To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On judicial subcircuits: If you took the Democratic ballot in the eighth subcircuit, you faced a choice of 101 candidates for 17 judgeships. This was far too many. Eighty-five of those candidates, however, were for the 14 judicial seats elected countywide. The interested citizen has an outside chance of understanding the race in his subcircuit and casting an informed ballot; this is not true for the old process....

Kurt Unloads Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It sounds a little shrill, but remember that he’s been forced into the humiliating position of having to defend his widely despised wife, Courtney Love, leader of Hole, a Yoko for the 90s, and–the liner notes again–a “supreme example of dignity, ethics and honesty.” It gets worse; he recounts in detail an overly sentimental story about a member of the Raincoats giving him a copy of the group’s rare first album: “It made me happier than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolization from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass, and the million dollars I made last year....

Mad Shak Dance Company Goodfellow’s Easel, premiered earlier this year at the Next Dance Festival, and the 1992 A Conference of My Ghosts are both quartets and both exemplars of the Shanahan movement style. But where the earlier dance has an obscure subtext about grief and loss, revealed mostly in voice-over lyrics (“My baby lies cold,” “Words seem so cold”), Goodfellow’s Easel follows a purely musical progression. At first Kevin O’Donnell coaxes from his trap set cut-off bursts of percussion–feints at meaning–then finally a long, drawn-out line like a strong wind with sudden gusts and lulls....

RAZOR SPIRITS The idea of using improvisation to create serious scenes is not new. Like long-form improv, it goes back at least as far as the Compass Players, if not into the primeval origins of theater, where all performance was created ad lib for the tribe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several of Chicago’s more progressive improv troupes–Ed, Annoyance Theatre, Cardiff Giant, Second City’s Lois Kaz–have recently begun pushing the envelope, yearning to create something more than mere comedy....

Combustible Edison 4/5, Lounge Ax On their second album, Schizophrenia (Sub Pop), Combustible Edison continue crafting misplaced exotica for a nostalgia-crazed generation that’s already moved on to 70s reruns of American Bandstand, even if they still drink martinis. While the group’s incidental music worked on the sound track of Four Rooms, the new record’s strained artistic reach emulates Ennio Morricone’s lousy 70s output amid the morning-after haze of cocktail excess. Nil Lara 4/5, Cubby Bear Raised in New Jersey by Cuban-born parents, Nil Lara weaves his roots into his new eponymous album....

Stagebill Ups the Ante Small not-for-profit com-panies stand to be most affected by the policy. “It was a shock,” says Mark Gagne, artistic director of the Free Associates, who adds that “the photos were a nice constant with Stagebill.” The Free Associates are presenting five different plays in repertory in the Ivanhoe’s smallest, 44-seat house. Gagne’s company comprises 15 actors, all of whom appear in the company’s Stagebill. That means the Free Associates will have to pay a minimum one-time fee of $200 in January, assuming they make no changes in their program....

US 3 SYNTHOPHONE RIFFS FOR DEEJAYS, VOLUME 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the success of “Cantaloop” has less to do with pop creativity than it does with other things–the evolution of sampling, new developments in copyright law, and the canny manipulation of both by a multinational record company. The song’s strange story begins with the work of a couple of British DJs, Mel Simpson and Geoff Wilkinson, who, like many DJs, recorded their own mixes....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet it’s an underappreciated art, if the sparsely attended (though heavily papered) concert at Ravinia on Friday night is any indication. Those who did attend were privileged to hear the Chicago Symphony Chorus in outstanding form in three choral works set to religious texts: two Stabat Maters, by Verdi and Rossini, and Verdi’s Te Deum....

Imaging Aztlan: Printmakers From Chicago’s Mexican By Bertha Husband Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andreu has assembled 33 very different artists spanning three generations in the service of this national remembering. But to what extent does his curatorial approach reflect the concerns of the individual artists? Andreu sets out to establish in the first two prints, executed in the 1940s and now in the Art Institute’s collection, what he sees as the art’s political and historical antecedents....

San Diego’s Drive Like Jehu may have named themselves after the crazed Old Testament chariot-driving king, but as recklessly as their squealing, caustic guitars careen around on the surface, at heart their music is controlled by a strong sense of order and precision. While their second album, Yank Crime (Interscope), lacks the dense packets of hidden hooks that filled the band’s debut, it’s another foot or two up in terms of unwieldy guitar firepower....

They’re back–and fittingly, we get to hear them on April Fools’ Day. With their infectious musical humor and inveterate tricksterism, the Either/Orchestra both celebrate and subtly undermine the big-band tradition. They also remind us of how one artist’s imaginative vision can drive an organization of his peers to giddily synergistic heights. Led by saxist/composer Russ Gershon, this ten-piece band from Boston retains an inventive, iconoclastic spark that manages to link such supposedly disparate spirits as Spike Jones and Charles Mingus....

There are at least two reasons not to write a letter-to-the-editor about an article that may be inaccurate or unfair. Typically, I’ve found, the publication compounds the offense by heavily editing the letter and by providing space below it to give the article writer the last word. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The clear purpose of the letter was to share with Miner–who I’ve known for years–my thoughts on where he got it wrong and to encourage him to interview sources who could set the record straight....

London Symphony Orchestra For the most part, the concerts were gorgeously played. Davis has long been known as an excellent Sibelius conductor; he’s recorded most of the orchestral works, including two complete sets of the symphonies–once, to wide acclaim, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the mid-70s, and again a decade later, to even greater acclaim, with the LSO. (Both sets are now competing with each other on CD.) You’d think that this success would sooner or later amount to an invitation to coast, but Davis’s concerts at Orchestra Hall showed him at the top of his game....

Maybe if bars could still run happy-hour discounts, more people would be in Dandy’s piano bar for Donnie’s birthday. The few customers are strung out along the short length of Dandy’s white-lacquered bar, each with one arm outstretched to the glass; when one elbow bends, all the other elbows follow, as if they were attached by a towline. Donnie’s friends are grouped around the far end of the bar, near the buffet laid out on the counter in front of the silent piano....

By Ben Joravsky But North River Commission officials say they deserve at least a minute or two of speaking time, since without their efforts there would be no new branch. “We’re not asking to make a major oration,” says Dale Bolling, a longtime commission member. “This may seem petty to some, but it’s important for volunteers to get credit for their energy and time. Why have these ceremonies if you’re not going to let the community speak?...

The three videos on this program all deal with the representation of women, but in very different ways. Old Wordly, by Leslie Thornton and Anouk de Clercq, consists of 50s girlie films–fully clothed women doing exotic dances–presented with only a little reediting. Seeing them back-to-back focuses one’s attention not only on the way they depict women as objects of desire but also on their repetitive, almost hypnotic rhythms, underlined by the irritating techno-music sound track....

Sir Mack Rice’s career dates back to the very genesis of modern R & B. He made his first recordings (with the Scalders) while still a high school student in Detroit; by 1956 he’d achieved national acclaim as a member of the Falcons, along with Eddie Floyd and Wilson Pickett. It was as a composer, however, that Rice made the most impact. He wrote “Mustang Sally” in 1965; later, as a house writer at Stax, he penned such classics as “Respect Yourself,” “Cheaper to Keep Her,” and the immortal “Cadillac Assembly Line”–all blends of rootsy blues and uptown funk....

BUSKER SOUNDCHECK 12/27, EMPTY BOTTLE This Chicago power trio kicks off its new EP, Wesley Lee Roth (Full Groan), with “It’s 3,” an insanely catchy wintertime reply to Blue Cheer’s version of “Summertime Blues.” Near the end of the second verse, call-and-response vocal lines slide into hilariously dead-on three-part calypso harmony over a bluster of hard-rock guitar. If Smashing Pumpkins were half this complex, spirited, or witty, they wouldn’t be nearly so famous....

BARK LIKE A COMIC Naturally, the more cleverly a comic castrates himself, using his license to tell the truth on only the safest topics, the more successful he’ll be. Which is why David Letterman earns millions masturbating the medium, acting goofy and obsessing about whatever trivial item is in the news that day–Bill Clinton’s hair, Joey Buttafuoco’s name, Lorena Bobbitt’s scary but effective cure for spousal abuse. And why a man like Jimmy Tingle gets banned from The Tonight Show for telling a few mildly barbed jokes about the Reagan administration....

Pop music means two things. For the first, it’s what’s popular, what’s capturing the imagination (or at least the attention) of fans, mostly kids, at any given time. But in the alternative and critical world the term has also, more and more, been used to describe music that does little but vacantly reference a smorgasbord of blithe verities: a certain pleasant style of vocal harmony, a certain soar or lift in the melody, and a certain freedom or looseness in the construction, all descended from Buddy Holly and all embodied in a Stones-Sly-Otis-Beatles utopian apogee in the 60s....