Near the end of In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger, David Berglund describes a visit he paid to his 83-year-old neighbor Henry Darger at Saint Augustine’s Home for the Aged in the early 70s. Darger had been moved there from his little third-floor apartment in Lincoln Park, where he’d lived as a poor recluse for 41 years, working menial jobs and quietly finishing a 15,000-page epic novel and a long series of elaborate paintings to illustrate it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Commonwealth Fund takes a first look at the presidential candidates’ health care plans so far. The short version: Obama, Clinton, and Edwards would “expand coverage by building on the strengths of the current system–pooling risk in large groups, generating efficiencies through employer-based coverage, and building on the success of public programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)....

The 12th annual International Exposition of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art brings 90-some dealers in ceramics, furniture, jewelry, and other three-dimensional media to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, 600 E. Grand. Special exhibits focus on furniture from Tasmania and the U.S., flatware, and work by artists living in Israel. The first two exhibits are among the topics of the following talks, which are free with general admission; tickets cost $15 per day, $12 for students and seniors, or $25 for a three-day pass....

The Science of the Squeeze Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was no confusion about their target: If you have a few assets, my friend, these people want to talk to you. And the more you have, the more interested they’ll be. According to research from the Giving USA Foundation and other sources cited by Falk, nonprofits collected $248 billion in contributions last year, and 83 percent of it came from individuals....

Ever since I wrote about Tom Petty in the Treatment last week, people have been coming up to me and bashfully admitting how seriously his music rocks them, like there’s something wrong with that. Not to overlook the sarcasm and subtlety of the song I’m referencing, but the dude really is the king: last night’s show at Charter One Pavilion was a monster. Petty was up there for two solid hours, playing almost nothing but hits–unflashy renditions of songs spanning his whole career, with the occasional veer into extended jams or blues just to show that the band can pull it off....

In Steppenwolf’s glossy 2003 staging of Richard Greenberg’s play, an impressive set and careful performances designed to show off the characters’ cleverness made the script feel like nothing more than a precious plume of postmodern spun sugar. In Mikhael Tara Garver’s rougher, considerably more intimate Uma Productions staging–Brian Sidney Bembridge’s design brings us right into the set–Greenberg’s wry, witty tale of literary types in 1919 is much more urgent and persuasive....

Lynn Becker hit many points in his column about Millennium Park [“Inspiration or Exception?” September 3]. He also took the time to explain the many expensive mistakes that occurred during construction. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Becker correctly points out that the Gehry stage is but a variation on his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. For this we can thank Cindy Pritzker, who wouldn’t accept Gehry’s original design, a Mies style that was shown in Chicago magazine....

Four months before 9/11 made all of us jittery about our borders, a tragedy in the southwest commanded national attention. In an attempt to enter the United States illegally, 26 Mexican men traveled the Devil’s Highway, a clandestine route through Arizona’s most punishing stretch of desert. They’d paid for guides (“coyotes”), but were led–on foot–in the wrong direction and then abandoned. Out of water and under a relentless sun, with temperatures climbing to 110 degrees, they staggered through “a vast trickery of sand,” feverish and deranged, drinking their own urine....

Before we kiss off 2006, here’s a checkup on some of the year’s loose ends—deals finally done, controversies gone cold, mysteries still unsolved. After months of e-mailed distress signals about its impending homelessness, the Chicago Photography Center got over the hump and purchased its space at 3301 N. Lincoln last week for $1.2 million. It’s a milestone for the group, which formed after Hull House effectively booted Richard Stromberg’s program four years ago....

These local new-wave dorks aren’t just playing at this free DVD screening of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, Vickie Hunter and Heather Whinna’s 2004 documentary about Christian rock–they’re in the movie, performing and giving interviews. The band formed in 1996, while the members were attending a fundamentalist Bible school that later expelled them–their unofficial Web site suggests it had “something to do with robots and hamburger meat....

If the title’s accurate, there should be a pretty good blaze going at the Trap Door on Friday nights. This amiably awful sketch-comedy revue certainly supplies enough stupid: the frat-boy stupidity of the skit about an all-male cheerleading squad, the inscrutable stupidity of one set at a murder trial, the thin-stretched stupidity of another in which People Against Pro-Action carries out a guerrilla operation, the homage-to-Mike Myers stupidity of a fourth involving the lyrics to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (“Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the fandango?...

Few saxophonists who’ve emerged in the past few decades can match the technical, improvisational, and compositional brilliance of Edward Wilkerson. Unfortunately Wilkerson’s made it tough for listeners to become aware of his vast talent. First, he’s stayed in Chicago, whereas most jazz players intent on making a career head to New York. Second, he’s been incredibly stingy with his releases–until this week, Last Option, an album from 2000 by his long-running group 8 Bold Souls, remained his most recent....

Since making his Carnegie Hall debut 20 years ago, when he was only 17, violinist Joshua Bell has received an astonishing number of Grammy nominations and awards, particularly for a classical musician, but he’s also done successful crossover recordings, including a fabulous bluegrass album with bassist Edgar Meyer, The Short Trip Home. His Romance of the Violin CD has been in the top ten on Billboard’s classical chart for at least 50 weeks, though it has an easy-listening streak that makes it much less satisfying than his fiery Kreisler Album or his recording of the Mendelssohn and Beethoven concerti, for which he wrote his own cadenzas....

It’s hard to tell exactly what the French duo Kristoff K. Roll does to make its richly textured music, and that’s part of the point. Jean-Christophe Camps and Carole Rieussec started their careers in the 80s studying acousmatic music, a close cousin to musique concrete’s manipulations of found sounds, before they began working together in the early 90s. One of their earliest pieces, 1993’s Corazon Road, mixed bits of conversations, street sounds, and general environmental ambience recorded while traveling through Mexico and South America; 1997’s Des Travailleurs de la Nuit, a l’Amie des Objets (Metamkine) assembled recordings of street demonstrations, monologues, and political chatter in France, Sarajevo, and South America into a cohesive collage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few groups in any style have endured like Puerto Rican salsa vets El Gran Combo. Pianist Rafael Ithier, who founded the band in 1962, still leads it today, and while they’re hardly cutting edge, they’re no nostalgic act either, always employing an excellent crew of musicians. When they stop in at Ravinia on Thursday as part of their 45th-anniversary tour, they’ll be joined by opening act NG2, a group I initially mistook for a generic Latino boy band (check out the faux-hawks and carefully manicured stubble of singers Gerardo Rivas and Norberto Velez on the cover of their recent album, ¡Al Fin!...

MURDER ON THE COMEDY EXPRESS and CHILDREN OF THE ABSURD, Second City Training Center, Donny’s Skybox Studio. Here’s my theory. I think Murder on the Comedy Express originally featured a framing device a la Agatha Christie, with Hans Holsen and Robyn Norris playing a pair of detectives whose investigation winds through and unifies this ten-skit revue. The concept fell through, but the programs and press materials had already been printed so Holsen and Norris reduced the framing device to a lame little opening speech, followed by maybe 45 minutes’ worth of unrelated skits, then allotted the excess time to another troupe, Children of the Absurd....

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism Whatever the reasons, the annual profits from DVDs outstripped those of the box office a few years ago. In both businesses most of the money comes from a few blockbuster titles. But there’s something new going on when a supposedly marginal polemic like Outfoxed can catapult itself into the big time, challenging entrenched media powers in the process. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Though Chicago audiences and venues support an impressive variety of music, it’s still one of the few major American cities without a cohesive indie-pop scene. I imagine the banjo-playing kid from Deliverance sitting on the steps of the Logan Square monument, except instead of a banjo he’s got one of those indestructible aluminum guitars like Tar used to play, and instead of “Dueling Banjos” he’s doing “Dead Billy” by Big Black–that’s when you know your sissy-pop kind ain’t welcome ’round these parts....

1101 W. Fulton (entrance on Aberdeen) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just as they are with food, people are becoming more curious about where their clothes come from and how they’re made. And as the market has expanded–largely on the Web–environmentally responsible processes and sustainable materials have lost their association with scratchy fabrics and shapeless silhouettes. Jessa Brinkmeyer says she opened her new boutique, Pivot, to show Chicagoans firsthand how nice eco-wear can be....

Back when they were touring as the rhythm section of Simian, a decent but now largely forgotten British electro-pop band, dance-music wunderkinder James Ford and James Shaw used to book postshow DJ gigs as Simian Mobile Disco. These days that name is the one they release all their music under, which so far adds up to a bunch of remixes and singles and one full-length, Attack Decay Sustain Release (Interscope). Some of rock’s messiest elements still pop up in the music–fuzzed-out guitar, for instance, along with liberal amounts of distortion and noise everywhere else–but there’s also a level of restraint....