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BEST OF DANCE & MORE FOR $1.98 Smith’s solo Scatterbrain builds phrases of increasing length and complexity from very simple movement material: his arm thrown across his body, his body thrown to the floor, galumphing hops, high leaps with straight legs and flexed feet, great arcing entrances, straight-line exits, and gestures suggesting exhaustion, puzzlement, and frustration. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both Scatterbrain and Smith’s new work, Amelia, are set to music by Radon Daughters, Smith’s own one-man band....

Like an infant whose vocal awareness hasn’t yet been funneled into any standard repertoire of language sounds, “voice artist” Lynn Book (with bassist Tatsu Aoki, who keeps up with her like Charlie Haden with Ornette) makes one ponder the long millennia it’s taken humanity to evolve such a thing as language. In performance she grunts, squeals, gurgles, and makes sounds simply unnameable, but her emotional range goes for beyond any mere childlike joy in the production of obnoxious mouth noises....

The first thing to know about Madison is that it is a created city, platted, supposedly in 48 hours, by developers who thought an isthmus between two lakes would be an awful pretty spot for a state capital and who, incidentally of course, just happened to own a lot of real estate there. They built a town in the middle of nowhere, and Madison has remained fairly isolated, psychologically as well as physically, ever since....

Even if, like me, you normally have a limited tolerance for rock ‘n’ roll songs delivered with self-conscious artsy theatricality, the sheer force of the collective musical personality of Maestro Subgum and the Whole may win you over anyway. Since 1985 or so, when I really couldn’t stand this group, they’ve undergone a fascinating transformation, and are easily the most improved rock act in Chicago. What’s changed is mostly the writing: they’re now composing and playing songs as opposed to words shouted over uninteresting chord changes....

I began seeing my old grade-school classmates recently. Like any other kids, they grew up and did the usual things grown-ups do. I read in the Tribune a few years ago that one of the boys had killed his mother during an argument. Another one grew up to become a jewel thief, but has since straightened out. Several people became drug dealers and petty criminals, but I don’t suppose that’s so uncommon....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Justin Hayford’s review of Le Theatre de Banlieue’s performance of La Nik a Wet [March 9] raises once again–and glaringly–the spectre of the Reader’s nearly complete lack of support for performance art, experimental theatre, and experimental music in Chicago. Hayford’s lack of historical perspective, his mistaken and superficial association of Le Theatre de Banlieue’s work with Beckett’s, and, perhaps worst of all, his ersatz nineteenth-century attitude to “musicality” are evidence of a surprising ignorance on his part....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miner gave two broad reasons why he disagrees with X. First, “Desert Storm remains a military operation that seems to be unfolding according to plan,” he explained. “That being so, the war’s still at the point where any daily paper is going to try a lot harder to cover it than to dig up fresh arguments why it’s wrong....

Suppose the government owned Jewel. And anyone could shop there “free”–but if you preferred Dominick’s or Treasure Island or Cub Foods, then you’d have to pay for your groceries. Your taxes would stay the same no matter where you shopped, and no matter how much you bought at Jewel. No doubt Jewel could cut corners and let its service slide quite a bit before many people would be willing to go elsewhere and, in effect, pay double....

If that were true, we couldn’t lift it. From a recent promotional letter: “His book covers the complete overview of the field of communication from the beginning of time to the far, far future.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bleak House. “Water from melting snow on the health center’s roof has seeped into fireproofing and ceiling tiles that contain asbestos.É The chemistry and physics building[‘s leaky roof] has been another entirely different problem....

“There are three reasons why bicycles can provide greater relief from auto pollution than almost any other transport option,” according to Mike Erickson in the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation News (June): “(1) they mostly replace short [car] trips which can produce up to three times more pollutants per mile than long trips, (2) their peak usage coincides with the ground level ozone season thereby providing relief when most needed, and (3) by substituting for autos they reduce congestion and improve the performance of other road users....

At the All-Star break, I reached the same conclusion the Cubs must have come to: that I had never really recovered from my late start on the baseball season. Of course, unlike the Cubs, who sleepwalked their way through the first half, I had the Bulls as an excuse. Still, at midseason, even though I had monitored the Cubs and White Sox in the standings and the box scores and more than a few times in person, I remained for the most part unacquainted with the main characters and plot lines of the two teams; I hadn’t even been out to see Jack McDowell pitch, and he probably has been the best baseball player in the city this year....

MORTAL THOUGHTS With Demi Moore, Glenne Headly, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, John Pankow, and Billie Neal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Music is almost always a main ingredient in a Rudolph picture; at least three of them–Welcome to L.A., Remember My Name, and Choose Me–essentially began as record albums around which Rudolph shaped narratives and visual styles. Ever since Trouble in Mind, he has worked with a new-age/fusion composer and musician named Mark Isham, and in certain respects the centrality of the role played by Isham’s scores rivals that played by the camera....

“Fifi” is one of the old-time performance artists painted by the prolific David C. “Snap” Wyatt, whose sideshow banners are featured in a current exhibit at Carl Hammer Gallery. Wyatt, who boasted that he could turn out one of these huge canvases (typically 10 by 12 feet) in seven hours, became known as the nation’s preeminent banner painter; Riverview Park, which had a huge sideshow, displayed only his work. Banners including those celebrating Sweet Marie’s eating disorder and the Alligator Girl’s acne, as well as Fifi’s talent for carrying her head around on a plate, will be hung at two locations through December 10: Hammer’s gallery at 200 W....

CTA to Ban Busses? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Can CTA patrons stand to ride in the same buses with graphic depictions of homosexual kissing? We may soon find out. The latest skirmish in the public-art wars will come to a head early next month, when more than 30 works will go up on approximately 1,500 billboards, buses, and subway platforms citywide as part of the national Art Against AIDS campaign....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then–just as I have in this essay–Joravsky gets to the second half of the story, buried on page 27, and turns the tables maybe 90 degrees. He finally gets to the meat of the matter, which is that Eisendrath’s is a too-soon campaign founded on a solid barrage of political muckraking and ass-kissing. He further shows–again a bit late–that Yates is really one of the good guys and has repeatedly proven his part as an honest and reliable congressman over a 40-year period....

HAPPY BLUEBALLS, YOUR LIFE IS WAITING! Manifest Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When we first see Happy Blueballs (Mark Howard Sutton) he’s bouncing around what may be his mother’s womb, or perhaps some other special room just down the hallway (so to speak). The room is white, with a cutout of a woman’s belly silhouetted against the backdrop, and next to it is an entrance camouflaged as labia....

People always have a favorite restaurant or night spot they want all their friends to try. There’s a guy at work–Joe–he’s got an Elvis impersonator. Joe has followed Jay Elvis from one unfash-ionable north-side tavern to another. A couple of years ago, when Joe lost track of Jay, he wrote to the Sun-Times’s Action Time. Joe breathed a lot easier when the paper reported where Jay was performing. The tavern has a couple windows, but they’re covered with white poster board on which the words “Jay Elvis Show” have been crayoned in a shaky hand....

Harold Budd isn’t happy about the fact that Tower Records in New York stocks his records in the “new age” bin. “Arrggghhh!” he eloquently responds from his home in Los Angeles. “I hope they never pass gun control laws in this country.” But the news that Chicago’s Rose Records keeps him in the avant-garde section is no consolation. “That’s even worse. I think I’ll go back to the new age bins....

After watching so much MTV over the last ten years, they can no longer think straight. They have the attention span of a mayfly, as evidenced by their apparent inability to follow the plot of a video clip from beginning to end. Their obsession with visual imagery blinds them to rational discourse. They are unable to distinguish image from reality. Their notion of logical thought is a confused stew of non sequiturs and suppressed middles....

We’ve just passed by the amputation kits, some still awash in dried blood, and we’ve glanced in at the ancient trepans used by Incans to punch holes in their skulls to relieve headaches. There are also panels depicting a Turkish bloodletting, an Indian woman about to have a nose job with her legs tied to posts in the ground, and some 19th-century medical students washing blood and gunk off their arms and hands....