Lifeline Theatre’s deceptively simple fable about a deceptively simple Forrest Gump type who undertakes a hero’s journey and dramatically alters the lives of everyone around him has undergone a minor face-lift since its premiere almost three years ago. Pacing and flow have been subtly enhanced: the cast stay in character the entire time, for example, avoiding the expository time-outs that occasionally threw the original production off track. But Eric Lane Barnes’s script remains impossibly smart: even when he’s drawing upon complex archetypes from myths and fairy tales to chart his protagonist’s spiritual awakening, his simple messages–about fellowship, humility, and staying true to one’s beliefs–ring loud and clear....

Jandek Ready for the House Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jandek has never performed in public. He has never willingly given an interview, though a reporter from Texas Monthly tracked him down this summer: they chatted about allergies, gardening, and The Matrix, and he politely told her that he never wanted to be contacted in person about Jandek by anybody ever again. All his albums have a fuzzy photograph on the front cover–of a man, or part of a house, or some curtains, or some combination of these....

The decline of Western civilization accelerates for the duration of this shocking, hyperviolent video documentary (2002, 80 min.) about backyard wrestling clubs, which offer teenage losers the chance to be set on fire, dropped through sheets of plywood, hurled onto scattered thumbtacks, brained with fluorescent light tubes, and smacked with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. The kids involved are all idiots, though the ones dreaming of WWF stardom are even more pathetic than the simple headbangers looking for thrills....

By Sergio Barreto “I didn’t understand how he could say I was trespassing when I had paid full fare at Western,” says Kerman. “He told me to leave the platform and head to the nonpaid area [between the turnstiles and the street]. There’s no point in leafleting in the nonpaid area–people aren’t going to pick up a leaflet as they fumble for change and run to catch a train.” He refused to budge....

An Ocean of Samples Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mastoon’s uncle gave him a drum set for his third birthday, but by age six, infatuated with “heavy metal rock stars” on MTV, he’d picked up guitar, and spent most of the next decade taking private lessons and jamming with friends from school. By 12, inspired by the likes of King Crimson and Primus, he’d started his first band, Transmission, with reedist Stuart Bogie–now a member of the Brooklyn Afrobeat band Antibalas–and bassist Eric Perney, who plays on Tom Waits’s new album Alice....

Bad to Verse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sam Adams incident took place on the sweltering weekend of July 20 and 21; Mariottini, who was responsible for the art vendors, says crowds were thin and tempers short. The poetry stage, at Division and Wolcott, situated between booths selling art and two loud music stages, was equipped with its own speakers. Not all the vendors were thrilled....

In late October, on the New York uberblog Gawker, a young writer named Jessa Crispin became the latest target of author and critic Dale Peck’s famously vicious verbal abuse. Peck, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile, is perhaps best known for his starring role in an ongoing lit-world debate over harsh reviews, or “snark,” which many say began when he kicked off his June 2002 New Republic review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil with the fighting words “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation....

Friday 6/29 – Thursday 7/5 Artist H.C. Westermann, who died in 1981, was profoundly influenced by the four years he spent as a marine in World War II, when as a gunner on the carrier Enterprise he witnessed kamikaze attacks and many other horrors. After a tour of duty in Korea, he studied at the Art Institute and refined his method–combining traditional sculpting techniques with assemblage, design, and woodworking. An exhibit of some 90 prints and drawings, “See America First,” opens tonight at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S....

By Linda Lutton It’s not every day that you find someone offering you $25,000 to buy a brand-new loft in a near-to-downtown neighborhood that hasn’t been built yet. The line outside the sales office at University Village started forming at 4 AM on March 1, the day the development began accepting applications for the affordable housing program. For the most part it was a white-collar and white crowd, with a few blacks and Latinos....

This week Facets Cinematheque and the Chicago Humanities Festival present a retrospective of films by Korean director Im Kwon-taek, who will lecture on Saturday, November 9, as part of the festival. Like Japanese masters Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, Im has set his films in both the feudal past (Chihwaseon, his latest release) and the Westernized present (Gilsottum), yet even in some of his contemporary dramas the characters are spellbound by tradition and obsessed with a national identity that’s been eroded by waves of colonials....

As a longtime fan of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which begins with British code breakers during World War II, I’m a sucker for the romantic and paranoid atmosphere of this thriller on the same subject, adapted by Tom Stoppard from the novel by Robert Harris. Production designer John Beard has a field day, his period re-creation so rich you can taste it, and the fine cast includes Dougray Scott (who suggests a young James Mason), Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, and Saffron Burrows (though she’s chiefly used as a glamorous icon)....

The ever-present twang in Phil Wandscher’s gorgeously atmospheric guitar work (previously heard in Whiskeytown) seems to have relegated Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter to the alt-country section. What this Seattle act really makes, though, is mood music of the highest quality, a la Chicago’s Pinetop Seven. Sykes sings in a restrained, all-cried-out drawl, while the band creates woozy, slow-moving soundscapes that fit her vocals like a casket. Little lyrical interpretation is necessary here–thematically, the new Oh, My Girl (Barsuk) is nonstop darkness....

“The Freebop Band had its origins in New York in the fall of 1978 as part of the loft jazz scene,” trumpeter Malachi Thompson wrote in the notes for Freebop Now! (Delmark), issued five years ago on the 20th anniversary of the band’s founding. “However, the idea of Freebop had its roots in Chicago”–some ten years earlier, when Thompson fell under the influence of the AACM. He came to believe that, as Andrew Hill’s music had presaged in the mid-60s, his era’s ferocious thrust toward musical freedom needn’t obliterate the important jazz that preceded it....

MEDESKI, MARTIN & WOOD, 8 BOLD SOULS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Medeski, Martin & Wood’s moody, genre-bending take on long-form improvisation–trance-inducing grooves that mix jazz lines with postpunk rhythms, a touch of psychedelia, and occasional hip-hop scratching, all immersed in a gently shimmering bath of keyboard textures–is as close to a definition of “acid jazz” as we’re likely to get. The trio took a step back from the early-90s hip of their customary approach for last year’s Tonic (Blue Note)–a mostly acoustic reminder of their music’s postbop roots, the album came off as a pleasant 21st-century update on Ramsey Lewis’s trio of the 1950s–but they’ve returned to form with their new record, The Dropper....

Over barfing oscillators and old-school electronic squeals, this Providence duo blasts out panicky beats that pound into your pelvis with nary a flourish. Yeah, they sound a lot like Lightning Bolt–drummer Brian Chippendale is in both groups and he’s up to his usual tricks here, alternating between meathead grooves and outbursts that sound like he’s kicking his kit down the stairs while screaming like a nasal Harpy into a modified mouth mike....

[snip] “The Vatican has never really come to terms with evolution,” writes Paul Varnell in the Chicago Free Press (September 8). “To say genitals were ‘intended’ for procreation ignores the fact that genitals, like the rest of our bodies, evolved as they did because they were more efficient means of reproduction than other means. Nothing about their development in the random mutation and natural selection process of evolution requires or implies any ‘intention’–or precludes their use for other purposes....

The Paranormal Review, Side Project, at the Side Studio. Unusual phenomena are happening everywhere, and in an effort to educate the public the “Charles Flynn Society” has assembled a series of sketches, songs, and dramatic readings depicting “paranormal, psychic, and bizarre” events. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Side Project show, written by Erik Brogger, is silly but often entertaining as it looks at communicating with the dead, flying furniture, out-of-body experiences, and poltergeist visitations....

During last year’s edition of this 24-hour improvised marathon, T.J. Jagodowski reportedly capped off a burst of wild late-night improv by throwing cold cuts at his fellow performers backstage and passing out from exhaustion. At hour 22, Keegan-Michael Key started hallucinating but finished his set. Yet both jumped at the opportunity to repeat the feat this year. “Sleep deprivation does really weird things to you,” says Andy Cobb, a Second City E....

I am a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I thought I should bring this to your attention. I think I have settled the shower curtain question decisively. –Professor David Schmidt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Initially I was reluctant to tackle the problem with so many other world crises clamoring for my attention. But eventually I allowed that the phenomenon could be attributed to the Bernoulli effect, the well-known principle that explains how airplanes fly: as the velocity of a fluid increases, its lateral pressure decreases....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Regarding Ted Shen’s Critic’s Choice (September 5), we would like to correct the reference to “last season’s alarming drop in attendance.” Lyric Opera of Chicago did not experience a drop in attendance in its 2002-2003 season; in fact, the company sold 294,533 tickets to 86 performances, a slight increase over the 293,140 tickets sold to the 2001-’02 season....