What makes a cell phone cool? It’s not that an executive from the service provider showed you his, the one that’s engraved with his name and filled with Frank Sinatra songs he’s downloaded–oh, and a couple tracks by Nelly Furtado and Matchbox Twenty, just to prove he’s hip to the times. Nor is it that you went to a party that rang in the new phone while declaring its predecessor obsolete, where you got to drink countless delicious shots of lemon vodka served over tiny scoops of lemon sorbet: you’d slam the vodka, then suck down the leftover white glob like a whore....

I’m tired of the way current alt-rock bands get dismissed as postpunk revivalists. Generations X and Y are supposed to be suspicious of canonization, but everywhere you look, bands with great songwriting chops are getting herded into the long shadows of their “authentic” progenitors–Interpol is just second-rate Joy Division, the Killers are nicking the Cars, and half the bands between the Hudson and the English Channel owe royalties to Gang of Four....

A couple weeks ago Mayor Daley took his Olympics dog-and-pony show to the Walt Disney Magnet School on the north side, far from the south-side neighborhood parks that will be overtaken if his plans for the 2016 games go through. Over at Jackson Park, the proposed site of a 20,000-seat field hockey arena, opinion’s a bit more split, as some opponents try to figure out how to deal with an all-powerful mayor with a short temper and a long memory....

This much I know: Anthony Clarvoe wrote a play about successive generations of a single family who spend the 20th century migrating westward, from their native Croatia to the United States and then on to Japan. What I don’t know, having only this amateurish Thunder & Lightning Ensemble production to go by, is how Clarvoe’s play might come across given half a chance. I think maybe it would be a smart, if predictable, serio-goofball look at what constitute roots in a compulsively mobile world....

Sacred Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sarah Seyedin hosts an open house on the first Saturday of every month at her art boutique Sacred Art, but this Saturday, May 6, the agenda will be a bit different. Instead of the usual cocktails she’s offering free cookies and juice as part of a Life Source blood drive that’s kicking off a monthlong fund-raising effort by Seyedin on behalf of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society....

It seems a bit pointless for Carol van Dyk to kick off Bettie Serveert’s sixth studio album, Attagirl (Minty Fresh/Palomine), by imploring, “Don’t give up on me.” By now it’s likely that the only people listening are loyal fans who wouldn’t dream of abandoning their fave Dutch band. For the faithful, Peter Visser’s roundabout guitar noodling and van Dyk’s vocal variations–from husky to chirpy, from rumination to recrimination–encapsulate basic truths about maintaining an artsy lifestyle outside the mainstream and into middle age....

She can’t write a simple essay without getting all first-person singular on your ass, and she’ll never retire those brittle evocations of the “neo-Romanticism of the sixties cultural insurgency,” though that’s an unfortunate generational tic she shares with many. But Camille Paglia’s very fervidness–imagine food flying from the corners of her mouth as she discusses Wordsworth–and her unstylish insistence on a right and a wrong in art, success or failure in no uncertain terms, is what makes her so valuable these days, when poetry is as foreign and feared as math....

“Squatting–that is, people who are living in vacant units or hallways illegally–is a significant problem in Wells,” writes Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute in a report on the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells housing development. “During a period of two weeks in early spring 2003, our interviewers counted 388 squatters (294 adults and 94 children) living in Wells….Unlike many homeless people who tend to move around from night to night, squatters at Wells have lived in the development for a long time....

Austrian sculptor turned playwright Werner Schwab, who died of alcohol poisoning on New Year’s Eve 1993 at the age of 35, penned more than a dozen plays like People Annihilation or My Liver Is Senseless. These plotless, antisocial works are the type of theater that typically drives audiences away: the stories abound in rape, murder, incest, scatology, and general contempt for humanity. But for Trap Door Theatre to lose three patrons—roughly 10 percent of the crowd on opening night, when the house was padded with friends, family, and other supporters—is exceptional....

Caridad Svich’s new translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s rarely performed play (which he subtitled “A Poem of 1900 Granada”) is both richly melancholy and sharply funny. Rosita (husky-voiced Dana Black) spends her life waiting for a fiance who never returns, with only eccentric visitors and bickering relations to remind her how time is passing. But the end is more puzzling than poignant in this Caffeine Theatre staging by Jennifer Shook, who takes a few uncharacteristic missteps that undercut both sense and resonance: the lyrical first act is betrayed by the second, with its odd double-casting choices and the realization that certain plot points should have been established earlier....

“Every suitcase contained the world,” Eduardo Galeano writes in “Immigrants a Century Ago,” one of 333 vignettes in his new collection, Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (Metropolitan). He lists some of the contents: “A lock of hair / a key that’s lost its door / a pipe that’s lost its mouth.” The acclaimed Uruguayan author’s book, itself a suitcase holding all that has passed through Galeano’s mind, encompasses sweetness and magic, dreams, poverty, Hiroshima, torture and exile, reckless multinational corporations, peasants, apartheid, Carthage, repressive Latin American governments, rebels, soccer, Zagreb, Gambia, Columbine, and the Twin Towers....

Though Emiliana Torrini’s latest album, Fisherman’s Woman (Rough Trade), mainly reflects her interest in British folk music, it’s clear the Italian-Icelandic singer has absorbed a few lessons from her recent excursions into indie pop and mainstream movie music. The disc is definitely a departure from its superb predecessor, Love in the Time of Science (2000), a gorgeous, electronically enhanced album of hooky trip-hop and glistening torch songs, on which Torrini’s voice and aesthetic suggested a less eccentric Bjork....

It wasn’t until last April that Cecilia Butler learned the state planned to close 12 access ramps on the stretch of the Dan Ryan that runs through the near south side. “I got a call from Maurice Lee, a reporter with the Hyde Park Herald,” says Butler, a longtime community activist. “He said, ‘Cecilia, did you know they’re taking away your exits?’ I said, ‘What? They’re just repaving them, aren’t they?...

Director Dina Facklis and a smart Second City Theatricals ensemble have spared audiences yet another night of done-to-death stories about dating traumas and men’s foibles. Instead four women and Joe Canale–someone has to move furniture–show how a sassy gay friend might have changed the lives of Shakespeare’s ingenues, including Juliet: “You’re 14! Look at your choices! Compared to you, Britney Spears has the wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt!” Even familiar subjects–motherhood, tampons, mammograms–seem fresh in the hands of these performers, diverse in type but unfailingly in sync....

Matt & Ben Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gosh, I love True West. And I suspect that Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, the creators of Matt & Ben, do too: they have more than a passing familiarity with Sam Shepard’s 1980 classic. Their satirical off-Broadway hit even name-drops the leathery scribe. They added a dash of The Odd Couple to Shepard’s basic story, then blew it up to cartoon proportions by recasting the battling duo as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck pre-Good Will Hunting....

In David Emerson Toney’s comic tragedy, inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard III, three African-American brothers in late-60s Cleveland struggle to find success and love while hiding family secrets. The first act does little but set the story up, and under Kamesha Jackson’s direction the actors seem swallowed by the stage–the monologues drag, the dialogue rings false. But in the second act, once the sparkling Corvet Williams enters as the woman who inadvertently causes the brothers to reveal all, the play comes across as tightly plotted, funny, and resonant....

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were one of the most successful comedy acts in show business history, but their movies have never been highly ranked by critics. In his landmark 1949 Life magazine essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” James Agee dismissed them as “semiskilled laborers, at best.” Writing in the Reader, Dave Kehr observed, “They never got the hang of the kiddie slapstick Universal assigned to them, and their physical comedy is low, heavy, and graceless....

Koros Art + Style Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is West Lake Street going the way of New York’s meatpacking district? Though until recently its next-door neighbor was a bakery equipment shop, the block where six-month-old luxury boutique Koros Art + Style is located is getting dotted with Range Rovers rather than forklifts. Inside, the cavernous space resembles a church–perhaps dedicated to the Greek goddess of extravagant joy from which the shop takes its name–with soaring ceilings, iron chandeliers, and antiques that include a wooden altar from London and a set of six sinks from a convent, now used to display denim....

Pitchfork has a report on M.I.A. dropping a spontaneous club set in Baltimore, as well as the latest news on her alleged “Bird Flu” project. The concept is not only becoming dated–most of us have moved on from bird flu to worrying about inevitable global ecological calamity, and more advanced worriers are fearing wandering black holes–it’s also kinda biting. Pitchfork also calls M.I.A. a “mash-up diva” in the piece, which seems to be a running problem with them....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thursday night, Chicago’s own John C. Reilly worked a packed house at the Cubby Bear to promote his upcoming comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, about a hard-livin’, hard-lovin’ fictional singer-musician (a composite of Johnny Cash and others). Swaggering and swivelling his hips in character, Reilly and his tight back-up band performed about a dozen original songs from the movie, some of which he cowrote....