Yoshihiro Suda When Chicagoan Adam Scott was given a one-person show at the Museum of Contemporary Art recently, he installed only one painting–an image of the museum burning, referencing Ed Ruscha’s 1968 depiction of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ablaze. Though Scott is actually a pretty interesting painter, this seemed a punkish gesture with the quality of a one-liner, especially compared to Suda’s far more subversive installation. And Suda’s work really is site-specific in an era when much sculpture is mislabeled as such....

Friday 4/19 – Thursday 4/25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sculptor and curator of “pet-chewed objects” Todd Slaughter will give a talk in connection with his Protected Comforts exhibit today at 5:30 in the Sidney R. Yates gallery on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. The show’s deadpan takes on domesticity include Comfort Zone–a living room suite cast in salt and slowly dissolving in a steam-filled chamber–and a collection of the aforementioned gnawed-upons: a pair of gloves masticated by a beloved dog dead some 17 years, a chair completely mauled by four weimaraners, et al....

This Massachusetts band started with the same pedigree as any other posthardcore outfit, but these days they sound like emissaries from some alternate rock reality. What if grunge hadn’t trailed off into thin derivative bluster? What if, instead of leaning on catharsis (by definition a short-lived burst) to milk the angry-young-man market at the expense of longevity, some of the raging riffmeisters of the class of ’92 had learned to express their angst via a cooler, more sustainable architecture?...

In the various groups he’s led, co-led, or just enlivened as a sideman, saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase behaves like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He appears mild mannered at first, most often anchoring a small reed section from behind his baritone sax, but in the middle of a solo he’ll nut out into the timbral stratosphere. (And even when he sticks to the written part he does so playfully.) Kohlhase cofounded Boston’s quirky Either/Orchestra in 1986, then borrowed some of his colleagues from that band to form his own quintet in 1989, producing several albums that featured both off-base original compositions and sections of full-throated freedom....

CHICAGO IMPROVISORS GROUP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The foundation of Chicago’s creative music scene is clearly its small groups, but one sign of its maturity has been the recent emergence of larger ensembles–including Michael Zerang’s nonet, the Peter Brštzmann Chicago Tentet, Fred Lonberg-Holm’s lightbox orchestras, and the nine-piece Vandermark Territory Band. The Chicago Improvisors Group–usually a tentet–came about in part because trombonist Jeb Bishop wanted to try a large band that improvised every note, a practice with roots in Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra, several incarnations of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, and the King †bŸ …rchestrŸ, led by German saxophonist and clarinetist Wolfgang Fuchs and clearly the most direct influence on the CIG....

The extraordinary potential of a cut—that alchemical moment when one image replaces another—has long been recognized by avant-garde filmmakers, from Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s to Peter Kubelka in the 1960s. In effect combining two different entities into a syncretic whole, a cut can restructure or reinvent reality—Kubelka hoped to replace the everyday with an imagined “paradise.” But in the last few decades young avant-gardists have not only made our image-saturated culture a primary subject but employed a different approach, editing less, or less intrusively, whether the footage is found or their own....

CLINIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every successful thief instinctively knows what to steal–and then how to act like it’s belonged to him all along. The four members of the English band Clinic acquit themselves like veteran jacklegs: They lifted the name for their old record label, Aladdin’s Cave of Golf, from a shop they used to pass on the way to practice. They’ve acknowledged that their self-referential costumes–Sgt....

The chamber-music collective CUBE has always had a sense of mission: it focuses on neglected contemporary classics and new pieces commissioned both from its local colleagues (Gustavo Leone, Ilya Levinson) and from its own members (Patricia Morehead, Janice Misurell-Mitchell). But Levinson’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which CUBE debuts tonight, is the group’s most ambitious production yet: a 40-minute single-character “opera” for baritone and chamber ensemble, it’s longer than any work CUBE has yet premiered and the first to be staged with costumes and a set....

JUNE 14 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 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....

Music visualization has a bad name in some circles, implying dance’s subordination to another art form. But the creation of movement to match the timbres, rhythms, and structure of music has a long history in modern dance, beginning with Ruth St. Denis in the early 20th century. New York choreographer Doug Varone shows that music visualization need not be limiting–that it can be an avenue to other insights. His As Natural as Breathing (2000) is set to a variety of pop music; the excerpt I saw features two men and two women dancing to some old, funky, bluesy jazz....

Tops or Bottoms and Persistence of Vision In the longer one-act that kicks off the evening, Tops or Bottoms, one gets the sense that the actors are working overtime–albeit with undeniable charm and empathy–to sell some of the hoarier passages. Scott Jaeck and Judy Blue play Jack and Robin, empty nesters in their late 40s awaiting the results of a pregnancy test from Robin’s doctor. Why she doesn’t use a home pregnancy kit or why her doctor couldn’t give her the results while she was still in the office is never adequately explained, which makes the entire scenario more than a tad artificial and distancing from the start....

Brigida Baltar: Bee House Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bee House #2 exemplifies the work’s instant allure. Here Baltar’s limp body, half-dressed, is sprawled across a hardwood floor as if immobilized by sudden paralysis. Her right arm is outstretched, her hand reaching for something outside the frame. What is it? What unseen force toppled her? And how are these things related to the smothering orange scarf, stitched in a honeycomb pattern, that coils snakelike around her face and neck?...

.22 The Worker (Roydale) I wince when folks talk about the “Chicago sound”–there are just too many different kinds of music in town for such a generalization to make sense. But some styles do prevail more than others. For instance, elements of the first Tortoise record–nimble bass melodies, wide-open drumming–have spread like dandelion seeds over the past decade. This second record from .22, which recalls other post-Tortoise output by combos like Dianogah and Pinebender, features zigzagging bass and pronounced shifts in dynamics....

When most people think of New Orleans’s heritage, they think of the French influence, which mark everything from street names to Cajun music to the city’s cuisine. But the city’s culture stems as much from its Spanish influence, which runs thick and fast through the work of Los Hombres Calientes, the irresistible musical tidepool presided over by kid trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, still in his mid-20s, and veteran percussionist Bill Summers, who was playing with Herbie Hancock’s band the Headhunters in the early 70s....

Last month I was taken aback by an E-mail from a colleague that said, “I thought, as an apparent defender of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that you should read this.” Before I accessed the link—an AP story about a woman stoned to death by court order for appearing in porn movies—I wrote back to say I was insulted by the implication that my regarding Iranians as human beings meant I supported a totalitarian regime....

Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago present this self-styled “convergence of Chicago artists,” running through April 26. Boasting Chicago first lady Maggie Daley as honorary chair, the avant-garde festival features more than 100 multidisciplinary presentations; participants include Plasticene Physical Theater, Theater Oobleck, the Curious Theatre Branch, Blair Thomas, Lucky Pierre, Free Street, David Kodeski, Sandra Binion, and others. All shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N....

Artist Robert Blanchon died in 1999, at the age of 33. Several years before he told me, “A lot of my work questions whether I exist at all.” “Because his work is intelligent, he doesn’t want the viewer to find a simple answer in it,” Neimanas says. “You have to look at it and think about it. It’s beautiful, it’s witty, it’s directed, but it doesn’t conclude.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

As November rolled around, the most frustrating year in Chicago sports history was still finding new ways to aggravate. After the Bears had opened 2002 by losing their first playoff game, and the Blackhawks had likewise made the playoffs only to lose in the first round, and the Cubs and White Sox had both seen their entirely valid playoff hopes crushed early in the season, and the Bears had brought failure full circle by winning their first two this fall only to lose their next six, no other hopes were left to crush....

“Black history is undervalued across the board,” says Morris “Dino” Robinson, a graphic designer pressed into the history business. Robinson was researching his family’s background in the mid-1990s when the publisher of the Clarion, a monthly newspaper, asked him to write an article about African-American history in Evanston for Black History Month. “I didn’t think I was the right person to do it,” Robinson says. “And I assumed something comprehensive had already been written....

Baby Wants Candy–a tight troupe now famous for its improvised musicals–began about seven years ago as one of the dozens of ImprovOlympic teams formed every year. Somehow they’ve avoided the usual dissolution of such groups. More impressive, they’ve never experienced the artistic conservatism that paralyzes improvisers eager to “do it right”–and reap the reward, presumably, of a career in NYC or LA. Instead the troupe has become the very model of smart, physical, quick-thinking, and just plain silly long-form improvisers....