I work for a small daily newspaper in Wisconsin. If pressed to answer honestly, I’d say I don’t believe most of the stories that appear in the NYT, WSJ, or Chicago Tribune [Hot Type, April 22]. My lack of faith comes from newspapers’ continual focus on institutional power, their inability to challenge authority, and their reliance on anonymous sources that could, for all I know, be invented. Every time I read national and international stories I have a picture of Karl Rove or Bill Clinton manipulating reporters for political gain....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night I was watching VH1 Classic’s presentation of the Kinks Christmas Concert, a 1977 performance that ends with Ray Davies emerging as the seediest and most dissolute Kris Kringle ever—even more than Billy Bob Thornton—for a perfunctory performance of the hastily-dashed-off instant classic “Father Christmas” (“Father Christmas, give us some money / We’ve got no time for your silly toys / We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over / Save all your toys for the little rich boys”)....

Second City’s 90th revue is a sharp-witted, skillfully performed set of satiric sketches about middle-of-the-road citizens pulled this way and that in an ever more polarized society. Actor-authors Daniel Bakkedahl, Brian Boland, Lisa Brooke, Liz Cackowski, Antoine McKay, and Jean Villepique form a crack team who work skillfully off one another–and off the audience in the evening’s improvised segments and in the free improv sets that follow most shows. Vignettes range from a running gag about a hapless Cubs fan trying and failing to catch a ball to a fourth-grade pageant celebrating American forces’ search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; other bits include a spoof of dinosaur wildlife specials, TV sports coverage digitally enhanced to exaggerate the violence, and a Moline political rally where Democrats pester a candidate with questions about personal problems–theirs, not hers....

As a monologuist David Cale can create a dozen nuanced characters in a single evening. But playing a single part in a chamber musical he wrote himself–alcoholic former country-western star Floyd Duffner–Cale replaces nuance with vacant stares, expressionless singing, and a cartoonish dumb-hick drawl. As his semi love interest, aspiring young singing sensation Clea, neophyte Faryl Millet contributes an almost adequate voice, undergraduate acting chops, and a fabulous figure. Too featureless even to be serviceable cliches, the pair slog through prefab sentiment and laughable improbabilities: neither of these crack musicians can muster more than two weak chords on the guitars they cart around....

Home, the 1980 play, was nominated for a Tony. Home the Musical makes it difficult to understand why. Adapted by the original writer, Samm-Art Williams, and composer Grenoldo Frazier, the musical has little character development or complexity. And it’s difficult to follow the 13-year odyssey of Cephus Miles (Lawrence R. Thompson in a one-note performance) as he moves from a small southern town in the 1950s to jail as a draft dodger, then on to the city’s temptations....

By Wednesday I’d spent a week working myself into a frenzy over my first trip to Hurricane Harbor, the brand-new water park at Great America. I kept rereading the amusement park’s Web site, which calls Hurricane Harbor “a Caribbean paradise boasting hundreds of wild and wet water activities and hours of fun for all ages.” I like water, I love fun. What could go wrong? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

9 Songs Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll used to be a commercially surefire package that today seems less automatically reliable. Which is presumably why Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs arrives in Chicago 15 months after its Cannes premiere–during the dog days of summer, when art-house films that distributors aren’t quite sure what to do with tend to surface. Sex is the main course, the side dishes are nine concert performances given by rock bands, and the spices are a few glancing references to cocaine and prescription drugs....

LIL WAYNE boasts that he’s the best rapper alive, but he’s not–he’s just the best rapper any ward in New Orleans has produced. Tha Carter II (Cash Money), his fifth album, went platinum three months after its release last December, largely on the strength of the single “Fireman.” Over simulated sirens and punching bass, Weezy raps with manic conviction about how his girl can’t wear “jeans that show the ass crack....

The songs on Neko Case’s 1998 solo debut, The Virginian, were rooted in catchy honky-tonk and retro pop, but ever since she’s been fruitfully working toward a distinctive synthesis of styles. With her latest and best album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-), she’s arrived at an amalgam of southern soul, black gospel, spaghetti-western twang, and girl-group pop that she totally owns. It’s a dark record, mostly hovering ballads thick with gothic imagery, and Case often dispenses with standard song structures–what passes for a chorus is often just another melodic episode that glides by once....

Like a photograph of a movie star’s good side, Neko Case’s last studio album, Blacklisted (2002), was a perfect but incomplete picture of her outsize talent. The noirish production on the album spotlighted her dynamic, expressive vocals and emphasized an atmosphere of unease, but it also gave short shrift to the earthy humor and unbridled energy that make her concerts such a blast. Her new album, The Tigers Have Spoken (Anti-), was recorded live in Chicago and Toronto, and it thankfully leaves some blemishes unretouched....

Public school officials say they’re dismayed that a $20 million budget deficit is forcing them to lay off teachers and teacher’s aides. But they might have an alternative if they’d just stand up to Mayor Daley and demand that he stop siphoning millions of dollars in property taxes away from the public schools every year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Early on, municipalities that set up TIFs had to tell the state exactly what they intended to spend TIF funds on, and the state had to approve the plan....

These two features, which open the Film Center’s monthlong series “Gilding the Cage: French Cinema of the Occupation,” show that there are both rational and irrational ways of understanding the period. Bertrand Tavernier based his fascinating drama Safe Conduct (2001, 163 min.) on the memories of two of his friends–Jean Aurenche, an apolitical screenwriter, and Jean Devaivre, an assistant director who served as a member of the Resistance. It’s the most textured portrait of the occupation I know, exploring the complex moral choices each man faced in working for a German film production company....

Chris Riter and the GreyZelda Theatre Group based their dark new play on the legend of a woman, Fanny Hooe, who disappeared in 1846 while visiting her sister at an isolated military base guarding a copper mine in the Upper Peninsula. Part ghost story and part psychodrama, the tale is told by all five main characters, each of whom has a different point of view. That may sound compelling, but it isn’t–precisely because most of the story is told, not shown....

ALL HAIL THE COOCHIE II: THE ONE COLOREDGIRL COOCHIE SELF DETERMINATION CIRCUS, at Acme Art Works. This multimedia performance-cum-lecture on women’s sexuality by educator and spoken-word artist Sharon L. Powell is nowhere near as, um, fuzzy in its politics as The Vagina Monologues. Far more ribald, it’s also more specific about how to create a friendlier environment for coochies of all races–lotsa condoms, rubber gloves, self-esteem, and imagination. Powell revels in her own sauciness and still serves up generous dollops of history, referring several times to Sarah Bartman, the “Hottentot Venus” brought from South Africa to France in the early 1800s and exhibited as a freak because of her generous buttocks and labia; Bartman’s sliced remains were returned to her native land only two years ago....

The New York quartet Akron/Family tends to get lumped in with the New Weird America set–I reckon people think that’s a good catchall category for anything quiet and strange–but pegging them as neohippies would be a big mistake. Their self-titled debut on Young God displays a tight, almost scheming sort of precision that makes every electronic breakdown and supposedly tentative guitar filigree sound like part of a master plan–part angelic, part demonic, mostly techno-heathenish....

Founded by Chicago police sergeant Greg Reynolds as a showcase for collectors of antique police cars, the Chicagoland Emergency Vehicle Show has grown over eight years into a massive ballet of more than 200 vintage and in-service squad cars, fire trucks, ambulances, choppers, and emergency management units. Now under the direction of freelance television cameraman Dave Weaver, the festival starts Friday with a tour of the Aurora Regional Fire Museum and a “Lights and Sirens Parade” (which also serves as the kickoff for the North Aurora Days Festival)....

There Are No Children Here, his 1991 report on two years in the life of a pair of preteen brothers in the Henry Horner Homes, established Alex Kotlowitz (then a writer for the Wall Street Journal) as an impassioned chronicler of the complexities of race and urban poverty. Kotlowitz turned his attention to Michigan for his next book, The Other Side of the River, but his latest project put the author back on the streets of his adopted hometown....

Until a few years ago Vietnam-born trumpeter Cuong Vu was one of the most exciting players in the New York scene: through the 90s and the early part of this decade he applied his peerless technique to a variety of hard-hitting projects that fearlessly wedded improvisation to electronics, including his own frenetic trio and Yeah No, a quartet led by reedist Chris Speed. But since 2001 the Pat Metheny Group has kept Vu busy both on the road and in the studio, and though I had high hopes that he’d shake up Metheny’s music, the guitarist still puts me to sleep....

The fusion genre known as Russian romance flourished in the Russian salons of the 1800s; based in folkloric music and influenced by the burgeoning Romantic movement in French literature, this potently emotional idiom came to epitomize Russian popular culture at the turn of the last century. (One of its characteristic melodies resurfaced on the late-60s pop charts when Mary Hopkin had a hit with “Those Were the Days.”) On her self-produced album Russian Romance, composer and singer Ella Leya–born in Azerbaijan, trained in Moscow, and now living in southern California–revitalizes the style....

An astute friend of mine who’s fond of making profound superstructural observations about culture proclaimed recently that so far this decade the overwhelming majority of pop rock has been perfectly OK–the kind of stuff another friend calls “listening-grade music.” But on any bell curve there are always exceptional folks two or three standard deviations to the right of the lumpen middle, and I’d include the local band Favorite Saints in that rarefied stratum....