Sunday Double Header at the Raven Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The downside is that year after year Chicago attracts hundreds of not very talented comic actors–misfits, neurotics, class clowns, and others who are more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha. When I studied at the Second City Conservatory several years ago, I was stunned at how many people had moved to Chicago to pursue improv and sketch writing....

Bears to Field Museum: Take a Walk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The operative rule was the one we all learned at the grade-school drinking fountain: the big guy goes first. The museum, like any sensible lightweight, got out of the way, and the Bears got their cash. In the rush of it all, they didn’t dwell on the fact that the road they’ll be putting in east of Lake Shore Drive, right where we spent $90 million fives years ago to get rid of a road, will make the museum’s west entrance–its only school-bus and handicap-accessible entrance–unusable....

Friday 2/1 – Thursday 2/7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 2 SATURDAY Want to know if we’re in for an early spring? Keepers at Brookfield Zoo will attempt to lure a groundhog named Cloudy out of her hole with a nutritionally correct carrot cake at 10:30 this morning inside the Children’s Zoo. The zoo is at 31st and First in Brookfield, and admission is $7 for adults, $3....

Going with someone who’s more than 16 years older or younger? According to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s “Research Bulletin” (March), the annual rate of homicides in Chicago from 1965 to 1996 among couples of the same age was 5.25 per 100,000 couples. When the woman was 16 or more years older than the man it was 21.41, and when the man was 16 or more years older than the woman it was 23....

Can you teach foundation officers new tricks? The journal of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Responsive Philanthropy, seems to have some doubts. An article in the fall issue reiterates findings of a 1997 study by the group since confirmed in a follow-up analysis: “Conservative foundations often work in a similar and well-coordinated fashion. For example, they often provide general operating support to their grantees, expecting no specific outcomes for their investment....

Rather than take the easy path through Latin-jazz territory–simple montuno grooves that emphasize brass and percussion, or familiar tunes done up with Latin accents–saxist David Sanchez keeps pushing back its boundaries. Instead of a trumpet or trombone, he features another saxophone in his elegant, compact sextet–the alto of Miguel Zenon, an inventive but restrained player who seems to channel Eric Dolphy through a modern Latin sensibilty. Their interplay electrifies Sanchez’s terrific 2001 offering, Travesia, as well as the earlier Melaza, both of which make a strong case for the vision of a true synthesis between Latin music and postbop improvisation....

Duke Robillard has been defying trends for decades. In 1967 the Rhode Island guitarist formed Roomful of Blues, a brawny, horn-heavy band that provided an antidote to the incense-addled Summer of Love blues-rock scene: instead of jamming indulgently on themes swiped from Chicago jukes, like many of the era’s more famous groups, Robillard and company leaned toward deft, economical arrangements of sophisticated Texas-California smooth blues. I saw Roomful accompany Muddy Waters in Connecticut in the mid-70s, a few years before Robillard struck out on his own, and even in that setting the band stuck to its uptown sound, burnishing Waters’s gritty baritone roar with rich horn textures and goosing his primal Chicago shuffle with a punchy swing....

This has been a big year for Family Tree. Until recently All Natural was the only act in the local hip-hop crew to have released an album, but now their All Natural Inc. label has issued two full-length debuts, by Iomos Marad and Daily Plannet. Marad is one of the crew’s newest members, but he sounds like an old soul on Deep Rooted, waxing poetic about Chicago, hip-hop fundamentals, and life’s inherent moral complexity–on “Anotha Late Night,” which features backup cooing by nu-soul singer Tanya Reed and extended improvisations by jazz flutist Nicole Mitchell, he speculates somberly about the lives people lead behind closed doors....

This group has only played a couple concerts over the past two years, but its roots stretch all the way back to 1990, when Buenos Aires-born clarinet and saxophone player Guillermo Gregorio first encountered German trumpeter Axel Dorner in Thomas Lehn’s jazz ensemble. During the hours of impromptu duets they played in each other’s apartments, they discovered a shared talent for improvising with the subtlety of chamber musicians. The quartet, convened by local bassist Josh Abrams for a February 2000 concert at Lula Cafe, amplifies that dynamic; its free play sounds as deliberate as Gregorio’s and Abrams’s compositions, and a cool demeanor governs its microtonally shaded melodies and gently swinging rhythms....

A lovely piece of work, this 1993 adaptation of A.E. Hotchner’s childhood memoirs takes place in Saint Louis in 1933, roughly three decades before director Steven Soderbergh was born, but its portrait of life during the Depression is pungent and wholly believable. Soderbergh gets an uncommonly good lead performance out of Jesse Bradford as the resourceful 12-year-old hero, who’s living in a seedy hotel and steadily losing the members of his family: his kid brother (Cameron Boyd) is shipped off to an uncle and his mother (Lisa Eichhorn) to a sanitarium, while his German father (Jeroen Krabbe) tries to make some money as a door-to-door watch salesman....

Songwriter Mark Nutter’s hip humor and mastery of musical genres established him as one of off-Loop theater’s top talents, a comic tunesmith in the tradition of Tom Lehrer and Abe Burrows. In the late 80s and early 90s his deft melodies and daffy lyrics distinguished the hit musical Wild Men!, a popular spoof of the men’s movement, as well as a string of brilliant revues from the sketch-comedy troupe Friends of the Zoo....

“North American Indians have no tradition of silver mining,” notes Mitchell Museum of the American Indian director Janice Klein. Everything on display in “Silver,” the museum’s new exhibit of 300 years of Native American silver craftsmanship, was “made from sheet metal obtained from non-Natives or recycled from coins, medals, or other objects.” Beginning with 18th-century ornaments made by Europeans or colonials and given to tribal leaders as gifts, the show traces the development of Native American silver work in the northeast, Great Plains, and southwest, and includes many early pieces made of a copper, nickel, and zinc alloy called trade silver....

Getting sucked into the whirlwind of furious misery created by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds has long required a certain suspension of disbelief–the darkness tends to be so melodramatic and all-encompassing that Cave can come off as a caricature of the tortured artist. I could never bring myself to join the ride until Cave’s most recent album, Nocturama (Anti/Mute). On gorgeous ballads like “Wonderful Life” and “He Wants You,” his dolorous moan glistens with an emotional coloration you might almost call soul....

Richard Neutra, the California architect often credited with introducing the International style to American architecture, only spent a couple years in the midwest, but they were formative ones. He was fascinated by the innovative commercial architecture of the Chicago School, and worked briefly for Holabird and Roche, the Chicago firm responsible for the first steel-skeleton skyscraper. But he was also obsessed with Frank Lloyd Wright–he named his firstborn son Frank–and put in some time with the Prairie School visionary at his Taliesin studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin....

This self-styled “convergence of Chicago artists,” running through April 26, is presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Boasting Chicago first lady Maggie Daley as honorary chair, the avant-garde festival features more than 100 multidisciplinary presentations. All shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport; the sprawling arts complex is a hive of activity, with simultaneous performances and installations in its four studio theaters as well as lounges, hallways, stairwells, and other spaces....

Elliott Carter’s five string quartets, composed over a span of 45 years, are often grouped with those of Bartok and Shostakovich as foremost examples of the form in the 20th century, but I don’t entirely agree with that assessment. There’s much to admire in them–intellectual vigor, experimental touches, structural tightness, deeply expressive moments. But the works aren’t all of the same quality: the first three display distinctive instrumental personalities and emotional variety, but the last two (dating from 1986 and 1995) betray an ossification of imagination, as though American art music’s grand old man found himself stuck in the groove of the postwar modernism he’d helped fashion....

This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists this year include John Starrs, Julie Caffey, Michael K. Meyers, Michael Martin, Free Street’s MadJoy Theatrics, and other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 13th annual Rhino Fest runs through October 13....

Most of the Malian music we get to hear in this country bears Western trappings–the drum machines in Issa Bagayogo’s songs, for example, or the funk bass that undergirds Oumou Sangare’s circular grooves. Rokia Traore’s three remarkable albums are no exception, but their subtlety and almost spartan restraint makes their departures from tradition sound radical. On the new Bowmboi (Nonesuch) the gorgeous, intimate arrangements suit her delicate singing perfectly: rather than use the customary call-and-response chants of Malian music, she overdubs layers of her own voice to create precise, radiant harmonies, and her gauzy acoustic guitar is rarely accompanied by much more than twangy n’goni and skeletal percussion....

I’m in a crisis. I am dating a man who is kind, considerate, and mature, and sexy to boot. The only problem is that he’s had a vasectomy, and I want kids–I want kids real bad. He says he would consider reversing his little nip and tuck, but it’s not as if he’s made any doctor’s appointments. Do I follow my head or my heart? So he told you he would “consider” reversing his little nip and tuck?...

SEAN BERGIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amsterdam-based saxophonist Sean Bergin has led his 11-piece MOB (that stands for “My Own Band”) on and off for nearly 15 years, and its music has a delightful, ragged ebullience that makes it sound like a group of old friends getting together and taking apart some favorite tunes. Many of the MOB’s members actually are longtime colleagues–drummer Han Bennink, saxophonist Tobias Delius, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, bassist Ernst Glerum, trumpeter Eric Boeren, and cellist Tristan Honsinger, among others–but on the band’s third and most recent album, 1999’s Copy Cat (Bvhaast), the tunes are all Bergin originals, chockablock with multilinear activity but still loose and relaxed....