This is my little piece of Virginia in Chicago. It’s a dark smoky bar with a house band that plays kinda kitschy cover songs, including Lynyrd Skynyrd. It reminds me of home–not that I’m a Skynyrd fan. There’s not a lot to do in Virginia. I’m originally from a coal mining community that’s pretty economically depressed, so lots of people have nothing better to do than to take peanut butter and set it on the tin roof of their house in the holler–that’s the hollow if you’re not from southwest Virginia....

It was drizzling on November 1 as I wandered through the Loop in a northwesterly direction. I couldn’t decide how to get home. Should I take the train, catch a bus, grab a cab? A Sun-Times reporter wanted to know whether I thought we still had a chance to save the house. In the story that ran the next day I was quoted saying, “This house means a lot to this neighborhood, and if we’re going to discount the fact that the house is important to a neighborhood, then we discount the fact that Chicago is a city of neighborhoods....

Man Hunt With Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders, John Carradine, Roddy McDowall, Heather Thatcher, and Frederick Worlock. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I only half agree with Gunning. He has a point when it comes to Man Hunt’s simplistic, tub-thumping conclusion, yet this finale provides a precise and logical bookend to what might well be the most hair-raising opening of any Lang picture–which is equally propagandistic, though I wouldn’t trade it for anything that wasn’t....

Lyric Opera’s annual freebie in the park, which features most of the leads from its first two or three productions of the coming season, is one of the best bargains in town. The roster includes Lyric veterans as well as newcomers, and this year about half of the numbers are perennial favorites. Bass baritone Samuel Ramey, who’s such a fixture his craggy visage should be carved into the Lyric proscenium, returns to sing “Kagda Zhe” from Prokofiev’s War and Peace, a piece from Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers, a trio from Gounod’s Faust, and a duet from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov....

Folksingers Tom Paxton and Anne Hills have performed together on and off since the early 80s, but until Under American Skies, released last year on Appleseed, they’d never cut an album as a duo. Skies is dominated by left-leaning populist anthems, some borrowed from the “folk movement” of the 60s and 70s and others original (either Paxton or Hills had a hand in eight of the fourteen songs); the duo’s singing is supported by airy fingerpicking, muted piano arpeggios, and occasional rhythm-of-the-road brush percussion....

Slampappy Marc Smith was in his element at the weekly Uptown Poetry Slam last Sunday night at the Green Mill. All blazing eyes and fervor, he wrangled the standing-room-only crowd all the way back to “slime corner”–what Green Mill regulars call the place near the front door, where a wall-mounted TV competes with the live performance, flashing and droning while the poets spill their guts in three-minute segments. As far as Smith’s concerned, television is the monster that inspired him to create the slam, and his dread of it is one of the things that separates him from some of his disciples–a gulf that a few years back had him walking away from the national organization he created, Poetry Slam Inc....

Kudos to Harold Henderson for illustrating the many follies and shortcomings of Chicago Metropolis 2020 [January 25]. Metropolis 2020, and the entire “Smart Growth” movement for that matter, don’t stand up to even the slightest intellectual scrutiny. I am a degreed urban planner and a career land developer. As I’ve seen this movement practically applied, it has succeeded in doing nothing more than drive up the cost of housing in the Chicago area, not to mention creating the urban sprawl which it sought to prevent....

One cold day last spring, four young men in winter jackets sat at a picnic table in a Milwaukee park, eating Dunkin Donuts and trying to form a master plan. They wrote down a few words: “handmade,” “recycled,” “functional.” They threw around some guiding principles: make stuff for cheap and sell it for cheap, reach a bigger audience, have a purpose. “We didn’t know exactly what we were doing,” says Scott Reeder, who was at the picnic table that afternoon, “but we knew we wanted to do something....

Bob Pierron has never led a particularly quiet life. A jeweler for 30 years, he also ran jewelry classes, exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, produced sculptures in wood–including an abstract series for the Woodwork Corporation of America–and made tiny masks out of silver and gold wire, which he sold out of his gallery, Studio 23, on Lincoln Avenue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the past 17 years, Pierron has found new uses for Tupperware lids, cutting boards, plastic Easter eggs, wheels from toy trucks, wooden bowls, drawer pulls, furniture legs, and picture frames....

AUTECHRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sean Booth and Rob Brown, the Mancunian duo known since 1992 as Autechre, have produced some of the most challenging and influential electronic music of the last decade. Their early releases on Warp Records spun elements of Miami bass, Afrika Bambaataa, and Mantronix into an abstract strain of robot dance music, but by 1994, when they released Amber, they had submersed all points of reference in a dense landscape of shifting rhythms and moody but simple synthesizer melodies....

The world of the Harlem Renaissance becomes an emotional lifeline for a troubled young college student (Anthony Mackie) in this smart and passionate debut feature by Rodney Evans. As a gay black man, the hero feels doubly isolated: macho classmates in his African-American studies course consider him a disgrace to the race, while his uncertain white lover may covet him for his skin color. But a window opens when he meets an elderly homeless man (Roger Robinson) who turns out to be poet and artist Bruce Nugent, once a colleague of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston....

Lots of people seem to think that dance, especially modern dance, is esoteric. And how often does a choreographer get onstage and explain what she’s trying to do? So here’s your chance to get the skinny from lots of Chicago dance makers at once. “Choreography Now,” part of the city-sponsored Let’s Dance weekend, features three different programs, all free, in which some 18 choreographers give lecture-demonstrations, then join in roundtable discussions of their work....

Lawyers notice the creeping coup. From an American Bar Association task-force preliminary report issued August 8 on the treatment of U.S. citizens detained as “enemy combatants” (www.abanet.org/leadership/enemy_combatants.pdf): “The Administration has not yet attempted to explain what procedures it believes should be required to assure that detentions are consistent with Due Process, American tradition, and international law. It cannot be sufficient for a President to claim that the Executive can detain whomever it wants, whenever it wants, for as long as it wants as long as the detention bears some relationship to a terrorist act once committed by somebody against the United States....

Stop asking questions! “When reading the professional literature, [12-year teaching veteran Ronelle] Robinson stumbled upon a surprising fact: Asking students questions was one of the least effective ways to help them understand their reading,” writes Elizabeth Duffrin in Catalyst Chicago (May). “Now she has a new routine that gets all students talking. On a morning in early April, Robinson sits cross-legged in a chair, holding up an illustrated story. Students sit before her, each beside a partner....

Downsized Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Kostiners, who met when Anne took Lewis’s photography class at Columbia College, have been buying old warehouse buildings in the West Loop and turning them into apartments since the 1980s. They bought the building at 312 N. May in the early 90s. It had been vacant for 15 years and had a cavernous boiler room in the basement that they decided to turn into a gallery....

About Face Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art team up for a showcase of new gay- and lesbian-themed works in various stages of development. Offerings range from workshop productions to readings and discussions, as shown in the schedule below. The festival runs through March 16 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Ticket prices for individual programs are given below; “all-access” passes cost $35. For more information and reservations, call 312-397-4010....

The Plush album Fed is Chicago indie rock’s Smile, its Tusk, its Loveless, with singer-songwriter Liam Hayes standing in for Brian Wilson, Lindsey Buckingham, and Kevin Shields. It took Hayes almost three years to record and mix Fed, and along the way he not only spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on studios, engineers, and dozens of guest musicians but stretched many of his personal and professional relationships to the breaking point....

About seven months ago the Park District quietly slapped a fee on lap swimming at the city’s indoor pools. Officials figured that since it was essentially a tax on yuppies–who else swims laps?–they would pay it without much complaining. Over the years he and his roommate, Sam Marts, became regular morning swimmers at Eckhart Park, at 1330 W. Chicago–funky digs, to say the least. There are burned-out lightbulbs in the locker rooms, broken lockers, lousy water pressure in the shower, and icy water in the pool....

ChicagoImprovAnarchy can’t be accused of exercising undue advantage over its audiences in this clever fully improvised murder mystery. Though, as usual, we must guess whodunit, so must the troupe’s detective–TV pitchman Billy Mays in the current version of the show (previously it was Columbo). After our suggestions have determined the characters, we vote on the victim, who then chooses his/her killer and tells the cast–except for the sleuth–who it is. We too are kept in the dark, and the murderer’s name is sealed in an envelope entrusted to a spectator....

They serve Indian-spiced Chinese food here–it’s my father’s favorite. We invited Carl and Mel to join us, but they have yet to call. Let me explain: A lady friend and I headed to Chinatown for dinner one night. I don’t know the name of the restaurant where we ended up, but it has a big Buddha in the window. A very small place, very quaint, with not very many people. We sat down and gazed across the room and there they were, the grandfathers of comedy–Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, having a quiet meal with friends....