Big Names on the Street Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My memory of street fairs was that you would have the bar-band mentality. It was like there were bands that were on the street-fair circuit,” says Eleventh Dream Day’s Rick Rizzo. “When I called [bassist] Doug [McCombs] to ask him to do it, he said, ‘Do we really want to do a street fair?...

The Homecoming There always seemed to be a current of dark humor coursing through the work of Harold Pinter–until about 15 years ago, that is, when he turned his attention to more overtly political parables, brief but horrifying tracts that could fit on a scant few pages. His 1988 12-page police-state drama Mountain Language is a prime example of a Pinter play dominated by horror, however absurd. But in 1965, when The Homecoming premiered in London, Pinter’s work still had a gleeful menace, derived largely from the banal way in which he presented evil: mordantly amoral, the play is reminiscent of Richard III exulting over wooing the widow of the man he’s just murdered....

Friday 5/23 – Thursday 5/29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Albuquerque-based duo of butoh dancer Ephia and experimental musician Jeff Gburek, who perform under the name Djalma Primordial Science, took the title of their new show, Love Song of Human Waste, from The Human Waste Project, a recent performance marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. For that work, five people spent 12 hours duct taped to chairs with bags over their heads....

Friday 6/13 – Thursday 6/19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 14 SATURDAY Last year I saw an orthopedic surgeon about a swollen knee. When it turned out the consultation wasn’t covered by my insurance, I got a $400 bill–but after a long conversation with the billing department, I got off for half of that. That was how I learned what the folks behind the Service Employees International Union’s Hospital Accountability Project have known for a while: self-paying patients in Cook County often have to cough up more than double what insurance companies negotiate for the same services....

“I have come to grasp an ugly but very important truth about American politics,” writes historian Robin Einhorn in the 2001 preface to her 1991 book Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872. “The antigovernment rhetoric that saturates our political discourse even today is rooted in the slaveholders’ fears of a democratic government invested with real political power….American governments were designed to be weak and decentralized so that they would not become democratic forums for debates about the nature and distribution of property....

If the libertarians and conservatives had been right, BP should have gone the way of Enron. On March 11 chief executive John Browne of the oil giant BP announced that the company had met its self-imposed target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over seven years ahead of schedule and at no net cost to the company. BP’s emissions are now 10 percent below 1990 levels, an achievement that naysayers have insisted would ruin the American economy if it were tried....

Fade Out: New Video, Part Two Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is one of the strongest video programs I’ve ever seen; almost all the works present lush, sensuous imagery within a coherent structure that expresses the theme. The two best are also brilliantly disturbing. Gregg Biermann’s The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (1999) mixes abstract imagery and representational photography to create powerful visual disruptions, the pieces seeming to spin away from each other....

In traditional media, from trompe l’oeil painting to abstract metal sculpture, the sense of an artist straining against or pushing beyond the limits of his medium is a major part of the achievement. In digital imaging virtually anything is possible, but with no physical material to struggle with, the result is often a hodgepodge of glitzy effects. Not so with Hans Hemmert’s four video projections on exhibit at Vedanta (along with many drawings), which at first appear to consist of digital images projected on sketches....

Dear Jonathan, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just wanted to point out one extremely minor but interesting factual error in your review. You state that “of course both takes of McElwee crossing the field had to have been shot by someone else.” In fact, I did shoot both takes myself. There was no one there but me (and a small, somewhat vicious puppy). I placed the camera on a tripod and framed the shot I wanted....

JIMMY SCOTT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jimmy Scott’s singing is a triumphant union of opposites. The 76-year-old has a fragile, childlike voice (he suffers from Kallman’s syndrome, which stunts development during puberty), but his full vibrato and mature delivery convey a deep world-weariness. And in contrast to the vulnerability of his persona, his technique–crisply bitten-off syllables, inventive intonation, willfully delayed timing, bracingly long silences–is absolutely masterful....

This gig is a showcase for the Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, the electronic-music-oriented little brother to Rune Grammofon, the most eclectic label on the Scandinavian free-music scene. A number of musicians affiliated with the imprint will make their Chicago debuts: Kim Hiorthoy, known primarily as the graphic designer responsible for the minimalist look of Rune Grammofon’s releases, makes music on the side. On Hei he delivers a pleasing, modest set of bedroom electronica whose primary influences seem to be Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada....

Lead Stories Joe R. Thompson, who in January was thrown 25 feet into the air in a car crash near Highway 40 and Woods Chapel Road in Blue Springs, Missouri, survived by grabbing onto some power lines that he hit on the way down. Thompson, 18, dangled from the lines for 20 minutes until rescuers arrived. Authorities explained Thompson was lucky enough to grab the lines that weren’t charged with live current....

“Sex, schmex,” says Deirdre McCloskey. “I was a man for 53 years. I did not go through the trouble to become a woman, go through such a radical change, merely for sexual pleasure. If it were just about having sex with men, there are a lot more convenient ways to do that than to have gone through all this.” Bailey and Blanchard describe the transsexuals in the second group as having “autogynephilia,” a term coined by Blanchard that means being attracted to one’s own female sex organs....

KELLY HOGAN 10/12, THE HIDEOUT Kelly Hogan, an Atlanta transplant and indie-rock vet, has charmed her way into the center of Chicago’s alt-country scene with her creamy voice, which can flow into the cracks of anything from country to soul to old-style pop; she’s appeared onstage with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, the Mekons, and plenty of others who’ve played for drink tickets at the Hideout, where she also tends bar....

Watching the three minutes of the Paris Hilton sex tape available online and any three minutes of her new reality show, The Simple Life, it’s clear that at least one aspect of the TV show is real–that too-blank-to-be-believed stare of hers. The fisheye she gives the camcorder during sex with Rick Solomon is the same one she gives Farmer Leding when he tells her she’s got to get a job....

The Play’s the Thing, Borealis Theatre Company, at Theatre Building Chicago. A tribute to art’s ability to improve on life, Ferenc Molnar’s charming, wise 1926 comedy puts the “play” in–well, the play. P.G. Wodehouse’s adaptation adds wry wit to Molnar’s comic machinery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While mocking the conventions of the well-made play, Molnar transforms despair into forgiveness. Promising young composer Albert, visiting two older playwright collaborators, overhears his fiancee, Ilona, in a compromising conversation with a former suitor, ham actor Almady....

Andreas Gursky at Millennium Park, through September 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part supertourists, part millennial encyclopedists–Gursky says he shoots “icons of our time,” and Arthus-Bertrand says he’s a “witness of our time”–the pair target different audiences. Gursky’s pristine prints appear in austere white-walled galleries while Arthus-Bertrand exhibits only in free-admission, open-air venues. They have rather different backgrounds too. Before Arthus-Bertrand became a photojournalist and started selling his pictures to National Geographic, Life, Geo, Stern, and Paris-Match, he piloted hot-air balloons for tourists over Kenyan savannas....

What Have They Learned? He said it lasted about half an hour. Then the cops came and everyone scattered. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When journalists got around to explaining the ongoing fascination with the May 4 hazing incident at Glenbrook North High School, they laid it to the existence of videotape that the TV stations happily played over and over and over. But the focus on perpetrators and victims, litigious parents and posturing administrators, obscured what it was in those videotapes that was so fascinating....

“I like to get the most out of hair,” says Tony Rizzo, the Italian-born, London-based hairstylist who founded the Alternative Hair Show. Rizzo began doing hair at the age of 13 because he enjoyed the ambience of hair salons. “I knew this was what I wanted to do,” he says. “I found that I was quite good at it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the audience members at Sunday night’s sold-out show at the Chicago Theatre were hair professionals, in town for the Chicago Midwest Hair Show in Rosemont....

2 FRIDAY “Jerusalem syndrome” is the term applied to what happens to visitors in the Holy City who have a religious experience and start to think they’re the Messiah, or begin speaking in tongues, or run naked in the streets, all of which happen more than you might think–about 100 times a year. Such behavior usually results in a free ticket to the loony bin, and the treatment of these tourists and pilgrims is the subject of Erin Sax’s 1998 documentary, The Jerusalem Syndrome....