HOUSE and GARDEN, Goodman Theatre. Alan Ayckbourn’s latest work is one first-rate dramatic comedy divided between two entertaining but uneven plays, performed simultaneously in adjacent theaters. Ayckbourn portrays a day in the life of a quaint, insular English village. The action is set on the sprawling estate of Teddy and Trish Platt: House (performed on the Albert Ivar Goodman stage) depicts the goings-on in the 18th-century manor house while Garden (played in the smaller Owen Bruner Goodman theater) takes place in the garden....

BAD NEWS OF THE HEART Like “Man,” other stories in Bad News of the Heart graphically depict the elusiveness of happiness and peace of mind. But Glover skirts monotony by leavening each one with quirky observations and frank sexuality. In the title piece, a former mental patient reveals that he falls in love only when he skips his medication. The self-loathing academics in “Iglaf and Swan” use sex as a physical release rather than an act of love; the Bel Air couple in “A Guide to Animal Behaviour” have a swimming pool with an undertow....

The big doors of Anshe Emet Synagogue swung open on August 6, and 50 or so kids entered the sanctuary, their eyes wide. Most of them were black preteens from the south side who’d never seen the inside of a synagogue, and they were there as part of the weeklong Ricky Byrdsong Not Just Basketball Camp. “We use basketball to get the kids in the door, so to speak, but we’re not really about basketball,” says Carlton Evans, executive director of the Ricky Byrdsong Foundation, which sponsors the camp....

LURRIE BELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Lurrie Bell, son of harmonica whiz Carey, has struggled with mental illness for most of his adult life, and his recent recordings have been frustratingly uneven: 1999’s Blues Had a Baby (Delmark), for example, juxtaposes his well-crafted solos with a handful of distracted, semicoherent outtakes. But his forthcoming CD, Cuttin’ Heads (Vypyr), is his most fully realized and consistent in years....

At her Jazz Showcase debut a year and a half ago, Lynne Arriale hand delivered to a Chicago audience the same news that her 2000 disc, Live at Montreux, and a flood of flattering notices in the international press had just telegraphed to the world: she’s created a strong-willed, willowy-voiced piano persona, the result of a decade’s evolution, that puts her on the shortlist of today’s noteworthy jazz keyboardists. The Milwaukee-born Arriale, who moved to southern Indiana in 1999 after spending much of her career in New York, fills every tune with a dense concentration of event–as a reference point I’d suggest the music of Fred Hersch, not because she sounds like him but because she employs similar techniques to her own ends....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October in Modesto, California, Kelli Pratt, 45, was arrested after she allegedly held down her 65-year-old husband and bit him over 20 times, tearing out chunks of flesh, because he was too ill and tired to have sex with her; infections in the wounds killed him six days later. Pratt suffers from multiple sclerosis and sometimes uses a wheelchair; her husband had been in the hospital for diabetes a week before the attack....

Jacky Comforty’s 2000 documentary, The Optimists, tells the story of how 50,000 Bulgarian Jews–including Comforty’s parents and grandparents–were saved from the Nazi death camps by a coalition of protesters that included the Bulgarian Orthodox church, labor unions, members of parliament, and countless ordinary non-Jewish citizens. Comforty, an Evanston resident, spent 12 years working on the film and raised most of its budget–over a million dollars–himself. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Piano Their Forte Andy Lansangan moved to Chicago from Saint Louis on New Year’s Eve 2000, enticed by what he’d heard about the music scene from Cayce Key, a friend from home who was already here. While Lansangan studied drumming at Webster University and the Percussion Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, Key had come in 1994 to learn sound engineering at Columbia College; he ended up playing drums in an art-punk three-piece called the 90 Day Men....

The cabdriver’s radio was cranked so loud I had to tell him three times where to drop me off. He’d tuned in a faint, staticky AM talk show that sounded like it was broadcasting from the moon. Against the buzzing and whirring a man’s voice crackled, “Racial profiling at airportsh ish shomething we’re gonna have to conshider, and I think Arab-Americansh undershtand the shituation.” The cabdriver slapped his other hand to the wheel and wrenched it as if he were trying to put the whole steering column into a headlock....

The Warriors Wing & Groove Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The stereotype of the overly earnest French intellectual, for instance. It’s been observed that French theatrical tradition maintains a fastidious distinction between tragedy and comedy, Racine and Moliere, Cocteau and Jerry Lewis. Where English-speaking theater had the example of Shakespeare’s wise and popular recognition that the truth is anything but pure–that it consists, more often than not, of messy negotiations between the profound and the ridiculous (think how funny Hamlet is as he hurtles toward not-being, how deeply Caliban aches)–the French got hung up on classical austerities that rendered their high dramatic literature Grimly Philosophical....

“We need to work together,” Charlotte Newfeld told a crowd of Wrigleyville neighbors that gathered at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church recently to discuss the Cubs’ plans for Wrigley Field. The agreement allowing the Cubs to play night games expires after the 2002 season, and the Tribune Company, which owns the team, wants to increase the annual number of such games from 18 to 30. At the same time, it’s proposing an $11 million makeover for the historic ballpark, with 2,100 more seats in the outfield, 200 to 250 more box seats behind home plate, a concession area behind center field where diners can watch the game through tinted glass, and a multilevel parking garage on the west side of Clark Street....

Artists Cherie Basak and Omar Gutierrez opened Revolution Studios this June because they were tired of working for other people. Gutierrez, who’s also been a tattooist for about eight years, and Basak, an art store manager, envisioned the west Bucktown storefront as a combination gallery and tattoo shop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But so far, though they’ve mounted shows of abstract painting, “intentional kitsch,” light sculpture, and prints, the tattoo studio has yet to become a reality: the couple’s petition for a special-use permit was denied in September....

There’s been something of a large-band funk revival lately, with groups like Los Angeles’s Breakestra and New York’s Antibalas offering a flesh-and-blood answer to the loops-and-samples approach of studio-centric hip-hoppers. Bullfrog, a six-piece from Montreal, Quebec, flaunts laid-back grooves that frequently sound like a cross between Willie Bobo’s funky Latin jazz and War’s Latin jazz-tinged funk; on the band’s self-titled full-length debut, on Ropeadope Records, only a few stretches—”Alright: Music for More Morning People,” the second half of “Snakeskin”—pick up the tempo....

From dear_raed.blogspot.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eh, they were never the environmentalists to start with; if they didn’t burn it they would have dumped it in the river or something. The smoke was there for three days the column could be seen from all over Baghdad being dragged in a line across the sky by the winds. During the same time and on the same road I take to work I see two HUGE trenches being dug, it looked like they were going to put some sort of machinery in it, wide enough for a truck to drive thru and would easily take three big trucks....

On the second floor of the River North nightclub Excalibur, a bank of 16 video monitors is lit in a checkerboard pattern, the dark screens carrying the title “Chicago Community Cinema,” the others flickering in unison with images from independent films. Below the monitors young people mill about, drinks in hand, schmoozing or just gazing around forlornly as the dance music pounds. Rows of white tables accommodate the evening’s sponsors, most of them film production or equipment rental companies, although a local screenwriting school and an off-Loop theater company are also represented....

Last August, a few days before the Republican National Convention, 75 puppet makers were arrested at a warehouse in west Philadelphia. They were charged with conspiracy and held on a bus without water or bathroom facilities for nine hours. Then they were put in jail, where most of them stayed for two weeks. To add insult to injury, police put the puppets they’d made–about 200 of them–into trash compactors. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

From its inception there’s been a cerebral strain in heavy music, though its detractors have rarely approved of the thinking going on: consider Rush’s elaborate thematic and musical edifices, or even Led Zeppelin’s frequent nods to the occult. (Aleister Crowley’s writing is pretty thorny stuff–if Jimmy Page actually understands the fellow, he’s got a leg up on most countercultural intellectuals.) Likewise most of the best progressive metal bands active today–Mastodon, Neurosis, Pelican–are no dummies, and they’re proud to wear their erudition on their sleeves (or at least in their liner notes)....

“I want McDono’s!” Tyesha yells from the backseat, her high voice almost a shriek. “Me too!” Travelle says, balling his little hands into tiny fists and smashing them into his thighs. “But mommy, I want McDono’s too,” Tia says, and in the rearview I can see her squirming in her car seat. Tyesha and Travelle gaze down lovingly at their little sister, who’s strapped in between them, then look at each other and smile their biggest, cheesiest smiles ’cause they know I can never resist Tia when she’s strapped in that thing, which I know she hates....

Next Time Maybe They’ll Listen Not exactly true, I thought. Greeley’s gone easy on the biggest culprit of all–the media. My mind was bent by an article I’d read a day or two earlier, Harold Evans’s infuriating piece in the November/December Columbia Journalism Review that began, “We were warned.” Evans’s story–which was headlined “Warning Given…Story Missed: How a Report on Terrorism Flew Under the Radar”–told the dismal fate of a 150-page study three years in the making....

Put ‘Em Together and What Have You Got? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » lists, cobranding publicity, and romancing donors at each other’s fund-raisers. And they’re not stopping there: Melissa Thodos is creating a dance for Bumppo’s holiday show, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and Bumppo actors will be a part of Thodos’s winter concert. No point in jealously guarding your audience when you know they’re going to be stepping out, Ross says....