Les Kniskern probably knows as much as anyone about the CTA’s Brown Line reconstruction project. A neighborhood activist in Ravenswood Manor, he’s been attending meetings, dickering with CTA officials, studying documents, and writing letters to the editor and blogging on the subject for the last several years. So now that the first phrase of the reconstruction is done–including Kniskern’s stop at Rockwell–I checked in with him for a progress report. Turns out that with the bad weather some problems have cropped up....

When you’re one of the world’s leading authorities on religious magic and mysticism, you get some odd requests. After the release of The Exorcist in 1973, reporters looking for a local expert deluged Rabbi Byron Sherwin with calls for interviews. Being a teacher as well as a scholar, he granted them. Soon after his name began appearing in the papers, Sherwin got a phone call from a distraught man who was convinced his ex-girlfriend had put a curse on him....

The Gospel According to Kass The Judas gospel really vexed Kass. “This gospel apparently expiates Judas’ guilt,” he wrote. “He can’t be a betrayer if he and Jesus were allegedly in the conspiracy together. Although early Christian bishops ignored that book, it is being offered, again during the Easter season, as an archeological find, as a goad.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No doubter is thrilled by fresh evidence of a godless universe....

You can count on Martin McDonagh’s brooding works, which skillfully blend dark humor with toxic violence, to crawl under your skin. In his newest play, a 2005 Broadway hit set in a totalitarian state, self-absorbed young writer Katurian Katurian gets hauled in for interrogation–and likely execution–when two local children have been killed in precise imitation of the child murders in his grisly stories. Amy Morton directs a stellar Chicago cast that finds nearly all the play’s morbid humor and works overtime to compensate for McDonagh’s uncharacteristic lack of coherence....

When I’m feeling cynical about well-publicized criminal trials, I sometimes use the timeworn phrase “they’ve never hung a millionaire in the U.S.” Certainly I can’t think of one. But is it true? –Timothy G. Merker, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Labor racketeer Louis “Lepke” Buchalter made millions in the 1920s and ’30s. Under investigation for extortion and murder, Lepke–head of the notorious organized-crime hit squad nicknamed Murder, Inc....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His entry on the late congressman doesn’t disappoint. “There will not be his like in the Congress again soon. Perhaps never,” Roeser writes. “Some thoughts: I hope that Congressman Rahm Emanuel has retained some portion of the innate grace from his ballet dancing past not to attend Henry’s wake or funeral. But if he goes it will be typical....

While visiting a friend in Seattle five years ago, Margaret Jung bought her first pair of Cydwoqs (pronounced “sidewalks”), leather shoes handmade in California. They were $170 on sale–“the most money I’d spent on shoes in my entire life,” she says. But after wearing them at her catering job–where she was often on her feet for 12 hours at a stretch–she found they were worth the money. “They were more comfortable than anything else I had,” she says....

When in a single weekend you find out that the IRS is garnishing your wages and that your new guy, who said he was going to Poland, actually went to Uzbekistan and got married for money, what’s there to do but skip town for a while? We picked them up at 6 PM in Hilary’s already overpacked 1997 Honda Civic, gibbering with the giddy excitement that precedes most cross-country trips. But after an hour of unabashed gossiping about boys, we didn’t have all that much to say to one another....

Last week in the City Council 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith made a plea for unity–a simple request, but one that exposed a new fault line in local politics. “We should not allow this ordinance to be so divisive that it takes years to get over it,” he said during the big-box minimum-wage debate. “This issue has caused some people to feel bad and not want to work together.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Ben Gordon has a predatory quality–it’s in both his appearance and his style of play. His chiseled features–high cheekbones and hooded eyebrows–give him the coolly dispassionate aspect of a bird of prey: keen, compact, and intent. On the court with the Bulls, he has a deadeye shooting touch when he gets hot, which is most often when a game is on the line. At those moments he rifles his shots with a distinctive heavy backspin, and each is what a golfer calls “center cut”–right in the middle of the hole, or in Gordon’s case the basket....

In 1991, when he was a gung ho 21-year-old marine, Jesus Jimenez marched off to fight in Desert Storm. “After that was over I didn’t think I’d ever go back to war.” But soon he’ll be heading back to Iraq as a member of a local national guard unit that’s being deployed to Iraq. “I’ll go and I’ll give 150 percent,” he says. “But I won’t lie–I don’t want to go....

Live Bait’s 11th annual Fillet of Solo Festival opens with this Tellin’ Tales Theatre showcase of monologues about the ways our bodies disappoint us, thrill us, and expose us to the admiration or condemnation of others. These are gorgeous stories, eloquently told, full of life, humor, and gentle insights. The standout is Maia Morgan’s philosophical, funny Looking at Naked Ladies, which begins in her bedroom and makes unexpected detours through a French cabaret, a zoo, and other vividly imagined places....

In a few weeks Wanda Jackson will learn if she’s among next year’s inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. For New York author and rock journalist Holly George-Warren, coproducer of a forthcoming tribute CD to Jackson, that’s not a moment too soon. In 2001 she visited the hall to give a reading from her new illustrated children’s book, Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll, for an audience of inner-city fifth graders....

Edna’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a recent visit to Edna’s I watched a middle- aged woman in a smart blue suit walk in carrying a cane. A waitress greeted her by name and asked if she’d have the usual. Apparently, every Saturday afternoon for the last 25 years Miz Bluesuit has eaten a plateful of stewed pork neck bones, a saucerful of dressing, a tall, cold glass of sweet tea, and a stack of corn cakes....

The members of Kekele are bona fide aristocrats of Congolese rumba music, having been star players in some of the greatest groups in the genre–including Franco’s TPOK Jazz, Sam Mangwana’s African All-Stars, Papa Noel’s Orchestra, and Les Quatres Etoiles. Based in France and formed for what was intended to be a one-off studio project, 2001’s Rumba Congo (Stern’s Africa), they take a gentle, old-fashioned, predominantly acoustic approach to the music. Also known as soukous, rumba was created in the multicultural city of Kinshasa after World War II, by musicians inspired by dance records imported from Cuba (which in turn were rooted in African polyrhythms)....

For more than a decade New York guitarist Marc Ribot has been recording tunes by the soul-searing free-jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. It’s a tough gig: Ayler’s compositions have an instantly recognizable spiritual tinge, but no musician has ever really captured the essence of his performances, where faith collided with unbridled expressionism. Ribot’s obsession reached its apex on last year’s Spiritual Unity (Pi), a quartet outing with drummer Chad Taylor, trumpeter Roy Campbell, and onetime Ayler bassist Henry Grimes....

Lowell Thompson Lectures The last time the Reader heard from adman turned artist Lowell Thompson, he was getting ready to take on segregation in the city’s museums and galleries. He planned to stand in front of the Art Institute in a sandwich board and offer to unveil his own work to passersby. At 8 AM on a bitterly cold February day he gave it a try, donning his signature black eye patch and a sign that read to see some art, just ask....

I’m still on vacation. Here’s another retread from the Savage Love archives, which I’m sure scholars of human sexuality will pore over someday, pondering archaic sexual practices like solo piss play and ancient slang terms like wack. We get a lot of letters here at Savage Labs. While every letter is unique, and everyone’s dumb-ass problem is compelling in its own special way, patterns do emerge. Wet’s letter is a good example of what the kids in the mail room call HTHs, or “How’d That Happen?...

THE BAKER’S WIFE, One Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Based on Marcel Pagnol’s popular 1938 film La femme de boulanger, itself an adaptation of Jean Giono’s 1932 novel Jean le bleu, Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein’s musical should be better than it is. The setting is exotic: a village in Provence. And the premise for the story–complications ensue when an older man marries a younger woman–has been a rich source for comedy at least since Chaucer wrote “The Miller’s Tale....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow night the 17-member Umm Kulthum Egyptian National Orchestra makes its Chicago debut with a performance at Mandel Hall on the campus of the University of Chicago at 8 PM. I haven’t heard them, but as you can probably tell from the name, they play Arabic classical music, the elegant, stately form made famous by the orchestra’s namesake. They’ve performed all around the world in the last 40 years (Egypt’s Ministry of Culture started the orchestra back in 1967), but only under this name since Kulthum’s death in 1975....