The Collected and the Ultimate Collector Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Edlis, who owns what is said to be one of the world’s best private collections of contemporary art, was armed with an arsenal of one-liners. He identified the main attraction in any number of Koons pieces as “the boobs,” said he purchased one because it matched a rug, and opined that the Wunderkam-mern label as Wainwright wants to apply it is a stretch....

There Oughta Be a Law Journalists like to think that at some point the health of a Stroger or Evans stops being strictly his own business and also becomes the public’s. Surely that point was reached when the question of Evans’s condition moved into a public forum, a courtroom. Attorney Don Craven–representing the Associated Press, papers in Moline and Rock Island, and the Illinois Press Association–has filed a motion asking for a transcript of the hearing and the medical records Blackwood reviewed....

This rambunctious rock operetta using Frank Zappa’s lyrics contends with a handful of awkward impediments. There’s the infamous middle finger of a post that sits dead center before the Elbo Room’s stage. Then there’s the Striding Lion InterArts Workshop’s ingenious seating process, contrived to guarantee a musical-chairs free-for-all. Finally, the tale itself–the adventures of Billy, a southern California mountain that picks up and starts lumbering across the continent–presents staging challenges that might stymie Mary Zimmerman....

This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world continues Friday through Thursday, August 13 through 19, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members, and $3 for SAIC students; for further information, call 312-846-2800. Programs marked with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended, and all works will be projected from video formats. Handsomely shot by Jeffrey T....

A jazz band can’t get much further under the radar than playing on Sunday afternoon once a month at the Green Mill, but that’s the schedule for the Chicago Jazz Composers Collective–which helps explain why its fourth anniversary concert has crept up without much fanfare. Modeled on New York’s Jazz Composers Collective, the CJCC presents new works–often terrific, always at least interesting–by two members or guests at each concert, allotting half the show to each composer....

When Andy McKenna Jr. took the reins of the Illinois Republican Party almost two years ago, he was determined to turn our blue state red–or at least closer to purple. The party was in ruins, due in part to the indictment of former governor George Ryan and the decision to import Alan Keyes from Maryland to run for the Senate against Barack Obama. McKenna, who’d made his political debut in the 2004 Senate primary–spending $4....

Isis fans have a happy autumn ahead–the new In the Absence of Truth comes out on Ipecac at the end of October, and later this month the band is releasing both a collaboration with Aereogramme (for Konkurrent’s “In the Fishtank” series) and its debut DVD, Clearing the Eye (Ipecac). More like clearing the vaults, I’d say–alongside the dense and dreamy music video and dark and devastating live footage there’s an exhaustive photo gallery....

English soprano and tenor saxophonist John Butcher drew from a pair of 2002 concerts in Japan to make his splendid new album, Cavern With Nightlife (the first on his new label, Weight of Wax), which shows his skillful responsiveness to different surroundings. He had never played with no-input mixing board player Toshimaru Nakamura until their set at Tokyo nightspot SuperDeluxe, but the two improvised a marvelously suspenseful and coherent dialogue; Butcher matched Nakamura’s piercing tendrils of feedback with abraded hisses and long, burred tones....

For as long as violence, crime, and perfidy in the name of “social justice” has been a sort of rite of passage for young, white, middle-class Americans who obey their professors, it has been framed as “activism” that, although unhelpful, is somehow proportionate to imagined abuses committed by chimeric right-wing cabals lurking always behind them as they speak drunkenly about President Bush being Hitler in some live/work space located in a newly gentrified corner of the city....

Matt Moran is not only one of New York’s most original jazz vibists and a founding member of the Claudia Quintet, he’s also a key figure in the city’s thriving Gypsy rock scene, documented last year on the two-disc comp Mehanata: New York Gypsymania (Bulgarian Bar). It’s an uneven set, encompassing the well-known (Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box) and the obscure (Zagnut Cirkus Orkestar, Guignol); Moran’s group Slavic Soul Party! stood out as one of the few that can balance its manic energy and irreverent spirit with a deep understanding of eastern European folk forms and the chops to play them....

“God, I’d love to talk to you–but I can’t.” I’ve been hearing that one for years, in language inflected with anger, shame, or a sense of the absurd. There’s no code of omertˆ in journalism, so when the bosses want silence they buy it. True transparency, then, is not only too much to hope for but probably more than we’re entitled to. Let sinners come clean to their priests. Newspapers are entitled to their quirky little mysteries....

There’s No Price Lower Than Free Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The free showings, promoted at walmartmovie.com, are part of a grassroots campaign to create momentum for the film, a strategy director Robert Greenwald successfully exploited for his previous documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. The Wal-Mart film marshals an army of familiar charges against the giant retailer, beginning with the way it knocks out local businesses and ending with security problems in its parking lots....

For the last 15 years reedist Ken Vandermark has fronted a crazy variety of bands, each conceived to explore a certain area of interest. In the Vandermark 5, one of his most versatile, the episodic compositions set the stage for high-energy small group improvisations. Their new double disc, The Color of Memory (Atavistic)–featuring saxophonist Dave Rempis, trombonist Jeb Bishop, bassist Kent Kessler, and drummer Tim Daisy–provides not only sheer riff power but also shifts in tone and density that lead to exhilarating solos....

It’s tempting to think of BERT JANSCH’s new disc, The Black Swan (Drag City), as a comeback, but the veteran British folkie never retired from playing live or making albums–he’s just recording for a hipper, more high-profile label (which also happens to be the first in the U.S. to sign him). Jansch’s 60s and 70s work–as a solo artist, with the influential folk-rock-jazz group Pentangle, or in duets with fellow Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn–has become a touchstone for younger musicians, and on the new album he’s practically annexed by the freak-folk crowd: he’s joined by Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, David Roback, and others, and coproducer Noah Georgeson has worked with Banhart and Joanna Newsom....

Andra Medea learned her first lesson about resolving conflict the hard way, when a bunch of toughs from her neighborhood trapped her in an alley and smashed her in the face. “I was always in fights when I was growing up,” she says. Those fights form the backdrop for her latest book, Conflict Unraveled, a clearheaded guide to finding logical ways to handle illogical people, particularly bullies who don’t fight fair....

Brett C. Leonard’s visceral, far-reaching update of Woyzeck–Georg Buchner’s 1837 unfinished masterpiece about a troubled soldier who kills his lover–is far from a one-note antiwar polemic. This tale of an isolated and enraged Puerto Rican combat vet of the Iraq war, separated from his wife and son and further marginalized by class and ethnicity, also focuses on the unrealistic romantic expectations fostered by pop culture. Dale Rivera delivers a gut-wrenching performance in Anthony Moseley’s inspired staging for Collaboraction (a local premiere), and the entire ensemble is well attuned to the cinematic rapid cuts and blackouts of Leonard’s script....

David Uttal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Uttal: Judy DeLoache, a coauthor of the study based at the University of Virginia, was my postdoctoral mentor at the University of Illinois, and we’ve talked about cognitive development for years. It turns out that studying children’s understanding of scale models is an excellent way to look at a general question: How do children come to understand symbolic relations, that one thing can stand for another?...

M.O.T.O. MISS ALEX WHITE AND THE RED ORCHESTRA Freakwater’s seventh album (and first in nearly six years) bodes well for the future of the 23-year partnership between Janet Bean and Catherine Irwin. With its hair-raising vocal harmonies, Thinking of You often recalls the Louvin Brothers’ best, Satan Is Real–and the roses on the CD cover are wreathed in flames, a nod to that album’s fire-and-brimstone artwork. Bean and Irwin are a powerful writing team with a talent for finding just the right devastating detail; highlights include the obsessive love song “Jack the Knife” and the allegorical protest number “Buckets of Oil....

Lagniappe–A Creole Cajun Joynt In most other respects, though, Madison, who owns the Cajun and creole restaurant Lagniappe, seems generous to a fault. Several years ago a homeless man asked her for food while she was dining with friends in the Loop. That led to “this vision to have a buffet under Wacker Drive” to feed the homeless. Madison, a Beverly native, was working as a chemist for the Sherwin-Williams paint company at the time....

EPILEPTIC It starts out as standard fare, a childhood terrorizing his small French town, banding together with other children to create maximum mischief. David tries to have a normal life despite his brother’s illness, and at times, when a treatment seems to work, he does. But as Jean-Christophe’s condition worsens he becomes violent and tyrannical, demanding more and more attention, until David is driven to fight him to protect the family....