Argentinean composer Gaby Kerpel got his professional start in music in the late 80s with multimedia performance groups like De la Guarda, and an acquaintance of mine who saw a recent New York gig where Kerpel performed material from his solo debut, Carnabailito (Nonesuch), says he’s brought a theatrical element to his own work as well. He’ll pick up an instrument, sample a brief melodic or rhythmic phrase as he plays, and then loop it; an animation of the corresponding instrument appears on a video screen, so that as he adds layers of loops the screen gets busier and busier....

Gorey Stories, Blindfaith Theatre, at Angel Island. What better season for a show based on stories by Edward Gorey, master of overcast skies and morbid mirth? Best known for The Gashlycrumb Tinies (26 letters, 26 quaintly gruesome child deaths) and the Mystery! series titles, author-illustrator Gorey offers the perfect example of metaphorical form: just as his ghostly manors seem to float on a sea of darkness, a taciturn Death lurks behind his starkly lit vignettes, waiting for the characters to stray beyond their edges....

Searah Deysach loves sex toys, but she won’t sell penis-shaped birthday candles or novelty plastic breasts. “I don’t want to sound like the lesbian with no sense of humor,” she says, “but it’s this awful attitude–like, ‘Hey, boobies!’ And I love boobies, but what’s fun about creepy replicas of genitalia?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1998, says Deysach, “My girlfriend E-mailed me to say, ‘We need a dildo, can you get one?...

Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto opens with a rush up the keyboard and a brassy fanfare, and the excitement almost never lets up. Stravinsky’s Petrushka is evident in the bright, rhythmic opening theme, and Liszt is apparent throughout the work in the extensive use of octaves, glissandi, repeated notes, and the dark, resonant bottom of the keyboard. Yet Bartok’s music always retains its own characteristic sound–including Hungarian folk song and dance elements, modal harmonies, and an alternation between the lyrical and the percussive....

Nancy Josephson drives a 1995 Ford Taurus station wagon that’s a tribute to her father, a New Jersey physician who died three years ago. “This art car is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Benjamin Harris Josephson” is spelled out in ceramic beads on the front of the hood. “1925-1998. Father, father-in-law, grandpa, citizen of the world.” She calls the car the Great Ride–the license plates read GRT RDE1. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a May story in southern California’s OC Weekly, an obscure provision in the state’s vehicle code allows any ordinary citizen, by means of an anonymous complaint, to force a motorist to attend a hearing at the DMV to “review [his] driving qualifications”–with license suspension a possible outcome. The loophole was intended to allow relatives of unsafe elderly drivers to ease them off the road, but as it’s written the law allows anyone to commit “bureaucratic road rage”: all complaints, even those completely unsupported by witnesses or evidence, must lead to a hearing, and even if the hearing ends in dismissal the victim’s insurance rates can be affected....

NNENNA FREELON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An interesting thing happened to vocalist Nnenna Freelon on her way to becoming a big deal: in 1994, after three albums, Columbia dropped her like a bad habit. Two years later she hooked up with a much smaller label, Concord Records; freed of overweening producers intent on “packaging” her natural gifts, she’s bounced back with three solid outings and a shot singing on-screen in the film What Women Want....

Alex Jones’s bad-neighbor drama has received great notices in London and LA, but I can’t see why. Though he shows a genuine feel for the learned and real helplessness of the very poor, this grim little fable plays like Planned Parenthood propaganda, simultaneously obvious and alarmist as it reveals the horrors of government-subsidized teen pregnancy and cohabitation. Young, expectant British couple Becky and Dan take up residence in a public-housing SRO, but their housewarming’s spoiled by music-blasting next-door menace Matt....

I read with much amusement Tim Klein’s letter regarding Jack Helbig’s critique of our hit production of Popcorn [June 8]. Certainly Mr. Klein is entitled to his opinion about our play, which he called “the worst piece of theater I have ever seen in my entire life.” Unfortunately, he distorts some rather important facts while outlining his critique. Mr. Klein writes, “Within ten minutes, at least half the audience left in pure disgust....

It was almost the perfect photo. Ricky Clemons had just drained a three-point shot at the buzzer, and the Missouri Tigers were strutting jubilantly off home court at halftime with a two-point lead over Colorado. The players’ arms were flung high in the air, like the arms of the referee who’d just called the trey, and like hundreds of arms in the background raised by ecstatic fans. Last July 4 the president was entertaining at home when Clemons dropped by....

Shemekia Copeland’s third and latest outing, Talking to Strangers (Alligator), provides welcome reassurance for critics (such as myself) who’ve been growing increasingly uneasy with the young singer’s apparent willingness to compromise her extraordinary gifts and take the easy route of rocked-out bellowing. Abetted by producer Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack, whose funk-driven, richly textured arrangements both propel her and leave her room to breathe, Copeland reveals a newfound penchant for nuance all over the album....

GROOVIE GHOULIES 10/24, FIRESIDE BOWL Defiantly lightweight and wickedly tight, this Sacramento trio has just released Monster Club (Springman), the latest in a long string of records devoted to B-movie themes. Their relentless riffing is so firmly in the Ramones/Queers tradition that the cover of Dee Dee’s “Pet Sematary” is indistinguishable in style from the rest of the album (then again, so is the Daniel Johnston cover), and though their campy aesthetic doesn’t allow for much depth, I do think “The Lizard King”–an ode to Godzilla–is some kind of brilliant (“Jim Morrison tried to take your throne / A weak attempt in a haze of methadone / Since the 50s you have been the one / The king who came from the land of the Rising Sun”)....

Like many children of the 60s, D.W. Jacobs discovered Buckminster Fuller in college. “I was studying theater at UC-Santa Barbara,” Jacobs recalls, “and Fuller spoke there a lot. My brother, who was also studying there, told me, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy talk.’ I said, ‘I can’t–I’ve got classes, I’ve got rehearsal.’ He said, ‘He talks all day. Come by when you can.’” Of all the 60s techno-visionaries, those thinkers who saw the future and declared that it worked, Fuller was the most eccentric and for many the most captivating....

The Right Man for the Job Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under Gainsley’s guidance, Sondheim allowed that he writes in spurts now, not as “intensively” as he used to; that he believes creative work goes on in dreams; and that any day he doesn’t have to write lyrics is a joy. He said the entire score for Sweeney Todd is a tribute to film composer Bernard Herrmann, who wrote for Alfred Hitchcock and also did the music for Hangover Square–a 1945 thriller “about a composer who, when he heard a certain sound, went out and murdered women....

I love the irony of the Oz-like voice on the Red Line intoning “This is Grand” right before you exit the train into one of the grungiest stops of the whole CTA. The place sucks. So as I walked down the stairs into the station Sunday night, it was strange to hear the melancholy strains of Swan Lake rising out of the depths. The tile walls make a great echo chamber, but the subway seemed like an odd venue for Tchaikovsky....

In the post-postrock era, when electronic jazz induces trance as often as dance, I’m becoming almost nostalgic for the fusion years. A great many albums that sounded trite within a few years of their release now strike with power and in some cases integrity, and even records by mediocre bands have aged well compared to much of what followed. In the late 70s, British bassist Percy Jones played with Brand X, a terrific fusion outfit that, like Tony Williams Lifetime before it and Tribal Tech after it, made winning, sophisticated instrumental music with solos that didn’t reference jazz but easily outstripped rock....

WADADA LEO SMITH & HAMID DRAKE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few players embody Chicago Underground maestro Rob Mazurek’s conception of “total music” more than trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. With drummer Jack DeJohnette, bassist Malachi Favors, and pianist Anthony Davis on last year’s superb Golden Quartet (Tzadik), he blows down the house with the blustery opener, “DeJohnette,” then plants a Zen garden on the site with the tender, lyrical, and profoundly economical ballad “Harumi....

With Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, and Ousman Sembene still active, one can’t call Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira the only old master we have left in cinema. But how remarkable to see someone in his mid-90s enjoying one of the richest and most productive periods of his career–five extraordinary and very different features since Inquietude in 1998. This is partly thanks to the resourceful producer Paulo Branco (who also sponsors Raul Ruiz); unfortunately, none of the five has found U....

France’s Bireli Lagrene started playing guitar and listening to Django Reinhardt records when he was four, in 1970. By the time he cut his first record, at 13, he was immersed in Django’s 30s Gypsy jazz dialect: the machine-gun single-note lines, the stinging line-ending vibrato, the fat chords charging up the fretboard. Now Lagrene found himself in a classic trap–great jazz musicians are originals, but his attempts to assert his own identity were less satisfying than his homages....

In the 1980s avant-garde film critic and historian P. Adams Sitney called Chicagoan Adele Friedman “a real original,” and this collection of 12 films (all but one of them silent) shows the evolution of her unique vision over the last 23 years. Her portrait films of the 70s and 80s follow their subjects rather than trying to control them, but their gaze is quirky, even fetishistic. In Chantal (1983) a woman on a porch grooms a reluctant cat; the framing and small camera movements give each a powerful physical presence, magnified when the woman shows off some scratches on her arm and the camera moves in....