Playwright Clifford Morts made his Chicago debut in September with the world premiere of this funny, poignant semiautobiographical account of a man’s downward spiral into alcohol and drug addiction and his first steps toward recovery. Confronting the issue of substance abuse with unusual humor and insight, the production gained an audience partly through word of mouth among members of the recovery community, who appreciated its absence of movie-of-the-week melodrama. Now it’s reopened in slightly different form: Morts has tightened the script and added an illuminating character, an abusive alcoholic father (played by Michael Colucci, who also directs)....

The Last of Mrs. Cheyney Working the room at a New Year’s party for London’s upper crust, British dramatist Frederick Lonsdale spotted a gentleman he despised walking in. The host, fearing that the occasion might be ruined if the playwright were tempted to start tossing the verbal darts that were his specialty, encouraged him to appease the object of his contempt. Lonsdale walked over to the man. “I wish you a happy New Year,” he announced graciously....

The University of Illinois basketball team is haunted by its traditions. In this, I refer not to any evil spirits conjured up by its mascot, Chief Illiniwek, a noble, graceful, and courageous image of American tribal tradition (even if he is a composite character and not purely Illini), but to its penchant for–how do I put this without offending the forces of political correctness?–for choking. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Stand-Up! Stand-Up! Fight! Fight! Fight! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not funny? New City, which ran the item and had to correct it, wasn’t amused. Neither was Chicago Comedy Festival founder Dan Carlson, who says the comic’s story was “completely fabricated.” A suburban Chicago native and former stand-up comic, Carlson founded his event four years ago after concluding that older festivals in Aspen and Montreal, catering to what they thought the entertainment industry wanted, weren’t using the funniest people....

When Tom Fetters travels for his job as a consultant for packaging company Crown Cork & Seal, he makes a point of seeking out Lustron homes. Some 2,500 of the one-story enamelized-steel houses went up around the country between 1948 and 1950, and Fetters can usually spot them by their distinctive roofs–which resemble the ones that came in Lincoln Log sets–and their luminous pastel exteriors: pink, surf blue, maize yellow, dove gray, desert tan....

What exactly does it mean to say that someone is “passive-aggressive”? I hear this term used frequently, usually with reference to a coworker, child, parent, etc, who is being a pain in the ass. Surely there’s a more rigorous clinical definition than that. –Frank Caplice, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The term “passive-aggressive” was introduced in a 1945 U.S. War Department technical bulletin, describing soldiers who weren’t openly insubordinate but shirked duty through procrastination, willful incompetence, and so on....

In the 80s, novelists Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis drew a connection between the 60s counterculture and the Reagan-era revolt against consumerism. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan had considerably more time to ponder the mysteries of the 80s before writing this 1996 play, set in 1982. But he couldn’t come up with any more compelling ideas about the selfishness of the time and the show’s three characters: rich, bored New York college kids holding a suitcase full of stolen cash....

It’s great to see young artists take an interest in politics, but they should learn more about the subject before they attempt to teach it. And you know a show’s in trouble when 15 of its 60 minutes are devoted to a debate over whether to have an intermission, even if the debate is intended to make a point about democracy. Experimental Theatre Chicago’s ensemble-generated movement pieces and sketches illustrate such fresh discoveries as “Conformity is bad–and pervasive....

Last month at 3030, a former Pentecostal church in Humboldt Park, a rapt audience of 50 sat in the pews of the red-walled chapel and listened intently as vocalist Jenny Walshe launched into her interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s dadaist poem Ursonate. “Fumms,” she said. “Bo wo tŠŠ zŠŠ Uu, pog•ff, kwii Ee.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Walshe was one of three performers at the inaugural event in the Discrete Series, a monthly dose of experimental poetry and performance started by Kerri Sonnenberg and Jesse Seldess in the hope of opening up the rarefied world of avant-garde poetry to people who might find the form’s emphasis on sound and language over content intimidating....

DECEMBER 6 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Zen Buddhist Temple resurrected the quarterly magazine Spring Wind: Buddhist Cultural Forum two years ago because after 9/11 “we thought we needed to get Buddhist insight out to the public,” according to a spokesperson. Tonight’s Zen Buddhist Temple Holiday Auction will serve as a fund-raiser for the glossy black-and-white magazine, which is sold via subscription and at bookstores and health food stores around the country....

In the Blood, Circle Theatre. Director Michael Matthews’s admirable production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s saga of a homeless welfare mother provides a fine opportunity to see just how empty this much praised play really is. Unlike Lisa Portes, who staged it at Next Theatre last February in broad, almost cartoonish strokes, Matthews scales everything back to human size–no mean feat given Parks’s penchant for overstatement. Her protagonist, Hester La Negrita, lives with her five children under a highway underpass....

The German post-techno duo of Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner, better known as Mouse on Mars, have been on a roll for a couple years now. Though the woozy, slo-mo dub-plasma soundscapes of their 1994 debut, Vulvaland, and its 1995 follow-up, Iaora Tahiti, were undeniably enticing, both albums were a bit too diffuse and noodly–the word St. Werner uses is “shy”–to hold your ear for long. But that changed with 2000’s Niun Niggung, when Mouse on Mars “went pop,” sort of: they tightened structures, simplified beats, and added vocals (courtesy of drummer and singer Dodo Nkishi), and the results were much more concrete and physical, sometimes even bordering on hooky....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September in Cleveland, Ohio, 49-year-old James Black dragged a naked, bloodied corpse out of his apartment house in broad daylight and left it on the lawn within feet of two dumbfounded maintenance workers. He looked at the men, then went back inside and emerged with a mop, which he used to swab the blood from the sidewalk outside his door....

Tribute and Benefit for Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brakhage’s ambivalence about existence can be seen in his early film dramas, in which agonized individuals strain against imagined prisons; it can be seen in his first major work, Anticipation of the Night (1958), a testament to the failure of imaginative seeing, ending in the protagonist’s suicide; it can be seen in the cosmic deconstruction that concludes the four-hour The Art of Vision (1965); it can be seen in what is perhaps his greatest achievement, the “Arabics,” a series of 19 abstract films that are both glorious examples of light in motion and unsettling documents of seeing so “abnormal” that the viewer feels almost disoriented....

In recent years, the Fat Possum label has made a cottage industry of “discovering” southern blues musicians, recording them at their rawest and promoting them as exemplars of an unsullied tradition. In the process they’ve tended to sensationalize their charges’ lives: any man with knife scars or a prison record finds his travails paraded as badges of authenticity. James “T-Model” Ford, who was born about 78 years ago in Forrest, Mississippi, and now makes his home in Greenville, is perfect fodder for Fat Possum’s mythology machine....

Rock, Pop, etc. ANTJE, RIPLEY CAINE, SUMMER CHANCE Free in-store performance. Fri 2/21, 7:30 PM, Women & Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark. 773-769-9299. THE BUSINESS, LIL’ BRENDA & THE MIDNITE WALKERS Fri 2/14, 8 PM, Apollo’s 2000, 2875 W. Cermak. 773-247-0200. ERIC COMSTOCK, MARY FOSTER CONKLIN, PAMELA SUE FOX, JUSTIN HAYFORD, LYNN LOOSIER, SIDNEY MYER, PHILLIP OFFICER, AVERY SOMMERS, LUCIA SPINA, KAT TAYLOR, LUMIRI TUBO, PAULA WEST perform as part of the Chicago Cabaret Convention (see sidebar for full schedule)....

On the last Friday evening in January, two weeks after the overseas detention of local community leader Sabri Samirah, nearly 100 Muslims gathered in the basement of the Mosque Foundation, a house of worship in south-suburban Bridgeview. They were there for a workshop on how to deal with “Special Registration,” part of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the Justice Department’s new program to document the whereabouts of foreign visitors ages 16 to 45 from predominantly Muslim countries....

Last year the Chicago World Music Festival halved its schedule, cutting down to five days after 2002’s blockbuster ten-day run. The fest has rebounded this year with a full week of music, but it’s still clearly suffering from the sagging economy: unlike festivals booked by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events (jazz, blues, gospel, Celtic music), which have more or less fixed annual budgets, the World Music Festival depends on whatever funding Mike Orlove and the Department of Cultural Affairs can scare up–sometimes the city kicks in a portion of the money, but organizers have to chase sponsors and grants for the rest....

“I like when people look at a picture of me and be like, ‘Oh, he looks like he’ll do something bad like this,’ says DeMarco (below), in the text that accompanies his portrait in photographer Dawoud Bey’s multimedia exhibit “The Chicago Project.” “Some people might look, like, ‘Oh, he looks like a bad kid, or…like, I can picture him doing…beatin’ up somebody or taking something from somebody,’ whereas that’s not me at all....

The first of three weekends in this festival of percussive dance, now in its 12th year, features contemporary Chicago artists taught or influenced by former famous tappers. Bril Barrett and Martin “Tre” Dumas of MADD Rhythms, for instance, studied at the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre and Tommy Sutton’s Mayfair Academy respectively. But like many tap dancers, these two purveyors of hip-hop tap haven’t been content to let the art form be: as Barrett said in a 1995 interview with the Reader (when the group was called Steppin’ Out), “A lot of young people weren’t into tap because they thought it’s only old people in tuxedos…....