier is a stoic detective (Danny Lee from John Woo’s The Killer) obsessed with hunting down his quarry, a gang leader susceptible to bouts of kindness (Anthony Wong). But the plot–with its obvious references to The Fugitive–hardly matters. Director Kirk Wong seems much more preoccupied with conveying the nihilistic paranoia that permeates both the world of law and the crime world. Every bloody break-in is counterpointed by a rash of police brutality; street-gang extortionists are equated with cops attempting to extract confessions....

Scalped Again! While events there didn’t lead them to believe that the store employees were in on the scam–as the Tower customers had–Blockbuster customers too protested after it became clear that a band of scalpers had succeeded in stacking their operatives at the front of the line for tickets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Complaints went nowhere. “I said to [the person who seemed to be in charge], ‘Hey look, some sort of a scam is being run here,’” says Schwartz....