As one listener in this era of rap and alternative rock who remains a sucker for straightforward two-guitars-bass-and-drums rock and roll, I’m left wanting by the many bands who traffic in this genre without intelligence or originality. Hence my enthusiasm for Tragically Hip. On their third record, Fully Completely, the Canadian quintet adapts the principles of punchy, intertwining guitars, urgent vocals, and nimble drumming to the post-Nevermind rules of the game....

Dear Letters to the Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A man’s life is a series of trials that women often figure in,” Hot Type columnist Michael Miner notes, musing on the O.J. Simpson case, and on the amorous wreckage of his own past, after the Kyprian’s gaze had fallen upon him, and led a much younger incarnation to wander off of his life’s path....

MOZART QUARTER I cannot tell a lie. I couldn’t follow all the plot details of Mozart Quarter–Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s delightful comic fantasy about contemporary sex relations in a working-class neighborhood in Yaounde, Cameroon–even after I saw it a third time. Some of my confusion was probably due to the subtitler’s effort to render part of the French African dialogue in American inner-city slang–an understandable goal, but one that sometimes sacrifices lucidity for superficial familiarity and occasionally produces outright gibberish....

This touring showcase of youth choirs from four countries, organized by an entity called the Alliance for Arts and Understanding, is the brainchild of Carol Stewart, a respected veteran church conductor from Iowa. Its intentions are laudable–introducing kids from various countries to one another’s musical heritage–but does the confab amount to anything musically? From what I’ve heard, the choirs involved are almost on a par with the Vienna Boys’ Choir: wellschooled dulcet voices with a focus on angelic expressiveness....

SEPTEMBER The 17th Annual Chicago Jazz Festival has lost its national radio broadcast this year, but that hasn’t stopped organizers from booking more than two dozen nationally and internationally known performers to fill up two Grant Park stages. Tonight from 6 to 10 at the Petrillo Music Shell you can catch Kurt Elling, Stanley Turrentine, Cassandra Wilson, and the Jackie McLean/Bobby Hutcherson Quintet. Tomorrow and Sunday the music runs from noon to 10; Saturday’s headliners are Henry Threadgill and Eddie Palmieri, Sunday’s are John Scofield and Clark Terry....

During the worst of the dying in Rwanda an ABC crew interviewed on Nightline tried to convey the experience of being there. They spoke with a depth of introspective anguish journalists almost never permit themselves in public. “There’s no escaping the decay, there’s no escaping the death,” explained producer Rick Wilkinson, who said he’d seen things that made him “personally insane.” Possibly because he felt Koppel had questioned his professionalism, his reply rambled....

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND BAD CIGARS at Dancetech Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It seems that Clemens carefully created his own public persona. As a public speaker he even wore a costume of sorts–white suit, shirt, tie, and shoes–and gave his persona a name: Mark Twain. He presented himself as an up-front kind of guy who saw beneath the veils of society, and most of his insights were based on a belief that “there are two sets of morals: private and real, and public and artificial....

LITTLE MILTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Little Milton is one of the few active bluesmen who can trace their careers back to Sam Phillips’s legendary Sun label in Memphis. In those days Milton mimicked everyone from his Memphis compatriot B.B. King to New Orleans shouter Roy Brown with uncanny accuracy, and though his sides from that era are now collectors’ items it wasn’t until he found his own style–on labels such as Bobbin, Chess, and Malaco–that he put together one of the blues’ most artistically satisfying careers....

A Certain Level of Denial Naked except for a flower-festooned hat and black slip-on shoes, Karen Finley lies motionless onstage in a tightly framed box of light roughly the size of a grave. One moment she speaks as a dispassionate psychiatrist barely able to conceal his sexist biases, asserting that because she’s naked she must desire him, and the next she becomes his long-suffering patient, doing her best not to scream when she tells him, “Women are tired of having their bodies viewed as a loaded gun....

Janet Cardiff’s memory is full of sounds from her parents’ farm in rural Canada. She recalls having to plunge a long knife into the gut of a cow bloated from eating too much alfalfa. “My dad had to get the vet, and in order to save the cow I had to release the air,” Cardiff says. “The air talks to you–it’s just opening and going ‘shooosh.’” This is one of many sounds the 37-year-old Cardiff conjures up in her installation An Inability to Make a Sound at Randolph Street Gallery....

Among the words that could have been invented just to describe Liliane Montevecchi are gamine and glamorous. She’s an elegant waif of a performer who looks and acts nothing like a woman of her 60-some years is supposed to act. In this cabaret revue, created for her by director Tommy Tune, she combines the ingenuous charm of a youngster with the confident composure that’s achieved only by a lifetime in the theater....

Lanky, soft-spoken David Cale has perfected a style of performance that lies somewhere between the multiple-personalitied Eric Bogosian and the minimalist Spalding Gray. Like Bogosian, Cale populates his monologues with numerous odd characters, all of them anxious to tell their stories. Unlike Bogosian, however, Cale doesn’t get hung up on transforming himself into the various personas he plays. Like Gray, he has stripped his show down to its essentials. Standing alone onstage, with only a microphone, a chair or two, and a head full of voices, Cale tells his stories simply and directly, without an ounce of bogus theatricality....

Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? In this 1991 Broadway musical based on the classic children’s novel, young Mary Lennox’s secret garden–a metaphor for the hidden hearts of two emotionally wounded children and their reclusive guardian–blossoms beautifully. The reasons include a lyrical score flavored with Celtic and Indian elements; a witty, never cloying script; staging that emphasizes full-bodied story telling and a plethora of interesting characters; a dramatically solid, rich-voiced cast; and exquisite, evocative scenery in the elaborate style of turn-of-the-century storybooks....

“I hate it.” Wes Kidd has spent nearly a year in limbo. He’s been sitting on a record he’s proud of. The album is Triple Fast Action’s swaggery and punchy Broadcaster. In it Kidd’s guileless lyrics and snappy hooks and the quartet’s versatile and powerful attack marry to create a worthy postpunk successor to the meld of hard rock and pop that marked the greatest records by Cheap Trick. So why isn’t it out?...

La Gran Scena Opera Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The operatic era to which La Gran Scena really belongs is not the present but the 50s and 60s–the Age of Big Hair. The logistics of the company’s hairdressing and wig-transportation needs are awesome to contemplate. The divas are introduced with a memorable rendition of “The Ride of the Valkyries,” featuring spears and bouffant hairdos–short a couple of sisters, but it’s still fun....

Friday 23 Ali Akbar Khan, the world’s foremost practitioner of Indian classical music, who’s often hailed as one of the world’s greatest living musicians in any genre, began his studies at the age of three at the hand of his father, master musician Allauddin Khan. Legend has it that he practiced 18 hours a day for years. Now 70, he lives and teaches alternately in the Bay Area and Switzerland, and still tours....

Though the folks in Quayle Country don’t much cotton to the views of the “cultural elite,” you won’t hear much disagreement in these parts with the recent pronouncement that Dan Quayle is history. A number of prescient local citizens have been saying it proudly for years, and their diligent efforts to gather memorabilia during Quayle’s abbreviated term as vice president will culminate this month in the opening of an entire Dan Quayle Center and Museum....

Dear Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ms. Eskin, in her attempt to be humorous and cynical, trivialized a problem that affects millions of Americans. She has the notion that a major depression is akin to a bad hair day. For those who have experienced serious depression, they would gladly trade the experience for worries of everyday life. Finally, Ms. Eskin believed that the program was the work of the pharmaceutical industry to “move product....

Summertime There are long moments when Summertime chills the bones. A woman throws herself against a closed door, screaming “Let me in!” A woman who towers over the stage repeats in a commanding, stentorian voice: “Answer me!” A woman barrels from one corner to another to yell until breathless the litany “Don’t come in, don’t come in, don’t come in!…I’m not dressed.” A woman crouched in a bushel basket with a light glowing between her legs rises to her full height slowly, intoning an urgent, bluesy song about the bed she’s prepared for a loved one....

Texas accordionist Flaco Jimenez has been playing and recording a potent form of Mexican conjunto music for about 40 years. Around the time Jimenez was born, his father, the original Flaco, was a key figure in the evolution of conjunto from a polite and folksy idiom into a more boisterous and lyrical one. Flaco the younger has taken the music further, mucking it up rhythmically and flirting with rock ‘n’ roll....