Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My colleague Jerome is kind of claustrophobic, and he doesn’t much enjoy traveling underground. As we stopped and the doors went through their routine of closing, opening, closing, then opening again while the canned CTA message about how improvements are under way blared, he grumbled, “Man, just get us out of this tunnel,” then alluded to the National Transportation Safety Board’s scathing recent report on last year’s Blue Line derailment....

Knowing he’d be having a show in Flatfile’s basement space, Jason Peot began monthly visits there more than a year ago. “I would wander around, look at blueprints, stare at the walls,” he says. “I really tried to get the site inside my head.” All his recent exhibits have included a site-specific installation that required regular visits beforehand, as he looks for something to bring out that’s “either invisible or taken for granted....

Three Oaks, MI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What made Knowlton’s show possible was the Low Power Radio Act of 2000, part of an effort to undo some of the damage done by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which sparked a wave of consolidation that continues to this day. Over six months in 2000, during five five-day periods, each for a different region, the FCC allowed community groups to apply for licenses for noncommercial radio stations of 100 watts or less....

Luc Moullet: Agent Provocateur of the New Wave Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And the range of his interests is still impressive: a recent list of favorites includes two silent films by Cecil B. De Mille, a short by Jean-Luc Godard, Rose Troche’s Go Fish, Raul Ruiz’s The Blind Owl, Catherine Breillat’s Tapage Nocturne, and King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry. He began making films in the 60s–flaunting his lack of technique and low budgets like a neoprimitive in Brigitte and Brigitte (1966), The Smugglers (1967), A Girl Is a Gun (1971), and Anatomy of a Relationship (1975) and implicitly mocking the glitz of the Hollywood films he wrote about....

Aeschylus’ trilogy about one family’s seemingly perpetual cycle of killing and retribution is unquestionably violent: father kills daughter, mother kills father, son kills mother, curse without end. But in British poet Ted Hughes’s translation, the work becomes an orgy of frenzied grisliness, with blood belching from bodies in foaming jets, collecting in pools, and splattering the faces of victim and killer alike, creating indelible stains. It’s the fall of the slaughterhouse of Atreus....

A Family Farm Album: The Photographs of Frank Sadorus Work and leisure coexist in the benevolent, fertile landscape captured by Frank Sadorus, an amateur photographer who documented his life on a farm in eastern Illinois from 1908 until 1912, just after his father died. Neoimpressionist Georges Seurat, who was actually working some 30 years earlier, also portrayed scenes of work and leisure but quite differently. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The puppets, size-27 psychic waitress, and physically violent counselor for gay couples all suggest that playwright Jay Paul Deratany is aiming for absurdity. But this show’s unbelievable central story line and superficial characters rob it of any truth: Deratany consistently glosses over anything of substance to get to the next (occasionally funny) joke. Ryan is told he’ll make partner at his law firm if he marries. Too bad he’s on bickering-only terms with his male significant other....

Seattle’s United State of Electronica could very well be America’s greatest party band. The all-ages hometown show I caught by the seven-piece this past spring was sheer audience-galvanizing positive energy, complete with girlfriends screaming from atop their boyfriends’ shoulders, discarded garments, and sweat flying everywhere. Their self-titled album (originally a free download, now commercially available on Sonic Boom) gave the Go! Team’s much-hyped debut a run for its money as last year’s most enthralling techno rock pastiche–full of vocoders, buoyant guitar hooks, wide-lapel hi-hat beats, and anthemic inducements to g’down, but no laptops or sequencers, despite the cheeky name....

Misfortune To this point Stace’s writing is so casually virtuosic that it’s breathtaking when the novel abruptly switches to the first-person voice of the foundling who, though born a boy, is being raised by Lord Geoffroy Loveall as his daughter and heir, “Rose.” She even points out the switch, mocking herself for using a fake omniscient voice to tell the story of her birth, and just like everything else in this novel, Stace overworks the joke until it screams, which is itself part of the joke....

There are pros and cons to getting your ass kicked by a rock star: Jack White’s thrashing of Von Bondies singer Jason Stollsteimer in a Detroit nightclub in December–and the resulting photos of the latter’s bruised, swollen face–generated worldwide headlines, giving the band a huge boost in name recognition on the eve of their major-label debut. The downside, of course, is that not a word written about them since has omitted mention of the incident....

When I profiled the Watchers in my column back in June, they made light of the hassles the band has had to deal with, from losing members to canceling their most recent tour while they were still on the road. It seems that the drag has finally gotten the best of them, though, and their show Friday night at the Empty Bottle is going to be their last. “We want to write new music and get on with it ....

Two summers ago Greg Allen started drinking. He’d made it to 40 without having much more than the occasional beer at a party, but now he caroused regularly with a new group of friends, all in their 20s. Walking from a bar to a party he’d yell out, “Midlife crisis!” “They were all very amused,” he says. But Allen was only half joking. While he was away Allen produced more work than ever before, which is saying something....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hello, Tom? Mammon here. Talk To Action continues its run of stunning investigative reports, reminding us of a hellhole parcel of U.S. territory on the Marianas Islands in the Pacific where where “thousands of garment workers–most of them young Chinese women–labor in indentured servitude, live in labor camps run by members of the Chinese Communist Party, and submit to forced abortions if they become pregnant....

Turn up late and you’ll miss the superior opening act on this double bill: Cook County Social Club, whose four performers, directed by Jeff Griggs, are as brazenly committed to improv’s “affirm everything” mantra as any I’ve seen. Their dark, flamboyant comic sensibilities clearly aligned, they orchestrate black-comedy vignettes tethered to richly odd characters, such as ham-fisted apprentice barbers. But what most impressed me was how fluidly and creatively they transitioned between scenes, usually dangerous improv moments....

Les Nomades Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite some dramatic changes in the kitchen, LES NOMADES is still the best fine restaurant in Chicago. Roland Liccioni left in December; his ex-wife, Mary Beth Liccioni, who owns the restaurant, replaced him with chef Charlie McKenna and sous-chef David Hayden, both from Avenues. Within a month she’d fired them both–their modern, eclectic approach wasn’t in keeping with the classic French fare this venerable establishment is known for–and hired Chris Nugent, who’s worked at Betise, MK, and the Park Avenue Cafe....

I t took me 15 minutes to walk from my Uptown office to the el station at Argyle, where I boarded the southbound Red Line train at about 8 AM. I got off 45 minutes later at 35th Street and headed for the bus stop. I waited 10 minutes, then hopped on the westbound bus for a 20-minute ride before transferring to a northbound 94 at California, which took me, in a few minutes, to my destination—Cook County Jail....

Mark Mallman, resplendent in his epauletted Sergeant Pepper jacket, rang in 2006 at Minneapolis’s 7th St. Entry with a pomp-laden version of the Cure’s “Fascination Street,” and I don’t doubt that the Twin Cities indie showman at least briefly considered rocking clear through till 2007. In September 2004 he played for 50-plus hours at a Saint Paul club; I hadn’t really thought about him much after hearing about that gig, and a return listen to 2004’s Mr....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January the Albuquerque Journal reported on the efforts of local emergency room physician Sam Slishman to find a facility for his Endorphin Power Company, which he says will be a rehab center for drug-addicted and alcoholic homeless people that partly offsets its expenses by enlisting patients’ help with the electric bill: as part of their therapy they’ll exercise on stationary bikes, treadmills, and weight machines that are hooked to generators....

Lyric Opera’s free concert, which includes highlights from the upcoming season, is a great opportunity to hear some truly gorgeous music and some major singers. Tenor Vladimir Galouzine, who will star as Calaf in Puccini’s Turandot and has gotten rave reviews for his performances in that role abroad, will sing the heart-stopping aria “Nessun Dorma.” Another highlight is certain to be the appearance of mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, a Grammy winner and international star who has a stunning voice–never heavy or forced–and is a great actress too....

In the past year Rudy Acosta has gotten more attention for the construction of his home–an ostentatious castle he’s building in Irving Park that’s outraged many of his neighbors–than for his hip-hop label, the Legion. That may be because the label has been all but silent since early 2005, when it put out a disc by local group Do or Die–Acosta’s first release after signing a distribution pact with Warner Music’s Atlantic imprint....