There’s a weird, discombobulating quality to Lamprey, from Dutch rockers Bettie Serveert. Taken discretely, the record is impressive: singer Carol van Dijk has a supple, soaring voice, the band seems to have an enviable control of dynamics, and its slightly off-kilter command of English produces some felicitous wordplay. The discombobulating aspect is that this is the band’s second album; its first, Palomine, was all that and a lot more: the songs were simply killer, the dynamic shifts tore your head off, and the album’s silky production was a low-budget, irresistible charmer....

BUCKET OF BLOOD–THE MUSICAL Some Mo’ Productions at Factory Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Bucket of Blood, unlike Reefer Madness or even Night of the Living Dead, is a masterpiece of its genre. More black comedy than scary movie–ads promised, “You’ll be sick, sick, sick–from LAUGHING!”–A Bucket of Blood is well written and reasonably well acted, and has a tight structure, a fast-moving story, and surprisingly three-dimensional characters....

Bullish Brits in a Bearish Market Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Belloc Lowndes Fine Arts, which will feature the work of contemporary British artists such as Howard Hodgkin and John Carter, is only the second gallery with British roots to open in Chicago in recent memory. The other, Hildt Galleries, which recently moved from 6 W. Hubbard to larger quarters at the corner of State and Oak, features 19th-century and early 20th-century British, European, and American paintings....

Friday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since premiering her one-woman show Temporary Girl at the late, lamented Lower Links two years ago, Lisa Kotin has done everything from a four-month run at the Improv’s Backstage Theater to acclaimed performances in festivals in San Francisco and Edinburgh. The show, an edgy, offbeat collection of skits and films about life as a temporary office worker, returns for a summer’s worth of performances at the Famous Door Theater, in the Jane Addams Hull House, 3212 N....

DAMN YANKEES, Shubert Theatre. This 1955 musical, created by director-playwright George Abbott and Brill Building tunesmiths Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, is quintessential post-World War II Joe Sixpack Americana–brash, loud, and schmaltzy. So 50s clown prince Jerry Lewis would seem an inspired choice to star in this Broadway (now touring) revival as Mr. Applegate, the devil to whom aging baseball fan Joe Boyd sells his soul in return for youth and fame as a star batter for the Washington Senators....

ILLINOIS PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title of Lita Grier’s Renascence for flute and orchestra holds a double meaning: the ten-minute concertino not only was adapted from a sonata composed three decades ago but also signals the rebirth of Grier’s composing career, dormant since the mid-60s. At 16 Grier won a New York Philharmonic young composers’ contest. While at the Juilliard she prepped with Peter Mennin, and at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she earned her master’s, her teachers included Roy Harris and Lukas Foss....

Four years ago, pastry chefs Rochelle Huppin-Fleck and Kathleen Magee didn’t have a thing to wear in the kitchen. Recent graduates of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, they had both landed jobs at trendy LA restaurants, only to find that the uniforms were sized for men, had no style, and were made of polyester blends that turned a long session in a steamy kitchen into Body Heat without the sex....

Dave Pyle isn’t the average Elvis impersonator–even if he wears a white jumpsuit. His hour-long show combines witty lyrics with karate kicks and stage banter about blue-bag recycling, vegetarianism, and environmental racism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m just tryin’ to save the planet one song at a time,” says Pyle, whose stage persona is Green E., the “environmental Elvis.” His shtick consists of spin-off songs with titles like “Don’t Waste Fuel” (“Don’t Be Cruel”), “Viva Felafel” (“Viva Las Vegas”), “Burning Sludge” (“Burning Love”), and “In the Landfill” (“In the Ghetto”)....

Local Boys Make Movie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their second film–tentatively titled Objects, but “we’re leaning strongly toward” changing the name to Peoria Babylon, says Diller–is about two good friends, Jon and Candy, who own Peoria’s “most prestigious and only art gallery.” When business goes into a slump, the two devise a scheme to attract the attention of the international art world that winds up backfiring and leaves them at the mercy of a notorious gangster....

Many unfamiliar flags have been flying over Chicago during the World Cup season, but the most unusual two were made right here by artist Stephen Velky. His renditions of the American flag and the gay pride rainbow flag may at first look comfortably familiar. But as their bumpy texture and sickeningly sweet smell attest, these flags are made of chewed gum. In replicating these symbols of collectivity in such a personal medium, Velky has created a pair of deadpan works that explore our ambivalent feelings about their fabric counterparts....

The summer concert season, according to a recent issue of Pollstar, is a disaster. Last year the industry rebounded only anemically after the 1991 debacle; now it’s gazing into the maw of hell as Pollstar’s accounting of the top 20 tours of the year so far puts ticket sales off 10 percent from last year. How bad is that? Well, this year’s top 20 have thus far earned only a skosh more than the top 10 tours did as recently as 1990....

Ah, the good old days. Everyone’s looking back to better times when people knew their place and respected authority and didn’t expect a whole lot of change. Newt Gingrich has looked back to fictional versions of earlier times, taking Boys Town as a model for what to do with all the orphans he’s laboring to create. Bill Bennett has reaped millions peddling platitudes from earlier writers (it saves writer’s fees). Bob Dole, who’s old enough to compare at least five generations, reminisces fondly about the days of self-reliance before farmers were softened by government subsidies....

By Cara Jepsen The second thing you notice is the giant Lotto sign–with its lighted rainbow beams and pot of gold–perched atop the red-and-white fuel island. The third is how quickly the numbers spin as the gas pumps into your tank; it takes about half as long to fill up at the Bobber as it does in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bobber’s attributes include the cafe, a CB shop, a knife shop (many truckers carry knives), a convenience store, a 24-hour garage with a full line of service (including parts and repair work), a motel with Jacuzzis in the rooms, a laundry, a TV room, a game room, a Goodyear tire dealership, truck scales, and six-dollar showers (or free with a fill-up)....

American Ballet Theatre Designed to be performed by and for members of the French court, ballet is now almost prohibitively expensive to mount–and attend. Thus American Ballet Theatre’s appearance at the Arts Center of the College of DuPage featured a live orchestra but a reduced complement of dancers in three short 20th-century pieces rather than one full-length classic. With tickets at $50 to $55, I don’t think the audience was getting any trickle-down effect, however....

You may think dancers are a physical bunch, living in a material world of biceps, deltoids, and pecs. But they’re not. Dancers worth their salt know that the body is the means to a numinous end, and that’s why as artists they’re peculiarly suited to treat mortality, to look at how body and soul come together–and separate. It seems appropriate that Chicago Dancers United should organize a benefit for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, especially given how hard AIDS has hit the dance community....

Fair Enough? Dealers Grumble, Organizers Ante Up for ’94 More than 180 dealers exhibiting at three international art expositions vied for attention and sales last weekend. And as they started to dismantle their booths earlier this week their responses to the three-ring art circus varied depending on which fair they were participating in and how much art they sold. However, many agreed that the multiple-fair scenario complicated matters for both dealers and buyers, who had to make the rounds before making decisions–if any were made–about purchases....

Saturday night at Rainbo, friends and couples cluster in the gloom. Suddenly there’s an apparition. It’s an eight-foot-tall something, large enough to require more than a moment to take in. A pair of two-foot-high papier-mache shoes are topped by a cascading pair of electric blue bell-bottoms and a ruffled pastel shirt. Above the shirt is a human face of some sort. Black dots splotch the part of the visage that can be seen below a seemingly glowing pair of blue sunglasses, and as for the hair, it’s some sort of weird skullcap with a few strands of stringy locks falling from the top like a horse’s mane....

While some performance artists deny television’s influence and others use video uncritically, the Loofah Method–a three-person multimedia performance troupe based in Bucktown–embraces TV, using the medium to critique the medium. “We all grew up with this TV blasting at us,” explains video artist and Loofah member Kurt Heintz, “and we don’t want that anymore.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a piece the group did before the election, “I Dream of George,” Salach played Dorothy while a gigantic, digitally manipulated video image of the president’s head played the Wizard of Oz, revealing the humbug behind the great and powerful Bush....

IT’S ONLY A PLAY True enough. But sometimes a decent plot doesn’t hurt. On the night I attended Cloud 42’s excellent production of McNally’s play, the gentleman seated next to me was perplexed. He appeared to be in his late 50s and, like McNally’s taxi driver, seemed to be the only one in the audience who wasn’t associated in some way with the theater. “I think the actors are all excellent, and there are some really funny lines,” he commented at intermission....

In the world of the sonic arts, voice- and text-based performance holds a pivotal place. Mixing media from aural poetry to extended vocalization and modes from narrative to nonsense, sound artists have been twisting the spoken word into semiotic pretzels since dadaists like Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Kurt Schwitters first took modernist vocal performance to stage. I first heard Dutch vocal extremist Jaap Blonk on a controversial recording of Schwitters’s classic of phonetic fragmentation, Ursonate....