DJ Premier maintains one of hip hop’s busiest schedules. In addition to his main gig with rapper Guru in Gang Starr, he’s a highly sought after DJ who’s produced for a wide variety of artists–from Arrested Development, Neneh Cherry, and Branford Marsalis’s Buckshot LeFonque project to rappers like Nas, Notorious B.I.G., and Das EFX. Celebrated for setting complex, funky beats within spare sonic scapes, he’ll eschew overused P-Funk samples in favor of anything from a free-jazz piano cluster to silky 70s soul jazz, enhancing the records of many rappers without drawing attention to himself....

Donald Byrd’s The Minstrel Show manages to contain and comment on the many contradictions and ironies of this theatrical form, popular throughout the 19th century. Minstrelsy started, for instance, with a white man in blackface “imitating” a black man; when more blacks performed in minstrel shows, after the Civil War, they also wore blackface and shock wigs. The stereotypes of African Americans were reductive and demeaning, yet minstrel shows represented one of the first opportunities for talented blacks....

A charming black-and-white fantasy by Tim Burton about the late Edward D. Wood Jr., a writer-director-actor at the lowest reaches of 50s Z-budget filmmaking, recently accorded cult pantheon status by virtue of his eccentric personality (he was a straight transvestite) and his very personal form of ineptness. Suggested by Rudolph Grey’s oral history Nightmare of Ecstasy, the movie concentrates on the time period during which Wood’s three best-known works (Glen or Glenda?...

Just before Christmas I came in to work at Remains Theatre–in the mall at 1800 N. Clybourn–and standing on the edge of the wishing well outside Goose Island Brewing was an exasperated maintenance man. He was leaning forward perilously over the water, rounding up pennies with a squeegee the size of a push broom. When he had a big enough pile he’d reach in and grab a handful of pennies and drop them in a bucket....

The bulk of rock music is built on long-held conventions both structural (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-verse-chorus) and lyrical (“Baby, baby, baby” etc). Bands like the Minutemen and Sonic Youth have made a point of toying with these conventions, but this New York band is downright iconoclastic. Over six albums and a dozen singles, God Is My Co-Pilot has distilled rock into jarring, fragmented sound shards–usually under two minutes long–that combine numb bass throbs, pummeling drum squalls, and scratchy, skittering guitar that sounds like the brittle jags of the Gang of Four’s Andy Gill sped up and discombobulated....

Just over a year ago, on one of last winter’s most bitterly cold nights, Huun-Huur-Tu made its Chicago debut. With the aid of ethnomusicoligist Ted Levin the strange folk ensemble from Tuva, a small region in southern Siberia just north of Mongolia from where they originally descended, offered a fascinating exposition of Khoomei (throat singing), a striking and downright haunting mutiphonic vocal style in which the practicioner sounds like he/she is simultaneously producing two or three different notes....

Few contemporary bluesmen can fuse influences and stylistic shadings with John Primer’s effortlessness and proficiency. For years he played with ex-Muddy Waters fretman Sammy Lawhorn at Theresa’s on 48th and Indiana; he joined Waters himself for a time and recently served as Magic Slim’s second guitarist. From Lawhorn, Primer absorbed shimmering melodicism, harmonic sophistication, and an irresistible sense of serious-minded musical playfulness. In Waters’s band he gained confidence in his own slide-guitar playing and honed his instincts for the tonal and rhythmic subtleties of blues singing....

Keiji Haino & Fushitsusha Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the burgeoning Japanese extremist noise-rock world, multi-instrumentalist Keiji Haino holds a hallowed position. He came onto the scene in the early 70s with Lost Aaraaf (an Albert Ayler-inspired group in which Haino sang), then formed the archetypal psychedelic noise duo Magical Power Mako (which made three fascinating records for Polydor). After that, Haino dropped out of sight for half a decade; reportedly he was taken seriously ill....

Like mandala, Margaret Jenkins’s The Gates: Far Away Near tries to paint a picture of the entire world from every possible point of view. In fact The Gates tries to paint consciousness, not just things. Only a mystic would attempt a task so outrageously ambitious, and Jenkins and her collaborators fashion a worthy mandala by using mystical techniques, like complexes of symbols that enumerate ways of seeing. The basic metaphor of this evening-length piece is looking at the city through seven gates, a metaphor that’s easy to decode–the root of the word civilization is the Latin civitas (“city”)....

RADICAL SCAVENGER(S): These works are often based on mass-manufactured objects and frequently use photographs and video–all media that reveal little sign of the artist’s hand. A few elements are juxtaposed to make an immediate impression whose instantaneity is in some ways similar to the glimpse of a billboard from a moving car or a fragment of a TV program caught while switching channels. Art is no longer seen as offering transcendence, lifting the viewer out of the present, but rather as refocusing her attention on our mass-manufactured world....

Violist Max Raimi first got to know music lover and local political activist Joel Finkel during the 1991 CSO strike. Finkel was there the day the strike began, immediately following a free performance in Grant Park. “After the concert [the musicians] put down their instruments and picked up their picket signs,” Finkel says, “and they marched over to Orchestra Hall.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raimi, a ten-year CSO veteran, had had some previous experience with activist causes: he’d played in a fund-raising concert for the McGovern presidential campaign, and more recently he’d played in one for the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance with the Mallarme Quartet, an ad hoc chamber group that also plays in local public schools....

The most absolutely fabulous thing happened to me after I read Anne Hollander’s new book, Sex and Suits. Before, when I had to look presentable, I’d stand in front of the mirror and agonize for half an hour. “Is this skirt too short for someone of a certain age and breadth?” I’d think, tugging at a hem. “If I wear a jean jacket with this slinky black dress will it look witty and ironic or just dumb?...

It wasn’t too many years ago that the bad teeth of the English, the bad breath of the French, and the bad manners of Americans were accepted as modest rules of thumb: not very edifying, perhaps, but serviceable in their way. That’s not to say people were blind to those Frenchmen (to choose one example) who were even bigger louts than the average Americano–far from it! They just reckoned that if they could draw a reasonable pattern from the known facts then it was worth losing a few million pushy Frogs in the calculation....

Let’s take a stroll down East Garfield Boulevard, on the south side. You won’t need a police escort: we’re going back 50 years and the joints, as they used to say, are jumpin’. Just off the corner of State Street is the swanky Club DeLisa, run by three Italian brothers who made a fortune selling moonshine up and down State until repeal came, when they opened this place. They’ve got a chorus line bouncing onstage, cards and dice are flying in the basement, but the real action in here is music–the sublime and ravishing sounds of jazz....

THE AFRICAN COMPANY PRESENTS RICHARD III Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The thing Brown’s drama has going for it is the largely overlooked history of America’s first black theater company. In the early part of the 19th century, in Greenwich Village, William Brown established the African Company, the resident troupe at his African Grove Theater, performing both original works and Shakespearean dramas–much to the dismay of New York’s white “legitimate” theater community, whose audiences were depleted by the African Company’s successful “amateur” productions....

Just So Stories But this man–who provided the inspiration for Disney’s warm and fuzzy The Jungle Book–also introduced the world to “the white man’s burden” and recommended that “if you hit a pony over the nose at the outset of your acquaintance, he may not love you, but he will take a deep interest in your movements ever afterwards.” George Orwell wrote of him: “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person…there is a definite strain of sadism in him....

I drink Mountain Dew and people are always acting like I’m getting an intravenous injection of caffeine each time I drink a can. Does Mountain Dew really contain that much caffeine? For a frame of reference, how much caffeine is contained in a normal cup of coffee? –Dave Jones, Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t care if you’re tired of this....

Ticketmaster Update Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the most recent set of hearings–held, for some reason, before the Transportation and Finance Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee–Congress began considering a new bill that would require the agency to print those fees on tickets. During the meeting, held at the end of last month, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group presented the results of a small study....

She’s been everywhere, all the hot spots, in the last nine years: Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq, Jordan, Nicaragua, not to mention numerous nuclear-missile sites and other off-limits government installations in this country. No one’s asked her to come, no one’s paid her way, and many have advised her not to go. You could almost hear the alarm in Bob Edwards’s voice when he interviewed her on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in July 1993: “You’re going somewhere where people are mowed down while standing in line for water....

A few years ago, beset by everything from the demise of his band the True Believers in a haze of drugs and acrimony to the suicide of his estranged wife, Alejandro Escovedo was unquestionably at a personal and professional nadir. Since then he’s slowly emerged from the gloom. At this year’s SXSW festival, he was everywhere: doing a powerful reunion show with the True Believers, another for-fun gig with an Austin all-star band, the Setters, and several solo appearances as well, culminating in his annual closing night blowout with the grand Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra....