Rush Limbaugh makes a good living denouncing the allegedly immense power of the left in American life. It would be comforting for me, as a confirmed pinko ideologue, to believe Limbaugh’s fantasy of leftist omnipotence. But alas, most leftist organizations in this country would have a hard time organizing a good picnic, much less the Revolution. With little influence in the wider world, most left groups these days concentrate on “propaganda” work–they still use the old term–among their vaguely sympathetic peripheries....

ROY HARGROVE QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Roy Hargrove has technique to spare, and one could easily concentrate on the fine points of such stylistic virtues as his economy of phrasing and purity of tone. But at his best, the still-young trumpeter goes beyond that: he elevates style to the level of substance. Thus, his economy of phrasing becomes not just a technique but a philosophy; his purity of tone transcends the medium to become the message itself....

Politix stink. They make me sick. I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll never go near them again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Politix may be the most interesting Moonlight Tobacco product, but the entire Moonlight line (as pictured in the glossy, full-color insert that’s been in the Reader and other alternative papers lately) has been clearly designed with this obfuscation in mind. First, Moonlight cigarettes make exemplary use of the latest device in the culture of evasion, the advertising strategy that the New York Times calls “stealth parentage....

Terms of Abortion Conversely, those foes object to the marketing of an essence-of-America word like “choice.” We spoke with John Kurkowski, executive director of the Des Plaines Pro Life Resource Center. “I’m sure you’ve seen some of the ads on television that say ‘Life–what a beautiful choice!’” he said. “I imagine those people are for choice but not abortion.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Richard O’Connor, executive director of Illinois Right to Life Committee, was even more emphatic....

Who Learned What? A Report From Kellogg’s Arts Management Retreat A good time was definitely not had by all at a recent weekend retreat for more than 50 Chicago arts executives at Northwestern University’s prestigious J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. “Kellogg needs to get its shit together,” says a blunt Jackie Taylor, producing director and founder of the Black Ensemble, who felt the business school did a “lousy” job of preparing for the retreat....

Bassist Willie Kent and his Gents have become well-known throughout Chicago and beyond for their no-nonsense, craftsmanlike approach to blues. Less renowned, but just as entertaining, is Big Mojo Elem. Elem played bass for some of the greats–Freddie King, Luther Allison–but in recent years he’s concentrated increasingly on singing. His high-pitched voice, remindful of the late J.B. Lenoir’s but with a grittier tone, is one of the most powerful in blues: he sometimes lays his microphone down and strolls through the club singing, and you can still hear every word and nuance....

All’s Well That Ends Well What emerges in this staging of Shakespeare’s rarely performed All’s Well That Ends Well are good intentions encumbered by too many contemporary interpretations and conceptual motifs for Humble Ambitions’ modest resources to support. And what might have seemed simple ingenuousness comes across as pretentious chaos. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Helena, the orphaned daughter of a respected physician, uses the skills learned from him to cure the King of France of a debilitating illness....

The Adding Machine National Pastime Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If that were all there was to Rice’s play, it would be an interesting but trivial relic–about as interesting and trivial as the stacks of insectlike adding machines covered with hard, dark plastic shells I used to see piled up at the Salvation Army in the early days of calculators. But Rice is after something more in the play than just another story about an obsolete employee who kills his boss....

Every Wednesday or Thursday between August and December a next-day-air package arrives at Ron Burger’s downtown office. It’s a package from dad back home in suburban Cleveland. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every summer when the Browns are at training camp, Burger visits his father to deliver blank tapes and envelopes. Every envelope is already stamped and addressed. He doesn’t want anything to go wrong....

Curtis’s Charm Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To say that John L’Ecuyer’s lovely black-and-white 16-millimeter (1995) adaptation of an autobiographical story by Jim Carroll–playing at the Chicago Underground Film Fest–is incomparably better than the movie version of The Basketball Diaries isn’t saying very much. Better to say that it’s sweeter, warmer, sharper, and filled with more human understanding than Trainspotting as it deals with a similar portrait of friends going in and out of drug addiction, this time in the lower reaches of New York City....

Paul Yule’s simple talking-head documentary, made for England’s Channel Four in 1991, was attacked in court by the Reverend Donald Wildmon, who called it “blasphemous and obscene”; Wildmon unsuccessfully tried to get it barred from the U.S. and sued the film’s producers for $8 million, which is why it’s a little late reaching us. The film is supposedly lethal because it presents both sides of the recent art-censorship debates and actually lets us see the contested Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, hear the 2 Live Crew music, and then make up our own minds....

FALSTAFF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re a fan of the melodic lilt and sledge-chordage of the best 70s American power pop (Big Star, the dBs, the Raspberries) but you like your lyrics a bit more evil–youthful exuberance curdled by a persistent chafing irony–Falstaff will ring your bells. Led by guitarist, singer, and instrument builder Ian Schneller, Falstaff were formed in the wake of the 1992 breakup of Shrimp Boat, and their eponymous debut–released on Schneller’s own Specimen Products label–is one of my favorite rock records of last year....

The city of Chicago is home to one million registered cars and 64 miles of expressway. If you own a car your share is about four inches of roadway. We all know the scene when everyone wants his four inches. You’re on one of Chicago’s many multilane, terminally straight, irreproachably flat expressways, and traffic’s flowing fine. But then a cloud passes across the sun, the radio station lapses into a 1980s flashback track, and things start to move with the viscosity of molasses....

I wanted to say hi and thank you to Paul Pekin for the “Home” article [November 25]. Well here I am still in South Lakeview for over ten years and feel I’ve gone through as many changes in my home as you did for 35 years in yours. If I say I live in South Lakeview people gave me a blank look; when I say it’s near Lincoln, Ashland, and Belmont their expression changes to the constant saying “so Lakeview that’s on the way up....

The many years that Lauri Macklin has been performing have taught her to pare her performances to the simplest things. In the 20-minute solo piece Parallel Worlds she sits in a chair and plays the accordion and sings wordlessly, then tells a story, and finally plays and sings again. But the story–about an idolized aunt who becomes mentally ill–and the way the singing and playing quietly communicate helplessness, love, and bereavement are as passionate as can be imagined....

Peter Pan, Shattered Globe Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Premiered in 1904 as a Christmas “panto,” in which the principal boy’s role is played by a woman, James M. Barrie’s fairy tale about a boy who wouldn’t grow up was revised in 1982 for the Royal Shakespeare Company by directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird and Barrie biographer Andrew Birkin. Their version has Peter played by a young man and included narration drawn from Barrie’s stage directions and from his 1911 novel Peter and Wendy....

The Magic Flute Yet the casual slurs uttered against women by virtually every male character in The Magic Flute are not easy to ignore. You don’t have to be an industrial-strength feminist to bristle at the constant references to women as vain, chattering twits who tend toward overweening pride and betray their admirers without compunction, or at the Three Ladies (who, after all, open the opera by slaying a dragon to save the hero) singing “Men are strong, but we are weak....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In addition, I am consumed with jealousy over his other exes, including his high school girlfriend and a woman he lived with in the early eighties. I torture myself with the idea that he has idealized them, wishes he could be with them instead of me, and that I can never measure up to them as a partner....

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s only made-for-the-movies musical–a lightweight piece of Americana that was old-fashioned when it was new in 1945–has been expanded into a charming, nostalgic stage show whose pre-Broadway tour boasts an unusually high quality of performance and production. The film score, best known for “It Might as Well Be Spring,” has been augmented by unfamiliar tunes from other R&H shows, including the lovely “Boys and Girls Like You and Me” (cut from Oklahoma!...

There’s darkness on the edge of town, and it’s from there that Townes Van Zandt writes and sings. Van Zandt’s vision is as bleak as the Texas landscape and as desperate as a parched man wandering that landscape in search of water and salvation. On guitar he’s one part Lightnin’ Hopkins–sparse finger picking, occasional flurries and arpeggios, an intimate meld of melodic and vocal lines–and several parts 60s-era folkie: some of his most effective work is strummed ferociously in minor chords....