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TANGO & CASH With Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell, and Jack Palance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The penis, when in the hands of an actor, never amounts to much more than comic relief, even when it is only wielded metaphorically. Though the penile jousting in Tango & Cash is merely verbal, this tale of two boyish cops on the trail of a punitive crime lord is straight out of the junior-high locker room–a $25 million fantasy of male pubescent fear and adolescent power, right down to the tenor of its dialogue and its perverse imagery....

For years Johnny Littlejohn has been hailed as one of the few contemporary slide guitarists worthy of carrying the traditionalist mantle of Muddy Waters and the other Chicago bluesmen who virtually reinvented the venerable form in the 50s. Despite that, he remains something of a well-kept secret. He doesn’t maintain the stinging ferocity usually associated with Chicago slide, but his melodicism and plaintive wail pack a deep emotional wallop. Unlike many slide masters (Waters among them), Littlejohn can also hold his own as a single-string lead player, and although his repertoire is limited to an armful of well-tested standards, he brings a refreshing sense of immediacy to his music....

Magic Slim has toned down his furious energy a bit since the days of his legendary jam at Florence’s Lounge, at 55th and Shields, but when he really gets into it he’s still one of the blues’s most exhilarating performers. His keening guitar work alternates sustained shimmering phrases with high-voltage flurries that sometimes seem to spark from his fingertips like an electrical charge, and he roars out his lyrics in a declamatory shout that reflects the bull-like machismo of his stage personality....

Last month marked the 65th anniversary of John Coltrane’s birth; in the next ten nights you can hear both surviving members of the galvanic Coltrane Quartet leading their own groups at the Jazz Showcase. In the early 60s, pianist Tyner and drummer Jones fashioned the pulsing, polyrhythmic frame for Coltrane’s reeling, at times fulminating improvisations; more than 25 years later, both men have retained and refined the qualities that supplied that cataclysmic power....

“Coming to school with your lunch in a paper bag instead of a Partridge Family lunch box was a real stigma when I was in grade school,” says violin superstar Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. “To make matters worse, while all the other kids pulled out bologna or peanut butter on Wonder Bread–many with the crusts carefully cut off by their mothers–I pulled out a long Sicilian peppers-and-egg sandwich, dripping with olive oil....

The remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis plays the remarkable Christy Brown, an Irishman born with a severe case of cerebral palsy who eventually taught himself to paint and write with his left foot, in a film adapted by director Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton from Brown’s autobiography. Far from milking this subject for conventional sentimentality, the filmmakers use it as the basis for an engaging and idiosyncratic character study. Lewis’s performance is necessarily a bit showy–one has to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the character’s contorted features–but he puts on a terrific drunk scene, and for all his character’s travails, the film as a whole winds up as surprisingly upbeat....

In attempting to explain to nonjournalistic friends the significance of Tina Brown’s move to the New Yorker, I suggested that it was a little like Pigtail Dick taking over the helm of the CSO. The metaphor is nonjudgmental; both Brown, the magician of the revivified Vanity Fair, and Dick, blithe frontman of the fabulous New Duncan Imperials, reign firmly in their own particular worlds–the questiono is how they would function outside of it....

“If you’re an angel and you’re coming to earth, and you want to pick a body to be in, why not put a little flair into it? You know? Why go out and be some doof?” says Kevin Kling of one of the characters in his play Lloyd’s Prayer. “I wouldn’t. I’d pick somebody that’s got something going for them.” Kling brings a uniquely skewed logic to his story of a boy who’s raised by raccoons, exploited by a con man named Lloyd, and inadvertently seduced by an angel of the lord–a gum-snapping, small-town beauty queen....

China Club, 616 W. Fulton: Robby, standing in the red light of a Chinese lantern, was mad. The guard at the door of the VIP room wasn’t going to let Robby in because he’d never heard of Robby’s band, the Cruel Woodchucks. So Robby had to lie and say he was BJ’s dry cleaner. BJ Murray is the host of the VIP room and one way to get in is to say you’re BJ’s friend....

STANDING IN THE WINGS at the Circle Theatre This concert began and ended with a quartet dressed in white. Todd Michael Kiech’s untitled work in progress uses three men (Angel Abcede, Louie Miller, and Kiech) and a boyish-looking woman (Cheryl Bye) in white T-shirts, white pants, and white sneakers. As the lights come up, Kiech steps away from the group to start a sequence of loose, circular falling movements. A turn on the toe of his sneaker turns into a quick pirouette in plie....

Dig through the fine print on the Cure’s new Wish and you’ll find this snatch of Shelley: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” That about sums up the source of the band’s phenomenal growth: On new songs like “High,” “To Wish Impossible Things,” and “A Letter to Elise” leader Robert Smith and his mates continue to craft paeans to sadness and desolation, but instead of continuing to cloak them (and choke them) in the vacant musical moan of the band’s fabled depresso period, they now construct luscious pop-rock settings of the highest order....

What is the origin of Uncle Sam, the cartoon character symbolizing the U.S.? Any relation to Sam Hill, as in what the S.H.? –Anonymous, Denver Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A widely held belief, one that can be found in supposedly reliable reference books, is that the original Uncle Sam was one Sam Wilson, a meat packer in Troy, New York, who supplied rations to the U....

The View From the Pressroom Two Sundays ago the Sun-Times covered “a slashing attack against American Jews” made by Gus Savage at a “candidates forum.” This new alliance may not come to anything. Even so, it’s the sort of street-level development the media used to overlook routinely. Headlines are easy; news is hard. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Young Rivlin (he’s just 33 now) hung around the pressroom and watched the media watching City Hall....

EUROPA EUROPA Solomon Perel was born in Peine, Germany, in 1925, the youngest child of a Polish-Jewish shoe merchant. He survived World War II first in a Soviet orphanage (1938-41), then by posing as an Aryan at the most prestigious and elite Hitler youth school in Germany. The only giveaway sign of his Jewish identity was his circumcised penis, which he had to keep hidden at all costs. (At one point, he even made an amateurish and painful surgical attempt to “uncircumcise” himself....

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY Though Brown’s career spans almost 30 years, all three works on the program at the Harold Washington Library (sponsored by the Dance Center of Columbia College and Performing Arts Chicago) were made within the last three. Yet they looked quite different–the main similarity lay in the scores, each of which used “found” sounds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first the music and dancing seem to inhabit very different worlds: the band’s martial sounds are raucous, out of tune, extroverted, while the dancing is quiet, contemplative, the dancers somewhat isolated from each other and not dancing to the music at all....

Johnny: Live, from bunker 27, it’s the Saddam Ditka show! Johnny: But Bush really likes to go to the air. These days, you can’t just win wars on the ground. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnny: Actually, you didn’t beat Iran. It was a tie, in 70,000 overtimes. Maybe you can stick to the ground against an army like Iran, but against the big boys you really need the bombs....

The first performance last November of Ralph Shapey’s Concerto Fantastique caused quite a stir at Orchestra Hall: more than half of the audience left between movements; those who stayed to the end, however, gave a rousing ovation. Despite its shortcomings–its length and unwieldiness–the hour-long work showed the iconoclast expressionist back at the top of his form and experimenting with a new idea: piecing together deliberately rough hewn sound blocks of unconventional rhythms and exotic instrumental colors....

CARMEN The only truly successful opera written by Bizet, Carmen, despite carping from Parisian critics at the outset, entered the repertory shortly after its premiere and has remained there ever since. The story of the wicked, fatalistic Gypsy girl and her romance with Jose (presented rather sympathetically in the libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, but a thoroughgoing cad in the novel by Prosper Merimee) has fascinated opera audiences for more than a century....

HEDWIG DANCES Jean Howard, a founder of the poetry slam, takes a more ambitious route, combining her poetry with Alice Q. Hargrave’s photography and Jan Bartoszek’s dances in Dancing in Your Mother’s Skin. Howard’s first book of poetry is illustrated with Hargrave’s photographs; this performance at Link’s Hall Studio, with Bartoszek’s dances, was described as a book-release party. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Howard’s work has the weaknesses common to performance poetry....

THE SONG OF JACOB ZULU Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Written by a white Jewish South African emigre named Tug Yourgrau and featuring music by the black South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, The Song of Jacob Zulu is set in South Africa in 1985 and deals directly with that country’s politics. In fact, it’s based on a true incident: its hero, Jacob Zulu, is modeled on a young man named Andrew Zondo–a cousin of Joseph Shabalala, Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s leader and the score’s composer–who set off a Christmastime bomb in a shopping center that killed and wounded mostly civilians, both white and black....