Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (2) Self-defense courses emphasize prevention, use of assertive body language and verbal techniques, and role-playing. These techniques can often be used to prevent a situation from reaching the point where violence is called for; in addition, these techniques can be used to defend against sexual harrassment. How does Ms. Miller propose that gun-toting women respond to sexual harrassment–shoot the guy?...

A JENKINS HOME COMPANION, Close Call Theatre, at Stage Left Theatre. Ken Jenkins’s monologues Rupert’s Birthday and Chug are minimalist tales of American eccentricity notable primarily as easily staged character studies providing a heart tug and a chuckle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rupert’s Birthday is the better of the two, offering the dramatic story behind a farm woman’s refusal to celebrate any public holidays....

A Shaky Start for Trib’s New TV Critic “I appreciate the fact that in today’s Tribune the new TV critic, Ken Parish Perkins, writing in Tempo, likes me. And I do appreciate that. But Ken, I’d rather have you dislike me than misquote me.” And he laughed. A Tribune editor might call the laugh chilling. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Olson got to the office it was clear to her what had to be done....

The marriage of pop melodies and loud electric guitars is hardly new, but it is continually renewed; Husker Do did it in the mid-80s by making the noise rawer and the hooks catchier, and My Bloody Valentine did it more recently by distorting the guitars into a candied sonic morass. Bailter Space, a migratory trio that has called New Zealand, Germany, and the U.S. home, have been around quite a while (the same personnel, drummer Brent McLachlan and guitarists John Halvorsen and Alister Parker, played under the name the Gordons in 1980 and were renowned as New Zealand’s loudest band), but on their new album, Vortura (Matador), they’ve perfected a new loud-pop variation....

Friday 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey, Prop Theatre–what in heck’s The Pot Show about? “It is the story of a group of touring debaters,” the theater responds via a press release. “At each venue they present the pros and cons of marijuana in American culture. However, members of both sides seem to suffer from psychoses and latent neurotic obsession. Hence, the debate takes on the feel more of tongue in cheek comedy than of an actual debate....

Major Payne With Wayans, Karyn Parsons, Steven Martini, Andrew Harrison Leeds, Joda Blaire-Hershman, Stephen Coleman, and Orlando Brown. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What these clay figures do nearly always seems to matter much more than who they are. In most of the films they temporarily become characters, but then they get warped, either by their mandated generic functions–their responsibility to generate uplift, or solicit pity or derision, or produce laughs, or inspire identification–or by the passing whims of the filmmakers (production executives included)....

In rock ‘n’ roll eclecticism is often the refuge of the dilettante, but not in the case of the Dog Faced Hermans, a Scottish quartet that calls Amsterdam home. For a moment on “Virginia Fur,” a song from their new CD Those Deep Buds, the distorted guitars sound like Sonic Youth, a probing trumpet recalls Don Cherry, and the bass player borrows a line from the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone....

A Village Voice reporter last fall quoted me as saying that Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls “talks a great show….But it’s backfired on him because he can fail to deliver.” What he left out was the context of my criticism: Like any artist Falls can fail, but when he does deliver, his productions are revelatory. Like Rat in the Skull, starring Brian Dennehy, at Wisdom Bridge more than a decade ago....

A century ago introducing new birds to North America was something of a fad. People who did this sort of thing called themselves acclimatizers. They formed societies such as New York’s American Acclimatization Society to pool their resources so they could buy more birds–mostly in Europe–and import them to North America. We owe our starlings to the New York group. A similar society in Cincinnati imported more than 70 species of European songbirds during the last three decades of the 19th century....

Hold the Hot Sauce!, Bailiwick Repertory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to dislike a solo show in which the performer offers audience members napkins on which to write their phone numbers, then deposits them in a shopping bag labeled “Garcia’s Dates.” Much praised for his consummate storytelling in Under Milk Wood, Michael Garcia in Hold the Hot Sauce! shares his own telling tales, and with an eloquence to match the content....

ISAAC STERN AND FRIENDS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Isaac Stern, the beloved elder statesman of the violin, has been taking an admittedly well-deserved rest on his laurels lately–he often seems only partly engaged in performances, and he’s been known to wander shockingly off-pitch. Yet when Stern is inspired, he can still show us what virtuosity really means, and his zeal for music education and the promotion of budding instrumentalists is unwaning....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfettered by fact or logic, Solot responds by arguing that the “ruling Conservative Party” successfully co-opted the anti-Semites “after the turn of the century.” But this was in fact a period of Conservative Party decline: from 10 percent of the vote in 1903 to 9.4 percent in 1907 to 9.2 percent in 1912. These figures suggest a less than convincing mandate for Solot’s alleged “ruling party”; they do however confirm the impression that the man simply hasn’t a clue as to what he’s talking about....

MARSHALL VENTE & TROPICALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marshall Vente leads a varied musical career as a keyboardist, composer-arranger, concert promoter, WDCB disc jockey, and (not incidentally) leader of several inventive ensembles. Tropicale stands out as the most eclectic of his bands: in it Vente blithely incorporates jazz and world-music pop, focusing on the sounds of Brazil but making use of specifically Afro-Cuban rhythms as well....

Lead Story Ten-year-old college graduate Michael Kearney (the youngest graduate ever, according to the Guinness book), upon acquiring a job as “special correspondent” for the ABC TV afternoon show Mike & Maty: “This is my big break.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five southern California graffiti vandals, who call themselves “artists,” were arrested in San Francisco over the July 4 weekend. Said one: “We came here to contribute something to this town, and we end up in jail....

“Call a man a genius often enough, no matter how justly, and his work gets to be beyond comment,” writes Martin Williams in his classic study The Jazz Tradition. As if acknowledging this predicament, the exhibit Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy looks not so much at the music of the great jazz trumpet player as at Armstrong’s influence and the force of his personality. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“This book is so full of laahs,” Keli Garrett says, laughing, putting an exaggerated drawl on the word lies. “Funny laahs. Story laahs. Laahs black people tell. Laahs we tell to make our stories funny.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She says her father was a butcher with a “real flair for embellishing stories.” He and her mother, who worked for the CTA, sent her to Robertson Academy, a small private school in Morgan Park founded as an alternative for black children to Catholic and public schools....

You know how it feels to run for the fun of it? Not for exercise, not to catch a bus, but because it feels good to use your muscles and move fast. Well, Paul Taylor knows that feeling too and exploits it. Look at a work like the 1975 Esplanade: the dancers tear across the stage, leap several body lengths into each other’s arms, tumble to the floor and roll to their feet again in a flash, vault onto each other’s backs to jump as high and as far as they can....

Cassandra Wilson Innovation has always been one of jazz’s most striking facets, but when it comes to mainstream America it’s often fallen on deaf ears, particularly since the ascendancy of rock ‘n’ roll in the 50s. The situation wasn’t helped much during the free-jazz movement of the 60s, when the avant-garde focused on more challenging aspirations at the expense of pure entertainment, creating a schism that hasn’t been bridged since....

Of course Italian food can be great. But that doesn’t explain the flood tide of Italian restaurants, from authentic trattorias and ristorantes to retro-red-sauce re-creations, that have opened here in the past half dozen years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My companion and I had a terrific version with earthy, rich porcini mushrooms and a touch of truffle oil and cheese ($10.95), plus another with mixed seafood, including shrimp and scallops, and a very light marinara sauce, garnished with some baby clams and mussels in the shell ($13....

Cranky, cracked, queer, cuddly Catholic comic Jimmy Doyle has the knack. He knows how to confide in an audience, how to entertain even while stripping his soul bare–revealing his deepest fears, his most tender vulnerabilities, his tortured childhood, suicidal mom, insensitive blue-collar dad-and entertain us at the same time. In his current show, part of Prop Theatre’s late night “Sex Talk” series, Doyle describes in excruciatingly honest detail his ongoing breakup with a boyfriend: the bouts of loneliness, the sense of abandonment, the fear of being sexually unattractive....