Ray Price, a crucial figure in country who transformed it in the 50s and 60s with hits like “Crazy Arms,” “Heartaches by the Number,” and “City Lights,” still performs and records today, at age 80. A Texas native, he began playing out shortly after a stint as a marine during World War II, though his career didn’t begin in earnest until 1951, when he signed with Columbia Records. After moving to Nashville in 1952 Price lived with Hank Williams, whose life was in shambles by then; Price would occasionally fill in at the Grand Ole Opry when his roomie was too drunk or ill to perform....

This fourth annual celebration of experimental art–four weekends of exhibits, performances, tours, and screenings–takes as its stage the “underused urban geography” of Bridgeport, or as the organizers, who also produce Lumpen magazine, call it, “the Community of the Future.” Programs are scheduled at a number of venues, mainly Texas Ballroom and Hey Cadets!, both at 3012 S. Archer, and Iron Studios, 3636 S. Iron. Performance and video programs cost $8 each, $5 for students; a festival pass runs $25....

It takes brains, heart, and courage to confront and transform a cultural icon, but playwright Phillip C. Klapperich and director Tommy Rapley do it in this House Theatre of Chicago show. From the opening “Pyramus and Thisbe”-like play within a play (the Munchkins’ take on Oz history) to the somber closing moments, when Dorothy is about to set off across the Impassable Desert, The Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz reimagines almost every element of this well-worn tale....

The Myth of Matt Lamb Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The book is a velvet massage, but Speer has managed to make it a brisk read. That’s no mean trick when the subject is a devout family man with nothing more to own up to than a drinking problem he’s already licked by the time he becomes an artist at age 52. Speer turns up the heat on descriptions of everything from the art (“These are the flowers Stephen Hawking would draw if he could”) to his own job (“To figure Lamb out will be an epic challenge, because his has been an epic life”) and makes the most of Lamb’s potty-mouthed, melodramatic persona....

Tomorrow’s Cult Band Today Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Busy Signals’ roots are in Atlanta, where bassist Jeremy Thompson–then a member of Douchemaster mainstays the Carbonas–met and began dating McGorty. Jensen, a friend of Thompson’s, was the first to come to Chicago, moving in 2002 after local punks the Tyrades recruited him as their drummer. Thompson and McGorty followed the year after, and by early ’04 the three of them were talking about starting their own band....

How could Martha Bayne’s story “The Other Alternatives” in your “Chicago 101” issue’s alternative-media section miss mentioning This Is Hell, Chicago’s best and most popular alternative news source on the radio? I had never even heard of Fire on the Prairie until I saw it mentioned in Bayne’s summary of alternative media. But why not mention Fire on the Prairie? After all, it is on once a month for 30 minutes, while This Is Hell is only on for four hours every Saturday morning!...

As an undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design, Mark Booth tried to write poetry after smoking pot for the first time, and all his Rs came out backward. His mom told him he’d been diagnosed with mild dyslexia as a child, and that’s why he’d been in a special reading group in first grade. Booth recalled being given sheets of paper that were half lined and half blank so he could draw a picture, then write a little story underneath....

The Public League boys’ basketball championship game is now played on the big stage, at the United Center, but in almost every other way it’s been diminished in recent years. Winning the crown used to mean an automatic berth in the state quarterfinals, but city coaches and players complained–rightfully–that the limiting of Chicago to one elite-eight representative was a racist policy of the Illinois High School Association, an attempt to appease suburban and downstate schools by preventing city teams from dominating the state tournament....

In Rupert Holmes’s comedy thriller two couples switch lovers, identities, and murder motives so often that we don’t know till the last minute who’s screwing whom (in every sense). The cast navigates the hairpin turns with nary a bump, enhancing Holmes’s wit with just enough ham–especially Laura T. Fisher, whose vocal swells and gestures say as much as the dialogue, and Amanda Christensen, who plays dumb blonde as only a very smart woman can....

It looked as though Patrick McDonough had scored a victory in his war against the Daley administration. Fired from his $80,000-a-year water department plumbing job for violating the city’s employee residency requirement, McDonough won a favorable ruling on January 17 from a hearing officer for the city’s human relations board, who ordered the city to hire him back. The city appealed, and one week later the board upheld the decision....

We’re deep in “hey kids, let’s put on a show” territory here, and the production’s tolerable only as long as you keep that in mind. Tell yourself that the infant Easy Street Players are merely cutting their teeth on Neil Simon’s 1963 comedy about newlyweds newly moved into their first apartment, and certain problems don’t have to matter quite as much as they otherwise would. The problems of the acting and direction, for instance....

This festival of work by black artists from around the world continues Friday, August 18, through Thursday, August 31, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Following is the schedule for August 18 through 24; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six friends in their 30s gather for the funeral of a seventh in this 2005 feature written by Tiayoka McMillan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Go take a look at local band My Were They’s MySpace page. You may notice something’s missing. Down on the left they give you the option of listing your band’s influences or giving a “Sounds Like” description, neither of which My Were They have chosen to do. For a band like theirs, filling in either of them would be a sticky proposition, because My Were They is only trying to sound like Interpol....

In 1954 Cowboy Jack Clement became a staff producer at Sun Records, recording Jerry Lee Lewis’s epochal “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” along with a host of sides by the likes of Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Charlie Rich. But by 1959 he’d ditched Memphis for Nashville, working as songwriter and producer at RCA and mentoring a young Charley Pride; by the mid-70s he’d gone independent and worked with outlaws like Waylon Jennings....

When Park Forest won its first All America City award in 1953 only white Americans were welcome there. When it won its second award, in 1977, it was one of the few racial-integration success stories in the country. Racial integration wasn’t part of the original plan. William Whyte’s classic study of the new suburban lifestyle represented by Park Forest, The Organization Man, published in 1956, mentions “Negroes” only once–and then only to say they weren’t welcome in the village....

On The Warning, released stateside in June by DFA, this English combo sounds like the Beta Band with a better ear: the melodies are hooky, the beats are mesmerizing, the vocals soar or coddle, and all the elements conspire to create sweeping rushes of romance spiked with subtle levity. The album leads off with a kinetic breakcore blast (“Careful”), a slickery dance-floor anthem (“And I Was a Boy From School”), and a languid pop gem worthy of Stereolab or the Junior Boys (“Colours”)....

Is Uglier Funnier? Loyalists almost always regard the new look of a newspaper or magazine as an incomprehensible misjudgment that’s thrown away the soul of the original. They have no idea how sick of the old design the staff has become. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The paper hadn’t gone through a redesign for over a decade,” Martin explained by phone from New York....

Infamous ss Two recent features about Truman Capote, coincidentally made around the same time, concentrate on Capote’s work on his true-crime best seller In Cold Blood, about the slaying of a family in rural Kansas. Both suggest that Capote’s life and career were destroyed by the emotional strain of researching and writing that book, yet they’re fascinatingly different in what they try to do and in how they depict their subject....

It’s been eight years now, and Chicagoans still haven’t forgotten–or forgiven, says David Maola, laughing. “It’s an issue that constantly comes up.” He’s talking about how the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, where he currently serves as director, snatched the title of world’s tallest building away from Sears Tower in 1996 and awarded it to the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Dog Dog Camel,” the lead track on this Chicago duo’s new Stay Hard EP (on Galapagos4’s Alabaster imprint), kicks off like a Day-Glo hybrid of Nintendo bonus-level music and the sound track to a B-grade spy movie. After a few seconds, though, they drop in a surprise: the stylized, semi-improvised pop electronica on their two full-lengths was strictly instrumental, but now they’re adding the occasional multitracked vocal part. Drummer Dylan Ryan (of Icy Demons, Orso, and Herculaneum) and multi-instrumentalist David McDonnell (of the shamefully underappreciated psychedelic trio Bablicon, as well as Need New Body and Olivia Tremor Control) approximate their layered studio sound onstage without extra personnel: McDonnell switches from sequencer to bass to saxophone, playing along to loops he captures with a delay unit....