Orpheus Descending Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Orpheus Descending, Williams’s first professionally produced full-length play, was a double flop. It lasted all of two weeks when it played in 1940 as Battle of Angels in a pre-Broadway tryout. He continued to rewrite it over the next 17 years, but when it was staged in 1957 on Broadway under its new title, it died in less than two months despite lead performances by Maureen Stapleton and Cliff Robertson....

Two songs into the Living Blue’s set at Latitude 30, a gust of wind blows open the big bay windows in the front of the Austin club, letting the music spill out onto the sidewalk. As pedestrians stop to peer inside, it proves to be a nice bit of accidental promotion for the Champaign band, playing its first-ever South by Southwest gig as part of a showcase for its new label, Minty Fresh....

William Elliott Whitmore William Elliott Whitmore sings like he feels that kinship in his bones. The Iowa songwriter seems constantly aware of mortality–sometimes he’s droll about it, sometimes he accepts it, and sometimes he’s fearful, enraged, or sorrowful, but he’s never far from the final bottom line. When he plunks his banjo, strums his guitar, and stomps his foot, he’s marking out time like a heart that’s counting down the number of beats left in it....

The decision to use torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib can be traced to the highest levels in U.S. government, and much of the value of this excellent documentary by Michael Kirk, broadcast on PBS’s Frontline last October, lies in its comprehensively mapping how the policy got carried out. Kirk reveals the pecking orders and blurred lines between military police and military intelligence, and the impression of ill-informed incompetence leading to frustration and sadism on the part of the torturers is devastating....

On its early records this local quartet used acoustic guitar, harmonium, and a pair of double basses to make rustic chamber music influenced equally by John Fahey’s idiosyncratic Americana, Tony Conrad’s string drones, and Morton Feldman’s sparse, glacially paced compositions. In a blindfold test, a fan of those discs might not recognize the new Up Above (Thrill Jockey) as the work of the same band–the music is still entirely acoustic, but now it sounds more like someone made an album of mashups using the African and Southeast Asian volumes of the Nonesuch Explorer Series....

In his new solo show, California-based performance artist Tim Miller applies the concept of “us” to himself and his lover, himself and his audience, sexual minorities, Americans in general, and the U.S.–a nation that pays lip service to equality while relegating some populations to second-class status. One of the notorious NEA Four who sued the government in 1990 when their National Endowment for the Arts grants were rescinded under political pressure, Miller is in a long-term relationship with an Australian man; because same-sex marriage is illegal here, the couple faces separation or emigration when the partner’s visa expires....

Zeibekika is a departure for Asimina Chremos, who’s come to think of herself as a solo artist: she performs with vocalist (and first-time costume designer) Carol Genetti, saxophonist Dave Rempis, dancer Julieann Graham, and the five members of Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre. But in a way all these people amplify the idea of the solo zeibekiko dancer, who performs to rembetika, often called the Greek blues. Chremos, whose father was Greek and whose Greek grandfather was a dancer and singer, explores her own heritage and the immigrant experience in general in a piece that ranges from the lighthearted (sheep, played by dancers in white Afro wigs, figure prominently) to the deeply moving....

This festival of work by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 4, 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 4 through 10; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Short works by local artists Mercedes Yolanda Cooper, Brian McQuery, Artel Kayaru, and Sonny Arthur....

On a balcony above the sanctuary of Redeemer Church in Park Ridge, a man sits at a wooden table, hunched over paperwork. Across the room, two young women on an overstuffed couch engage in animated conversation, sipping coffee. Light filtering through immense stained glass windows casts a golden glow over the room, and live acoustic guitar music bounces off the wooden beams of the cathedral’s ceiling. There are racks full of magazines–Harper’s, the Atlantic, Christianity Today....

Architecture is about more than buildings–it’s also about people, events, and ambitions. Here’s my list of the ten most important things that happened in Chicago architecture this year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Construction on Block 37 The 1989 bulldozing of the entire city block across from Marshall Field’s turned into one of Chicago’s longest-enduring fiascoes, resisting a succession of developers, architects, and beautiful visions to remain little more than a dirt pile for a decade and a half....

Ypsilanti weirdo Max Cloud, now performing under the name Hazmat, makes honest-to-God outsider music–it seems like he’s driven by an agonizing compulsion to squeeze out all the ideas backing up in his brain. I saw him regularly four or five years ago, when he played here more often, and he leapt from persona to persona onstage: he’d be a black magician coaxing an infernal racket out of an instrument he made from a credit-card reader, he’d spout funny-sad beat poetry out of nowhere, he’d play cracked-out street performer and blow long blasts of noise out of a flat cardboard “saxophone” equipped with some sort of contact-mike contraption....

“Excuse me, where are you from?” Amadou Tandina, who came to the U.S. from Burkina Faso in 1997, tried everything to get people to stop asking him that question. He wore a suit, read the Wall Street Journal on the train, slipped into a dark sports bar to catch a Bulls game. Nothing worked. “I don’t really still understand why people still think that I’m from a different country,” he told interviewer Jeff Libman, who teaches English as a second language at Truman College....

At heart drummer Steve Reid is a jazzman: he’s spent four decades playing with the likes of Dexter Gordon, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis, and during the 70s he was a mainstay of New York’s free-jazz scene. But unlike many skinsmen on that scene, Reid never gave up the groove, keeping the music swinging no matter how wild the front line got. As a leader he recorded a few Coltrane-influenced discs in the 70s for his own label, Mustevic Sound, whose catalog has recently been reissued on London’s Soul Jazz label....

In some ways, she says, this form-fitting jersey dress by MelanieNicole represents a departure from Lani Granum’s usual semibohemian style, which incorporates found objects and ethnic influences. “I can appreciate a good pinstripe suit once in a great while, but normally I’m much more free-form and colorful,” says Granum, a 56-year-old yoga teacher and psychotherapist. But whatever she wears, she likes to feel “like my clothes are really a part of me and uplift me and move with me....

For anyone still coming to grips with Le Tigre’s latest album, This Island (Universal), a brief history is in order. This Island came out five years after the trio’s 1999 debut; Reject All American, the swan song from Kathleen Hanna’s old band, Bikini Kill, came out five years after its first release. On both records you can hear a band, a half decade after it started, compensating for a slight erosion of inspiration and enthusiasm by emphasizing chops and slyness of execution; after all, only a fetishist of primitivism or an outright knob can be an amateur forever....

Can you remember what was going on in the world on November 11, 2005? I’d forgotten that, for one thing, cable news was filled with stories about the aftermath of suicide bombings at hotels in Jordan. That story and other programs taped over 14 hours on that date, including horror films and shopping-channel shows, loosely inspired Plasticene’s new Live Feed: 11.11.05, directed by Dexter Bullard. To create the piece the group broke up into pairs, then reconvened ten days before the opening to blend their scenes–though the vignettes definitely resist a tidy story arc....

This new chamber musical by composer Stephen Flaherty and director Frank Galati celebrates 20th-century literary lion Gertrude Stein and her lifelong love for Alice B. Toklas. Galati’s libretto, stitched together from Stein texts, conveys both her quirky charm and radical vision as an artistic innovator and queer pioneer, while his artful, elegantly designed staging conveys the gentility of a long-gone era. The folk, ragtime, jazz, and blues idioms in Flaherty’s lyrical, textured score bring out the innate melodiousness of Stein’s writing, with its childlike rhymes and flowing rhythms....

“Usually women don’t get on a motorcycle unless a man is involved,” observes Mary Scruggs near the beginning of her travelogue about Run for the Wall, an annual pilgrimage by a group of Vietnam-vet bikers to the D.C. war memorial. She rode not for one man but the lot of them, to collect their stories for a documentary. The flood of names (“road” names and real ones alike) and details sometimes threaten to overwhelm the narrative, as do occasional flashbacks to Scruggs’s complicated relationship with her father, now deceased....

Lead Story A Los Angeles Times correspondent reported in June from Yap, a group of islands in the Federated States of Micronesia that’s familiar to Guinness Book readers as the home of the world’s largest currency: immense stone coins called rai, the largest of which are nearly 12 feet across and are rarely moved but simply transferred to new owners in business transactions and legal settlements. Other, less quaint aspects of traditional Yap culture that persist today include a rigid caste system, widespread domestic violence against women, and a ban on wearing a shirt during certain holidays....

Turntablists from Jam Master Jay to the X-ecutioners have indulged in flashy displays of scratching, but despite its name, the technique doesn’t necessarily despoil a DJ’s record collection. Philip Jeck, on the other hand, prefers his vinyl thoroughly despoiled. The 51-year-old Liverpudlian treats the hiss and crackle of his exceptionally distressed records with the same respect he does the music in their grooves; looped snatches of barely discernible tunes ascend through thick layers of surface noise like bubbles of swamp gas rising out of a murky primordial ooze....