AMERICA LITE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I laughed twice in two hours. The first time was during a skit entitled “History Lesson.” The premise is that Bush has decided to sell Ohio in order to alleviate the national debt. Now, to appreciate this skit, you must understand that there’s something inherently funny about Ohio. I didn’t know that, but since Ohio pops up in another piece (“Script Ohio”), I can only assume that just mentioning Ohio is good for a laugh....

A man raises a trumpet to his lips. A rash of triumphal notes blasts forth. But only the musician’s jaw and skull are visible. The rest of him is immaterial to the X-ray film that originally registered his recital. This footage–which was shot in the 1950s in a Rochester hospital by James Sibley Watson Jr., a pioneer in X-ray moving-picture technique–has been given new life by experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Her new film, Sanctus, a ghostly essay on bones and beauty, heads up a batch of videos that are part of a new group exhibit at the Renaissance Society, an exhibit the artists hope will “make viewers more physically and metaphorically aware of themselves....

They’re calling this show the “Chicago Jazz Triple-Header,” probably as good a way as any to describe a concert that collects a west-coast trumpet ace, a septuagenarian violin master, and a respected contemporary keyboardist/composer: eclecticism reigns. Trumpeter Bobby Shew has impeccable credentials–as reliable and resilient in a big band, but also as a fiery and incisive soloist in a variety of small-group settings. (He’s one of those players who rarely spring to mind when you list the great trumpeters, but he always prompts an admiring “Who was that?...

BURNIN’ WITH THE 8 BALL Main Line Productions at the Chicago Actors Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mercury has more pressing matters on his hands. His demon muse, Ultra, is undertaking a coup. She thinks it’s time for a change. Ultra wants to take over more of Mercury’s life, she wants him to be her mate. Mercury, locked in an alternate dimension, is both captivated and repelled by her, and they dance a dangerous duet, arguing all the while about art, the 80s, and mythology, as well as other, sometimes incomprehensible things....

A genuine oddity from 1963 Czechoslovakia, long banned because of its satirical and antiauthoritarian tendencies, this fantasy in ‘Scope and color by Vojtech Jasny describes what happens when a magic show featuring a cat with a pair of eyeglasses turns up in a fairy-tale town. When the eyeglasses are removed, people are obliged to show their “true colors”–folks in love turn red, liars purple, thieves gray, betrayers yellow and the local schoolchildren see through the duplicity of the adults for the first time....

Sandy Holubow paints houses in Old Town and Lincoln Park–on canvas. “A house is really a metaphor for the self,” she says. “It can be a mask. A house is as important as a face, or the way we dress. That’s what holds my interest.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her houses are painted at different times of day and from different perspectives, depending on what Holubow is trying to evoke with her paintbrush....

To the editors: Other groups can take a lesson from us in setting up more opportunities for winners. We have at least two of everything, besides overlapping political groups which only exist to give more people a chance. We have two sporting leagues, two choruses, three weekly newspapers, even two little writers’ groups and two different Roman Catholic worship groups! Some of these were started because somebody didn’t get to be a big enough queen in one already existing....

Perhaps you already know that the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, from New Orleans, uses instrumentation virtually identical to that of the swinging brass bands that have escorted funeral processions down the streets of that city since early in the century. America today sorely needs to be reminded that it possesses a parade march tradition that, like the samba parade music of Brazil, has nothing to do with war. But what’s even cooler about the Dirty Dozen is their penchant for incorporating more recent jazz and pop strains....

By calling Don Cherry a father of “world music,” I don’t mean to slight either his trumpet playing or his vital niche in the history of jazz. His expertise on the instrument–which might be seen as a logical (if bold) extension of Dizzy Gillespie’s playing–made it possible for him to learn and execute the early music of Ornette Coleman; in fact, Coleman’s first recordings seem to belong almost as much to Cherry, whose scruffy sound has twined inextricably with the music....

CHRIS SASSER Because each anthropomorphic being is the focus of attention inside its own canvas, the four pieces work together as a sort of portrait series. The sarcasm here is heavy and humorous. All four beings have the same intense, driven expression worn by attacking predators and social climbers. The flower chains of paint “frosting” seem to point to the ambition that characterizes the mainstream art world, in which art is often made and purchased as a tasty confection....

When you drive to Oxford, Wisconsin, by way of U.S. 51, the first commercial establishment you come upon within the town limits is a weather-beaten saloon called Spuds and Suds. Last summer, when I passed through, the building’s outer walls were decorated with advertisements for 7-Up, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the Budweiser 1988 Lawn Tractor Races. During high season, the tavern doubles as a deer registration center, and the ads compete with posted instructions telling each hunter to attach a carcass tag to his animal’s ear or antler....

Lead Story Oregon State University entomologist Michael Burgett reported in April that the average American eats about a pound of bugs a year–the aggregate of bug parts that appear in certain foods and that are too costly to remove. Burgett said that bugs generally provide more protein than an equivalent amount of other food. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recently expired: the patent for the “Toe Holder,” two rings welded together that fit over a sunbather’s big toes....

Lead Story Plant City, Florida, police arrested a 17-year-old free-lance “police officer” in January and charged him with stopping motorists and “scolding” them for minor traffic infractions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new Italian magazine, Hooligans, says it is dedicated to “soccer fans and skinheads” who don’t “love” violence “but who don’t fear it, either.” The first issue, which sold out, included an editorial praising violent British soccer fans....

NOIRESQUE–THE FALLEN ANGEL Terminal City is of course a distorted reflection of our own society, where “playing the game” is the key to success, without regard to how the rules can abuse and even destroy people. It’s a world where spontaneous thought has been replaced by advertising slogans (“Oh my pause that refreshes!” one character says as part of a litany of laments). And it is a world where love is forever distant....

The Norfleet Brothers hail from Alabama, but they’re also an important part of Chicago’s gospel-music legacy. The brothers began playing in concert and on radio in their native state in 1946 and began to achieve national acclaim after after they moved here in 1948. By 1959 they had their own gospel show on WBEE; they were so popular that the show was eventually expanded from 30 minutes into a mammoth two-hour production....

OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL BDI Theater Company COUP On the surface The Letter could be seen as an Asian variation on Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, with the primary question being how best to use the opportunity presented by a sudden windfall. But The Letter also addresses the question of how much responsibility children must assume for the suffering of their parents. Kelly speaks at great length of her mother’s hardships and elects to stay close to her, chiding the more independent Lynn for being absorbed in her own affairs....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One, a quote from Rob Buono, an Eisendrath legislative aide, reads, “Some of these guns, you pull the trigger and they spray 30 bullets within seconds. We’re not talking about an old-fashioned handgun, which discharges one bullet at a time” (emphasis added). Well, it didn’t take much research on my part to put the lie to Buono’s statement....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can live with the writer’s description of me (short and balding), but I take issue with her statement that I agree (in any way) with the statement that the teachers are not teaching. While there may be a few cases where staff is not performing as expected, the vast majority of teachers and staff are doing an exceptional job especially when one takes into consideration the circumstances and uncertainties in which they find themselves....

Greil Marcus launches his new book, a study of Elvis Presley’s presence in popular culture since 1977, with a clever title–Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. Given the omnipresence of Elvis in contemporary life–as the song says, “Elvis Is Everywhere”–he often seems more alive today than he did during much of his career. “The enormity of his impact on culture,” Marcus writes, “was never really clear when he was alive....

One of the most surprising things about Peter Bogdanovich’s touching and fascinating sequel to The Last Picture Show (1971)–based, like its predecessor, on a Larry McMurtry novel–is that, far from being a trip down memory lane, this bittersweet comedy is largely structured around historical amnesia: the hero walks with a limp and has grown estranged from his wife and his former girlfriend has lost her husband and son, though the reasons and circumstances behind these and other essential facts go unmentioned: they’re buried somewhere in the forgotten past....