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Without epic theatricality, Brecht’s emblematic plays can shrink to facile morality lessons. Director Christopher J. Berens reduces Brecht’s 1947 quasi-Marxist retooling of Galileo’s life–a brash, sweeping saga depicting his headstrong struggle to publish scripture-defying scientific discoveries despite threats from the Inquisition–to a measured chamber drama. Brecht created a morally ambiguous title character, part genius, part self-absorbed showman motivated by food, drink, and money, and if you overlook that ambiguity, Galileo becomes merely a noble if occasionally brusque truth seeker....

Grant-Lee Phillips’s old band, Grant Lee Buffalo, was a study in wasted potential. Too folksy and baroque for the alt-rock fray it was thrown into, the group collapsed in 1999, frustrated with a label that didn’t know what it wanted besides better sales. The GLB story is often told as a cautionary tale about the evils majors do, but Phillips wasn’t blameless himself. Grant Lee Buffalo was his show, and he’s the one who stuffed its four records with vaudevillian flourishes and arch wordplay till the richness was all but suffocating....

Culinary school: who needs it, right? Charlie Trotter dropped out; Thomas Keller never went. Some see it as an ivory tower that’s no substitute for the frying-pan-to-fire skills learned in a real working kitchen. Even Anthony Bourdain, a Culinary Institute of America grad, has said he’d rather hire an experienced dishwasher than a culinary school graduate. But faculty, administrators, and students across the city argue that there’s no better way to get a well-rounded education in a such a short period of time–two years on average....

Lead Story According to a June article in the New York Times, Catholic churches in the U.S., Canada, and Europe are outsourcing certain ritual prayer requests, or mass intentions, from their parishioners to Catholic clergy in India. Indian priests said that this practice has been going on for several decades, and that the requests from the U.S. are typically accompanied by donations of $5 to $10, much more than they are offered by members of their own congregations....

Lead Story In June prosecutors were deciding whether to file charges against a couple in Crown Point, Indiana, who allegedly beat their 17-year-old son because he’d refused to let his sister borrow some of his underwear after she and friends went swimming in their clothes. When the boy took his underwear to his grandparents’ house for safekeeping, police said, his enraged parents followed and the confrontation ensued. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last week of March: (1) The U.S. General Accounting Office released the results of a test in which enough radioactive materials to build a “dirty bomb” had been easily smuggled into the country via car over both the Mexican and Canadian borders. (2) A U.S. official said that a third of the world’s 130 civilian-run nuclear research reactors weren’t sufficiently secure to prevent the theft of such bomb materials....

I’m a man in my early 30s and I have never been in a serious relationship. I started seeing a therapist to get to the bottom of my relationship problems, and her opinion is that they may stem from an incident that happened years ago. I was raised by a single mom. When I was about 15 years old she went through a very bad breakup, and while I was comforting her we wound up having intercourse....

It’s been five years since local polymath bassist and composer Tatsu Aoki premiered his large-scale composition Rooted: Origins of Now at several Chicago concerts, which were followed up by a Southport Records CD of the same title–enough time for Aoki to revisit the work’s themes of cultural inheritance, alienation, and synthesis. The title of his new piece, Re:Rooted, suggests a change in direction, and Aoki has explained that the work more consciously explores the influence of the Bay Area’s Asian-American jazz movement, where he’s increased his involvement during this decade....

Last Saturday just before dusk, I was outside a Humboldt Park apartment building watching graffiti artists Flash, Chumbly, and StefOne and a couple others paint a wall with huge bright flowers. A passing cop car slowed down for a few seconds, then continued on its merry way. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Streets and Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith says the city’s antigraffiti program doesn’t differentiate among painted signs, murals, and tags....

Friday 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RHETT MILLER I’m sure Rhett Miller is a sweet guy, but going back and listening to his 2002 album, The Instigator (Elektra), it’s all too clear why his solo career didn’t take off: from its circa 1979 pouty-faced cover close-up to its circa anytime heartland lite rock, he just didn’t have enough firepower to distinguish himself. Alive and Wired (New West), the new live double CD by Miller’s band, the Old 97’s, is full of exactly what his solo effort was missing: excitement....

These pictures from the permanent collection of the Tocovava, formerly known as the Stockton Art Museum, are on exhibit through June 19 at the C’est Pour Moi coffeehouse, 30 N. Whittaker in New Buffalo, Michigan. The shop is open daily 8 AM to 7 PM unless business is slow. Curator Joe Puleo, who wrote the commentary here, holds regular hours as manager, though he’d prefer visits before 5. Catalogs with tipped-in color plates of these and other works from the collection are available by special order for $15....

A wild high school senior (Elisabeth Moss of The West Wing) passes out drunk at a school dance, gets raped by a classmate, and decides that her ensuing pregnancy is the result of an immaculate conception, infuriating her parents and their conservative Baptist community. Shot on digital video, this 2003 debut feature by Deborah Kampmeier struck me as familiar when I was watching it–the same basic idea has inspired filmmakers as dissimilar as Manoel de Oliveira (Benilde, or the Virgin Mother) and Preston Sturges (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek)....

I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts On Being a Woman | Nora Ephron (Knopf) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Ephron has missed the politics of her neck. Necks are important, she says, because they reveal age the way faces and hair, which can be Botoxed and dyed, respectively, don’t. “Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck....

One recent morning Brendan Houlihan, candidate for the Cook County Board of Review, was looking over the shoulder of an election board hearing officer, squinting to make out the signature on a voter registration card being flashed on the computer screen before him. They’d been staring at names, addresses, and registration cards on the computer screen for hours as he tried to beat back a challenge to his nominating petitions that could get him knocked off the ballot in the March 21 primary....

The gorgeous set and costumes in this Chicago Children’s Theatre production are certainly impressive–and they better be given how much the ballyhooed new Equity company is charging for tickets. At about two hours, Robert and Willie Reale’s odd musical, based on Arnold Lobel’s series of books starring the eponymous friends, may be too long for children. And mostly it’s too silly for adults, though Bradley Mott and Joseph Anthony Foronda in the title roles give the script some pleasing dignity, underplaying comic scenes that less experienced performers might have pushed over the top....

That three guys in bright blue makeup who bang on giant PVC pipes with mallets continue to inspire such devotion is as amazing as the show itself. If you’re one of the handful of people in the Chicago metro area who hasn’t seen it yet, please ask the couple next door for a blow-by-blow description–they’ve probably watched the show eight times. Better yet, bring them along: for the first time since 1997, large portions (in the second act) have been reworked....

For more than a decade Christina Billotte has been working the same basic MO, pitting her sophisticated melodies against the minimal, often simplistic playing of her various bands. Slant 6 charged along like some prehistoric version of Wire; in Quixotic the inept drumming of her sister Mira gave the group’s often gorgeous tunes an unsettling tension. In Casual Dots she’s joined by guitarist Kathi Wilcox (Bikini Kill, Frumpies) and drummer Steve Dore (Deep Lust), and on their eponymous debut on Kill Rock Stars, they keep things lean, but pull off Billotte’s songs with precision and crispness unmatched by her earlier groups....

The Sporting News proclaimed Chicago the top sports town in the nation this summer, but that doesn’t mean there’s a monolithic fan base. We’ve got two baseball teams, and the only thing their fans agree on is how irksome it is that football dominates the talk shows and sports pages from the opening of training camp in July right on through the pennant race in September. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The south side gets no respect. The White Sox have the best record in the major leagues and can’t fill the Cell; the Cubs are sub-.500 and still pack Wrigley Field. Maybe it’s the same with novels: Adam Langer’s recent Crossing California, set in Rogers Park, got loads of press, and John McNally’s 2004 chronicle of a southwest-side childhood, The Book of Ralph (Free Press), didn’t–a shame, because it’s a terrific book....

Julie Roberts’s voice, already as bluesy as any currently allowed on country radio, may even have deepened a bit since her eponymous 2004 debut. And as befits this singular instrument, her new Men and Mascara (Mercury) is high on sadness and low on what I’ll call spunkiness, that indomitably sassy feminine pluck that’s always been Nashville’s detour around feminism and genuine heartbreak. And her songwriters give Roberts plenty to hurt about: on “Paint and Pillows” she doggedly totes up evidence that she’s being cheated on in her own home, not only discovering “that long dark hair on the back of my chair” but pointing out “That ain’t the way I make my bed....