It would be easy to assume the two figures hanging out in a vacant North Avenue lot on a recent rainy evening are up to something nefarious–possibly illegal. He’s holding a plastic stencil in one hand and a can of silver spray paint in the other, while she consults from a few feet away. Aay Preston-Myint, a student and tour guide at the Art Institute, and Ilana Percher, an applications engineer, are the founders of the Chicago Tapes Project, a participatory art endeavor launched in April as part of Version>05....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Claiming to be concerned about identity theft, Ron Blankenship, the 63-year-old owner of a shoe-repair business, withheld all personal information from the public during his quiet campaign for sheriff of Jefferson County, Alabama. After he finished second in the Democratic primary earlier this month, earning a spot in a runoff, reports surfaced of a shady past: in the late 80s he was wanted by local authorities on a variety of charges including theft and forgery, and according to police Blankenship faked his own death in 1990 (allegedly in an attempted insurance scam) before serving time for assault....

Lead Story Compelling Explanations Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ricardo Meana, 81, was charged with attempted murder in November after his 82-year-old wife (who reportedly has Alzheimer’s) was found in a supermarket parking lot, left alone in her wheelchair inside the couple’s minivan with a plastic bag tied over her head. Meana, who was in the store at the time, allegedly told authorities that his wife had felt sick and he’d put the bag on her head in case she vomited....

ROLLIN HUNT DEARLY HONORABLE LISTENER (SELF-RELEASED) This weekend the throngs will decamp for Lollapalooza to experience a vertiginous array of mediocre-to-terrible bands (and a couple good ones) in the company of tens of thousands of half-drunk strangers. Seeing a show outside in the Chicago summer dusk is a welcome reprieve from standing around in a smoky club, but the idea that mega-festivals somehow create ad hoc communities out of their mega-crowds–a meme we probably owe to Woodstock–is ridiculous....

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color feature (1964) uses colors expressionistically, and to get the precise hues he wanted, he had entire fields painted. The film came at the end of his most fertile period, just after L’avventura, La notte, and Eclipse, and it isn’t as good as the first and last of these, but the ecological concerns look a lot more prescient today. Monica Vitti plays a neurotic married woman briefly attracted to industrialist Richard Harris, and Antonioni does eerie, memorable work with the industrial shapes and colors that surround her; she walks through a science fiction landscape spotted with structures that are both disorienting and full of possibilities....

Around 1971 Jean-Pierre Melville said, “I sometimes read (I am thinking of the reviews after Le Samourai and Army of Shadows), ‘Melville is being Bressonian.’ I’m sorry, but it’s Bresson who has always been Melvillian.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bresson spent nine months in a German internment camp in 1940-’41, before the occupation of France, and his imprisonment is alluded to in one of his greatest films, A Man Escaped (1956)....

In his 2001 illustrated fantasy novel, Neil Gaiman aims for storytelling that’s both cynical and childlike, postmodern and naive. Happily, in transferring the novel to the stage for the Griffin Theatre Company, William Massolia dispenses with Gaiman’s annoyingly self-conscious, clever narration and focuses instead on the fascinating twist-filled story, which fuses elements from fairy tales, quest legends, and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Even the book’s stock characters are more interesting in this staging by Dorothy Milne, in large part because they’re played by high-caliber actors–Jennifer Grace, Vanessa Greenway, David Blixt–who know how to create and maintain an illusion of depth....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recently the Reader has chosen to cover the current events surrounding the HotHouse [The Meter, September 22, August 4]. Great, keep the stories coming. Unfortunately, thus far the reporting of Marguerite Horberg being ostracized from the very club she founded and nurtured throughout the course of two decades has been unsettlingly biased in favor of the corporate interests that have chosen to oust her....

The Silent Mastermind The Tribune Company climbed into bed with the Chandlers in March 2000, when it swallowed the Times Mirror Company, an acquisition disingenuously described in the pages of the Tribune as a “merger,” even a “marriage.” The city room of the Times Mirror flagship, the Los Angeles Times, saw it for what it was: a conquest and occupation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Tribune veteran told me he read Greising’s profile and “wanted to go take a shower....

If there’s a thin line between madness and genius, Bronx native Tracy Morgan has been delicately walking it for years–as Hustleman on Martin, as unaccredited zoologist Brian Fellow on Saturday Night Live, as Oprah Winfrey on 30 Rock, or as a ghetto nerd in ESPN video game commercials, telling an unamused Ben Wallace, “The way I dunk on you is gonna look unorthodoxt.” The guy is hilariously, enigmatically weird–as lost in irony as Will Ferrell, as unpredictable as the early Eddie Murphy, as fiendish in character as Jonathan Winters....

Curated by University of Chicago professor Wu Hung, a survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, “A Second History” investigates a pre-Photoshop era when anonymous retouchers removed extraneous peasants, disgraced officials, and other undesirable details from Mao-centric compositions. Chinese artist Zhang Dali reproduced 91 photographs, mostly of Chairman Mao, that originally appeared in official Chinese publications over a period of 60 years. Then he paired them with earlier versions, also published, or the original negatives if he could find them....

“War President” is an image. It is not a textual statement or rhetorical argument. An image is like an empty room and any message that one reads in that room necessarily came in the baggage one carried when one walked in the door. If I made an image of George Washington composed of images of the American dead from the revolution, would viewers likely take that image as an indictment of Washington?...

The 16th annual Chicago Humanities Festival, this year themed “Home and Away,” runs 10/29-11/13, offering dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by an international coterie of writers, artists, and scholars as well as film screenings and theatrical and musical performances. All programs are $5 in advance, $6 (cash only) at the door, unless otherwise noted. (Tickets for some sold-out programs may become available; check at the venue no later than 30 minutes before the program....

Cinderella Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The plotline is similar: a Cinderella company lands a fabulous new home in the downtown theater district, where it’s expected to live happily ever after serving an intimate off-Loop-style experience to tiny audiences. Silk Road, the not-yet-four-year-old creation of partners Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani, will present Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat as its inaugural production in the temple’s newly constructed 80- to 120-seat venue....

On paper a collaboration between David Allan Coe and Pantera might sound like a recipe for total comic disaster, but Rebel Meets Rebel (Big Vin) is a fightin’, fuckin’, and rockin’ good time. Vinnie Paul, Rex Brown, and the late Dimebag Darrell, collectively billed here as the Cowboys From Hell, were Coe-heads from way back when–Pantera were known to blast “Jack Daniel’s, if You Please” before shows–and worked with the country cult legend off and on during the four years preceding their 2003 breakup....

How Do You Spell Dorktastic? Begin in 2002, when playwright Tony Kushner spoke here, and Weiss slammed him in print for his “stock anti-Israeli diatribe.” Forward to May of last year, when Weiss said in an item about Kushner’s Caroline, or Change, “Unfortunately, Kushner, in the classic style of a self-loathing Jew, has little but revulsion for his own roots.” Given equal space in the Sun-Times to reply, Kushner called Weiss’s description of him “ugly and baseless....

Thanks to Ben Joravsky for questioning the appropriateness of proposing two heavily used south-side parks (Jackson and Washington) as the venue for the 2016 Olympics [“A Promise Made to Be Broken,” October 4]. They are gems in the Park District system and both provide south-side residents with opportunities to enjoy large natural areas without leaving the city. When I lived in Hyde Park many years ago, the short walk to Jackson Park, with its natural beauty and solitude, was one of the highlights of that neighborhood....

Lead Story Government in Action Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A California appeals court ruled in December that a lawyer had been denied a fair opportunity to argue his case at a zoning hearing before the Los Angeles city council. A videotape of the hearing showed that while the lawyer and other parties addressed the council, most members were on the phone, talking among themselves, or wandering around the room....

I was living here on the third floor with seven other guys. It was a total frat-house thing–the reason why landlords don’t want to rent to 21-year-olds. We’d made a road trip to Indiana to pick up some fireworks, including some tennis-ball-sized mortar shells–you light ’em and drop ’em in a tube and they fly out. We were in the kitchen shooting these things into the alley between the houses behind us, toward the trees on Racine Avenue....

I’m looking over in the kitchen area, where I see a bachelorette party, and it reminds me of a recent Las Vegas getaway weekend with my girlfriends. We were short on cash and came up with the idea that one of us should pretend to be engaged in order to get free stuff–although we’re all very single. So before we left we bought a cheap first-communion veil and a fake $2 engagement ring from a low-cost accessory store at a mall....