Of all the songwriters who’ve packed up their allegiances and headed to the States, the most surprising is probably Ray Davies, who was the poet laureate of disappointed middle-aged Englishmen before he was out of his mid-20s. Few 60s-era admirers of American R & B had the cojones to be so unabashedly nostalgic, vulnerable, and, well, British. Davies bore his status well–Robert Christgau famously called “Waterloo Sunset” the most beautiful song in the English language, and I have yet to see a convincing argument to the contrary....

The self-titled debut by this young quartet from Philadelphia, released on High Two, is one of the year’s most striking and satisfying jazz albums. Steering between the poles of pure schematic exercise and pedal-to-the-metal blowing, Shot x Shot arrive via intuition and empathy at a beguiling middle ground. The twin-saxophone improvisations of Lennie Tristano’s groups are clearly an antecedent, but the explorations here feel more leisurely and harmonically ambiguous. While the elements of their approach–lovely, melancholy melodies, inventive permutations of written material, shifts between foreground and background–aren’t new in themselves, they execute them with distinction; it’s impressive simply that tenor saxophonist Bryan Rogers and alto saxophonist Dan Scofield both play nearly the whole time without ever getting in each other’s way....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seth Cohen PR recently sent me an e-mail entitled “Hip-Hop in Iraq” that I clicked on with interest. Generally I’m all in favor of Americans learning more about the cultural scenes in countries we’ve bombed the shit out of. Actually, I’m in favor of us learning about them before we bomb the shit out of them, but to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to hell with the foreign policy you have, not the one you wish you had....

On a brisk morning this past March, Jeff Tweedy took a walk through the park near his house on the northwest side. He shuffled through the grass, past the swings and across the baseball diamond, retracing his steps over and over again before slumping onto a cold iron bench. But his migraines and panic attacks were becoming stronger and tougher to deal with. Tweedy had become anxious about taking painkillers, scared that he was becoming an addict....

“You know how many actors in LA want to be in an Elmore Leonard project?” asked Morgan Freeman on a recent episode of HBO “First Look,” one of those cable shows where the studios pimp their upcoming releases. I can’t answer that one, but I do know that since Leonard began publishing fiction 53 years ago, 20 of his 37 novels have been adapted for the movies or television. His stock in Hollywood really exploded in 1995, when Barry Sonnenfeld turned his hood-in-Hollywood comedy Get Shorty into a hit John Travolta vehicle....

Peter Gundling doesn’t know where the time goes. He’s been trying to finish his first film, a stop-motion animation called Toys, for almost eight months now. He tries to work a couple hours every day, more when he can swing it. And every day it’s the same thing. Just when he really gets going, and the lighting is just right, and the frames start clicking like clockwork, the doorbell rings downstairs and one of his friends tramps up to his attic studio....

In the past few weeks city officials have been leaking their plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars rehabbing downtown office buildings, building new transit lines, and improving infrastructure throughout the Loop. The word around City Hall is that the flurry of announcements heralds the start of two campaigns: Mayor Daley’s run for reelection and his effort to extend the soon-to-expire Central Loop tax increment financing district to pay for a major portion of the proposed development....

To the editor of the Reader: Strong words. Indeed, fighting words. And yet all of this (with the exception of the very last three words–they spilled over onto page 26) the Reader managed to squeeze onto page one. Imagine that! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally to page 28, the only page on which Felshman comes close to dealing with something important. The fact of the matter is that Alan Dershowitz spent the better part of the past 12 months employing repressive, thuggish tactics, including the threat of litigation (How many times do you suppose Dershowitz can remind the people he’d like to silence that if he sues them he’ll “own” them?...

DURANG 4PLAY, A Reasonable Facsimile Theatre Company, at Theatre Building Chicago. This sampler offers an introduction to prolific American playwright Christopher Durang, showcasing his mischievous, dreamy style and two of his favorite subjects: the devouring mother and theater classics. Alternately demonic and saccharine matriarchs whirl through ‘Dentity Crisis and Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, indulging in incestuous affairs and other manipulations of their offspring. Then there’s Medea, Durang’s abridged twist on the classic (written with Wendy Wasserstein): here the killer mother is contemplating eating her young, with encouragement from a snappy Greek chorus/gay entourage shouting self-help slogans....

Heaven knows what possessed the Chicago International Film Festival to adopt “Film capital of the world” as its slogan this year, but considering some of the movies that played in New York and Los Angeles recently and never made it here, it’s more than a stretch. Among the remarkable films they could see and we couldn’t were the subtitled, not the dubbed, version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumiere (2003), and several 2005 films, including Tickets (with 40-minute episodes by Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and Ermanno Olmi), Hou’s Three Times, Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’enfant....

Chicago trumpeter Malachi Thompson died at his home on Sunday morning, July 16, from lymphoma. The disease had been in remission since the early 90s, but it resurged in the last few weeks. He was 56.Thompson was long-time member of the AACM, and early in his career he formed key partnerships with saxophonist Carter Jefferson and Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie—Thompson was a one-time member of Bowie’s popular Brass Fantasy group....

Life in Adam Rapp’s play is nsty LaBute-ish, and short. Like Neil LaBute, who made his reputation with In the Company of Men, Rapp posits a tiny universe overwhelmed by the vicious pastimes of a charming narcissist. In act one we meet Davis, an upwardly mobile book editor traveling Europe with his suicidal college pal, a playwright named Matt. Prescribing sex for Matt’s depression, Davis brings him Christina from Amsterdam’s red-light district–but not before cynically creating the circumstances for deep awfulness in act two....

Steve Brownstein’s statements in “Born Bad?” are the cornerstone of the pit bull argument and reflect this city’s response to damn near everything controversial: stronger law enforcement. Let’s take a look at two other law-enforcement priorities in Chicago. The first, which is hinted at by Brownstein, is illicit drugs sale/use. I don’t know about you, but the so-called war on drugs has made it nearly impossible for me to get any kind of narcotics in the city of Chicago....

Dakota/Dakota, the local instrumental trio that guitarist Mike Sullivan and bassist Colin DeKuiper played in a couple years back, didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Riddle of Steel, the Saint Louis band they poached drummer Dave Turncrantz from to form this new instrumental trio, might’ve had a shot if he’d stuck around. A year and a half in, it’s still too early to make the call with Russian Circles, but they’ve got a long attention span to go with their short history–it gives an impressive focus to the lush, ambitious, force-of-nature indie metal on their full-length debut, Enter (Flameshovel)....

The Princess Diaries Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steve Robinson first heard about Princess Magogo in the fall of 2000. He’d just arrived to take over management of WFMT when he got a call from Regina Fraser, a member of the Chicago-Durban Sister Cities committee, about a South African opera based on the true story of a 20th-century Zulu princess. Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, who was born in 1900, was the daughter of a king, a singer with a three-octave range, a composer, one of the last players of the ugubhu (a musical bow), the chief archivist of Zulu music, and the first female “praise singer....

Rock, Pop, Etc. STEVE ANTHONY ORCHESTRA Ballroom dance concert. Sun 7/18, 2 PM, Willowbrook Ballroom, 8900 S. Archer, Willow Springs. 708-839-1000. dance on various stages, with AfriCaribe/Nuestro Tambo, Chicago Samba, Happiness Club, Kokyo Taiko, Mas Bands of Chicago Carifete, Na Kupuna Ukulele Club, Trinity Academy of Irish Dance & others. Sat 7/17, 12:30 PM, Millennium Park, Michigan between Randolph & Monroe. 312-742-1169. STEVE COOPER ORCHESTRA Ballroom dance concert. Sun 7/25, 2 PM, Willowbrook Ballroom, 8900 S....

Never really part of any trend, this Florida-via-Indiana band, sister band to the Silos, exists in a kind of limbo. For over 20 years they’ve plotted their own career, complete with hard-to-find releases and a cult following. And they haven’t changed their sound either: graceful, folk-based indie rock that’s both familiar and unusual, like Wilco stripped bare. I defy anyone to hear the melody of “Drive Somewhere” (which was a bit of a local hit long ago) or the viola line that snakes through “There’s a Family” (which reminds me a little of John Cale on Nick Drake’s “Fly”) and not be moved....

Team chemistry in football is different than in any other sport, especially since two-way players went the way of the leather helmet. The Bears are usually a team of split personalities: the “Monsters of the Midway” on defense and the shrinking violets of Grant Park on offense. That’s how Bears fans have come to prefer it–in a manner typical of Chicago they’re set in their ways and comfortable with the team’s deficiencies....

Pharmacopia is a large, spectacularly colorful installation by Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth. Part of the group show “Sex. Drugs. Rock n Roll” at Gescheidle, it reflects on our obsession with drugs, both legal and illegal, and puts that obsession in terms of a crazed, overheated postmodern sensibility. A large chandelier made of hypodermic needles studded with beads hangs from the ceiling, sparkling but also menacing. A medicine cabinet has apparently crashed to the floor, where it’s surrounded by mirror shards, and artificial flowers festoon a toilet and the walls, as if plants have taken root in an abandoned bathroom....

A Legacy Destroyed Like most architects of their time, Adler and Sullivan also designed numerous homes–especially after Frank Lloyd Wright joined the firm in 1888–including Charnley House on North Astor. Few survive. Last August Hurricane Katrina flattened two cottages Sullivan designed in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, one of them his own vacation retreat. So few of any of Adler and Sullivan’s structures survive that every loss is painful. In January a fire reportedly started by a worker’s blowtorch gutted their Pilgrim Baptist Church in Bronzeville, built in 1891 as the Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv synagogue....