Comic Stripped Good question. With great fanfare the Tribune had just asked its readers to vote for their favorite strips. “It does seem odd that you ran the comics survey and dropped Winnie before the results were in,” noted SGNye Chi. “And what about that comics survey?” wondered DavidG3276. “Why did you make this change beforehand?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This was the infamous Mister Boffo cancellation, hastily reversed by E-mail mutiny....

Defending the Caveman Many of these turn out to be pretty bad, mostly because comedy-club material, with its heavy emphasis on dick jokes, easy sexual stereotypes, and whatever topics happen to be hot on TV, seems all the more superficial and sexist over 90 minutes. This is exactly what derailed Robert Dubac in his The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron. Despite his show’s I’m-a-sensitive-guy title, Dubac’s material turned out to be the same old misogynist shtick (“Women don’t have to think....

Homework *** (A must-see) Both Godard and Kiarostami could be described as creatures of state funding, hence representatives of what Churchill argued a country should fight for and what Newt Gingrich would contend we can and must learn to live without. Interestingly enough, in a letter to the New York Film Critics Circle last January, Godard paid tribute to Kiarostami, lamenting his inability “to force [the] Oscar people to reward Kiarostami instead of Kieslowski....

Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry mixes the language of anger and love, juxtaposing images of war with symbols of passion. It’s the legacy of growing up in South Africa, simultaneously influenced by the desire to overthrow a repressive government and the steadfast love of his grandmother and mother. A former deputy secretary of culture for the African National Congress, Kgositsile rejects poetry that sounds like “a carbon copy of English literature.” His work is filled with the music, turmoil, and contradictions of South Africa....

HOLE When she brings baby Frances Bean onstage (she didn’t in Chicago) or includes heartbreaking references to her late husband in the video for “Doll Parts,” she’s using them to get attention. Or is she? Her anger toward Cobain is startling. She refers to him as an asshole, screams at him for leaving her, changes the words in her songs about him to the past tense. When some fans at the Chicago show handed her a poster to autograph after the show, she unrolled it and shouted, “Don’t give me your fucking Nirvana poster to sign!...

MICHAEL, MARGARET, PAT & KATE In his “musical reminiscence” Michael, Margaret, Pat & Kate, folksinger Michael Smith confesses that he never achieved the fame enjoyed by such friends and peers as Steve Goodman and John Prine. In fact, by the mid-1980s he’d given up on the music scene and was working a straight job when Steppenwolf Theatre hired him as composer and troubadour for The Grapes of Wrath. Happily, that gig launched a mid-life career in music theater; it also brought him into contact with the gifted director Peter Glazer (Pump Boys and Dinettes, Woody Guthrie’s American Song)....

A CHILD IS BORN A Child Is Born, Stan Nevin’s drama on just that subject, was clearly intended to be a powerful, socially relevant work. But as they say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Writing a politically correct play seems to have been Nevin’s intention, and at that he succeeds. A Child Is Born is full of such pertinent fiery issues as rape, race relations, abortion, and marital infidelity....

Robert Blanchon didn’t want his picture taken. Not even from behind. He declined to pose with his back to the camera while facing 14 drawings of himself that he had hung in Randolph Street Gallery for a group exhibition called “Telling . . . Stories.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The project originated with an invitation to submit work to the Drawing Center, a gallery in New York City....

8 Bold Souls Among the musicians most often celebrated for the innovations Marsalis disdains are members of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In questioning Marsalis recently about his failure to feature more “experimental forms” of jazz, “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross cited Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, all long associated with the AACM. Marsalis responded with the back of his hand: “I don’t feel that most of what they’re playing is jazz, so I don’t feel obligated to present it at Jazz at Lincoln Center....

A showcase for generally unknown pro, semipro, and student directors, this monthlong event features productions ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material, all in the service of what Bailiwick press materials proclaim “a new world vision.” Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 883-1090. Through October 26: Mondays-Thursdays, 7:30 PM. $8 per program; each program features two or three one-acts packaged under a single title. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Can Journalists Get Religion? How many divisions does the pope have? Stalin’s the one who asked, but reporters would have shared his scorn. The press’s rule of thumb was this: A lot of churchgoers read the paper, and there’s no need to risk offending them. So give them their harmless folklore, while the hounds of journalism chase serious matters. The first new course open to both student bodies was “Religion and Public Issues,” offered last spring....

Hugh Grant was arrested…for what? Oh, that. The older I get the more confusing this world seems. Not the arrest. Hell no. In my glory days as a forest-preserve copper I arrested plenty of people for that–or something like that. There are variations on variations. If you’re one of those people who spent your hormone years in the Chicago suburbs I may even have arrested you. He should have been in the forest preserve when I was working....

An 81-year-old woman with limp hair lies in an open coffin in one of the viewing rooms at a north-side funeral home. She’s wearing a navy blue double-knit dress and has a rosary laced through her fingers. While waiting for the curling iron to warm up, Aletha thumbs through the pictures. Her job is to make a “head” resemble the person in the pictures as much as possible. “You should see some of the pictures I have to work from,” she complains....

DJ FOOD/FUNKI PORCINI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DJ Food is an alter ego for Coldcut, the pioneering duo of Matt Black and Jonathon More. Coldcut put British hip-hop on the map with their remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” and their cut-and-paste-style collaborations with a variety of vocalists–reggae crooner Junior Reid, the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, and a then-unknown Lisa Stansfield–were influential in the development of what’s now called trip-hop....

A quintessential British cult figure, Edwyn Collins is in large part responsible for the mass popularity of wimpy pop, from the Smiths to Teenage Fanclub. His early-80s Glaswegian neopop band Orange Juice happily embraced premeditated earnestness, naivete, and coyness amid untrained guitar jangle and, later, white-boy soul. While few bands made the mistake of directly emulating Orange Juice’s often insufferable sound, their impact was undeniable: slipping through the cracks between synth-pop disco and postpunk goth, Orange Juice liberated the simple pop song and enabled its return to the charts....

For curious Chicagoans interested in making acquaintance with contemporary art music in the European concert tradition but who don’t know where to start listening, “Face the Music,” a monthly series at HotHouse, offers a chance to sit quietly and hit a beer while letting a diverse assortment of provocative sounds wash over you. The musicians–members of Chicago’s new-music community performing their own chamber works and those of various composers from the U....

Carmina Burana Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is one of the certifiable hits of 20th-century music, a rarity given that it’s a choral work. (In his program notes Phillip Huscher observes that 25 CD versions are listed in the Schwann catalog, as good a gauge of popularity as anything.) Something in this music grabs the listener and will not let go. The first time I heard it I was ten years old, idly half listening to a local classical radio station in Kansas City....

A lot of noise is being made about the Rolling Stones’ longevity, but compared to these guys the Stones are brash youngsters. Never mind the ages of the individual band members (only drummer Ben Sandmel is under 60; two others are octogenarians)–the band itself, at 64 years old, is eligible for a senior citizen’s discount. But they play with a joie de vivre that groups one-tenth their age should envy. The Ramblers are a dance band, and they’ve honed their craft over decades of playing their crowd-pleasing blend of western swing, country and western, and Cajun music in the honky-tonks and dance halls of southwest Louisiana and east Texas....

Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight: that’s the spirit behind this hilarious reworking of Shakespeare’s most famous play. Written in a perky 60s style that recalls Richard and Robert Sherman’s Disney film scores, Jeff Richmond and Michael Thomas’s musical doesn’t coast on kitschy smugness or gross-out grotesqueness like so many spoofs; instead it offers a series of clever, surprising variations on the original story, building to the upbeat ending implied by the title’s exclamation point and proving that there is nothing like a Dane....

When Cris Mazza’s second collection of short fiction, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, she received a call from a radio station wanting to interview her. Once someone at the station finally read the book, however, they canceled the interview. They were looking for actual victims of sexual harassment, and Mazza’s characters were too complicated to be neatly categorized as victims anyway. Best of Chicago voting is live now....