Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Chicago . . . is our only major city that had, from its beginning, an immigrant core contained within an immigrant skin.” Unlike Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, it was never a WASP town. “It has no colonial past: only an immigrant and industrial history and a postindustrial present.” (BTW, Jacqueline Peterson paints a dizzying and unforgettable picture of Chicago’s non-WASP past in “The Founding Fathers,” a chapter in the book Ethnic Chicago, the first few pages of which can be read online....

To understand the relationship between Craigslist and the newspapers of America, recall last summer’s hit movie War of the Worlds. Think of Craigslist as the army of rampaging tripods and publishers as the screaming humans who don’t know what hit them. The tripods don’t get any lines, let alone a scene where they and the humans talk things over. But if there were one it might resemble Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s recent appearance at an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference in San Francisco....

Renaissance radical Christopher Marlowe led a juicy life: a gay atheist, he was a probable Catholic sympathizer working for Queen Elizabeth’s secret service to rout out Catholic sympathizers. So it’s hard to understand why Harlan Didrickson took such liberties with history in this world-premiere bioplay. Although at first he adheres closely to encyclopedic fact, making the play feel like a staged master’s thesis, gradually he begins to pile on the fictions....

Plenty of pop artists try dressing up their songs in orchestral finery–it’s an isolated experiment, typically, and the subsequent return to a more modest scale is often greeted with relief. Rufus Wainwright’s recent Release the Stars (Geffen), on the other hand, is his third consecutive album to prominently feature elaborate instrumentation, and it’s becoming clear that it’s no gimmick but a key part of his aesthetic. Rock backbeats notwithstanding, it’s always been easy to find elements of musical theater and opera in Wainwright’s florid compositional style and overwrought, diva-worthy delivery, and now that he’s playing up those aspects, they work to underline his wickedly self-mocking sense of humor (lately he’s been partial to wearing monogrammed lederhosen)....

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda The difference in scale is breathtaking: Rita’s inadequate skill set vs. Juliette’s holocaust. The difference in effect, not so much. Rather than draw gravitas from Rwanda’s vast trauma, Linden’s conceit reduces that trauma to nothing more than a neat little twist–a novel way for her characters to meet cute. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The St. Lawrence Quartet, a Canadian group founded in 1989, has earned a reputation for spontaneity and informal persuasiveness. Their latest CD, of three Shostakovich quartets, stresses the music’s humanity; it’s less menacing than some recordings, and the playing–anchored by cellist Christopher Costanza, a former member of the Chicago String Quartet and the Chicago Chamber Musicians–is vibrant and never top-heavy. This concert was supposed to consist of Franck and Beethoven quartets, but the first violinist is bowing out to attend the birth of his child....

The Detroit band THUNDERBIRDS ARE NOW! takes its exclamation point very seriously indeed. The rowdy cheer of “T-H-U-N-D-E-R / B-I-R-D-S ARE NOW!” that kicks off its new Justamustache (Frenchkiss) lets you know exactly what’s coming: more manic energy than you may know what to do with. Sure enough, the album is a barrage of traded shouts, chant-along melodies, and pinprick hooks that chatter away over machine-gun beats. Their style harks back to simpler times–times like 1979, 1982, and 1983–but these guys are hardly mere kitsch spelunkers....

In an early essay Woody Allen assumed the role of a hanger-on whose anecdotes were all identical except for the name dropped. “Then Scotty Fitzgerald punched me in the nose.” “Then Ernest Hemingway punched me in the nose.” “Then Gertrude Stein. . . .” That story must have inspired Sean Miller’s shapeless new play about Hemingway and Fitzgerald landing in a Mexican jail from which only Gertrude Stein can spring them....

John Arndt The strange sights and sounds of John Arndt’s show at Gallery 400, “Empire,” made me want to revisit Utah. Arndt, who lives in Forest Park, spent a monthlong artist’s residency at a former military base in Wendover last year. During a walk in the desert he happened upon a potash plant: large ponds, what looked like salt beds, and earth-moving equipment. “I wasn’t sure what I was looking at,” he says....

In November 2004 the city sued to seize a northwest-side bike shop, arguing that it stood in the way of a condo development that would help rejuvenate Jefferson Park. Last month it dropped the suit, saying that there was no need to claim the property after all–the condos could be built around the store. But a look at the documents involved suggests that the city had an even more compelling reason to quit the case: hearings were beginning to reveal politically sensitive material....

Like any good grandmother, Olga Sarantos likes to brag about her grandkids. A few weeks ago she went to her church, Assumption Greek Orthodox in Austin, with a clipping from the New York Times about her two eldest, Matt and Eleanor Friedberger, who play music as the Fiery Furnaces. “I was showing it around and I was surprised because a lot of the people weren’t aware of the Fiery Furnaces,” she says....

Photographer Zana Briski traveled to Calcutta in 1997 to shoot the red-light district and befriended several children of prostitutes; on her next trip she gave them point-and-shoot cameras and instructed them in basic photography. As documented in this 2004 film by Briski and Ross Kauffman, the children brought back no shattering shots of sexual servitude, but like much children’s art, their images were fresh and sometimes startling. To some extent the story arc has been willed into being, as Briski organizes shows of the children’s photography in New York and Calcutta and embarks on a strenuous campaign to get them into decent schools so they won’t be sucked into life “on the line....

Beta Boutique Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 773-276-0905 In the nearly two years that Janice Moskoff has been putting on her popular Beta Boutique sample sales, the former retail consultant has been a nomad, hopping between locations. But she says it was always her intention to settle down, and last week she did. Bargain seekers can now regularly search the merch–which ranges from 40 to 90 percent off retail–in the heart of convenient Bucktown....

Say that jerk falls off his bar stool after you barely even punch him and wants to make a federal case out of it. Or you forget to check out at Dominick’s, and the security guard thinks you meant to steal that six-pack. Or you’re careless enough to smoke your joint in public and a squad car happens by. The long arm of the Chicago Police Department is about to grab your collar....

William Finn’s self-indulgently personal 2003 cabaret show, which closes Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago’s “Finn Festival,” is devoted to departed friends. In addition to off-putting in-songs it features gossipy lyrics, name-dropping, the occasional deeply felt sentiment about a noble teacher or loving mother, and in at least one case an astonishing meanness of spirit: one song mocks a “moron” who loved chickens. L. Walter Stearns’s five performers strain for sincerity (and several notes): they can only be as authentic as these lengthy tributes, many of which need footnotes, permit....

The slinkiest sexy song of last year came from one of those cowboy-hatted journeymen even country fans have trouble telling apart: Gary Allan’s “Nothing On but the Radio” was a late-night sway hooked to the sort of mild, self-explanatory pun that’s Nashville’s gift to the American vernacular. Here was just the thing for middle-aged marrieds seeking a nonchemical cure for erectile dysfunction, sung in the warm, husky voice of a man comfortable enough in his masculinity not to be all pushy and macho about it, and smooth and experienced enough not to confuse hyperventilation with heavy breathing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today’s champagne tasting at Binny’s in Lakeview is sold out, but several of its suburban locations, including Des Plaines, Glen Ellyn, Highland Park, and Schaumburg, have tastings Friday and Saturday. Sample sparklers including prestige cuvees Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon, Louis Roederer Cristal (if you’re not backing Jay-Z’s boycott), Krug Grand Cuvee, Deutz Cuvee William, and Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame....

The ordinary objects in Jungjin Lee’s “Thing” photographs–a coat, a chair, a clam–hover mysteriously in space, stripped of their backgrounds. Their solitary forms, which seem fused with the handmade rice paper she prints on, radiate quietude. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lee was born in South Korea, where she still lives, and attended a Seoul art school that didn’t offer photography courses. The students organized a photography club and took weekend shooting trips to the suburbs and countryside....

Sitting outdoors here reminds me of something that happened when I was on vacation in Puerto Vallarta with friends. We were at this open-air bar, and this girl bumped into me and we started talking. As we were getting acquainted, two guys in suits came up and told her it was time to go. She asked me, “Do you want to go and have a good time?” and I said, “Why not?...

Bill Streeter wiped a stream of golden-brown grease from his chin as he pulled his maroon minivan out of a KFC parking lot in Bloomington and turned toward Chicago. He popped a cassette adapter attached to an iPod into his tape deck, and for the rest of his trip alternated between stored tunes and podcasts–downloadable radio programs he subscribes to via Real Simple Syndication (RSS), media aggregation software often referred to as “TiVo for the Web....