Aldermen don’t have much on their docket these days–a proposed smoking ban, possible tax hikes to sort out for next year’s budget, a multibillion-dollar O’Hare expansion, questions about who and where federal corruption investigators might turn their attention to next. So last week the council skipped debate on city issues to tackle a pressing problem: the scourge of communism. The aldermen’s initial focus was on a resolution memorializing the 1945 Warsaw uprising against the Nazi occupation....

Some statements are so well encoded you never guess they’re there. On the other end of the spectrum are plays like Electronic Baby, so skewed toward an offbeat concept that you can’t believe they’re not metaphoric. This rock opera by John Austin (music) and Kathleen Lombardo (book) focuses on a 13-year-old who prefers cars to boys. Her parents’ weird dismay at her lack of sexualization seems allegorical by default, while their efforts to straighten her out (with a makeover and visits to a shrink) and pry her away from a gearhead aunt scream homosexual panic....

Charlie Bremner is a ceremonial magickian, and when he tells people what he does, he wants to make sure they get the spelling right. “M-A-G-I-C-K-I-A-N,” he says. “Magic without a k is David Blaine.” Last weekend the baby-faced and blond-ponytailed 31-year-old led a workshop on one of his specialties at Alchemy Arts, an occult bookstore in Edgewater. “Banishing: What it is and how to do it!,” the flyers for the event read....

The most interesting of the three new works on New Leaf Theatre’s program is Nick Keenan’s performance piece Lexicon: he has a sound designer’s sensibilities, and his script/soundscape (delivered in voice-over) is ambitious, challenging, and entertaining if at times impenetrable. Three dancers perform Allison Kurtz’s choreography, underlining the text’s stream-of-consciousness observations. But at 50 minutes Lexicon is too long–we begin to rebel against its randomness, wanting to impose order. A static staging and dull performances mar Idris Goodwin’s Close to Victory, a Behind the Music-style retrospective for a street slam poet....

I attended a Lutheran ordination last weekend. “Will you give faithful witness to the world?” the candidate was asked. “I will,” she said. There was a laying on of hands, and someone spoke. “Bless Jennette’s witness and work among us that it may further understanding and reconciliation where there is fear and estrangement.” Someone else said, “Discipline yourself in life and teaching that you preserve the truth, giving no occasion for false security or illusory hope....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rudolph Hicks Jr., 30, was arrested in Brooksville, Florida, in early December for trespassing. Before deputies could cuff him he shrugged off five Taser shots, a bite in the leg from a police dog, and a faceful of pepper spray. A few days later police in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, were considering whether to file animal-cruelty charges against Robin Bush, who fatally strangled a 130-pound rottweiler after it attacked her Yorkshire terrier....

If you’re into sexual power trips, James Gregg’s new Redlight should make River North Chicago Dance Company’s performances this weekend an excellent choice for Valentine’s Day. The subtly erotic piece for five couples, set to tango music by Gotan Project, has all the vehemence of tango dance but none of its moves. Usually women are the instigators of the violence, making this a sort of reverse apache dance–they dip the men back, sit on them as they crawl across the floor, or leap onto their backs and knock them down....

Sandra Deer’s delicious soap opera, receiving its Chicago premiere from Caffeine Theatre, is set during the Easter uprising of 1916, but it has less to do with the Troubles than with the troubles of the heart. The title comes from a Yeats poem about the elderly transcending the pleasures of the flesh, but here an aging Yeats does anything but: he continues his unrequited love for Maud Gonne while novelist Olivia Shakespear and her niece pine for him in vain....

On July 26, 2001, 79-year-old Sid Bild was crossing State at Van Buren with his friend Marjorie Feren when he noticed that the pedestrian signal had started flashing. He remembers warning Feren, who was a few steps behind him, that the light was about to change. Then he felt a nudge and an intense pain in his right arm. He dropped to his knees before he could reach the curb. “My arm looked pretty mangled,” he says....

This trio from Springfield, Missouri, owes a lot to Billy Childish–the insanely prolific, stubbornly primitive, hilariously misanthropic British rocker who’s been bashing away in varying degrees of obscurity for almost three decades. Thee Fine Lines deliver the same kind of catchy, dirt-simple tunes, stomping 60s garage beats, snarly guitar, distorted vocals, and shitty sound quality (sorry, I mean “vintage production”) that made Childish projects like Thee Headcoats and Thee Mighty Caesars tasty....

A Mano335 N. Dearborn | 312-629-3500 $$$Asian, Japanese | Dinner: seven days | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 2, other nights till 11:30 Cafe 1031909 W. 103rd | 773-238-5115 When Kurt Serpin says he’s cooking Ottoman cuisine he doesn’t mean the extravagant feasts of the sultans, but he is talking about the traditional national cuisine that developed in their expansive palace kitchens. The menu in his compact Lakeview restaurant is certainly expansive, covering the expected mezes—hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, falafel—kebabs, and grilled seafood dishes (Serpin is from the Turkish city of Mersin, on the Mediterranean), but also a nice selection of less common items, like the pre-Ottoman, tiny wontonlike meat dumplings known as manti, which arrive in a deep bowl of yogurt-tomato sauce....

For five years the city’s been battling Hyde Parkers over how to prevent erosion at Promontory Point, the peninsula at 55th Street. And now the make-or-break vote in the impasse has come down to Senator Barack Obama, a politician who apparently can’t stand to take a stand. Over the last five years the residents have fought the city at the state, local, and federal levels. They’ve formed the Promontory Point Community Task Force, packed public hearings, written letters to editors, and raised about $100,000 to fund their own studies and reports....

Fever Pitch With Jimmy Fallon, Drew Barrymore, Lenny Clarke, Jack Kehler, James B. Sikking, and Ione Skye Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fever Pitch, the latest feature from shock-comedy siblings Peter and Bobby Farrelly, is based on Hornby’s 1992 debut book, a diaristic nonfiction account of his lifelong obsession with English soccer. Hornby himself scripted a 1997 British adaptation featuring Colin Firth, which seems to have been the starting point for this passable romantic comedy, in which a maniacally devoted Boston Red Sox fan (Jimmy Fallon) is forced to grow up when he falls for an ambitious professional woman (Drew Barrymore)....

The White Sox came home to die last week. No one was prepared to admit it when they opened their last home stand against the Detroit Tigers, but everyone felt it, from the upper deck down to the dugout. The Sox were businesslike but somber during batting practice, especially compared to the younger, playful, Central Division-leading Tigers. And as the Sox dropped two of three to the Tigers and then lost 9-0 and 11-6 to the Seattle Mariners to open the final home series of the season, their fate never seemed tragic, the mood in the park never despondent....

Having made a dirty fortune during the Civil War, old Marcus Hubbard likes to pose as a genteel southern gentleman while keeping his two grown sons on short leashes. His wife Lavinia wanders around like a born-again Lady Macbeth, driven dotty by guilt over the family crimes. Only daughter Regina seems to know how to get her way, manipulating Marcus’s unacknowledged jones for her. The accumulated tensions lead, as they must, to an oedipal explosion....

Commenting on this remarkable 1957 feature in the Reader, Dave Kehr wrote, “Nicholas Ray’s direction of black-and-white CinemaScope, that freak child of the 50s, is consistently brilliant in this raw, confused masterpiece about two commando officers (Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens) lost in the North African desert after a dangerous raid. The moral parable fades into metaphysical speculation, as the desert is always there to lend an eternal perspective to the personality conflict....

At 3:45 AM on September 18 a man began throwing a spark plug repeatedly at the glass front door of Cyberia, an Internet cafe in River North. When it didn’t break after 15 minutes, he walked to a side window and tried his luck there. It was good. He shattered the glass, stacked the window’s icicle-shaped shards into a neat pile, and stepped inside. He emptied the cash register and safe and took off with a 38-inch plasma TV under his arm....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The central premise of Dean’s argument is that the current ‘conservative’ movement shares none of the core principles of the political conservatism which attracted Dean to its movement . . . . [it] has nothing to do with restraining government power or preserving historical values. Instead, it has transformed into an authoritarian movement which largely attracts personality types characterized by a desire and need to submit to and follow authority....

Presented by the Music Box and the Silent Film Society of Chicago, this series of double features ($10.50 admission) showcases new prints from the silent and early sound career of slapstick master Harold Lloyd. Screenings are Friday through Thursday, July 1 through 7, at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, and all silent programs feature live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren, Dennis Scott, or Mark Noller. For more information call 773-871-6604 or visit www....

Quemont Greer finished his college basketball career with the DePaul University Blue Demons last March thinking he had a bright future. The six-foot-six, 240-pound forward was the second player in school history to earn first-team all-Conference USA honors. His senior year scoring average of 18.3 points per game was the second highest in the conference, and he’s the only player ever to be named Conference USA player of the week three times in a row....