The Streets Where He Lives Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Boys Town is getting smaller and smaller,” Casner says. “It used to be from Diversey up to Grace, now it’s Belmont to Grace, and it just sort of dies out between Halsted and Clark. There’s a fight for it, and it revolves around the gay bars and businesses in the area. The gays moved in years ago when it wasn’t such a great neighborhood, redeveloped it, as they often do, but didn’t invest in ownership....

Rock, Pop, etc. ANCIENT GREEKS Free concert. Fri 7/20, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-7094. ATMOSPHERIC AUDIO CHAIR Free concert with Miles Maeda, Josh Werner, Mystic Bill, and Tom Pazen. Sat 7/21, 2-6 PM, Burnham Park, 31st and Lake Shore Dr. 773-251-0774. T BONE BURNETT with Steppenwolf Ensemble member Martha Plimpton and crime writer James Ellroy as part of the “Traffic” series. Mon 7/23, 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N....

Who Will Buy These Memories? Radio legend Ed Schwartz is in anguish. He wrote former radio-TV critic Gary Deeb to denounce him as “a gross failure and an ethical disgrace.” When Deeb didn’t reply, Schwartz posted the letter on Jim Romenesko’s popular media Web site–the national hot stove of gossiping journalists. And this week in the column he writes for the Lerner papers, Schwartz says that what Deeb did “is more than a sellout, it is a moral burnout....

CHICAGO RHYTHM & BLUES KINGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Mellow Fellows–the brawny, horn-heavy band that backed singer Larry “Big Twist” Nolan for nearly two decades–carried on under that name for a while after Nolan died in 1990, then in ’93 changed their name to the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings. Unsurprisingly, the six core members of the Kings–and a handful of frequent guests, including Chicago sax legend Gene “Daddy G” Barge–play a free-swinging soul blues very similar to the Mellow Fellows’ specialty, augmented in the past few years by increasingly aggressive funk rhythms and sophisticated, bebop-tinged melodies....

The price and the results. From 1995 to 2000, unions increased their payments to the AFL-CIO by 25 percent, reports David Moberg in the Nation (September 3). The payoff may have been more in politics than in organizing: “While the number of nonunion voters shrank, labor boosted the union household share of the vote steadily from 19 percent of the electorate in 1992 to 23 percent in 1996 and 26 percent in 2000…....

Scholars are still arguing about Dmitry Shostakovich’s political beliefs. Some claim he was a communist but say it’s a mistake to hear everything he wrote in terms of that; others claim he was a closet dissident who criticized the regime using an ironic musical code. The truth is probably somewhere in between. This week the Civic Orchestra, the training orchestra of the CSO, is playing one of the works that’s at the center of this controversy, his Symphony no....

Dewey Redman’s usually associated with jazz’s left wing: As Ornette Coleman’s foil from 1967 to 1974, the tenor saxophonist developed a personal take on his boss’s happy ramblin’ alto sound. (His timbre was darker and woollier, befitting his bigger horn, but still nimble enough to track Coleman’s sudden zigzags.) He also co-led a 1999 release, Momentum Space (Verve), with fellow progressives Cecil Taylor and Elvin Jones. But if liberal cred was all Redman had going for him, it’s not bloody likely he’d be booked this week into Chicago’s bebop temple, the Jazz Showcase....

Though rehashing the past is for defeatists, I kind of wish Enon would just spaz out like they did in the good ol’ days. Toko Yasuda, who sings a lot more than she used to, is a declawed kitty cat, so breathily cutesy as to be embarrassing sometimes, and former Brainiac keyboardist John Schmersal tinkles where he used to stab. But what they’ve lost in raw charm they make up for in elegance....

The headline on the front page of the Tribune read: “Police arrest 2 in Roscetti Case.” New men had been charged with the October 1986 rape and murder of 23-year-old Lori Roscetti. The four men previously convicted and imprisoned for the crime had been exonerated in December, but not before spending over a decade in prison. It was a landmark that perhaps many noticed but only a few paused to appreciate....

Hedwig Dances artistic director Jan Bartoszek offers a smorgasbord of five new dances by five choreographers on the troupe’s spring program–and returns to the stage herself in company member Victor Alexander’s Nunca Tarde (“Never Late”), a piece about a choreographer’s journey from youth to maturity. Sometimes holding out her hand to people who don’t see her, sometimes lovingly shadowed by another dancer who reaches longingly after her when she walks away, Bartoszek seems to alternate between being invisible and exerting a subtle, almost imperceptible influence....

Round-eyed and spindly-limbed, the black-and-white freehand figures that populate Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical comics ooze childlike wonder even when they’re having sex, smoking pot, or analyzing their problems with sex and pot. In his first book, Clumsy (2002), Brown charted the hopeful excitement and depressing decay of his long-distance relationship with a girl named Theresa. His new one, Unlikely (informally subtitled “Or How I Lost My Virginity”), follows a similar trajectory: he meets a girl, they fall in love, they’re magically happy, and then it all falls to shit....

“Wasn’t this supposed to be a musical?” asks Billy Joel in his song “Where’s the Orchestra?” Though marketed as a musical, director-choreographer Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out is a two-act narrative ballet performed to live renditions of some two dozen of Joel’s pop hits. That makes it easy to pick at–“too Broadway,” “too dancey,” “too rock ‘n’ roll,” yada yada yada. But Tharp is surely used to such kvetching by now; her career has been all about melding genres and breaking down barriers....

I’m here tonight with my girlfriend Bernardine. We like to come here after a nice meal. One of the most delicious meals we’ve had was at Charlie Trotter’s. Bernardine is from Sydney, Australia, and she’s been to Tetsuya’s, a restaurant there that is owned by apparently Charlie Trotter’s best friend. When Bernardine called Trotter’s she mentioned that she’d been to Tetsuya’s and the reservation was made for two or three evenings later, which is rare–it usually takes a while to get a table....

Before the Food Network, before salsa could be found in diners and Krispy Kremes north of the Mason-Dixon Line, before Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain, Big Night and Babette’s Feast, nouvelle cuisine and organic produce, the Silver Palate and the Moosewood, and long, long before America discovered it wasn’t supposed to like Wonder Bread, writer M.F.K. Fisher published her first book praising the pleasures of the table. Before any of us lived in an America that took food seriously, Fisher wrote fierce, brilliant prose about the dignity and importance of human hungers....

BILLY NAYER SHOW 1/7, EMPTY BOTTLE This is indeed just as much a show as a band: since 1989, songwriter and performer Cory McAbee has been building a cult following on the coasts with films, music, and sometimes a combination of the two. When fronting the Billy Nayer Show band–longtime partner Bobby Lurie on drums, Michael Silverman on bass, James Beaudreau on guitar, himself on autoharp and ukulele–he’s been compared to Kurt Weill, Bob Dylan, Harry Nilsson, Frank Zappa, and Penn Jillette; his “adult fables” on last year’s album, The Villain That Love Built, include “Mr....

Combine the sharp news parody of The Daily Show with the jokey shtick of any late-night interview program and you get something like Second City E.T.C.’s Talk Show, a successful mix of social and political commentary and comedy. T.J. Shanoff and Peter Grosz host this melange of improvised material–including set pieces like “Good Week, Bad Week,” where they riff on news events–and conversation with three “local experts,” who change with each performance....

The W Hotel Lakeshore–an uber-hip remake of the old Days Inn–hasn’t drawn near the crowds it expected at either its bar or its restaurant, WAVE, despite having the best lakefront seating in town. It could be because of the way the check-in area flows seamlessly into the bar and restaurant, making them easy to mistake as just part of the lobby. Or maybe it’s the abstract wavy video looping on a large screen in the center of the dining room, which doesn’t do anything for the appetite....

Last week the New York Times published an article on Sara J. Rudolph, a survivor of the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls, one of them Rudolph’s older sister. While the motive behind the bombing was racist, Rudolph said she would never understand how “someone could be that cold.” Now 50, she jumps at loud noises. She said, “There will never be any closure for me....

Mary and Joseph dance instead of speak, the heavenly host wear African garb, and the good news about Jesus is told in gospel songs in Mike Malone’s adaptation of Langston Hughes’s 1961 work. Thrillingly sung and efficiently danced in this Congo Square Theatre Company production, the two-act piece consists of Hughes’s folksy retelling of the Nativity, then Malone’s history of gospel music. What links the two halves is their mix of jocularity and reverence....

Nation’s supply of nerds threatened. “Human life always has been a struggle against the limits of nature,” writes University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum in the New Republic (December 4), reviewing the recent book From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. She worries that parents-to-be may use genetic technologies to seek the superficial best for their progeny. “We know that many of the most creative and valuable human lives are the result of particularly difficult struggles that forced people out of the mainstream and made them the targets of contempt and abuse....