Part of a lineage that goes back to Don Pullen and McCoy Tyner, Jason Moran plays the piano with a heavy touch, especially in the lower registers, pounding out fulminant bass lines and dense, clustered chords. It can sound as if a ton of bricks had fallen on the keyboard–but one at a time, in the right order, in the right place, producing harmonies as distinctive as any in jazz during the past decade....

After several millennia, movies, television, the cell-phone camera, and Jackson Pollock, you’d think serious figurative painting would have had it. And as far as a large segment of the international contemporary art business is concerned, it has. Even the work of an ace like John Currin isn’t so much in the figurative tradition as it is an extraordinarily accomplished joke about it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The image is joshing, yet that Long chooses to play it out across 48 square feet bespeaks his ambition....

This six-member troupe performs character-driven sketches often rich in observation. They embrace physical comedy, develop varied personas, and explore awkward situations with abandon. A silent scene of passion going painfully awry and a smart but not-so-scary murder mystery are particularly entertaining. But this late-night show isn’t entirely successful. Director Piero Procaccini should have cut the more familiar material, like the street-bum rant, and reined in other labored efforts. In particular the sketches with a magic theme grow tiresome, especially since they typically require the viewer to swivel and strain to see the action....

To the editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I really am surprised and saddened by the resulting divisiveness that has occurred in response to the sign on the front door of my cafe, “Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven” [Hot Type, November 18]. The fact that a piece of paper held up by suction cups could elicit such an enormous response both nationally and internationally shows there’s far more to this issue than me or my tiny cafe....

Live Action Cartoonists’ show is just as disjointed and superficial as it was in its premiere at the PAC/edge Performance Festival in spring 2005. Though the video segments are ingenious, writer-director Natsu Onoda unwisely chooses to throw everything but the kitchen sink into her 90-minute production: insomnia, capital punishment, criminality and the justice system, mercy killing, the nature of death. Onoda’s program note about her childhood insomnia and a grandmother’s passing implies the piece has some emotional import, but its simpleminded story of a teenage romance cut short and repetitious kiddie-show presentations of fact, always prefaced by the same hideous ditty, rule that out....

Richard Buckner has spent much of his career chafing at the “alt-country” label, but he doesn’t have anybody to blame but himself: his 1994 debut, Bloomed, was produced by outlaw country legend Lloyd Maines, and the album seemed like a sincere homage to the likes of Gram Parsons and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. But since then, the singer-guitarist has approached the genre from an angle. Despite the sleepy twang in his voice and the foursquare simplicity of his acoustic strumming, he’s no roots musician: his idea of a whiskey-soaked lament sounds like Gertrude Stein’s poetry, his conception of a country arrangement can include a vibraphone or a moody synth, and his taste in collaborators runs from Howe Gelb to David Grubbs....

Silver City Almost 60 years ago, in the essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell made observations about bad writing that have lost none of their relevance. “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house,” he wrote....

I was dating an amazing guy–smart, funny, caring, and interesting. I just wasn’t that attracted to him. I enjoyed hooking up with him, but it was never one of those “Oh man, I just have to have you” things. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And why do you want Boy #1 back? It can’t be because he’s smart, funny, caring, and interesting. Boy #1 was all those things when you dumped him for Boy #2....

A sense of romance is conspicuously absent from the slick, sloppy, or analytical work that seems to make up most of the art shown in Chicago today. For those with a secret longing for subtlety and warmth, however, this evening of visual art and performance by fantastical, visionary queer artists is not to be missed. Taking place in a lovely unrehabbed Wicker Park house, the program features Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow, whose performances and exhibits at Three Walls in spring 2004 felt like a wondrous breath of perfumed air from a quarantined Victorian bedchamber....

Music writer and editor Yuval Taylor’s been involved with some high-minded books in his career. As a senior editor at Chicago Review Press, the local nonfiction house whose umbrella includes the music and film imprint A Cappella and the Lawrence Hill Press line of titles in African-American issues, he’s shepherded to publication a collection of slave narratives, an anthology of Frederick Douglass’s writings, and the English translation of the Portuguese title Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World....

Editors’ note: this story ran as a sidebar to the cover story “Tools of Torture,” on February 4, 2005 I recently located two museum curators who specialize in electrical equipment (one wishes to remain anonymous) and read them descriptions of the devices provided by Andrew Wilson and Melvin Jones, two men who claimed to have been shocked in February 1982. The curators concluded separately that each man was describing a violet ray machine....

I’ve just finished reading about how researchers have concluded that Mars was never warm based on analysis of a meteor–found on earth. More distantly you’ll remember that they were debating whether a fossil of a living organism had been found in a martian meteor found in Antarctica. My question: How do they know these meteors came from Mars? Are they labeled? Have they found meteors from other planets that they recognize?...

In a rage over Todd Stroger’s crowning in place of his ailing father as the Democratic candidate for Cook County president, pundits and ordinary citizens alike have been thumping their fists on the table and declaring, “I’m voting for the other guy!” So it’s a good time to take a deep breath and learn a little about the political unknown who, if the protest vote continues to gain momentum, just might win the November general election....

Isolation and aging are the concepts behind artistic director Michelle Kranicke’s new hour-long Just Left of Remote. The hoods that are part of Heidi Dakter’s costumes may look like beekeeper headgear or Victorian bonnets, but from the dancers’ point of view, Kranicke says, they provide instant privacy, almost a kind of armor. She begins the piece by going back to the basics of mass and inertia, with live-feed video close-ups of a dancer’s feet and calves as she crouches and slowly shifts her weight, suggesting the balancing act of creating identity: changing, reacting to change, moving forward because there’s no alternative....

Born in Madrid and raised in Stockholm, Ana Laan creates a sophisticated brand of internationalist pop; like Bjork and Bebel Gilberto, she takes sounds from a multitude of traditions and makes them her own. Though her father is Swedish and her mother is American, she sings most of the songs on her stunning 2004 debut, Oregano (Nardis), in Spanish. Musically, though, she speaks many languages. “Para el dolor” is pure bossa nova, “Uti var hage” is a traditional Swedish folk tune with layered a cappella vocals, and the hard-hitting, bass-driven “Hidra” sounds like it could have originated in the Middle East....

Hide and Seek With Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Kamke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving, Dylan Baker, Melissa Leo, and Robert John Burke Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t read that quote without laughing, because it so perfectly captures the psychotic dimension of De Niro’s screen persona. But even the most charitable observer would have to admit that for the last few years the revered actor, now 61, has been going home early....

The story [Hot Type, June 16] was simple. The U.S. government and several news agencies decided to pay off Dr. Wen Ho Lee over $1.5 million for lawyers’ fees and as a penalty for having published/leaked his name as a suspected Chinese spy at Los Alamos. I guess that’s the going rate for destroying a world-class scientist’s life and career. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The skew was simple too, summed up in this quote: “[The media companies ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique (Leaf), the forthcoming EP by French musician Colleen (aka Cecele Shot) opens with the sound of a music box being wound up, which is appropriate. With the exception of one piece, the entire 39-minute EP–commissioned by French national radio’s Atelier de Création Radiophonique (Radiophonic Workshop Of Creation)–was created exclusively by using a variety of music boxes....

Pop-Ups for Print Kimball was showing off a new national campaign the NAA calls the Newspaper Value Proposition. If you examine the campaign at naa.org/advertiser–a site that greets you with the headline “In an opt-out world, consumers opt in to newspaper advertising”–you’ll come across plenty of graphs and ads. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point gets rolled into the argument, along with a book by Ed Keller and Jon Berry whose cover announces, “One American in ten tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy....

Bangalore-born sarod player Rajeev Taranath was introduced to Indian classical music not long after he learned to walk: he learned to play tabla at four, began to study singing a few years later, and at fifteen was performing professionally. Like many Indians, Taranath admired sitarist Ravi Shankar, but when he first saw Shankar live, in 1955, he was struck more by the sarod player onstage, Ali Akbar Khan. Twenty years old at the time, he soon moved to Bombay to begin nearly 50 years of study with Khan and his sister Annapurna Devi....