ALL IN MY HEAD: An Epic Quest To Cure An Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache | Paula Kamen Kamen is a dogged researcher, and she peppers her discursive story with information gleaned from the other “tired girls” she’s met and interviewed along the way, as well as sidebars detailing everything from off-label drug use to trepanation. By the end of 318 pages she slowly, grudgingly comes to realize that, as the 12-step mantra goes, peace may well come from accepting that which she cannot change....

This adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel is as strong and pretty as bone china: the stage’s artificiality suits the somewhat dusty story while its immediacy brings home the characters and Austen’s ethical conundrums. Adapters James Maxwell and Alan Stanford cherry-pick Austen’s best lines, which makes the play hilarious if occasionally schematic. But the acting compensates for the whiff of Cliffs Notes. Cindy Gold is exquisitely vulgar as Mrs. Bennet, and Nigel Patterson offers an appealing birdlike interpretation of the obsequious Mr....

I was reading a Wikipedia article about two-time Medal of Honor winners the other day, one of whom was General Smedley Butler. He claimed to have unmasked the “business plot,” also known as the “White House putsch,” a scheme to install a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. Supposedly some congressional committee confirmed Butler’s claims. Did the “business plot” really exist? If so, how come no one’s ever heard of it? –Brent, Urbana...

Inside my running shoes I was making little fists with my toes, trying to bundle any remaining heat. One of them cracked. It might have shattered and come off completely; I was too numb to know for sure. I wanted to cry, but tears would have frozen instantly too. I watched each breath dissolve like a sour daydream into the frozen sky as I squirmed around, waiting for a customer. Not a single car yet tonight....

The story of Millennium Park, as told by Loyola historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle in Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press), is three uplifting tales in one: the site, up from the lake and the post-Fire rubble; the politics, up from a landfill’s worth of failed plans; and the culture, up from a conservative vision of merely filling out the north end of Grant Park to a tightly packed series of walkways, sculptures, and theatrical spaces....

Tru While you can get signature dishes like chef Rick Tramonto’s caviar “staircase” ($91 for osetra), we opted for the $35 caviar spaetzle, twisted clouds of dough dressed with mushroom foam and a mushroom emulsion and topped with spoonfuls of the tiny eggs. A heart-stoppingly rich poached egg, slow-cooked for 90 minutes, was served in a champagne cream sauce with caviar over asparagus tips and minuscule croutons. And the much-hyped “faux gras,” created for the restaurant by superstar chef Laurent Gras, was a mousselike concoction of chicken liver and pork fat, dusted with cocoa and wrapped in a Sauternes gelee....

A Number Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spare in language and rich in ideas, Churchill’s 2002 A Number, now receiving its local premiere from Next Theatre Company, is even more chilling than her 2000 fantasia of global warfare, Far Away, which Next performed two years ago. Just an hour long, A Number deals with cloning–but that’s like saying Glengarry Glen Ross is about real estate....

Union Bargaining Made Easy Remember in The Wizard of Oz how quickly the Winkies lightened up once the Wicked Witch of the West disappeared? A case can be made that the Wicked Witch deserved credit she never received for keeping afloat the Winkie country, where the only apparent cash crop was poppies. But she was nasty and no one liked her. It was sort of like that when Hollinger International’s board reared up last November and got rid of Black and David Radler....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alpana Singh’s book provides advice on “color coordinating wine with dessert,” a “wine horoscope,” and a chapter called “What Wines Go With Bingeing” [“Alpana’s Revenge,” October 13]. And she expects her book to be read by women like the “female CEO running Pepsi,” who supposedly need help figuring out wine lists at business dinners? That’s not just preposterous but insulting....

Believe it or not, Ani DiFranco rarely put out more than one album a year in the 90s: it was only her habit of cramming all those extra words into a line (symptom of a brain in perpetual overdrive) that created the impression of crazy prolificacy–although following the 2001 double-disc Revelling/Reckoning with a double live album (her second in less than five years) was arguably an instance of overproduction. Like last year’s Evolve her new album, Educated Guess (Righteous Babe), retreats from the loose folk-jazz of her late-90s work in favor of her original solo acoustic approach....

As others see our mayor. From Lisa Chamberlain’s report “Mayor Daley’s Green Crusade” in the July issue of Metropolis: “Seated at a long conference table surrounded by reports and memos, Daley’s locution ricochets from a grand vision of environmentalism to the vexing minutiae of urban life: the damaging effects of rock salt, poor drainage, abandoned gas stations; how to properly dispose of batteries and aerosol cans; and getting homeowners to disconnect their downspouts so rainwater can be returned to the earth rather than funneled into an overtaxed wastewater system....

I once heard a Chicago saxophonist complain about the discrepancy between Donald Harrison’s generous embouchure–a broad mouth with a plump lower lip, seemingly designed by nature to create a fat, billowing saxophone tone–and the pointed, slightly acerbic timbre he gets out of his instrument. “If I had those lips,” the local swore, “I’d have a sound like Cannonball.” Harrison brings a skewed approach not only to his alto sound but to his music as a whole, and it makes him one of the most intriguing alumni of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, in which he played from 1982 to ’84....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The world has a lot of problems right now — Iraq, impending environmental collapse, the Genesis reunion — that make the sticky matter of consumer rights in the digital marketplace look petty in comparison. As far as I know, digital rights management never came up as an issue in any campaigns this year; none of the candidates on the ballot I marked up this morning seemed to have strong opinions about it....

A few years back Puerto Rican pianist Eddie Palmieri re-formed his classic salsa band, La Perfecta, which in the 60s transformed the genre’s typical three-minute dance tunes into extended blowing sessions, adding jagged rhythms and avant-garde harmonies to the deeply soulful vocals, irresistible percolating percussion, and punchy contrapuntal arrangements that make salsa so thrilling and sensual. But Palmieri also loves jazz–he’s been coming back to it for decades–and earlier this year, after two terrific albums with the new La Perfecta lineup, he released Listen Here!...

From Our Online Readers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lincoln Elementary charges $600.00+ dollars for students to participate in the band. The money goes directly to paying for the band teacher. Daley has given the shaft to the kids of this city. He’ll gladly take TIF money to divvy up with his cronies, but when it comes to the kids they don’t have deep enough pockets for him....

Lead Story In April a man legally known only as Leigh was arrested for trespassing at the courthouse in Machias, Maine, for the 24th time. A former employee of the state marine patrol, Leigh has devoted himself to getting arrested for trespassing as a protest, hoping to convince the court to grant him a new hearing on his 1993 conviction for reckless conduct with a firearm. He’s spent about nine years in the county jail so far, and now has no other residence....

This happened last year. We were all standing in the hallway stairs going up to Red Dog around two in the morning. I was kinda sticking my head out the door into the alley off Damen and right across from there some guy started shooting people. It was like a spray of bullets. The doorman herded us back inside and we piled up the stairs. One of the doormen closed the door and said, “Not again....

Thanks to an unending stream of CD reissues, music by obscure bands from the late 70s and early 80s–New York punk-funk outfit ESG, for instance, or British postpunkers A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo–is finding its way to listeners who weren’t yet born when it was made. One of the latest beneficiaries of this trend never even put out an album during its existence. The Prefects formed in Birmingham, England, in 1976, and soon got busy as a supporting act distinguished by a shambling attack and unusually droll lyrics....

The 1957 film that established Stanley Kubrick’s reputation, adapted by Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson from Humphrey Cobb’s novel about French soldiers being tried for cowardice during World War I. Corrosively antiwar in its treatment of the corruption and incompetence of military commanders, it’s far from pacifist in spirit, and Kirk Douglas’s strong and angry performance as the officer defending the unjustly charged soldiers perfectly contains this contradiction. The remaining cast is equally resourceful and interesting: Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Wayne Morris, Ralph Meeker, and the creepy Timothy Carey, giving perhaps his best performance....

My girlfriend of three years is a smoker. In the beginning of our relationship her smoking didn’t bother me. I come from a family of smokers and I used to smoke myself. But now her smoking is a huge turnoff. I’ve started a new job where I work with cancer patients, and I see the deadly effects of smoking every day. I’ve tried everything under the sun to get her to stop....