If it’s really better to burn out than fade away, what can be said about burning out, fading away, then coming back to do it all over again? Evan Dando, front man of the never terribly exciting but never disagreeable Lemonheads, spent much of the 90s on alt-rock’s A-list before getting tangled up in some rather public personal problems and quietly deciding to take a break for a few years. His 2003 solo comeback, Baby I’m Bored, may not have set the industry on fire, but it did prime the pump for the return of his band....

My dog is dying. He’s ten years old–not that old for a wheaten terrier, but not young for any dog–and suffering from inoperable abdominal tumors. He has good days and bad, days he can eat and days he doesn’t. His spine has become a spiky ridge leading to the increasingly protruding hip bones. I’ve had to carry him up and down the steps on more than one occasion, but recently he’s rallied–though as I write this he’s staggering around and losing his footing on the wood floor after barking at the doorbell....

Man and Camel | Mark Strand (Knopf) Not that that’s so surprising. Strand–a Pulitzer winner and onetime U.S. poet laureate–is a self-conscious postmodernist. In the context of poetry that means he eschews the strident bombast of the beats, instead choosing a self-referential aridity. A perfect example is the volume’s nadir, the presumptuous “Moon.” This is a less skillful retread of one of Strand’s more anthologized efforts, “The Prediction,” and like the earlier poem, “Moon” is obsessively about itself....

Rufus Reid’s playing epitomizes the conflicting faces the bass has presented to modern jazz. Ever since Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown developed the technique that made the instrument a solo vehicle, it’s been torn between its traditional place as a rhythmic anchor and a spot in the front line. In the 70s, after graduating from Northwestern, Reid did as much as anyone to bridge that division, marrying old-fashioned tone to newfangled virtuosity; in the process he influenced two generations of mainstream bassists, first with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, then as an in-demand sideman, and later leading his own bands....

Last February, a few weeks before the Louder Than a Bomb teen poetry slam, Ciara Miller woke up at 3 AM. Her mother was yelling and banging on her bedroom door. “I looked out the window and it looked like the stuff from Rescue 911 or something,” she says. “The whole house [next door] was on fire. I started shaking and panicking.” As the fire spread to her building and the apartment began to fill with smoke, Ciara bundled her baby sister, Sagia, into her coat and fled down the back stairs into the alley....

The White Sox’ season hit rock bottom (one hopes) with last week’s brutal six-game home stand. Mark Buehrle, the supposed ace of the five-man starting rotation, bookended the set, losing the first and last games. He had only one bad inning in the opener against Texas, but that five-run third gave the Rangers all they needed in the 10-3 win. Every inning was an ordeal in the closer against the Minnesota Twins....

Not only was the article “Born Bad?” unable to answer the question whether or not pit bulls can be safe, it gave far too much credit to foolish no-kill shelters and abusive trainers with their remote-control laziness. Dogs do not need to be “dominated” by an alpha but taught what is expected of them and rewarded for their correct response. This dog wasn’t being stubborn but reacting out of fear by barking and lunging at some scary things to keep them the hell away from him....

I’ve heard talk about “suitcase” nuclear weapons, which someone could carry around and detonate anywhere. Is this possible? I’m not talking about whether someone could get hold of the proper components or be mad enough to pull it off. Rather, I always thought uranium and plutonium were really heavy and the amount needed for a bomb would be too much for one person to tote around. Gold, for example, is much heavier than most people think, certainly heavier than movies typically suggest, and plutonium has a much greater atomic weight and thus should be even heavier....

Exposure Tapas Supper Club Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Round about 10 PM on a recent Friday, Exposure Tapas Supper Club became my idea of a bad time. The boisterous people at the next table were shouting just for the fun of it, the talented jazz combo was much too loud, the previously attentive waiter was MIA, and when the check finally arrived, it was incorrect and almost impossible to read in the dim light....

La Pomme Rouge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Success could spoil La Pomme Rouge. Unlike Sugar, which once occupied the same signless space, Jerry Suqi and Jackson Miranda’s vision of a belle epoque Parisian salon depends on a romantically decadent ambience rather than a high-energy buzz. Fill it with noisy crowds and no one will fully appreciate the luxurious fabrics, gilt mirrors, Victorian ceiling fixtures, and art nouveau artwork....

Last year Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour released Egypt (Nonesuch), a stunning musical statement intended in part to challenge perceptions of Islam in the West. Instead of using his longtime African band, mbalax masters the Super Etoile, N’Dour recorded the album with Fathy Salama’s Cairo Orchestra, an ensemble steeped in the ancient traditions of Arabic classical music. The original tunes on Egypt are praise songs that celebrate West African Sufism–a deeply tolerant strain of Islam that gets little attention in American media coverage of the Muslim world....

Chris Abani’s 2004 breakthrough novel, GraceLand, was an impressive literary balancing act: set in Lagos, it nested an intimate story about a 16-year-old boy trying to hustle out a living within a panoramic portrait of lawlessness and broken-down colonialism. His new novella, Becoming Abigail (Akashic), is also about a Nigerian teenager, but the focus is tighter. Abani’s stripped away GraceLand‘s lighter touches—the recipes, the colorful bits of Nigerian folklore, the comic riffs on the invading Western culture....

Mickle Maher’s tragically hip 90-minute adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” for Steppenwolf for Young Adults aims to subvert more than frighten, flippantly depicting a man’s obsession with burying his twin sister prematurely. As the deluded Roderick, Matthew Krause erupts in silent-movie mugging; Tracy Michelle Arnold literally deconstructs the pre- and posthumous sister, Madeline; and Kirk Anderson doggedly depicts their supposedly rational, dithering, clueless visitor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Plenty of people have made compelling arguments about how the time spent debating this ordinance–and then criticizing and defending it in the 12 months since–should have been spent on something else. As reprehensible as many people find the production of foie gras, most also agree that other problems are more widespread and pressing–such as the fact that Chicago has long had one of the nation’s highest rates of serious asthma, a potentially deadly but usually treatable disease, yet the health department has never made confronting it a top priority....

Two years ago Mark Morris’s company finally introduced Chicagoans to his breakthrough 1988 work, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, set to an oratorio by Handel. Now they return with a program premiered in 2006, Mozart Dances, described by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker as “the most grave and lovely piece Morris has made in years.” She adds, “In performance it is an utter thrill.” Mozart Dances consists of three pieces–“Eleven,” “Double,” and “Twenty-Seven”–each set to a different Mozart work: Piano Concerto no....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to the prosecutor in a case tried in September in Lewes, England, 42-year-old David Churchward told police after his arrest that the marijuana he’d been growing–he was caught, naked, allegedly tending to 638 plants–was for his wife, who had difficulty sleeping. Also in September, Reuters reported that a 55-year-old woman facing drug charges in Lobez, Poland, told police her marijuana crop was for her cow, which had been “skittish and unruly” before she started putting pot in its feed....

This is one of those stories that’s way too strange to have been made up. OK, so me and my boy were out club hopping, and we stopped by here because he knows the manager and we got ushered into the backroom VIP area. It was full of the usual beautiful people, and we strutted in like rock stars. I settled into the big leather couch and was feeling pretty good–I had a healthy amount of drinks in me already, so I was half euphoric, half oblivious to my surroundings....

With this Olympia trio you get a yowling, yodeling, throat singing ethnomusicologist, an upright bassist, sleeve-worn pretensions to a sort of art-school neo-backwoods shamanism, and, to top it off, a Calvin Johnson connection–meaning they’d probably deserve a good pelting with possum if they weren’t so terrifyingly good at what they do. And what they do is pound out hair-raising surrealist swamp rock that hews to a maniacal sense of rhythm, practically creating their own genre of primitive prog in the process....

On August 4 the five members of the Joint Review Board gathered in a drab, windowless room on the tenth floor of City Hall to consider the LaSalle Central TIF, Mayor Daley’s latest proposed tax increment financing district. To appreciate the self-destructive effect of this timid behavior, you have to understand the impact TIFs have on the taxing bodies the Joint Review Board members represent. TIFs in Chicago are districts created by the City Council at the mayor’s urging....

Thanks for critiquing the Chicago Tribune’s lame “Road to War” series, which was purported to be an analytical reexamination of how we got into such a messy situation in Iraq [Hot Type, January 6]. A better title for the series would have been “Rehash of a Whitewash.” How can any journalist still give Bush & Co. the benefit of the doubt after so much information now indicates that they knew they were “cherry-picking” intelligence to scare the public into backing a preemptive war?...