“I moved to San Francisco when I was 15 as one of the first wave of hippies, and I lived in Haight-Ashbury,” says Ric Addy, owner of Shake, Rattle & Read. “The way I lived out there was by selling underground newspapers like the Berkeley Barb and the Los Angeles Free Press. I helped build People’s Park, and I did the Fillmore thing. But by 1970 things started to go downhill....

Visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 may have thought Chicago lived up to its official motto, “Urbs in Horto”–city in a garden. The exposition was held in Jackson Park, and strung around the city like jewels on a necklace were the other grand parks: Washington, Garfield, Lincoln. They were ideal places for a Sunday promenade or a restful view of trees and flowers. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MONKEY SHINES: AN EXPERIMENT IN FEAR You’ve got to get through a few layers of foam rubber before you reach what’s good (or better than good) about George Romero’s new feature. There’s a series of obstacles–cultural, corporate, ideological, stylistic, aesthetic, commercial–standing in the way of what the movie is doing at its best; they may not count for much in the long run, but it’s better to be forewarned and forearmed....

LEWD FOOD FLUXUS BANQUET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most Fluxus eat-ins, if you will, had simple themes, such as a color or a specific dish. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a seminal Fluxus artist, once had a banquet in which every dish included grapefruit. On another occasion the artists might have produced a banquet of only green foods, or the now-famous “Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes” (reprised, after the more traditional dessert, at the Arts Club) featuring mashed potatoes flavored with cinnamon or mint as well as the more common varieties with gravy or melted butter....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read with great interest your recent story “Life Without Father” by Bryan Miller [October 9]. Having heard of Single Mothers by Choice on WBEZ recently, I was amazed to hear the repetition of certain statements. The tone of the overall story seemed to be pointed in the women’s favor, ignoring any effects of this situation on the children....

Ice-T, onetime south-central LA street hood and now the chief practitioner of a searing hip-hop subgenre called gangster rap, is a stolid rapper and a fairly unimaginative writer. He has yet to come up with a classic track, though his work on the title theme from Colors and his contribution to the New Jack City sound track, “New Jack Hustler,” come close. His music–unadorned tales of violent street life over an arid, almost detached rap backing–is the musical equivalent of an LA ghetto’s hazy glare, and quite effective; more important, however, is his symbolic position as the smartest of the west-coast rappers, and the one who’s grown the most as well: he’s been slowly overcoming his penchants for dis-ing gays and women to become a responsible voice of ghetto frustration....

ITALIAN AMERICAN RECONCILIATION Of course not. And so the playwright has to look elsewhere for somebody to write about. If you’re Shakespeare, you can write about ranting royalty or Arcadian swains piping on oat straws, or whatever. If you’re David Mamet, you’ve got fucking lowlifes, fucking thieves, and fucking hustlers. And if you’re John Patrick Shanley, there’s Little Italy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shanley can be good on Little Italy....

JAZZ FREDDY at Live Bait Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was probably inevitable that someone would think of creating a dream team of the better improvisers in the city. It was not inevitable that a dream team would create great improvisations. When I used to hang out at the ImprovOlympic six years ago, the dream team Harold Be Thy Name–made up entirely of rising stars at Second City, among them Chris Barnes, Mark Beltzman, and Joel Murray–routinely created the most dismal improvisations....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cindy Havens, a 30-year-old waitress in Ottawa, Ontario, had her crime downgraded from trafficking in marijuana to possession after she explained to a judge in July that she had such a large quantity on hand because it seemed to be the only thing her pet iguana, Pogo Longtail, would eat. (The judge then mused aloud whether his ruling would cause a run on iguanas at local pet stores....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 28-year-old industrial engineer was fired from his job in Cookeville, Tennessee, after a November incident in which he was charged with indecent exposure (a charge that was later dropped). He was apprehended outdoors at a mall, stark naked. His explanation was that his car had broken down and that, despite a driving rainstorm, he needed to get underneath the car to see what was wrong....

Perhaps the wildest comedy yet from Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti, a European cult favorite here starring as a water-polo player and Communist politician suffering from amnesia. Interspersing clips from a TV screening of Doctor Zhivago and Moretti’s own Super-8 work from the 70s as well as cameo appearances by Raul Ruiz as a metaphysical priest, Moretti concocts a dreamy satire about the ambiguous status of the Communist Party in contemporary Italy, with water polo serving as a ruling metaphor (the title refers to a goal-scoring technique); journalism and advertising are singled out for particular comic abuse....

The Chicago-area debut of this most unusual trio is a cause for serious celebration. The Motian Trio delightfully achieve one of modern art’s most satisfying goals: they manage to communicate dearly while using fresh and even unfamiliar dialects. The whole band mirrors the layered, constant energy of the drum work of its aptly named leader: his oddly accented, subtly phrased rhythms seem to always be in motion, restlessly following an undercurrent of their own while driving the music above them....

“Acoustic blues,” said the gent at the door of Buddy Guy’s Legends a few Wednesdays ago when a prospective customer asked him what Rory Block’s show was going to be like. “It’s just a girl singing.” Block has said that since being introduced to the blues at age 14 she’s felt that “the spirit of the music is in me,” and she doesn’t try to be anything she isn’t–no posing, no red-hot-mama histrionics or theatrical affectations....

Shot with camera equipment and film stock furnished by Jon Jost, the third feature from radical independent writer-director-cinematographer-editor Gregg Araki–after the award-winning Three Bewildered People in the Night and The Long Weekend (O’Despair)–is a talky but potent doomed-couple-on-the-run picture in which both leads are desperate young men who recently tested HIV positive. Jon (Craig Gilmore) is a sometime film critic who lives in LA, and Luke (Mike Dytri) is a cop killer on the run; in a rough parallel to Godard’s Breathless, Gilmore plays Jean Seberg to Dytri’s Jean-Paul Belmondo....

THE SEA HORSE Fortunately Quando Productions’ The Sea Horse, despite a rocky first act, verifies the power of committed acting to imbue any material with emotional truth and dramatic power. Anne Reifsteck as barkeep Gertrude Blum pulls out all the stops, allowing the last 20 minutes of this play to devastate her; she dives into an emotional chasm from which she has hardly emerged even after her second curtain call....

Georgia-born blues guitarist Tinsley Ellis may be best known for his stint as lead guitarist of the Heartfixers, an Atlanta aggregation that developed a cult following in the 80s as one of the hottest young southern R & B outfits since the Allmans. His early influences ranged from B.B. King to James Brown, and he’s added a healthy dollop of Texas and New Orleans to his repertoire, making him among our most stylistically diverse young musicians....

An 18-year-old marine is hazed to death on the U.S. outpost at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Is it an accidental excess or murder? Does responsibility lie with the two gung ho marines accused of the crime or their disciplinarian superior officers? To find out, three witty defense lawyers–“a pushy broad, a smart Jew, and a Harvard mouth”–wage legal war against the rigid, right-wing, religious-fanatic top brass of the marine base. Guess who wins?...

CHICAGO IMPRO THEATER at Holy Covenant Church Every week the group improvises on a new theme, among them “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Go West,” and “Back to School.” The show I attended was “Baseball.” Such innocuous themes pretty much rule out hard-hitting, attention-getting social satire; it’s up to the ensemble to give the sketches enough importance and immediacy to grab the audience’s attention and keep it for two to five minutes at a stretch....

COMING ATTRACTIONS Then there’s blunt satire, which merely bludgeons the audience with the obvious–a clown who puts basketballs under his shirt and pretends to be Dolly Parton. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, the public fascination with mass murder could be the topic of sharp satire. If you kill enough people, you can be sure someone will write a book about you. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood immortalized two ex-cons who wiped out an entire family....

“A friend of mine told me, ‘The older you get, the more you sound like a Republican. It’s scary.’ I agree. It is scary. But now I can say, ‘I’m not a Republican. I’m a communitarian.’” “Then three individuals, one of whom at least is a member of the Environmental Advocates, brought an action against the village with the state Department of Human Rights. They claimed that they were handicapped by chemical sensitivity, that our spraying kept them out of the parks, and that therefore we were denying the right of access to handicapped people....