Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In late May the West Virginia secretary of state ordered the town of Littleton (population 217) to hold its June 8 municipal election as scheduled, even though no one was running for any of the seven offices and the deadline for registering as a write-in candidate had come and gone. Voter turnout on polling day was zero (down from 19 in 2002), and the town has petitioned the county to dissolve its charter....

In Elizabeth Bagby’s underdeveloped new musical for the Sansculottes Theater Company, a doctor examines a corpse and declares, “No marks of violence”–although a sheet covers most of the body. It’s a typical ill-conceived moment. Bagby takes nearly three hours to tell the saga of two notorious Irish drunkards who murdered 16 Edinburgh residents in 1828 and made a small fortune selling the bodies to anatomist Robert Knox. Her characters and plot are sketchy, and she never dramatizes the dehumanizing forces of poverty and xenophobia that supposedly lie behind the protagonists’ misdeeds....

Upstream Theater, based in Saint Louis, makes its local debut with this clever riff on Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy,” about a captured ape who wills himself to become human to gain a semblance of freedom. In director Philip Boehm’s conception, the report takes the form of a history lecture by the grandson of Fritz the ape along with hilarious “found footage” allegedly shot by Fritz at the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Milwaukee Brewers were slugging the ball into the stands — and onto Waveland and Sheffield — with the wind blowing out during batting practice at Wrigley Field as they opened their big series with the Cubs Tuesday night. Even so, the mood around the Brewers’ batting cage was markedly different from the last time they were here. The sunken-eyed Ryan Braun, the “Hebrew Hammer,” was quietly efficient as usual, smashing balls into the left-field stands, but the left-handed slugger Prince Fielder eschewed the personal sound effects (“Bam!...

Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sato creates these streaks by acting as his own sun. He sets up his eight-by-ten-inch view camera, often at night, then wanders through his scenes–some urban, some rural–waving a flashlight. Using hour-long exposures (for daytime shots he stacks neutral density filters on the lens to slow the film’s speed), he renders the moving lights visible but never appears himself....

The secondary characters, the ensemble, even the saluting pigeons in this touring production of Mel Brooks’s musical outshine the leads. Bob Amaral’s characterization of sleazy Broadway producer Max Bialystock wavers between pale imitations of his forerunner Nathan Lane and Rodney Dangerfield, and he often mumbles through his difficult songs. Andy Taylor is too handsome and confident to play shrinking-violet accountant Leo Bloom. Yet the supporting characters are spectacular, especially Ida Leigh Curtis as Swedish sexpot Ulla, Bill Nolte as Hitler worshipper Franz Liebkind, and Stuart Marland as supergay director Roger De Bris....

Dominated by a 13-foot shadow puppet of a blasted tree, Carrie Hanson’s newly expanded The Waning Hours is uncharacteristically “lush” for her, she says. Described as “a dance of three episodes of mourning,” it’s set to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The new sections are Hanson’s duet for herself and Krenly Guzman, which opens the piece, and a solo for Guzman; a trio that Hanson premiered in 2004 at the Other Dance Festival concludes the work....

Myra Casis and Meg Sheehy have never had the kind of family or spousal financial support that many other gallery owners enjoy–they saved for more than a decade to open Zg. (Its unpronounceable name, written like an element in the periodic table, is meant to indicate its uniqueness.) They met during their first year at Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, and right after graduation, in 1988, Casis began working as a receptionist at what was then known as Douglas Kenyon; Sheehy started a year later as a gallery assistant....

Nash Kato says it’s one of those truisms that turn out to be true. “A band’s no different than a marriage,” he says. “Look at marriage today. All my married friends last a year or two.” Last month in San Diego and Los Angeles Kato and Roeser, who met at Northwestern University in the early 80s, played their first live shows together as Urge Overkill since Roeser quit. Roeser says he made the first move....

They Don’t Know Jack In the New York Times on February 5, Sarah Vowell hailed 24 as a liberal’s guilty pleasure. Describing a recent scene in which Bauer, interrogating a treacherous aide to the president about missing canisters of nerve gas while time was, as time always is on 24, fast running out, points a knife at his face and tells him that if he doesn’t talk, “the first thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to take out your right eye....

Rock, Pop, Etc. H.J. BECK, LAMPS ON AMPS perform at an art opening featuring works by Jason Churchill, Laurel Anderson, and Janet Luebbers. Sun 4/4, 7 PM, Munki Haus, 1278 N. Milwaukee #4W. 773-329-0907. CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVISITED Sun 4/4, 6 PM, Rialto Square Theatre, 102 N. Chicago, Joliet. 815-726-6600 or 312-902-1500. GRANDADDY, SAVES THE DAY, FIRE THEFT, HEY MERCEDES All-ages. Sat 4/3, 7 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212....

Every morning Blackrose II’s udder is emptied into a bucket to ensure that her milk doesn’t mix with milk from the other cows at Indianhead Holsteins. Theirs gets shipped to a cheese factory, but Bob Schauf, who owns the Barron, Wisconsin, breeding farm with his wife Karyn, uses Blackrose II’s milk for his family and employees. The three-year-old cow gives up to 11 and a half gallons a day, more than they can drink, so he’s forced to dump about half down the drain....

Friday 7/23 – Thursday 7/29 24 SATURDAY Feminists and cheapskates take note: Women & Children First’s annual storewide sale starts today. Every book in stock is 20 percent off and some are reduced as much as 50 percent. The store’s at 5233 N. Clark and is open from 10 AM to 7 PM; the sale runs through August 1. Call 773-769-9299. i The Garfield Park Conservatory started keeping honeybees in 2001 and is now home to eight productive hives....

Kabuki actors often begin their training in this demanding art form as young children. So it’s no surprise that casting conventional Chicago actors, only a few of whom have performed in American Kabuki shows, in Shozo Sato’s unsparingly traditional production results in a handsome but shallow evening. The cast’s slow, singsong speech, stylized movements, and generally stony expressions may adhere to convention but convey little feeling or narrative sense, and Sato’s minimalist design doesn’t provide images resonant enough to compensate....

Of all the dynamic figures who emerged from the AACM, none has had a stronger influence on how it fulfilled its mission than pianist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams. A cofounder of the organization in 1965–and its president for most of the years between then and 1977, when he moved to New York–Abrams boldly conceived a new model for creative music, moving musicians out of the world of chattering audiences and unscrupulous club owners....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Texas jury decided in 1991 that Steven Kenneth Staley should be put to death for murdering a restaurant manager, but six days before his February 2006 execution date Judge Wayne Salvant granted him a stay, having heard doctors’ testimony that his mental illness would keep him from understanding why he was being killed. Prosecutors then moved to force the 43-year-old Staley to take antipsychotic medication that might make him competent, and in April Salvant granted the motion (but gave Staley’s lawyer time to appeal)....

Mr. Dumke, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps John Tierney’s article from the New York Times entitled “Recycling Is Garbage” is taboo due to the overwhelming amount of public outcry, but continuing the “garbage crisis” hysteria only makes it worse. I would just like for the media to inform the public about the misconceptions of the fundamental energy and cost savings of recycling....

The Pork Sort rrr This sterile white-and-steel space would make a lab rat feel at home. But for fine dining with a rotation of top-notch seasonal ingredients, served by a crack cadre of skilled food-service ninjas who would die for your smallest whim, chef Paul Kahan is still at the top of the game. Don’t do what I did last time, succumbing to my basest instincts and ordering course after course featuring a cured pork product....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This semester, I had another former sex worker come talk to my [college] class. Let’s call her Lauren. She was very different from Kiki. Polished. Articulate. Totally mini-van-driving soccer-mom looking young woman. Currently wrapping up her master’s degree in epidemiology. In order to work her way through an expensive private college, she was a call girl for two years....

When installations and performances inhabit a public space, they often gain from the street-theater component: watching people encounter the art becomes part of the show. That should happen with at least two pieces in “Site Unseen,” the city’s evening of site-specific work at the Chicago Cultural Center. M.W. Burns’s sound installation, Distractions, just outside the Randolph Street entrance, might make a passerby think he has a hole in his pocket or look around for a clumsy busboy....