When the genocide in Rwanda reached a fever pitch in 1994, the majority of Western forces there hightailed it out, permitting the slaughter of over 800,000 civilians in fewer than 100 days. One of the notable exceptions was Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, the man in charge of the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, whose repeated calls for immediate intervention on the part of the international community went unheeded. Filmmaker Peter Raymont follows Dallaire as he returns to Rwanda ten years later hoping to put to rest the personal demons he’s wrestled with since leaving....

Until a couple years ago Fran Pelzman Liscio only knew Johnny Paycheck from his 1977 hit “Take This Job and Shove It.” But in 2002 the New Jersey-based writer and former CBGB scenester (she recently finished a script, with director Mary Harron, for a film adaptation of the punk-rock oral history Please Kill Me) was properly introduced to Paycheck at the Web site of Chicago singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks. Liscio was a regular on the site’s message board, and another visitor, Seattle country DJ Liz Shepherd, turned her on to Paycheck’s back catalog–arguably one of the finest and most overlooked in country music....

Half a million Americans will get a new hip or knee this year, but fewer than 500 of them will be up and walking the same day. Of the nearly 20,000 orthopedists who perform hip and knee replacements, fewer than 30 use a technique Richard Berger, a 42-year-old Rush University Medical Center orthopedist, has developed–a muscle-sparing procedure that minimizes pain and drastically reduces recovery time. “On my own I can only help a few hundred patients a year,” he says....

Jessica Yu met the late Ted Shen, a frequent Reader arts contributor, in 2000, when Yu was here giving a talk on The Living Museum, her documentary about self-taught artists in a Queens psychiatric center. Shen asked her whether she was familiar with Henry Darger, the reclusive Chicago janitor who died in 1973, leaving behind hundreds of paintings depicting the child heroines of his 15,000-page epic novel titled in part “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal....

On the 23-hour Sunday that kicked off daylight saving time, about two dozen Chicagoans rose early and drove two hours south for the privilege of doing some old-fashioned labor. They were headed to a farm in Livingston County to dig and clean hundreds of wild onions to benefit the nonprofit organic-farming group the Land Connection. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kris and Marty Travis hosted Sunday’s ramp dig at Spence Farm, which has been in Marty’s family for seven generations....

Rock, Pop, Etc. BIG BAND Tribute to big-band music. Fri 2/20, Sat 2/21, Fri 2/27, and Sat 2/28, 7:30 PM, and Sun 2/29, 3 PM, Jedlicka Performing Arts Center, 3801 S. Central, Cicero. 708-656-3948. BROOKS & DUNN, JEB NICHOLS, JOSH TURNER Fri 2/20, 7:30 PM, Convocation Center, Northern Illinois University, 1525 Lincoln Hwy., De Kalb. 815-752-6800. DIGABLE CAT Free in-store performances. Sat 2/21, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake, Oak Park....

Corporation counsel Mara Georges works for Chicago’s taxpayers, of course. It’s pretty to think that inside City Hall keeping us happy is everybody’s job number one. The municipal code also directs the corporation counsel to “protect the rights and interests of the city in all actions, suits and proceedings brought by or against it or any city officer, board or department.” That means Georges works for the police, to name the department whose chestnuts most frequently need to be pulled out of the fire....

Young Fresh Fellows Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Already the biggest act to come out of Deerfield, the Redwalls–brothers Justin (bass, vocals) and Logan Baren (guitar, vocals), Andrew Langer (guitar, vocals), and recent addition Ben Greeno (drums)–started out as a teenage cover band called the Pages. They played Beatles songs in north suburban venues like Nevin’s Live, where they met their future manager, Mitch Marlow, then booking the club....

Anyone who’s visited the Green City Market in south Lincoln Park knows business is booming. A nonprofit dedicated to promoting sustainable agriculture, the market is packed with shoppers twice a week, and on a good day there are thousands. But its success has become a problem. The market has nearly quadrupled in size since its opening eight years ago, and as the crowds grew, “it wasn’t hard to see that we didn’t have enough farmers,” says founder Abby Mandel....

On their first two EPs, 2003’s Orange and 2004’s All Songs Written By, HUMAN TELEVISION displayed enough frenetic, trip-and-be-trampled pop-hook zeal to run neck and neck with the Wedding Present circa George Best. Now the Philly-by-way-of-Florida quartet has rolled out their first full-length, Look at Who You’re Talking To (Gigantic Music), and while the songs are as catchy and jangly as ever, they’re also warmer and more diffuse. The tempos, driven by drummer (and Lilys member) Mario Lopez, have been pulled back a bit, bringing the songcraft of singer Billy Downing, whose sense of melody is one of the sharpest in indie pop, to the foreground more than ever before....

On the last Saturday in October around 100 people gathered in a ballroom at the Radisson on East Huron for a $100-a-plate dinner with live jazz. The event was a benefit for the Georgia Doty Health Education Fund, a south-side organization founded by nonprofit executive Don Doty that works in prisons and low-income communities. Representatives from the state and local health departments were there, mayoral and gubernatorial proclamations attesting to the important work being done by the fund were read, and Father George Clements, whom someone called the “black pope,” gave an invocation....

Mark Brown Shocks the Faithful A young liberal journalist told me he could admire Brown’s intellectual honesty in the abstract but believed the price was too high to pay. Brown had given aid and comfort to the enemy. Brown himself wrote a day later, “The reaction certainly has made for a most unusual day, the strangest part coming when I hear from family and friends that Rush Limbaugh was quoting from the column and remarking favorably about it ....

This ribald, eloquent new play by Ron Hutchinson dramatizes–and enlarges for comic effect–a marathon writing session undertaken in 1939 by film producer David O. Selznick, script doctor Ben Hecht, and director Victor Fleming. Sequestered in Selznick’s office with only bananas and peanuts to eat, the trio cobbled together a screenplay for the movie Gone With the Wind. Featuring rich comic performances by Ron Orbach as the obsessive and overbearing Selznick, William Dick as wry onetime Chicago newspaperman Hecht, and Rob Riley as the swaggering, macho Fleming, Moonlight and Magnolias replays the eccentric backstory of one of the all-time great movies, juggling wisecracks and a hefty dose of physical humor with passionate discourse on the art and business of movies and the role of Jews in creating an American national identity during Hollywood’s golden age....

In preschool I had an imaginary friend named Kim. She was a character in The Care Bears Movie, and though I’d outgrown her by the time I started elementary school, people tease me about her to this day. But recently I received some unexpected news: Kim could have been an angel. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After these experiences Channer attended a reading by Doreen Virtue, the creator of a practice she calls Angel Therapy....

Spanked “Mr. Steinberg, you are a complete ass,” said Martin by way of introduction. “When you have a white columnist working for a white newspaper who has the audacity to suggest that a black politician checked in to the hospital for campaign purposes when in fact he is actually sick . . . this to me shows the kind of ignorance that is pervasive. And when you purchase the Sun-Times this is the kind of individual whose salary you are supporting....

In the 90s bass clarinetist Gene Coleman, director of the new-music group Ensemble Noamnesia, helped connect Chicago’s avant-classical community to like-minded European musicians and to the city’s post-rock scene. He’s in Pennsylvania now, but his interest in musical cross-pollination hasn’t waned a bit. His latest venture is the Tabadol Project, which unites improvisers from Beirut with American and European players in five U.S. cities this month. The Lebanese musicians have built a scene from scratch in a country that’s still recovering from years of civil war and foreign occupation, and they’re developing a vocabulary that owes little to either jazz or traditional Middle Eastern music....

Every year, one lucky pop single is by some mysterious consensus deemed acceptable to indie-rock sensibilities. When TED LEO combined “Since U Been Gone” with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” in a solo-acoustic medley for an online video performance, it effectively ratified Kelly Clarkson’s soaring Avril homage as 2005’s winner. Yet Leo seemed to be implying neither that Kelly C’s hip quotient now equals Karen O’s, nor that Williamsburg chic is as crassly commodified as American Idol–he was just enjoying the elegant simplicity of the chord changes....

friday23 cJIMMY BURNS From the 50s into the 70s, this guitarist and singer performed in doo-wop, folk, and soul acts (his 60s and 70s discs on USA, Tip Top, and other local soul labels are collectors’ items). That kind of resume might make you wonder if Burns isn’t just a stylistic opportunist, but it’s helped give his blues work–his primary output for nearly 30 years now–the range that’s its strongest suit....

Somewhere Eugene O’Neill is smiling . . . grimly. Though based on a Chekhov story, Romulus Linney’s 1991 script follows O’Neill by casting an American family’s disintegration in classically tragic terms. The Agamemnon of the piece is old Benjamin Pitman, the richest man in dirt-poor Manard, North Carolina. As proprietor of the town’s only general store, he’s built an empire by cheating his neighbors. Now he’s anxious to secure his dynasty, which means getting his son, Shelby, to produce an heir....

The citywide celebration of all things dour and doleful, honoring what would’ve been Samuel Beckett’s 100th year on earth, continues with this weekend of theater curated by the Irish American Heritage Center’s resident Shapeshifters Theatre. Friday and Saturday at 8 PM in the IAHC auditorium, Chicago expat Michael Martin, no stranger to obsessive monologues, performs Beckett’s late-period masterpiece, the harrowing Krapp’s Last Tape, under the direction of Curious Theatre Branch founder Beau O’Reilly (who’s been spearheading the company’s own Beckettfest since January)....