Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That dialectic still engages artists in both media, as “Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography shows. The straightest takes on the theme of this ambitious MCP-curated exhibit of 15 painters, photographers, and videographers come from two well-known painters, Gerhard Richter and Eric Fischl. Richter, whose career is defined by his many explorations of the overlap between the two arts, is represented by work from 1989: postcard-size shots of sylvan and urban scenes he painted over with delicate sprays and skeins of color....

Candidates for commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District usually don’t have Web sites, don’t march in the Gay Pride Parade, and don’t receive endorsements from Democracy for America meetups. The board of commissioners is typically filled by Democratic organization veterans and longtime district employees, and campaigning typically means buttering up the committeemen who do the slating, passing out yard signs, and hoping your name comes first on the ballot....

Yutaka Sone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fairness Sone said during his talk that his aim is only to entertain and perhaps enchant the viewer. At that he’s fairly successful: in an essay Walker calls Sone’s work “straight-up fun…no strings attached.” And after all, as we’re told, Japanese art isn’t policed for distinctions between fine and commercial art the way Western art is....

Hugo Ball, whose Cabaret Voltaire birthed Dada during World War I, described it as “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” The latest in WNEP Theater’s “Soiree Dada” series, whose subtitle means “Blind Donkey Hopscotch,” gets that. Performed by nine clowns in whiteface and tramp costumes, the piece’s anarchic games and strangely mesmerizing nonsense poems are ingeniously buffoonish while its half-giddy, half-terrified insistence on the cruel emptiness at the center of things becomes a kind of merry dirge....

Though Blue Yonder (Skycap), the most recent trio album from Boston pianist Steve Lantner, is entirely improvised, there are none of the volatile, extroverted keyboard machinations such a format typically yields. Lantner seems happiest taking a little chunk of melody and reassembling it, as though it were made of Legos, into countless wonderfully jagged permutations. He’s fond of dark, sometimes dissonant harmonies, and his sound can recall some of the most idiosyncratic voices of the postbop era, from Herbie Nichols to Lowell Davidson, but his touch is as light and graceful as that of the classic beboppers who came before....

If you can judge a city’s culture by the amount of publications it supports–not to mention its disregard for trees–then Chicago is a culturally rich, tree-loathing city indeed. Whereas one gay monthly is enough for many entire states, we have four competing weeklies, in addition to biweekly, monthly, and quarterly magazines, as well as podcasts and radio programs. The publications can be picked up at many shops in the gayborhoods of Boys Town and Andersonville, and at homo-friendly coffee shops and bookstores all over town....

Trading Post Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It seemed like such a no-brainer,” Hirsch says. Even Haszlakiewicz, the tech expert and devil’s advocate of the group, thought they could have it up in six months or so. They spent two years working out the kinks and in 2005 launched a fledgling version of swapsimple.com. After a year of user feedback and further refinements the site was expanded to include DVDs, video games, and all kinds of books....

If only contemporary American filmmakers were as generous toward actresses as Pedro Almodovar, whose movies offer women the complex roles once enjoyed by Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani, and Sophia Loren. Penelope Cruz gives a mature, full-blooded performance as a working-class Madrid housewife whose oafish husband tries to rape their teenage daughter and winds up dead on the kitchen floor. This gritty melodrama is tempered by surreal black humor when neighbors in her provincial hometown report sightings of the ghost of Cruz’s mother (Carmen Maura)....

If you’ve tried and failed to wrap your mind around the “repeal” of the federal estate tax, here’s one reason it’s so complicated. Chicago attorney Susan Bart writes in the January issue of the Illinois Bar Journal, “Congress wanted to take credit for ‘repealing’ the ‘death tax,’ but did not want to make the spending cuts to replace the decreased revenues that would result. Thus we ended up with absurd legislation that, if not amended, will repeal the estate tax only for 2010....

When Toronto-based writer and performer Darren O’Donnell hit Quimby’s in October, he delivered a monologue from his ever-evolving one-man show A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, a theater piece that dramatizes one of his pet concerns: the breakdown of the boundary between audience and performer. He wasn’t on a stage in the tiny bookstore, and the abbreviated bit he delivered didn’t include any direct audience participation, but the partly improvised piece was electrifying–a far cry from your typically sleepy reading....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve long been a fan of Austin’s the Gourds, who more than just about any other contemporary act have channeled the broad Americana spirit that once made the Band such a potent force. Songwriters Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith have pretty disparate singing voices—Russell has a poetic, scruffy dog delivery loaded with naturalistic Texas drawl and Smith has a pinched yet appealing squawk—but the combination provides impressive range....

The designers of the new Pritzker Pavilion’s sound system claim that the speakers on Frank Gehry’s spidery trellis will create a “room” above the audience that will approximate the sound of a traditional concert hall. This weekend we’ll find out if they do. To inaugurate its new space, the Grant Park Orchestra has commissioned a work from former Chicago Symphony Orchestra composer in residence John Corigliano, Midsummer Fanfare, and invited several of Chicago’s finest musicians to perform this and other works....

Nelson, a former drug addict with a shaved head and piercing eyes, has the arrest record to back up his looks. In 2002, when he was caught with $100 worth of crack, he was out on an I-bond from an arrest two months earlier for possession of $40 worth of crack, a stolen Dodge Neon, and three credit cards that weren’t his. He was looking at several years in the state penitentiary, but after ten months in Cook County Jail, Nelson was sentenced to 24 months’ probation and sent to live in this brick courtyard building on far North Damen....

“This is my entourage,” jokes Rhymefest as he walks into the Jefferson Park home studio of his friend Franco de Leon. He’s accompanied by his teenage sister, his girlfriend, and a seven-year-old son from a previous relationship. “You know, all us hip-hop stars have a big posse.” Wearing a navy blue mechanic’s jumpsuit with rhymefest printed across the front, the rapper otherwise known as Che Smith settles on the couch, takes a bite from a hoagie, and glances at the TV–it’s tuned to BET, and 106 & Park is doing a segment on Kanye West’s GQ spread....

This offbeat comedy was hailed at Sundance, snapped up by Fox Searchlight, and given a blue-chip publicity campaign, developments that seem wildly out of sync with its warm regard for the underdog. A fractious family of misfits piles into an ailing VW bus and sets off for California so the youngest (Abigail Breslin) can compete in a children’s beauty pageant; suffering each other along the way are her irascible grandfather (Alan Arkin), suicidal uncle (Steve Carell), Nietzsche-obsessed teenage brother (Paul Dano), beleaguered mom (Toni Collette), and abrasive dad (Greg Kinnear), a motivational speaker whose nine-step program for success constantly aggravates the others’ sense of failure....

You have to admire Liz Lerman’s chutzpah: she fearlessly tackles genetics in the 90-minute Ferocious Beauty: Genome, which includes texts, dancing, and lots of projections. Too often, though, the piece is merely expository: sometimes it resembles a talking-heads documentary (various scientists offer their views), sometimes a colorfully illustrated textbook, sometimes a burlesque act/kids’ science show (sexy Miss Tata personifies the TATA box, an element in initiating DNA transcription). Occasionally Lerman ventures into more challenging territory–she questions the desirability of survival and longevity, for example, in a sequence where an elderly person looks at “mandatory” rules for various ages: at 95, take up motorcycle riding; at 105, join a Russian roulette club....

Trombonists Jeb Bishop and Jeff Albert could both use some good luck. Bishop quit the Vandermark 5 and Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet more than a year ago after developing problems with his hearing, and throughout 2005 took only the occasional gig, using the time off to let his ears heal and reassess his musical direction. Albert is from New Orleans, and I don’t need to tell you what Hurricane Katrina did to that place....

This local four-piece belongs to the small but growing class of metal bands approved for use by sensitive indie rockers, due in part to the absence of vocals–without the usual snarling and spitting to make them sound angry, even Pelican’s most brutal riffs feel impersonal in their staggering power, like weather systems. There’s only one sane reaction to a bunch of burly guys with ax handles pounding on your door and hollering, but if you’re in the right frame of mind you can enjoy it when a thunderstorm throws its shoulder against your window....

Since the 50s New York’s bustling Latino music community has defined itself by its ability to develop new hybrids. That progressive instinct is a sign of vitality, but constantly pushing the music forward also risks obscuring the scene’s rich history. To help keep that from happening, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra celebrates the classic sound of New York Afro-Cuban music from the 60s and 70s. Formed in 2000 by producer Aaron Luis Levinson, the group is mostly made up of veteran sidemen who’ve played under major figures like Mongo Santamaria and Tito Puente....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you thought malicious, greed-motivated legislation was strictly for Republicans, you should meet Democratic Reps. George Miller (CA) and Ruben Hinojosa (TX), who have added language to a 747-page spending bill that would axe federal financial aid to schools who don’t sign up for paid “alternatives” to P2P filesharing. Essentially it says “sign up for these for-profit services or no more Pell grants” and then cackles demonically....