Cool Kids, Phono, Hollywood Holt, Mic Terror INFO 773-525-2508 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mano’s best known as a DJ. He spins club nights around town, puts together mixes, and backs MCs for their live sets–including Shawnna, who’s signed to Def Jam, and local rappers like Hollywood Holt (his cousin) and Mic Terror. (He’s also got an ongoing collaboration with electro diva Drea.) But his primary passion is production–if he blows up, his beats and remixes will be the reason....

There’s some gruesome stuff happening in McHenry County in Sheldon Rusch’s debut mystery, For Edgar (Berkley), and it’s up to Illinois State Police special agent Elizabeth Taylor Hewitt to get to the bottom of it all. A human skull affixed to a tree in Chain O’ Lakes State Park, trailing a gold ribbon, eventually leads to a clue: a metallic golden scarab. Hmm. A former UIC English major, Hewitt deduces that the depraved killer’s “work” references the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Gold-Bug....

Reminiscent of Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 follow-up celebrates love between man and wife, boy and girl, farmer and pig. Written for film, then remade for stage and screen over the next 50 years, it picked up an assortment of “trunk songs”–material from other shows–along the way. These jell to produce a tuneful, memorable score–as Sunday’s audience demonstrated, humming vigorously, if largely off-key, to “It’s a Grand Night for Singing.” The superb cast’s exuberance keeps the Iowa corn from turning to mush, and Thomas M....

He was the best of brothers, he was the worst of brothers. But to Mehaffey and Kasper the rift between the Dickens brothers is water under the bridge, which is why they are aiding an effort to put a headstone on the unmarked grave of Augustus Dickens, his common-law wife, Bertha Phillips, and three of their children who died as infants. The five share a plot on the western rim of Graceland Cemetery, in what Chicago cemetery historian Helen Sclair calls “the low-rent district” of a graveyard best known for high-class residents like Daniel Burnham, Bertha Palmer, Marshall Field, and George Pullman....

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story has its share of gothic elements: the nutcracker hero with the Jolly Roger smile, for instance, and his seven-headed rodent adversary. This Incurable Theater production retains all the most dramatic episodes, like the battle between the toys and rodents culminating in their commanders’ thrilling duel. But Incurable distances us from the more horrific motifs by using puppets–hand, rod, shadow, and marionettes–and masked actors. Assisted by a four-piece orchestra playing music that echoes the workings of mechanical curios, this Nutcracker tells a poignant tale of courage and sacrifice yet never risks being too scary for young audiences....

Friday 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HOCKEY ISLAND I doubt any of the countless hot bands in Williamsburg have even heard of Hockey Island–they’re unsigned and have yet to release a full-length album. But if they keep writing material as good as the stuff on their two self-released EPs, all that’s gonna change real soon. Guitarists Virat Shukla and Greg McKenna originally played under the name in Baltimore in 1999, but that incarnation fizzled and the two parted ways....

At the end of last year Karen Clark heard about a job opening at a nursing home in Rogers Park. The job–overseeing dietary charts so 118 senior residents would get their required diabetic or low-calorie or pureed meals–seemed perfect for her. It was half a block from her apartment, it was full-time, it paid $11.25 an hour, and she was a trained sous chef with 20 years of experience in the food industry, including cooking for a nursing home....

Will Clinger and Bret Tuomi exude the spirit of Hope and Crosby (but look more like Laurel and Hardy) in this Theater Wit musical, written by Clinger and James Fitzgerald. The story follows the rise and fall of Rise and Shine, a vaudeville duo enamored of their bombshell producer, from a “freak show carnival” in Kankakee to big revues in “the big city.” The cast brings lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek energy to each scene: the wisecracking is whip smart, the melodies have hooks, the lyrics are catchy, and the whole show moves at a ba-dum-bum pace....

Here endeth “The Valentine Trilogy,” which follows a single character–often, but not exclusively, known as Elliot Dodge–through adventures in three pop genres. The first installment was a western; the second, a samurai tale; and this one is a superhero saga set in 1930s Chicago. Think Road to Perdition meets Stupendous Man from Calvin and Hobbes. Valentine Victorious is longer than it needs to be, and neither its pseudoscience nor its pseudoplot makes much pseudosense....

As someone who supported the war for mostly different reasons than the Tribune [Hot Type, January 6], and who now believes he was mistaken, I’d offer a different analysis. If the United Nations was to be believed, the prewar policy of “containing” Saddam Hussein was killing approximately 50,000 Iraqi kids per year. Even before 9/11, the United States had three basic options: keep a weakened Iraq in place as a realpolitik counterweight to Iran (at the cost of all that human misery, regardless that Saddam was stealing the oil-for-food money), removing the economic sanctions and giving Saddam a multibillion-dollar blank check to rebuild his conventional army (once the fourth largest in the world), or removing him....

It was a luncheon in a large, stately dining room at the Union League Club, one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious private clubs. But the anti-property-tax rhetoric on the menu at last Thursday’s gathering of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago would have played well in a VFW hall on the northwest side. For starters, the vacancy rate in downtown office buildings remains stubbornly high. At about 18 percent, roughly five points higher than the national average, it’s below the rate in Houston (21....

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind With Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkinson. Labour and rest, that equal periods keep; Only once in a blue moon does a screenwriter who isn’t a director become known as an auteur. Plenty of distinctive movie writers have reputations as actors or as actor-directors, starting with such giants as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim, but they’re rarely celebrated for their writing....

He held out a hand Of injured pride she started In the Richard Powers novel Galatea 2.2, a cognitive neurologist and a novelist endeavor to create a neural net sentient enough to pass a PhD comprehensive in English literature. The machine, dubbed Helen, ultimately develops a mind of its own. Eric Elshtain and Jon Trowbridge aren’t quite that far along with their Gnoetry poetry-writing program yet–but then they’re only on version 0....

Ian Adams fell into his new band, the Submarine Races, ass-backward. First he got a record deal, then he joined somebody else’s group, and then he wound up being its front man and chief songwriter. Now, about a year and a half since the process started, the Submarine Races are set to release their self-titled debut, a disc of keening, spiky pop that displays Adams’s love for literate UK postpunk as well as the simple but sublime songs of Chuck Berry and 60s girl groups....

The feminine mystique doesn’t get much more mysterious than this. Bianca and Sierra Casady, estranged half-Cherokee sisters who began a new life together two years ago, are open secrets: they lay out all the information you could need on Noah’s Ark (Touch and Go), the tender milkmaid melodies adorned with tattered, lacy frills of toy piano, glockenspiel, and even samples of meowing cats or dripping water, but it’s still impossible to figure them out....

Alto saxist Lou Donaldson has been playing the same tunes, and a lot of the same riffs on those tunes, for as long as I can remember–he even introduces them with the same commentary, delivered in his improbably high-pitched voice with the same torpid cadence. And for some reason, it never gets old. It reminds me of Jackie Gleason’s set pieces on The Honeymooners: audiences would laugh first in anticipation of his toothless threats, then laugh again when he actually uttered them....

When my raver ex-girlfriend moved away several years ago she started sending me letters telling me about house tracks she liked. Sometimes she didn’t know the names of them, so she’d invent titles like “The Snail Song” or “The Beep Song.” If you’ve spent enough time in decent dance clubs in the past five years you probably have your own anonymous favorites–something you call “The String Section Song” or “The One That Needs a Rakim Verse”–and there’s a good chance the people responsible for them are Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani, otherwise known as Metro Area....

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That Hunter wasn’t done. “My former editor,” her column continued, “recently ran a week of shoe stories at his new paper, the New York Daily News, including a shoe horoscope, which he kindly passed along. Here is mine, Capricorn: ‘Normally impervious to fashion slavery, this spring you’re swooning for the latest footwear. [Yeah, right, patent leather Birkenstocks.] For one big office event, you even abandoned sensible shoes for the global gypsy look....

Like alchemists seeking the philosopher’s stone, improvisers have pursued the ideal of a fully improvised two-act play. Of course, the very notion may be chimerical: generating plots that are both complex and coherent seems almost beyond the pale of “yes, and” technique, and improv’s dreamy associative mechanisms tend to lock up when grounded in a single stable reality. But when a bona fide genius like T.J. Jagodowski takes command of the proceedings, anything is possible....

The beauty of punk was that it couldn’t possibly sell out. Who’d want to buy? “It was by definition ugly and nasty and based on an opposition to money and fame and success,” writes Anne Elizabeth Moore, former coeditor and associate publisher of the defunct Chicago-based zine Punk Planet, in her new book, Unmarketable. “Membership was based on the principle that what was made by hand for yourself and your friends was better than what could be purchased....