Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The district has an annual budget of nearly $400 million, and so far this year it’s awarded $35.4 million in contracts for office supplies, garbage disposal, and all sorts of other odds and ends, from refrigerators to trophies. But the two biggest contracts, and four of the top ten, went to firms that provide landscaping services and supplies, according to district records....

There are 3,252 rail transit stations in the country. The Chicago region has 402. Walk half a mile from any one of those stations in any direction and you’re in its “transit zone.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Transit zones are all over: from the loop, where they overlap, out to suburban Harvard and Harvey. What they have in common is potential. They can be convenient and cheap places to live, because being able to walk to a train can make a car less necessary....

“Your son was depressed,” the coroner said. “He had a psychiatrist’s phone number in his wallet,” the coroner said. “The police told me the alcohol in the orange juice was fermentation.” The cancer and the chemo and the grief coalesced into a knot of bile. –Pieter, age seven, September 1986 He denied having even the usual fears and anxieties of childhood. He drew some pictures that were barren and without people....

Like the great DOG and Cook County Theatre Department, Sprung Movement Theatre finds captivating ways to do almost nothing onstage. Unlike most movement-oriented troupes, they never indulge in overwrought, pretentious posturing. Instead they’re subtle, hip clowns whose every tiny gesture communicates. And I, their new 50-minute piece, focuses on an unstable friendship between two men that begins when one of them lugs a heavy sack onstage, then jumps out of his skin when the other crawls out of it....

Atalee Judy’s brave new One, a revised multimedia dance-theater piece, is ambitious, passionate, and carefully executed. Clearly she aims to connect with the audience in this “series of dark, romantic, voyeuristic visions”–but her thoughts are all too plain. Video snippets set in castles or dilapidated modern buildings repeat without building in intensity, and the structure is predictable: two people introduced on video eventually form a couple onstage. More important, a work that should feel dangerous and gritty comes across as tame (except Judy’s solo section, a horrifying look at self-mutilation)....

Legendary Chicago-born magician Harry Blackstone bought a farm in Colon, Michigan, in 1926. A few years later, fellow conjurer Percy Abbott visited Blackstone, decided he liked the look of the town, and founded Abbott’s Magic, now the world’s largest dealer in wands, hats, scarves, and other prestidigitory paraphernalia. Although it’s mainly a mail-order business, Abbott’s has a small showroom in town where the clerks will demonstrate magic tricks–but only once, because “twice is a lesson....

You won’t remember me unless you’re a trivia freak with a stack of Tennis back issues, but that’s cool. Hardly anyone, even in the industry, follows the game well enough to know anyone but the men’s and women’s winners at Wimbledon, plus a few other genuine American heroes. Right now it goes like this: Roger Federer, that Ukrainian chick, Serena and Venus, Agassi, Anna Kournikova, Sampras sort of, and McEnroe, because who can forget McEnroe if he won’t go away....

The company presents a gift to its founder, Gus Giordano, with the new Giordano Moves. It’s also a gift to us. Associate director Jon Lehrer was driving home with another dancer from a gig when they started talking about why audiences don’t seem to appreciate Gus’s choreography as much as the performers do. Lehrer decided the solution was to create a more contemporary, abstract work that included all the facets of that early-jazz-dance style without re-creating any particular dance....

Joe Steiff’s poignant solo show about growing up gay in rural Appalachia is sad and funny, the nostalgia cut with a keen hindsight that’s piercingly honest. An old-fashioned storyteller, he spins his tale in a soothing voice that takes us into his hometown of 300 souls, where there are guns in the glove box, people play bluegrass on the front porch, and young gay men are abandoned by their family, friends, and community....

This interactive 130-minute staging of the Danish downer by Stranded Lot, a very new troupe, features a ton of unfocused energy and inarticulate emoting. There’s no fixed seating, and the peripatetic audience circulates around the sanctuary to follow the company’s deconstructed version. Nine actors throw themselves into the work, employing masks, TV monitors, ladders, assorted planks, and some dauntingly athletic moves. No question, codirector Chris LaBove’s tightly wound Hamlet impresses in his dogged pursuit of truth....

For almost 25 years and more than 200 albums, Tokyo noise patriarch Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow, has maintained an unflinching devotion to sonic brutality. Anglo noisemongers like Whitehouse and Boyd Rice have linked violent sounds to sexual power, black humor, or antisocial aggression, but Akita treats them as a source of pleasure in themselves, exploring their intricate physical interactions and embracing their sensual richness. Detractors like to complain that all Merzbow recordings sound the same, and on the most superficial level they do–you can always count on layers of squalling, crushingly dense white noise, the aural equivalent of wading blindfolded through a four-foot snowdrift in a howling gale....

Hailed as a prodigy, condemned as a fraud, abstract painter Marla Olmstead was selling canvases for $24,000 before she started kindergarten. Her seemingly cautious and levelheaded parents granted documentary maker Amir Bar-Lev intimate access to their family when Marla was first being celebrated in the U.S. and Europe, which gave him a unique vantage point when 60 Minutes II broadcast a report in February 2005 suggesting that Marla’s father was coaching her if not painting the canvases himself....

Lead Story Questionable Judgments Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The University of Florida announced in January that it would provide health benefits to domestic partners of its employees, but the employees must declare in an affidavit that they and their partners “have been in a non-platonic relationship for the preceding 12 months.” A university human resources official said such a pledge is “increasingly standard” in domestic-partner programs; married couples enrolled in the UF health plan, however, are not required to affirm that they actually have sex....

No Longer a Parking Garage, Not Yet a Museum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The odd thing is, if anyone is equipped to navigate the local political and bureaucratic terrain, it’s DuMont. He’s worked in public affairs broadcasting here since the 1960s, producing talk shows for the likes of Jim Conway, Howard Miller, Lee Phillip, and John Callaway. His own local show, Inside Politics, which started on WBEZ in 1980, morphed into a nationally syndicated weekly radio program, Beyond the Beltway, broadcast locally on WLS AM....

Leora Laor By taking only minor liberties with the Hebrew, it’s possible to render the name of Israeli artist Leora Laor in English as “my light, to the light.” This is not only very cool from the perspective of those of us whose names don’t mean anything interesting, it’s also appropriate. Because the Laor pictures now on view at Daiter Contemporary draw their uncanny power–as well as their powerful uncanniness–from an intense negotiation between the world’s light and Laor’s own....

It was four years ago that Jennifer Estlin and Mick Napier of Annoyance Productions tried the banana strategy. In a quest for investors to help them transform Annoyance from a theater troupe into a company that could produce film and video as well, they deployed 10 to 20 ensemble members, each discreetly equipped with a banana, to mingle with the crowd in front of the Chicago Board of Trade every Thursday morning that July....

Rene Marie didn’t start singing in clubs till 1996, at the age of 41, but just two years later she made the happy decision to leave her job as a bank teller to concentrate on music. She has superb tools and the fearlessness to use them for experiment rather than mere recreation. Her voice has a light, translucent timbre, tight intonation, and a giant emotional range that allows her to cover spirituals and Cole Porter with equal credibility....

Bertrand Tavernier’s exquisitely crafted tribute (1986) to American jazz great Bud Powell is screening locally (in 16-millimeter) for the first time in 11 years. The director’s perenially heavy mood seems especially well suited to this indigo-shaded story of a black American saxman (Dexter Gordon) living and performing in Paris in the late 50s, though the point here is the music (enlarging on Tavernier’s well-known affection for American blues-jazz idioms): the not-quite-satisfactory relationship Tavernier concocts between Gordon’s alcoholic musician and a chirrupy young Frenchman who becomes his self-appointed protector seems little more than a dramatic excuse for the performances that flow around it....

When Sam Prekop made his 1999 debut solo album, he assembled a superb group of musicians who headed into the studio before they’d spent much time playing together. But on the road they matured into a confident, expansive band: cornetist Rob Mazurek became more than an occasional accompanist, and Prekop and fellow Sea and Cake guitarist Archer Prewitt developed a nice snap in their ethereal, contrapuntal, and bossa nova-kissed lines. Prekop says he wanted his follow-up, Who’s Your New Professor (Thrill Jockey), to capture the vibe of a live performance, and though he and engineer John McEntire did plenty of postproduction editing on the record, there’s no question the quartet sounds far more assured than on the debut....

Ever since I started attending university and had full access to the Internet, I have developed a new fetish. I want to be treated like a baby. I have a girlfriend. We have been together for over three years now–almost as long as I have been reading your column. I want to tell her about my thing for infantilism, but I don’t know how. She took my experimentation with wearing women’s underwear pretty well, but somehow I think this is a bit more extreme....