By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The Indigenous Environmental Network is not simply a combination of the Native American movement with environmental activism,” writes Zoltan Grossman of Madison, Wisconsin, in Z Magazine (November). “First, there is a complete absence of the concept of ‘wilderness’–or the idea of nature devoid of human beings. Instead, humans are presented as an integral part of different natural regions, acting within them to gather their sustenance....

The Whipping Boy, Griffin Theatre Company. Sid Fleischer’s Newbery Award-winning 1986 novel, a lightweight variation on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, has been turned into an unpretentious hour-long kids’ show by playwright William Massolia and director Richard Barletta, who’ve resisted the temptation to pad the slim story and created a brisk little play about a bratty royal who runs away from home, taking with him the street urchin employed as his proxy for punishment....

Los Lobos This morning I heard the issue of Bob Dole’s age discussed once again on the news. A reporter asked if Dole can connect with voters under 30. The answer, of course, is clear. The man’s plumb out of touch. He’s played the game of politics for so many years that the actual requirements of politics have long since slipped from his grasp. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

VAN MORRISON Many singers would have been content to rest on those laurels. Some, like Burdon, did. But Morrison soon proved he was a star of a wholly different order. Decisively ending his R & B apprenticeship with a pair of astonishingly mature recordings–the hypnotic pop-jazz of Astral Weeks and the perky bed-sheet soul of Moondance–he went on to become one of the most influential figures of the pop era, as important in his own way as Dylan or Miles Davis....

NAS THE SUN RISES IN THE EAST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the second phase of the competition, aesthetics, is only beginning. Many critics see the battle now raging between the good guys, those thoughtful bohemian types, like P.M. Dawn and Arrested Development, and the glib thugs, like Dr. Dre’s Death Row posse and the South Central Cartel. While nobody with a functional brain would dispute the vast expanse between the Death Row version of streetwise buppiedom, “Say it loud, I’m rich and I’m proud–once again, say it loud, I’m bad and I’m proud,” and Arrested D’s “the revolution will be user friendly” syllabus, the musical terrain within those borders is being widely mischaracterized....

Now the life in me trickles away, –Job Last September a doctor at a pain clinic told her the source of the pain in her feet and legs was RSD–reflex sympathetic dystrophy–a scary-sounding term she was not familiar with. He recommended a series of nerve blocks: anesthetic injections into the affected areas or into a central nerve ganglion. Since then Aavang has had some 15 blocks. Several halted the pain for up to two days; most gave relief for only about six hours, and then it was “back to square one,” she says....

It doesn’t take a genius to notice all the echoes of the 70s in the 90s. Queen and Led Zeppelin have never been more popular, and Neil Young has scored his biggest successes in years by recording two albums that sound exactly like ones he recorded 20 years ago. New bands are also getting in on the trend: Blind Melon sounds an awful lot like the early 70s Grateful Dead, and grunge bands like Tad and the Melvins sound just like Black Sabbath....

James Gierach is not a household name. He’s running for governor in the Democratic primary and not even political junkies know him. One forum for gubernatorial candidates forgot to invite him. Some news stories lump him in on the fringe with the LaRouchie candidate, the kiss of death. In a January Tribune voter survey, his support was less than the poll’s 3 percent margin of error. Gierach wants to bring Illinois’ drug strategy in line with the policies in much of Western Europe....

LONG JOHN HUNTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Long John Hunter started his blues career in Beaumont, Texas; his first recording, “Crazy Baby,” in 1954, was on Don Robey’s famed Duke label in Houston, the same outfit that helped build the careers of Big Mama Thornton and Bobby “Blue” Bland, among many others. But his real break occurred in 1957, when he crossed the border into Ciudad Juarez and became the featured act at the Lobby, a club with a clientele like the cast of a Fellini movie....

Patrick Hughes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The well-crafted works of Patrick Hughes, which he makes from wood using a ruler and glue and then painting them, are another matter. Like many paintings that rely on trompe l’oeil techniques, they comment on reality and perception. Trompe l’oeil is not what distinguishes these works, however. Rather than trick our eyes, they trick our entire bodies....

“To think what salmon have to swim through….It’s amazing they ever get upstream.” –British Columbia environment minister Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know the latte guy likes me because he treats me differently than the other customers. He waits on me first. He talks to me while he steams milk. He “accidentally” charges me less than he should. Sometimes he doesn’t charge me at all....

Regina Harris Baiocchi says that when she went to Roosevelt University in the mid-70s to study composition, “the instructor was not encouraging at all. He wanted all his students to write the white classical stuff.” But she was also in love with jazz and gospel, the music of her childhood. “I knew I wanted to compose since grammar school. I started out in vocal music because my mother was in a church choir....

With their forward-looking 1992 debut album, Bizarre Ride II (Delicious Vinyl), LA’s the Pharcyde got in on the ground floor of the diversification of hip-hop. Eschewing the gangsta shtick that’s earned Compton and Watts natives like Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Warren G. their reputations, the Pharcyde took an approach that was both topically and musically more akin to that of Oakland’s Hieroglyphics crew–Souls of Mischief, Casual, Del the Funkee Homosapien–a loose collective that favors more diverse samples and grooves, less violence, and less misogyny....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The very high cost of housing, not burning crosses, is what keeps most blacks, and whites for that matter, out of North Shore suburbs. According to the 1990 Census, the average home value for Wilmette’s 8,350 houses was $314,000. That same year, only 728 black households in the entire eight-county area lived in a house valued over $300,000....

POSIES 6/21, METRO Seattle’s Posies have a new album, Amazing Disgrace (DGC), a new rhythm section, and a retooled sound. Main men Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, the pair that flesh out Alex Chilton’s re-formed Big Star, remain unabashed pure popsters but leave behind the rarefied jangle in favor of Cheap Trick-like power pop (Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen perform on the record’s “Hate Song”). While some melodies show the Posies’ knack for hooks, others either cloy, like the horrible “Everybody Is a Fucking Liar,” or get smothered by the band’s desire to rock, such as “Grant Hart,” the wan ode to the Hüsker Dü drummer....

Must be these new video games. Title of a student paper presented last fall at an Argonne National Laboratory symposium: “Irritation From Ingestion of the Urticating Hairs of Tarantulas.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This program made possible by the support of corporations like you. Allan Siegel in Video (January/February): “In Chicago, a city with plentiful resources– music, theater, literature–only a handful of WTTW’s programs reflect Chicago’s cultural abundance; and few programs draw on the capabilities of Chicago’s production community…....

The Rhinoceros Theater Festival THURSDAY, AUGUST 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this one-man show, Kodeski recounts the long life of a minister’s wife, based on anecdotes he gleaned from interviews with the woman (who now lives in a local retirement home). “Performing in a style that’s the very antithesis of drag–sans wig, falsetto, and stereotyped feminine gestures–Kodeski is nevertheless remarkably affecting,” says Reader critic Jack Helbig....

Spin For as long as filmmakers have pointed cameras at the world, they have edited their images to make points. And for just as long other filmmakers with other agendas have reedited those films. Surrealists whimsically collage unconscious links, deconstructionists yank at Oz’s curtain, and propagandists revise their enemies’ salvos. Back in 1927 Esther Shub skewered the czarists using Nicholas II’s home movies to reframe Russian history through a communist lens....

Vocalist Vernis Rucker is the latest protege of Quinton Claunch, the fabled Memphis Svengali whose Goldwax label launched the R & B careers of O.V. Wright and James Carr in the 60s. Her debut CD, Stranger in the Sheets, showcases a voice that can segue effortlessly from sexy intimacy through lady-in-the-streets assertiveness all the way to an ecstatic gospel crescendo; she’s already learned how to convey strong emotions by undersinging. Whether purring the blues in a sweet, kittenish soprano (“Fishin’ for a Man”) or gleefully exacting retribution on a recalcitrant lover (“Dead to Right”), Rucker sounds both sensual and refreshingly assertive....

My daughter Elly spent one Sunday caroling at Lincoln Park Zoo for an event the zoo holds every year, hosting young people’s choirs from the area. Elly, who’s seven, sings with one of the troupes of the Chicago Children’s Choir. Last year they were allowed to take center stage, near the seals and sea lions. It’s the best spot; the animals there clap. This year the CCC was relegated to the reptile house; it’s hard to think what crocs and snakes might do to show their appreciation....