LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that Cartmill shouldn’t be the dominant actor in the show, for the play belongs to Valmont. Not only is he the most interesting, the most dangerous, the most sexually active character–at one time or another he has slept with every woman in the show except his maiden aunt–but without Valmont, nothing would happen. It is Valmont who initiates young Cecile, who has just finished her convent education, into the mysteries of sex....

Material Issue is fronted by the rebarbative Jim Ellison, a long-legged gamin who leads a youthful three-piece band. With a chip on his shoulder the size of Cabaret Metro and a penchant for saying stupid things in public, he’s an onstage natural full of equal parts attitude and shit. But as you watch him skip, sneer, and mug his way through a typical set, you’ll finally have to laugh at how easy he makes it all seem....

MAX ERNST: DADA AND THE DAWN OF SURREALISM Along with about 180 other works in various media from the first decade of Ernst’s maturity, roughly 1916-1927, this picture can be seen in a superbly installed and sharply focused show at the Art Institute. An intelligent alternative to the all-over-the-map museum blockbuster, this exhibit gives an in-depth view of the period in which Ernst developed many of the artistic modes he used throughout his career, offering a fine introduction to both his work and 20th-century art....

Usually when a band comes together to honor the work of one composer, it places a premium on fidelity: the instrumentation, and even the style of the soloists, consciously evoke the dedicatee’s original recordings, and you end up with some variation on a ghost band. But Monk’s music long ago transcended this limitation; his compositions have proved both durable and plastic, lending themselves to unexpected interpretations by a wide range of musicians (from the Italian pianist Giorgio Gaslini, who created minimalist deconstructions of Monk tunes, to guitarist Peter Frampton–honest)....

PJ Harvey’s Astonishing Debut In her new collection of essays, Sex, Art, and American Culture, Camille Paglia conforms to the caricature she presents in her public antics: a gender-based version of the syndrome nicely outlined in its racial form by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in the caustic “Famous and Dandy.” (“What will we do to become famous and dandy / Like Amos and Andy?”) The song’s about how the culture can force even “liberated” blacks into clown roles....

Pradith is well traveled. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He picked the place. On Broadway near Wilson, it’s called the Hair Force. The sidewalk outside was being ripped apart by two men with jackhammers, which echoed inside the shop like pistons firing inside an engine. It was a large place, eight chairs, but only one of them was taken. All of the hairstylists were black Americans, and there were dozens of pictures of the latest black hairstyles on the wall....

When we are fortunate enough to discover someone willing to visit our excruciatingly drab apartment, a topic which invariably comes up is the nature and origin of our vintage red lava lamp. Just what is a lava lamp and how does it work? Is it the result of some ghastly industrial accident or did someone create it on purpose? –Jim Geckle, Brian Repp, Tim Ray, Lindor Henrickson, Greenbelt, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now....

AWAY ALONE Playwright Janet Noble wants to explore the emotional dynamics of a family, although in this case the family is a group of related and unrelated Irish immigrants in present-day New York City. Noble uses time-honored and possibly worn-out conventions to enact this drama. Her hopelessly naive protagonist, Liam (Andrew Lyons), is newly arrived in America; he functions as a surrogate for the audience, so that we can discover the New World along with him....

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You know there’s a story you want to tell, but it’s not going to be in paperback. You’re saving this one for the big screen and the big bucks, right? Get some pointers at Nuts and Bolts of Screenwriting for Film and Television, a two-day writing seminar sponsored by the American Film Institute. It’ll be led by Carl Sautter, the guy behind Moonlighting’s one great episode–the black-and-white mystery dream sequence when Maddie sang and David purred....

Friday 30 Infrared film, which reacts to heat as well as light, makes very detailed, eerie images. But the film is unpredictable, so only a few professionals make it a specialty. Two who do, Joe Schuett and Peter LeGrand, will offer workshops today at the Midwest Photographic Centre, 510 E. State in Rockford. Schuett’s A Landscape Retreat in Infrared Photography runs from 9 to noon and costs $65. LeGrand’s Infrared Nudes runs from 1 to 4 and costs $75....

In Brooklyn’s halcyon days, when Coney Island was America’s answer to Karlsbad and Marienbad, the high point of many of my summer evenings was a bone-racking, brain-numbing ride on the Cyclone followed by a Nathan’s hot dog with all the trimmings. Once safely back on terra firma, of course–to reverse the order was to court disaster. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to information supplied by the Nathan’s Famous organization, 73 years ago founder Nathan Handwerker found himself possessed of $300–his life’s savings....

I was only a block from work when the clouds exploded. Even though I ran and jumped until I made the nearest doorway, the rain had become a part of me. Water dripped from my hair, crawled along my neck, and pushed its way through my clothes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Water splashed everywhere. The man with the empty bag shook his head....

To the editors: After reading Dennis Polkow’s recent review of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring as performed by Chicago Opera Theater [April 14], I find myself with severe doubts regarding his qualifications to critique opera. I found a number of things with which to disagree–and only one of them was a purely subjective judgement. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Item. Mr. Polkow holds that the snare drum got ahead of the rest of the orchestra in the beginning of the third act....

Beneath its surface merriment, the music of Loketo conceals a certain sadness. It’s one of the most compelling examples of what happens to Zaire’s buoyant soukous music when you levitate it out of its homeland and drop it on the elegant, high-powered metropolis of Paris. It sounds like soukous on too much caffeine, skipping fast and slamming hard, and what it gains in nervous energy it loses in rhythmic subtlety. But I’d hate to sound like a mindless purist–after all, this displacement really just reflects another phase in the evolution of that organized noise we call music, and Loketo’s heavy reliance on the bass kick drum can evoke a heady exuberance....

THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME That in-between stage is the one Lynda Barry cleverly re-creates in The Good Times Are Killing Me. She acts as a go-between, a medium, putting us in contact with long-dead childhood experiences. Arnold Aprill, who has adapted Barry’s novel for the City Lit Theater, manages to make these vaporous experiences materialize onstage. But he goes a step farther in his direction of the play–we see the glorious eccentricity and goofy humor that shape Barry’s vision of childhood....

DO THE RIGHT THING I can’t say that I’ve been an unqualified Spike Lee fan. His flair for publicity has tended to overwhelm his talents as a writer-director-actor, and the fact that he remains better known to the general public for his TV commercials than for either She’s Gotta Have It (1986) or School Daze (1988) points to an adeptness at working both sides of the street that has made it difficult to assess his work....

Where did the name “Dixie” come from? And exactly what states comprise Dixie? –Leigh-Anne Horton, Dallas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dixie is usually thought to include the states of the Confederacy, but where the term comes from nobody knows for sure. Here are the three leading theories: (1) Before the Civil War, the Citizens Bank of Louisiana, located in New Orleans, issued ten-dollar notes that bore the Creole/French word dix, ten, on one side....

Last November 1, Daniel Sotomayor flashed a Gay Chicago press card and made his way into a historic press conference: Mayor Daley’s unveiling of the city’s AIDS Strategic Plan. Nothing’s written in stone, said the mayor. Daniel Sotomayor himself has AIDS. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The next day, Sotomayor led an ACT UP demonstration at City Hall and was arrested. Gernhardt finally told Sotomayor he was putting the cartoon “on hold....

Who could have predicted that black stars would so dominate the 80s pop firmament? Any accounting of the decade’s most important acts would have to include at least three black acts in the top, oh, four or so, by my reckoning–Prince edging out Bruce for number one, the two of them followed closely by Run-D.M.C. and Michael Jackson. Plastic Princess Whitney Houston will never inherit the throne of Queen of Soul, but her phenomenal sales figures have at least to be acknowledged....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The reason why people want to see this movie is revealed when Clarice makes a confession after she discovers a severed head belonging to one of Lecter’s victims. She felt fear, then excitement. I didn’t. The reason I went to see this movie was because it was a cut above most slasher movies. It wasn’t....