Steve Soble has a knack for transforming underappreciated real estate into restaurants. Not so long ago he saw the hidden beauty in a condemned North Avenue bathhouse. He purchased it, revamped it, and salvaged the spectacular space that became Shawn McClain’s elegant restaurant Spring. More recently an asphalt-shingled structure at the northeast corner of Roscoe and Damen caught his eye. “I saw this wonderful building hiding under a burqa” is how he describes the site that once housed Red wine bar and the Italian restaurant Sipario....

Between them, percussionist Glenn Kotche and bassist Darin Gray cover a lot of ground. In the past year Kotche has played rock on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and supper-club jazz with Fred Lonberg-Holm and Jason Roebke on A Valentine for Fred Katz (Atavistic), and he released a solo album full of dreamy electronic treatments of his drums and cymbals called Introducing (Locust/Quakebasket). Gray’s solo record St. Louis Shuffle (Family Vineyard) consists mainly of buzzes and blurts achieved by plugging in and unplugging his bass, but his trio, Grand Ulena, plays aggressive, ass-clenchingly precise jazz rock on its upcoming debut, Gateway to Dignity (Family Vineyard)....

This touring program of international digital films continues Friday and Saturday, September 21 and 22, at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln. Tickets are $10; a $55 pass (available to the first 150, and $65 thereafter) admits you to all festival events. For more information call 866-737-3378 or 773-348-4123. Cinema Electronica Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Music videos for various electronic pop bands, including Mouse on Mars, Daft Punk, Super Furry Animals, Gorillaz, Orbital, Radiohead, Etienne de Crecy, Red Snapper, and Fatboy Slim....

Deep in the winter that preceded the 1999 season, his second as White Sox manager, Jerry Manuel was plotting his pitching strategy for the midseason series against the Cubs. The Sox won the series, and the Cubs, who’d reached the playoffs the previous year, began tumbling, while the Sox began their rise toward the division championship of 2000. The series showed that Manuel, who had gained a reputation as a calm, considered philosopher-manager, had a competitive edge, an edge that rubbed off on his players....

DANGLERS 3/16, MARTYRS’ And now for something completely different–really. It’s not just this Milwaukee trio’s instrumentation–upright bass, violin, and drums–that charms me. It’s what they do with it. Three years old and already with an EP and a couple of live releases floating around, they’ve at last gotten around to making a full-length studio album. The self-titled CD, produced by former Violent Femmes drummer Victor DeLorenzo, is a geographical and chronological crazy quilt of virtuosic and at times romantic acoustic prog–it’s like what might happen if, say, Uz Jsme Doma were to collaborate with Andrew Bird....

Hit and Runway With Michael Parducci, Peter Jacobson, Judy Prescott, Kerr Smith, Hoyt Richards, John Fiore, and J.K. Simmons. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The compulsion of market analysts to divide audiences by race, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, and sexual preference before they even set foot in a movie theater has had some grim and infuriating consequences. For example, DVDs are made to be sold in different “regions” or “territories” that are defined according to nationality, and as a result we can’t play many French or English DVDs in this country–even if they’re DVDs of American movies in their original language, as they most often are–without a special player....

Live Bait Theater has been a center for solo performance ever since its first show: James Grigsby’s Terminal Madness, produced in 1988. But not every solo performer can pull the kind of audience that would come out for Marcia Wilkie or Jeff Garlin or Cheryl Trykv, and so for a long time the folks at Live Bait have alternated solo shows with larger productions. This has been good for Chicago theater–Live Bait has produced some of the best new work on the off-off-Loop scene–but bad for solo artists, who have fewer places to perform today than they did 13 years ago, when Club Lower Links, MoMing Dance & Arts Center, the Organic Greenhouse, and Randolph Street Gallery were still around....

By Jonathan Rosenbaum Another problem is that sometimes art houses such as the Music Box prefer to show some films after practically everyone else on the planet has seen them. Brian Andreotti, the Music Box’s booker, says this is because the art houses want to wait for the New York reviews–which sometimes means waiting to hear what reviewers who don’t even like foreign films have to say. Why should their verdicts be so precious?...

Rock, Pop, etc. TARA BETTS, PMS, DJ AM/PM and others perform at “Women Out Loud.” Tue 2/25, 7 PM, Resource, third floor, 1561 N. Milwaukee. 773-227-6111. DEL SOULS Free in-store performance. Fri 2/28, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1 N. La Grange Rd., La Grange. 708-579-9660. GALACTIC, LYRICS BORN WITH JOYO VELARDE & DJ D-SHARP 18 & over. Fri 2/21, 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212....

On Airs and Shifts, two recent recordings made originally for his monthly radio program, Selektion, German multimedia artist Achim Wollscheid manipulated the playback of multiple CDs, layering the output in fluid combinations to create peripatetic, skittering soundscapes that move from ominous hums to flailing white noise. The music bears certain similarities to the “glitchwerks” school of contemporary electronica, but Wollscheid’s work never stays still long enough to be relegated to wallpaper....

LiveWire Theater’s evening of one-acts is supposedly inspired by J.D. Salinger, but that can’t be unless his defining feature is wistful pointlessness. Even on their own terms the pieces fail. David Alex in Les cuisses de grenoille l’ail after the Second Eskimo War does nothing with the interactions between two young men and their guest, a threatening female veteran. Alison Weiss’s The Mutants in the Hudson concerns an ex-whiz kid, now a war hero, who freaks out after writing a successful book because he feels neither heroic nor successful....

By Ben Joravsky “It was so much different back then,” says Tuchman. “Parents weren’t around us all the time. A lot of them, like my parents, were immigrants. My dad was a baker. He baked bagels from morning until night. He was a hardworking man trying to provide for his family. He didn’t have time to go to our games. The only adult at Max Straus was Manny Weincord, the sports director....

It’s been four years since Blur released 13 (Virgin), a muddled batch of songs heavily inspired by American indie rock; the once cocksure Britpoppers–who for many years battled Oasis for UK pop supremacy–seemed to be searching for a new sound. In the interim front man Damon Albarn visited Mali, where he recorded the surprisingly strong Mali Music (Honest Jon’s/Astralwerks) with a stellar cast of traditional players like Afel Bocoum, Toumani Diabate, and Lobi Traore, and struck gold with the cartoon side project Gorillaz....

Friday 1/7 – Thursday 1/13 There’s no time like the present, according to organizers of City2000, a photography project documenting Chicago throughout the new year. They’re hosting their first public exhibition tonight, only seven days into 2000. A free reception, featuring the work of numerous local photographers, runs from 6 to 9 at 312 N. May; call 312-455-8585 for details. The exhibit will also be on display Saturday and Sunday from 11 to 5....

Tragically Hip It means quite a bit when you think about it. A bar is an intimate place, sometimes more intimate than your living room, and with that intimacy comes the potential for surprise. No one stands in line to buy tickets to see a bar band. When we get to the bar, we might not even know if there’s a band that night. But later the beehive vibration of bar chatter is flattened by some plainly dressed group of third-shift rockers we’ve never heard of, who disarm us with a drumbeat beyond intellectualization and the sound of a shitty amp through a shittier PA, who play better that night than they ever have before or may ever again....

I’ve seen many versions of this 1975 Bob Fosse-John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, and this one is the most effective. It’s less slick and more lively than previous touring productions of director Walter Bobbie’s still-running 1996 Broadway revival. The cynicism of Fosse and Ebb’s script (based on Jazz Age journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins’s play) seems less facile and more credible; a rat-a-tat pace and some strong lead performances make the story compelling and even moving as well as darkly satiric....

This international festival of animated films and videos runs Friday through Sunday, November 7 through 9, at the Biograph, Chicago Cultural Center, and DePaul University Student Center, 2250 N. Sheffield. Tickets are $6, $5 for children under 12, and are available at the venue box office 15 minutes prior to showtime. Festival passes, which grant priority seating, are $100 to $295; for more information see www.cineme.org or call 312-733-3827. Web Animation...

Everyone Needs a Hobby Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I pretty much decided to change my life,” says Adams. “I had been doing the self-employed thing for over seven years and I didn’t like what I was doing. I was burned out on music and I didn’t care; I didn’t buy any records or see many shows.” By June he’d landed his current full-time job....

Recording infrequently and devoting much of his energy to private teaching, saxophonist George Coleman dropped below most jazz fans’ radar for much of the 80s and 90s–despite the fact that so many younger musicians during that period concerned themselves with lionizing the elders who’d laid the groundwork for the hard-bop mainstream of the 60s. For a short stretch in 1963 and ’64, Coleman’s fluttery yet virile tenor played the foil to Miles Davis’s laconic, hypersensitized horn in the trumpeter’s legendary quintet–but he was in the unenviable position of following John Coltrane and preceding Wayne Shorter in that role, and those two extraordinary musical forces have greatly overshadowed him in jazz history....

HERBERT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upon releasing his latest album, Bodily Functions (K7/Soundslike), British dance-music producer Matthew Herbert posted the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music–a ten-point manifesto not unlike Dogma 95’s Vow of Chastity that he adheres to in his own work–at his Web site, www.matthewherbert.com. Among its most interesting promises: no sampling other people’s music, no factory preset keyboard sounds, and no replication of traditional sounds when it’s physically and financially feasible to use the real thing....