If you believe Martin Atkins, even he isn’t sure why he decided to fly to Beijing in fall 2006 and record the best and brightest of the city’s nascent underground rock scene. He already knew the American expats who run D-22, the top rock club in town, and they could tell him which bands to watch—but he’s been touring for decades and has connections like that all over. And given his credentials—he leads Pigface and runs Invisible Records, and since the early 80s he’s played with the likes of PiL, Killing Joke, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails—he probably could’ve gotten a project like that off the ground almost anywhere....

Khanate But the brontosauruslike trudge of slow metal has come to a near standstill of late thanks to the recent emergence of doom metal bands like Khanate, now on tour promoting their second album, Things Viral (Southern Lord). Khanate’s music is closer to the score for a Japanese Noh play than anything in mainstream metal. Seemingly endless stretches of meditative silence, illuminated by otherworldly discord and pocked with tiny abrasive sounds, are shattered by precisely placed bursts of thundering agony....

Read Harold Henderson’s blog, Daily Harold, at chicagoreader.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [snip] Freedom. At Salon economist Brad DeLong remembers Milton Friedman’s response when General William Westmoreland denounced the idea of phasing out the draft in the 70s, saying he didn’t want to command “an army of mercenaries.” The late Friedman asked, “Would you rather command an army of slaves?” Westmoreland got angry: “I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves....

The U.S. vs. John Lennon s The U.S. vs. John Lennon Of course, Lennon had his own problems with the religious right: his first real brush with controversy came in 1966 when an American fan magazine reprinted his remarks to a British reporter that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” and that Christianity would “vanish and shrink.” The U.S. vs. John Lennon treats this incident briefly, reprising old news footage of Bible Belt disc jockeys condemning the band, the Ku Klux Klan hosting bonfires of Beatles merchandise, and Lennon finally backing down at a press conference in Chicago....

The first of Millennium Park’s crowd-pleasers to develop a major problem was the Bean, as Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate has come to be called. Unveiled last July, the sculpture’s been hidden inside a tent since January as workers grind down and polish the seams between its 168 metal plates. In the process the original budgeted cost has almost doubled, to $17 million, and according to Karen Ryan, spokesperson for the Department of Cultural Affairs, no completion date has been set....

Bill Evans, who turns 65 in a matter of days, is still performing at an age when other dancers have long since retired. Trained in ballet, modern, and jazz, he revolted against the discipline of holding in his stomach (which inhibits deep breathing) and “working through” injuries (i.e., ignoring them) at about 30, when he realized that chronic physical problems were threatening his career. He started thinking about what it felt like to tap-dance as a kid (at the age of three he put marbles between his toes so he could sound like Fred Astaire), remembering his free flow of movement and lack of concern about how he looked....

The unlikeliest achievement of the new wave of postpunk is that it’s made spastic yelps cool. Not “cool” as in trendy, though it is. I mean “cool” as an overall mood. With a band like the Rapture, for instance, vocal hysteria is just another formal element; it’s meant to be a sonic effect, not something that conveys a sense of jittery tension. Judging by their self-titled debut album on Sire, the Futureheads seem to come by their anxiety honestly....

Entertainment!, Gang of Four’s 1979 debut, took the classic elements of rock ‘n’ roll–bass, drums, guitar, vocals, and songs about desire–broke them into jagged pieces, and reassembled them into something that rocked fiercely even while challenging the genre’s conventions. Bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham played stiff funk grooves at punk velocity; guitarist Andy Gill hacked against their momentum in the verses and dropped dissonant, out-of-tempo chords where the solos were supposed to go; and lead singer Jon King wailed above a babel of conflicting slogans chanted by the rest of the band....

On May 24 the two big local preservationist groups got together downtown for a press conference, where they were to make what they called a “major announcement” about the “preservation of the historic Cook County Hospital.” When I heard this, I wondered, Was Mayor Daley finally going to join the movement to save County? So if there’s no money to save and no votes to win by tearing it down, why doesn’t Daley tell Stroger–who, as everyone knows, takes his orders from Daley–to back off?...

Robert O’Hara has said of his 1996 play that he wanted to “imagine what it would be like for me to go back in time whole, as a gay black American.” Written as his graduate thesis in the directing program at Columbia University as one part of a trilogy on slave history and family ties, it suggests both August Wilson and Tony Kushner. Like Wilson’s Aunt Esther, one of the characters is an ancient survivor of slavery, and O’Hara shares Kushner’s penchant for fantasy: he sends the old man and his gay great-great-grandson back in time, from 1994 to the eve of the doomed Nat Turner slave rebellion in 1831....

Melissa Turner The first-ever director of fashion art and events in Chicago, Turner is charged with supporting and publicizing the city’s nascent fashion industry and acting as a liaison with designers. So far she’s had her hands full with Fashion Focus Chicago, now in its second year, but future projects reportedly include developing an online resource guide to help designers find materials and showcase their work and a “fashion incubator” at Macy’s for emerging talent....

An MCA retrospective of a career spanning half a century is the occasion for a conversation with the artist and her curator, Elizabeth Smith. One recent afternoon the artist sat for an interview in the MCA cafe. Joining her was Elizabeth A.T. Smith, the MCA’s chief curator. MT: The work that you saw was the big constructions done in the 60s? MT: Why? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MT: She was just one other person sending you notes and leaving messages for you?...

Though he’s best known as an improvising cornetist, Rob Mazurek has spent an increasing amount of time in recent years as a sound sculptor, using a wide array of electronics to shape richly textured abstract music. In the past he’s done his exploring on solo albums like Orton Socket’s 99 Explosions (Moikai, 2001) and Silver Spines (Delmark, 2002). But for the eponymous debut by Mandarin Movie, released earlier this year on Aesthetics, Mazurek formed a band to extend and radically broaden his palette....

Though he’s best known as a painter, Roger Brown produced three-dimensional pieces that expressed his saucy, often biting satiric views even better; that work is surveyed in this excellent retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. Brown famously preferred advertising to high art, and Galvanized Temple is both more solid looking than classical architecture and amusingly ridiculous: the columns are garbage cans, and the peaked roof is made of aluminum siding. Brown shows his sympathy with everyday laborers in Mask for a Waitress, constructed around a mop whose strands would cover the wearer’s hair; flatware festoons a piece of wood running along the mop handle and the mask itself is painted with Brown’s signature yellow windows enclosing lone silhouettes, evoking the city dweller’s loneliness....

Playwrights Anthony Ruivivar (an actor on NBC’s Third Watch) and Tony Glazer (a writer on the same show) offer an intriguing premise in their 2003 off-Broadway play. Three bank employees and two customers are locked in a room-size safe after a robbery–along with a huge stash of money. Was there really a robbery? Is one of the victims actually the perpetrator? Unfortunately, the premise is all that’s interesting. The playwrights strive to examine human nature at its worst, but for 90 minutes their script lurches from cliche (“We’re running out of air!...

On top of booking the San Francisco Jazz Festival every fall, nonprofit presenter SFJAZZ organizes events year-round; in 2000 it installed saxist Joshua Redman as the artistic director for its spring season of concerts. Last year it launched the SFJAZZ Collective, also under Redman’s direction, and this week the high-powered octet makes its Chicago debut. The lineup combines youth with experience and celebrity with comparative obscurity. Alto saxist Miguel Zenon and drummer Eric Harland are relative newcomers; Redman and pianist Renee Rosnes are young veterans....

Wallace Shawn’s 1996 drama is set in an unnamed country whose intellectual elite have been purged in a proletarian revolution. (The skimpy details evoke Nazi Germany or Mao’s China, but Shawn seems also to be addressing the debasement of American culture.) The play finds self-absorbed Jack, his wife Judy, and her poet father Howard recounting the events that led to Howard and Judy’s executions, leaving Jack as their “designated mourner.” Shawn’s dense text, structured as a series of overlapping monologues, is an ambitious choice for the small, non-Equity Right Brain Project, and the actors aren’t always up to the task....

We’re all taught in B-school that market prices are determined by supply and demand. I can’t for one minute believe this is true of crude oil prices. Demand appears to be static (that is, static at a given moment, although steadily increasing with time) and not affected by price at all. China isn’t going to buy incrementally less oil as the price goes up. So how is the market price actually determined?...

Few things bug a reporter more than an unasked question. The question that isn’t asked–because the reporter didn’t think of it in time, or he lost his nerve, or he was drowned out by oafish colleagues–isn’t answered, and a story that hangs on the answer can’t be written. Another day went by, and Baker held a morning press briefing at the Cubs spring training camp in Phoenix. Beat reporter Bruce Miles of the Daily Herald had a line of questions ready for him....

Rock, Pop, Etc. MARY J. BLIGE, GLENN LEWIS, MARIO WINANS Sat 5/1, 7:30 PM, Arie Crown Theater, McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Dr. 312-791-6190 or 312-559-1212. RICHARD CURTIS & ROLAND ROOS “Clicks and Vox” performance and installation. Fri 4/30, 8 PM, Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton. 773-395-2844. NELLY FURTADO, EASTMOUNTAINSOUTH Fri 4/30, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. PAT HUMPHRIES & SANDY OPATOW Fri 5/7, 7:30 PM, Unitarian Church of Evanston, 1330 Ridge, Evanston....