Once upon a time, the life of a freelance book critic could be an eerily quiet affair. In 1995, a couple of years after Simon & Schuster axed the imprint where I’d labored for three years on the bottom rungs of the editorial ladder, I worked some old publishing contacts and snagged a book review assignment for the Baltimore Sun. I had never written for an audience any bigger or more exacting than the desultory skimmers of my college newspaper....

Teo Gonzalez’s 16 meditative abstract paintings at Roy Boyd, which contain thousands of repeated outlined shapes with dark centers, have suggestive power, but they’re also about abjuring the usual kinds of meaning in art. The centers, applied precisely with a brush, are sometimes small dots and sometimes fill almost all of a shape’s borders. The grids the shapes are arranged in are typically full of curves, and there’s a bit of humor in their slightly cartoony look and obsessive repetition: Untitled #258 has, according to Gonzalez, 11,581 gold marks; the smaller Untitled #273 has 4,489 black ones....

Absorbing and instructive, this 2003 Canadian documentary tackles no less a subject than the geopolitical impact of the corporation, forcing us to reexamine an institution that may regulate our lives more than any other. Directors Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent) and Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan cogently summarize the history of the chartered corporation, showing how it accumulated the legal privileges of a person even as it shed the responsibilities. This conceit allows the filmmakers to catalog all manner of corporate malfeasance as they argue, wittily and persuasively, that corporations are clinically psychotic....

Copenhagen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Historically, only a few facts about the meeting are known. Heisenberg, who’d been Bohr’s student in the 1920s, was head of Hitler’s nuclear program when he visited Denmark to deliver a lecture at a conference. He also got clearance to meet with Bohr, a half-Jewish Dane who discovered nuclear fission–a man Hitler could only have viewed as a serious threat....

A music-biz professional told me recently that Chicago’s annual World Music Festival is too big and sprawling. He thinks it should include fewer artists (this year there are more than 60) and that more of those should be marquee names. But the things he’s complaining about are exactly what make the fest so special–it’s a veritable smorgasbord, assembled without the music industry’s regard for the bottom line. True, there’s so much good music on offer every day that it’s impossible to see all the shows you might like to, but how exactly is that a problem?...

The New York Times has an article and accompanying video about Chan Marshall of Cat Power–more specifically, about the total alcoholic breakdown everyone pretty much already guessed she was having earlier this year. Strangely, hearing that she’s been so truly fucked up makes me like her a lot more. I used to think that her goofy-retarded stage persona was born out of an extreme form of passive-aggressive behavior. But knowing that it was actually the product of a combination of rock-bottom boozing and–if the report that she “obsessively chas[ed] ‘bad spirits’ around her apartment with a lighter and sage,” is to be believed–mental instability, she gets a retroactive pass from me....

Conor McGrady’s stark drawings and paintings at Thomas Robertello are done in blacks, whites, and a few shades of gray. Their harsh lone figures and empty public spaces are haunted by a vague menace. McGrady says his youth in embattled Northern Ireland is key to his work but that his pieces also refer to the U.S. security state today. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McGrady says he chose black and white because his subject is “how power manifests itself in state structures and the urban environment....

Though he just turned 30, Adrian Tomine is an old hand at cartooning. As a teenager in 1991 he started xeroxing his Optic Nerve comic book in print runs of 25 to be dropped off at Sacramento bookstores. At 17 he had a regular strip in Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, and by 1994 Optic Nerve was being published by Drawn & Quarterly. Since then Tomine has inspired a kind of cult fandom similar to that of his peers (and friends) Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, to whom his work is inevitably compared....

Miracle With Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Eddie Cahill, Michael Mantenuto, and Nathan West. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re in the movie’s target audience of children and young teens it may have, but I don’t feel any great need to wrap myself in the flag over a 24-year-old hockey game, especially now that the Soviet Union is history and the U....

Bill Irwin is all kinds of distinguished. He’s won a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Tony, two Obies, and a sampling of just about everything else you can win both on- and off-Broadway. He’s starred with the Pickle Family Circus, appeared in a number of movies (including the Manchurian Candidate remake due out in July), played Lucky in Waiting for Godot and Mr. Noodle opposite Elmo on the “Elmo’s World” segment of Sesame Street....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We begin with one fact: on Friday, March 10, the Chicago Police Department estimated that it was ready to deal with 10,000 proimmigrant demonstrators along Jackson Boulevard. In actuality, more than 100,000 protesters showed up, essentially to repudiate the Hastert/Sensenbrenner “Border Security” Bill (HR 4437) that proposes, among other things, the criminalization of every undocumented immigrant. At the same time, in Grant Park, there was another demonstration in support of tightening local and federal laws to curb illegal immigration in the U....

JANA GUNSTHEIMER: STATUS L PHENOMENON | ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO INFO 312-443-3600 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This “crisis” supposedly occurred June 4, 2007–exactly one month before the Fourth of July. And as with the Katrina and 9/11 disasters, insurance companies are reluctant to assume liability. People are fleeing Chicago in droves while President Bush makes vague proclamations about freedom, terrorism, and private property....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In addition, the article incorrectly presents statistics, generalizes facts, and does not challenge some key misconceptions, thereby creating an inaccurate picture of the property tax system. For example, the article says that the tax rate stays roughly the same year after year. Between 1996 and 2004, the aggregate tax rate for the city of Chicago has actually dropped from 9....

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Bud and Lou as two deliverymen with an oblong package for Frankenstein’s castle. As burlesque and later radio comics, Abbott and Costello found their metier in bizarre patter routines; they never got the hang of the kiddie slapstick Universal assigned to them, and their physical comedy is low, heavy, and graceless. This 1948 effort is probably the last of their watchable films, though it’s a long way from their best....

In the Reins (Overcoat), a collaboration between Iron & Wine and Calexico, is the poppiest effort either act’s released. Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, who sings in a dawn-breaks coo, sounds emboldened by Calexico’s presence, and he almost breaks into a croon on “Red Dust,” a song that might just kick off a new genre: twee bar boogie. Conversely, Calexico seems at times to hem in its horizon-wide expansiveness to suit Beam, and though the sound is less distinctively epic, the arrangements are no less lush....

Local queer duo James Tsang and Math Bass combine simple, art-damaged songs and simple, art-damaged videos with forced, overearnest arm gestures and homemade costumes that pile up the most inconvenient elements from each gender’s stereotypes (glitter, ruffles, football pads): a year and a half ago, the first time I saw them, they unraveled balls of yarn while singing along to lyrics superimposed over clips projected behind them–a cat running around, for instance, or somebody unzipping a sofa cushion and working the dust out of it....

I’ve spent half my salary in this bar–more on tips than on drinks because we don’t even pay for rounds anymore. It’s a step up from a college bar–good people, a good time, there’s no dressing up; you’re basically hooking up with friends. In fact, the bar owner said to me about a year ago, “You have to meet these three girls,” and ever since we’ve become inseparable. People here address us as the Chicago Sex and the City girls or the Fantabulous Four, because that’s my favorite word....

I like it here because of the amazing view from the top floor and because of the excellent wine list. And I should know about wine–I just came back from New Zealand, where I worked in the vineyards harvesting the grapes. It’s a madhouse at harvest time. You get paid according to the weight that you harvest, so it’s every man for himself. You start off with a bin, which is like a basket, and you fill it as fast as you can, and then they tag it so they can pay you later....

Since fleeing the fundamentalism of their native country 20 years ago and making Paris their capital in exile, Khaled, Cheb Mami, and other leading practitioners of rai, the youth pop of Algeria, have created a slick international version of the style to back their smooth, melismatic singing. Rachid Taha, an Algerian-born rocker who’s lived in France since he was ten, has taken another route, resisting the tug of assimilation. Back in the 80s he led a punk band, Carte de Sejour (“Green Card”), whose music reflected the anger of disenfranchised immigrants; over the years he’s increasingly reclaimed his Arabic roots while maintaining the confrontational stance of the outsider....

Almost ten years ago Lisa Buscani packed up her bags and moved to New York to become a nun–onstage, at least. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The chasm between fringe performer and star in a commercial hit like Late Nite Catechism seems wide, but Buscani credits touring with the show in part for her newest performance work, Solid Citizen, which examines how difficult it can be to do the right thing....