Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the most idiosyncratic African-American musicians to ever play have died in the last few days. On Wednesday, August 2 Rufus Harley, a Philadelphia legend who started out as a saxophonist but soon found a way to play the bagpipes in a jazz context, died from prostate cancer at the age of 70. He made a number of peculiar jazz recordings for Atlantic, he also worked briefly as a sideman for hard-boppers like Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, and he appeared on a pair of late Albert Ayler recordings, New Grass and Music is the Healing Force of the Universe [editor’s note: see Comments for a correction]....

I’m a female in my 20s and will soon be marrying my boyfriend of four years. We met overseas via a personals site, and while most things are great between us, we do have one issue: group sex. He wants it, I don’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of the issue is that while he did experiment with a couple of guys and girls before we met, I was (and am) his first and only penetrative sex partner....

This fourth annual celebration of experimental art–four weekends of exhibits, performances, tours, and screenings–takes as its stage the “underused urban geography” of Bridgeport, or as the organizers, who also produce Lumpen magazine, call it, “the Community of the Future.” Programs are scheduled at a number of venues, mainly Texas Ballroom and Hey Cadets!, both at 3012 S. Archer, and Iron Studios, 3636 S. Iron. Performance and video programs cost $8 each, $5 for students; a festival pass runs $25....

Filmmaker John Anderson remembers when he got the seal of approval from Brian Wilson. In March 1998 he’d been called to Wilson’s home in Saint Charles, Illinois, so that the eccentric former Beach Boy could decide if he was the right man to shoot a video and concert film for the forthcoming Imagination, Wilson’s first album of new material in a decade. After an hour of shop talk the two adjourned to dinner, where Wilson’s family and business associates joined them....

DAGONS 5/21, HIDEOUT With the best of the two-piece bands–from Flat Duo Jets to Mr. Airplane Man–you never feel like something’s missing. I’d add to that short list this California couple (front woman and guitarist Karie Jacobson and drummer Drew Kowalski), whose bangy garage blues is touched by a graceful, moody goth sensibility. On the Dagons’ third album, Teeth for Pearls (Dead Sea Captain), there are hints that the band may be capable of compelling artiness too–“Urdoguzes” is a delirious piece of space drone, and the final track, “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” is a recording of Jacobson’s grandmother and father singing and picking on acoustic guitar....

It didn’t take much to burn John Sheppard out on the book biz. In the late 90s he sent a novel he’d completed in the University of Florida’s MFA program–a book he worked on for six years but now describes as “postmodern crap”–to an editor at Algonquin Books. She passed, and so did one agent whom Sheppard was referred to by Bridge magazine fiction editor Mike Newirth. Then one day in 2001 he picked up a flier for iUniverse, a print-on-demand service....

Aesop Rock is a man of ideas. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. He hasn’t released a lot of records in the ten years he’s been around, but unpacking his dense lyrics could keep a dedicated fan busy for a lifetime–and with the addition of his latest, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux), that study’s gonna take at least a few more years. With a style somewhere between the precision flow of Kool G Rap and the verbal diarrhea of a schizophrenic on the bus, Rock delivers far-out rhymes thick with cryptic imagery: “They grew ’em in the royal dirt of Suffolk County’s flooring / With the blood of an alcoholic clergyman in his forearms,” for instance....

On the southern curve of Mexico on the Pacific, the mountains and microclimates of Oaxaca have nurtured a number of distinctive foods. Oaxaquenos have had some time to refine their culinary tradition: 2,000-year-old Monte Alban was one of the first Mesoamerican cities. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Oaxacan tamale is rectangular and made of smoothly ground cornmeal wrapped in a dark green banana leaf, which imparts a distinctive herbaceousness and slight color to the masa....

Guerrero, on Mexico’s southwestern coast, is home to Acapulco and Ixtapa–the former an old Spanish port, the latter created by the government to lure tourists. Folks from Guerrero make up a sizable portion of those migrating to the States, and many restaurants in Chicago serve Guerrerense specialties. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vuelve a la vida (translation: “come back to life!”) is a spicy seafood cocktail that may be just the way to greet the dawn after a night of partying on Guerrero’s “Mexican Riviera....

At 71, country singer Bobby Bare has gone through numerous phases, but his smooth, instantly recognizable voice and good taste in songwriting have remained constant. In 1962 Nashville Sound architect Chet Atkins signed him to RCA, where he recorded much of his most important work; the storytelling in early songs like “500 Miles Away From Home,” “Miller’s Cave,” and “Four Strong Winds” earned him fans in the folk movement, but he also embraced a lush countrypolitan sound on tunes about heartbreak and betrayal like the sublime “The Game of Triangles” and “Your Husband, My Wife,” one of his many duets with Skeeter Davis....

Bill Rossberger has spent much of his life either on Lake Michigan or looking at it. He and his wife, Bonnie, live next door to me in a third-floor apartment across the street from Rogers Avenue Beach. The walls of their living room are covered with sailing prints, and there’s a telescope in the corner so he can see what’s passing by on the lake. A retired salesman for Inland Steel, which owned a large fleet of ore boats, Rossberger still likes to watch the “lakers” slide along the horizon....

Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, which commissions jazz artists to put together new projects for concert performance, has announced its fall schedule for the promising Downtown Sound Gallery series at the Storefront Theater. The series is a part of the Umbrella Music group, an impressive coalition of local musicians designed to guarantee that the local scene continues to thrive. It kicks off on October 2 with a panel discussion and demonstrations on personal approaches to improvisation....

Edward Gorey meets the Ringling Bros. in this tale of murdered brides on trapeze. A joint production by the Strange Tree Group and Aloft Aerial Dance, Ghost Stories! features a few comically sinister men–serial seducer-killer Mr. Spacky and his hunchback sidekick–and a whole flock of bloodstained females in tattered bridal attire. Best about the show is its cozy air of the harem: the brides bicker and compete but also giggle at and gang up on Mr....

The prevailing view is that the Illinois Republican Party lies on a slab in the morgue. “People think it’s dead from the shoulders down and up,” says conservative commentator Thomas Roeser. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2002 the GOP lost control of both houses, and every statewide candidate went down but Judy Baar Topinka. “I’m an army of one,” says the state treasurer, who also became state party chairman shortly after the election....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The sidewalk outside Century shopping mall at Clark and Diversey, home to Landmark’s Century Centre theaters, seems way too narrow to accommodate angry swarms of Bill O’Reilly supporters, carpooling in from Naperville and Buffalo Grove and points beyond the Fox (the river, not the TV network), who promise to descend this afternoon and evening (though maybe not—snark, snark) to protest the Chicago release of Brian De Palma‘s new Mark Cuban-produced anti-Iraq war film Redacted....

Uncle Vanya Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anton Chekhov once suggested that “one ought to write a play in which people come and go, eat, talk about the weather, and play cards.” Try pitching that to Broadway investors. Like so many other unpopular but great playwrights–Lope de Vega, Racine, Strindberg–Chekhov has long been less admired on the Great White Way than “appreciated” in regional not-for-profit theaters....

Please, please, please, settle this question. The discussion has been going on for ages, and anytime someone mentions the words “airplane” or “conveyor belt” everyone starts right back up. Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction)....

When I’m reading novels of, say, the antebellum south and there’s a guy who goes around on a cart selling blocks of ice, how the heck did he get it? I mean, they didn’t have the fridge to rely on. Did they go way up north and cut blocks of ice and pack it in straw for the summer, or was there a way to manufacture ice at that time? I can’t figure this one out and have nowhere else to turn....

Ever see a production irretrievably sunk by a single moment? That’s what happens in this staging of Eric Simonson’s 1992 adaptation of Mark Harris’s 1956 novel (also a 1973 movie). The tone of Simonson’s ball-club tearjerker, about a dim-witted catcher with a fatal illness, is understandably macho. The only sustained evocation of emotion is indirect, when one of the ballplayers sings “Streets of Laredo”–performed in Tony Adams’s staging by someone who’s not only tone-deaf but doesn’t give the lyrics any feeling....

Blame Enron Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The untitled work consisted of six 22-foot-wide white plastic modules (think stretched Ws) strung on aluminum rods like a set of chunky beads and lit from within. It had been commissioned from Chryssa (like Michelangelo or Christo, she’s known by her first name) by the building’s developer and the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill at a cost of $275,000....