Developer Jim Gramata was converting a Lincoln Square two-flat into a single-family home in May 2000 when somebody scrawled “No yuppies” on the front porch. Antigentrification comments were spray painted on the property four more times that year, the words bigger and bolder each time. In May 2001 police charged a neighborhood youth, 18-year-old Sean Barnes, with eight counts of criminal damage to property, including spray painting a for-sale sign at Bell and Cullom as well as Gramata’s and Johnson’s houses....

Noon, Daley Center NATIVE AMERICAN EQUINOX See below. Chicago guitarist Fareed Haque–the son of a Pakistani father and a Chilean mother–has explored fusions of jazz, pop, and funk. But on his forthcoming album Macedonian Blues (Proteus Entertainment) he and Goran Ivanovic, a classically trained Croatian guitarist who now lives in Naperville, transcribe a series of Macedonian folk tunes, interpreting them with a mix of jazzy sonorities, flamenco fire, and classical detail....

Woyzeck The citizens of Leipzig looked with similar horror on Johann Woyzeck. On June 21, 1821, the 40-year-old former soldier and occasional barber and bookbinder heard a voice telling him to stab a woman who’d been his lover. After buying a new handle for his knife, he wandered about the city, almost throwing the weapon into a nearby pond but thinking better of it. He spotted the woman by chance on the street, forced her to let him walk her home, then stabbed her seven times....

Marty Garcia is immortalizing 1,000 people in Chicago one at a time, in oil pastel on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of bristol board. “Every Sunday I call 20 to 40 people to schedule as many as ten in one week,” says Garcia, 26, who fits his hour-and-a-half sessions between shifts as a part-time stock clerk at Dominick’s. “I’ve asked customers,” he says, and he sneaked in one sitting with a coworker in the store’s break room....

Paloma, my brother’s wife, stomps her way down the aisles of the ShopTime Grocery, smoking a cigarette. “Your brother is an ugly man, Tanya,” she says. “Even his cock. It is very ugly. A short, fleshy, bald thing.” She is Walter Cronkite reporting the short, fleshy, bald news. But if she’s telling me, she’s already told Eddie. I like Paloma. You know where you stand with her. I hurry after her and almost crash the cart into Mrs....

Gag me. Under the USA Patriot Act, booksellers and librarians must allow the FBI to investigate the reading choices of citizens and noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities–and they’re not allowed to disclose that any such investigation has taken place. So reports Nat Hentoff in Editor & Publisher (April 1); he adds that at least three such secret investigations have already taken place. “The ABFFE [American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression] and ALA [American Library Association] have told their members that they are entitled to lawyers once raids on their records have happened....

File 13 Stays Open Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sinkovich’s experience with Epitonic had convinced him of the need for more independent imprints. “It seemed like there were a lot of great bands that hadn’t been able to find labels, and people often suggested that I should start [one],” he says, but he’d been discouraged by financial and logistical hurdles. File 13 already had a catalog with dozens of titles and a distribution deal with Sacramento’s prestigious Mordam Records, a company so democratic in spirit it consults with each label that it works with before adding a new one....

Minority Report With Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow, Lois Smith, Peter Stormare, Tim Blake Nelson, Steve Harris, and Kathryn Morris. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The parallel with porn is more apparent when one reflects that most futuristic, gadget-ridden science fiction is selling something that has more to do with the present than the future: “investing in the future” is mostly about buying now, and the hype about “experiencing the future” through the latest technology is an invitation to dig into our pockets today....

Fishtank It’s tempting to dismiss Scott as the lesser half of the brain trust behind Half Cocked Productions. Arik Martin is easily the more prolific of the two playwrights and a much better craftsman. While Grand Guignol horror is the company’s stock-in-trade, Martin tends to exercise a modicum of restraint: every action serves a purpose, and every moment is imbued with a deeper meaning. Martin favors structure. He’ll hand you a glass of water to swallow his bitter little pills while Scott would rather straddle you, pry your jaws open with a rusty crowbar, and choke you with his....

I work here on weekends. One night I had just gotten off, at 4 AM, when I walked into my apartment to find a man lying on the couch. I started screaming, “What the hell are you doing in my house?” But he was passed out, obviously drunk. I went into the kitchen and picked up a butcher knife before I headed into my bedroom–and there I found another guy passed out....

Several years ago I was here when it was the Cairo nightclub for a friend’s birthday. I had worked here once part-time, so the evening was filled with a lot of free drinks. I had way too many. My friend Jen volunteered to drive me home, and I woke up the next afternoon fully dressed on my bed without remembering a thing. A friend told me what happened, according to what Jen had told her: Jen could not find my keys, so the doorman let me into my apartment; but first we went into the wrong apartment!...

Mannheim Steamroller Christmas: A Night Like No Other Well, technically it was far from morning, and come to think of it I’d been up for a while. More accurately, it came during one of those first stabs at thought you take on a day whose noon ablutions consist of peeling your eyelids up over your contact lenses and scraping a fellow reveler off your floor so you can argue over which restaurants have coffee and a smoking room....

Blending Indian religious art and popular culture, Ravinder Reddy creates sculptures the New York Times has called “kitsch for the ages.” In his first one-person show here, he uses industrial paint on fiberglass to evoke some of the paradoxes of this blending: his six large female heads are imposing, humorous, cheerful–and a bit frightening. Some also echo ancient Egyptian sculpture, and all have a sphinxlike impenetrability. Lakshmi Devi, painted gold, reveals a hint of a smile; the back of her head is covered with a fiberglass rendering of elaborately decorated fabric held in place by netting....

I have a recurring fantasy about having a threesome with my husband and his brother. I’m not interested in other men, and I’m not interested in my in-law without my spouse’s involvement. So how do I bring this up? Or will the aftermath of even asking be too weird to live with? –Obsessed With My Brother-in-Law Hubby: (Half listening.) “Really?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wife: “Well, in it I was having a three-way with you and your brother!...

Thank you for printing a column on cunnilingus. Your straight female readers appreciate it! And while I understand your distaste at having to read so many E-mails about the practice, I feel compelled to respond. After printing lots of contradictory advice from women about cunnilingus, you told straight men simply to ask the women they’re sleeping with what they like. But, Dan, not all of us can actually tell a guy what we like....

This two-month showcase of Chicago sketch comedy features more than 30 local ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints, with two to four groups sharing the bill at each performance. Participating troupes include Annoyance Productions, Weaselicious, Brick, Salsation!, GayCo Productions, the WNEP Theater, and many others; the festival is presented by Posin’ at the Bar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sketch Fest runs through March 2 at the Theatre Building, 1225 W....

The last few times I went out to see the White Sox this season I skipped the press box in favor of the grandstand–in part because at that point the fans were more interesting than the players. In Chicago, only fans of the Blackhawks have suffered worse at the hands of ownership, but by now there are so few true hockey fans in town the comparison’s almost academic. Sox fans smoke a (very) little bit less than their hockey counterparts and they generally tell better jokes; for all the bitterness they share with Hawks fans they’re a hardier, more enduring breed....

Last year and the year before, this event organized by Paula Frasz and Dmitri Peskov was billed as a mentored show, with some choreographers riding herd on other, less experienced artists. Now it’s evolved into a concert in which the choreographers give one another feedback but there’s no one-on-one teacher-student interaction. And watching the youthful Peskov’s Ophelia, Ophelia, I could see that he’s a choreographer in no particular need of help: he has a vision and a fine sense for repetition and variation....

Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield’s bawdy 1987 deconstruction of the Shakespeare canon remains comic gold. And in this A Crew of Patches Theatre Company production, David Blixt, Benjamin Montague, and Scott Leon Smith get drunk on the script’s intoxicating rhythms. But here the redraft of Othello as a hip-hop musical devolves into blackface–the actors wear hood ornaments and Rasta wigs–and an inhibited crowd at the show I attended meant that the audience-participation segment (basically the entire second act) floundered....

Lately I’ve been hearing that the difference between the haves and have-nots in the U.S. has been increasing, and that unequal distribution of incomes has been approaching that of the Gilded Age. Is this literally true? While I understand that Bill Gates and corporate CEOs and such are taking home some serious cash, are we really seeing a return to the era of the robber barons, when a tiny percentage of the population controlled a huge chunk of the national wealth?...