TRAGEDY We Americans have turned what a more reflective people might experience as despair into complacency. What might have seemed aimlessness is replaced with the comfort of placelessness. Drive across the country and try not to run into a Taco Bell, Walmart, or 7-Eleven. Try not to hear the same 25 songs on any radio station you pick up. Try not to find the same processed food simulacra on the shelves of every indistinguishable roadside convenience store....

Sculptor Tom Czarnopys says some of his earliest memories involve hunting and fishing in a national forest near his boyhood home in Michigan. “I remember when I was perhaps five years old, cutting ferns, helping my dad build deer-hunting blinds with a little red serrated pie knife. I still have memories of the smell of the soil, the sandy soil underneath the roots.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By second grade, Czarnopys was drawing animals, fish, and birds....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The issues aren’t whether or not Merel’s buildings have enough Dumpsters, or people hanging out, or trash accumulation per se. It’s community standards. Instead of having a photo of Joe Moore trying to look tough, a picture of one of Merel’s buildings side-by-side with a better managed building would have given readers outside of Rogers Park a better idea of what’s going on....

It’s difficult to think of a better jazz cellist than Deidre Murray. In fact, it’s difficult to think of many other jazz cellists; but that shouldn’t detract from the commitment and capability she brings to the instrument. Murray has a classicist’s technique but a jazz player’s sass. She plays with a large but not fulsome tone, which she manipulates via unorthodox use of traditional techniques; these techniques allow her to fully exploit the expressive range of her instrument (which bears a timbral resemblance to the tenor sax)....

Fountains of Wayne Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While there’s nothing particularly smart about Fountains of Wayne, they’ve managed to stand out against this year’s lackluster pop competition by openly displaying their tunefulness, unhindered by either irony (like Weezer) or extraneous sonic gunk (like Eric Matthews). On their eponymous debut (on TAG), guitarist-writers Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger (who also plays with Ivy) might cop from the Beach Boys on one song, borrow from the Beatles on another, and on yet another conjure late-70s power pop, but the antecedents have a way of dissolving into the sugary delirium....

GEOGRAPHY OF A HORSE DREAMER Carpe Noctem Productions at Shattered Globe Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Shepard’s plays have nothing to do with our daily lives they have everything to do with our deepest, most violent emotions. Shepard knows where our desires and fears lie and he creates situations to get at that place. His plays have a raw energy–they’re almost like a primal scream–and they resonate long after the lights go up....

GREEK STREETS Apple Tree Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It comes as no surprise that Petrakis’s stories are wonderful read aloud. In fact, in the foreword to his Collected Stories he even admits that he relishes reading his short stories to “high school, college, library and club audiences.” Nor should it surprise anyone that Petrakis’s words translate nicely to the stage. In large part, this is because Petrakis’s work is fresh and compelling....

OH, ART! OH, MEMORY! A TRIBUTE TO LAURIE COLWIN City Lit Theater Company at the Chicago Cultural Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every once in a while, however, a production comes along that shows why these adaptations have become so popular. Such a show is City Lit’s sublime evening of five stories by the late Laurie Colwin, Oh, Art! Oh, Memory! Kathryn Gallagher (who adapted and directed four of the stories) and Tina Thuerwachter (who adapted and directed one) come very close to realizing Breen’s dream of a hybrid of literature and drama that combines the immediacy and “simultaneity” of drama with fiction’s “narrative privilege”–the ease with which writers of fiction can switch points of view and voices, something not even cinema, with its infinite number of camera angles, can equal....

Lord of Illusions The Prophecy Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions partakes of this fantasy, linking power with the ability to provoke fear. In the film, which takes place primarily in LA, good magic (that practiced by the prophets in the Bible) is “glittering” and false, merely a magician’s trick. True magic is dark and evil. The prophet with real power in Lord of Illusions is a Hell’s Angel gone to seed: Nix (Daniel Von Bargen) is a sweaty, grizzled guy with a beer gut who tosses fire from hand to hand and is immortal....

A fascinating, revealing, and deeply disturbing–if highly imperfect–documentary feature by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, codirectors of the excellent Brother’s Keeper, about the trials and convictions resulting from the brutal murder and mutilation of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Most of what we see persuades us that two teenage boys have been convicted of these crimes more because of their nonconformity within the community than from any hard evidence (the likeliest suspect, the stepfather of one of the victims, hasn’t even been charged)....

Jazz Giant’s Modest Ambition Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anderson, who was born in Monroe, Louisiana, and at 12 moved to Chicago, began playing music seriously in the 50s, but spent most of the time developing his sound. He would see legends like Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and Ornette Coleman and attend endless jam sessions, but he would only listen. “I respected them cats too much to play back then,” he says....

Driving the Halsted bus gave Juanita Clark a good vantage point from which to keep an eye on her son. Quona was only 18 but he’d been living on his own for about a year, so she appreciated the occasional glimpse as she passed through Lakeview. Whenever she did spot him she pulled the bus over, passengers and all, to see how he was doing–make sure he was going to school, check on his health....

SCRAWL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because we here in the media are so obsessed with nihilistic youth, any grubby yobbo who articulates a desire to off himself can get himself hailed as the spokesperson for his generation. But since 1985, Scrawl’s Marcy Mays has chronicled the painful path from the hazy days of college through postcollegiate confusion to the acceptance of adulthood with more empathy, elegance, and honesty than all other comers....

MAGNAPOP 9/16, METRO Epitomized by the catchy MTV hit “Slowly, Slowly,” the hollow but bouncy sounds of Atlanta’s Magnapop place them clearly in a genre henceforth known as “alternative bubblegum.” They’re fronted by the appealingly sweet voice of Linda Hopper–whose ancient membership in Oh-OK, a quirky Athens trio with Matthew Sweet and Linda Limner (the sister of Michael Stipe), partially explains her strong melodic sensibilities. On their recent Bob Mould-produced Hot Boxing (Priority) Magnapop undergird their squeaky-clean pop with an airbrushed aggression....

When you hear what Rick Gellert has been doing with himself the past few years, you may want to give him a hand. When that got boring, he started feeling around for alternatives, first hitting on swimming pool equipment. “I played around a lot trying to see if nozzles and jets could do the trick,” Gellert says in the matter-of-fact tone another person might use to direct you to the bread aisle of the grocery store....

Press releases that glazed our eyes: “National Jewish Theater Presents Midwest Premiere of Broken Glass, Arthur Miller’s Shattering New Play.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There is a real danger that higher education, even at public universities, will become the preserve of the rich,” Illinois public university faculty senate leaders say in a recent news release. In 1994 dollars, state funding per student has dropped from $5,415 in 1970 to $3,448 in 1995....

THE SEAGULL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was much to register. Chekhov’s most lyrical, plot-driven work depicts two young artists, aspiring writer Constantine and ardent actress Nina, who find their futures suffocated by their smug elders: Constantine’s life-sucking actress mother Irina Arkadina and Trigorin, a writer romantically interested in Nina who reduces life to antiseptic fiction. Jaded and disgusted with themselves, Arkadina and Trigorin use their broken dreams to justify their selfish acts, seizing on any pleasure to make up for lost joy–which is just what made them fail in the first place....

I was E-mailed the following story. Is there any way you could confirm this? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Over the years many people have questioned [Armstrong] as to what the “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky’ statement meant. On July 5, in Tampa Bay, Florida, while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26-year-old question to Armstrong. He finally responded. It seems that Mr....

My wife and I are expecting a baby boy. Soon we will face the prickly question: to circumcise or not to circumcise? As far as we can determine, the dispute has not been settled which is healthier. As youngsters we heard that circumcision fosters cleanliness. Then we heard that this argument is feeble in a society familiar with the concept of soap. Then we heard of correlations between uncircumcised penises and cancers of the prostate and vagina....

The most noticeable difference between this edition of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago and the four others that preceded it is: there’s no Shakespeare! No sprawling marathons, no this-year’s-Olivier pandering. English theater is still represented–by Alan Ayckbourn’s new play, performed by his own company–but it doesn’t overshadow the rest of the fest. Which might mean that festival organizers trust in their audience’s broadened tastes. Or maybe they’re just burned out on the Bard....