Last February members of the Rogers Park Community Action Network saw an article in Loyola’s student newspaper, the Phoenix, about a proposed tax increment financing zone for the area surrounding the university, and their blood began to boil. For several years members of RPCAN, a community organization that fights for affordable housing and tenants’ rights, had worried that someone would try to put a TIF in the neighborhood, and now someone was trying to....

Plenty of Irish writers, from James Joyce to Brendan Behan, have turned their miserable childhoods into great literature–or at least popular prose. But few have succeeded so well as the McCourt brothers, Frank and Malachy, who’ve told and retold the same stories in many different media. Malachy was the first to become a celebrity of sorts, delivering his funny autobiographical reminiscences on the Jack Parr, Dick Cavett, and Merv Griffin shows in the 60s and 70s....

Last year Patrick McCarthy and a couple of pals were playing around with electric motors, attaching pens and markers to them to see what they’d create on paper. Says McCarthy, “One of us said, ‘How about having a gallery show with these machines? We’ll let them draw and paint and stuff and then we’ll auction off the work.’ We all went ha, ha, ha. And then we went and did it....

Angola’s Jose Adelino Barcelo de Carvalho first achieved fame as a record-breaking track star on Portugal’s national team. But while he was representing his country’s colonizers athletically, he was also in discreet contact with various liberation organizations. When the Portuguese secret police, PIDE, identified him by his activist pseudonym, Bonga, in the early 70s, he fled to Rotterdam. He’d already led a band that celebrated Angolan identity back at home, but exile honed his political edge, and Bonga’s debut, Angola 72, became something of a manifesto....

Steven Young’s lame Wisconsin jokes are barely held together by his plots, one about an ice-fishing championship and the other about a young man being pursued by a relentless federal student loan officer (played by Kate DeVore with a brilliance that recalls Fargo). One of the fishing competitors is dead–and the play is equally inert. The milieu’s other denizens–a brain-damaged hockey player, a hooker with a heart of gold, a flatulent sheriff, a born-again Christian–are the proverbial characters in search of an author, or at least a reason for being....

If you can’t get married, be sure to adopt your kid. “When a married couple has a child together, both parents automatically have a legal parent-child relationship with the child,” writes Tiffany Palmer in the American Bar Association’s Human Rights (Summer). “Because same-sex couples cannot currently marry, this automatic legal relationship is not available, and, in most situations when a same-sex couple has a child together, only one parent has a legal relationship to the child....

For the past seven months two veteran Chicago actors, Kate Fry and Ned Noyes, have been watching a group of south-side teenagers act onstage at Phillips High School, a poor, predominantly black school on 39th Street. Fry and Noyes, who are both in Court Theatre’s current production of My Fair Lady, are part of the Hyde Park theater’s attempt to address what almost everyone agrees is a deplorable situation: there are no theater classes at most Chicago public schools, and despite Mayor Daley’s repeated vow to promote reading, many public school students will go from kindergarten through high school without reading a classic play, much less acting in or seeing one....

SOMETHING CLOUDY, SOMETHING CLEAR, 27 WAGONS FULL OF COTTON, and A TRIPLE SHOT OF WILLIAMS, Bailiwick Repertory. When a Tennessee Williams play isn’t done often, there’s a reason. Bailiwick’s three-show Williams festival stands as unfortunate proof of that. But one production suggests that these plays might just be waiting for the right interpreter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, produced in conjunction with the Foreground Theater Company....

Hype is an honest critic’s worst enemy. I mean, what could I possibly write about the Strokes’ new Room on Fire (RCA) that would ring true? If I praise them for their ingenious hooks, you’ll dismiss me as a dupe, another cog in the promotional machine; if I criticize them as chilly formalists, you’ll lump me in with the knee-jerking backlashers. Contrary to widely circulated claims, the band’s 2001 debut Is This It didn’t “save rock” for or from anything or anyone–it was just a great power-pop record snazzed up with carefully selected retro fashion accessories....

The Scaffold Project, Curious Theatre Branch, at the Lunar Cabaret. The three writers in this year’s program of new works all show promise, especially in their skill with language, and the stagings tend to improve the material. But only writer-performer Leo Asuncion has really got it going on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Degenerate, handily directed by Bryn Magnus, is an intensely physical, stylishly oblique monologue that’s both riveting and ridiculous from beginning to startlingly moving coda....

The Wrong Sort of Poet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Howard Austin was a Springfield resident, an accountant, a man of faith, and a Democrat who was known for an unusual facility. He could sit all evening at an event–say, a political fund-raiser–listen to the after-dinner speeches, then get up and deliver a lengthy poem recapping the proceedings and often making fun of them....

Rock, Pop, etc. THOMAS CHRISTENSEN plays piano to accompany Oscar Micheaux’s film Within Our Gates. Sun 1/6, 7 PM, Max Palevsky Cinema, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th. 773-702-8359 or 773-702-7999. PATCHOULI Free in-store performance. Fri 1/11, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 15160 S. La Grange, Orland Park. 708-460-7566. BEAT KITCHEN 2100 W. Belmont: Bar and restaurant with music after 9:30 PM, later on weekends. Fri 1/4, the Bomb, Returnables, Zero to Nine, Deans....

Dutch reedist Ab Baars knows how to play the sly games that his country’s senior jazzmen–especially Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink–have made a stock-in-trade. As a longtime member of Mengelberg’s ICP Orchestra he’s developed an instinctual ability to turn on a dime, and his occasionally comic decisions–like dropping a surprising snort or sourly intoned quote into one of his authoritative solos–are only made funnier by his sober demeanor. On his own, though, Baars opts for a more straightforward approach....

Amy Rigby was a fixture on the New York/Hoboken indie-pop scene of the 80s long before she started performing in the Last Roundup and the Shams; she’s now four records into a solo career that’s hardly as one-dimensional as her admirers might cause you to believe. Countless pundits have gushed about how sensibly the 43-year-old Rigby chronicles the angst of a middle-aged divorcee, but in fact this calmly persevering woman–who can write circles around most current pop-rock songsmiths of any age, gender, or career positioning–expounds intelligently on a great range of subjects....

Blues guitarist Big Jack Johnson, a Mississippi native, cut his teeth in the 50s on the Delta juke-joint and house-party circuit, where in 1962 he met multi-instrumentalist Frank Frost and drummer Sam Carr and formed the band that would determine the course of much of his career: as Frank Frost & the Nighthawks they recorded for Sun Records subsidiary Phillips International and became one of the most popular blues acts in the region....

Bruce Kang didn’t think he’d chase anyone hinkier than the average deadbeat debtor when he opened a collection agency in a small office on Lincoln Avenue. It was the winter of 1990 and the former news-hound for the expat Korean press had contacts all over Koreatown and back home. He figured he’d found his slot, and was surprised six months later when a suit from a big Seoul-based utility walked in the door looking for help....

The White House was a crafty place during the Clinton years, thanks in part to George H. W. Bush. It was his presidential proclamation that made 1993 the Year of American Craft, inspiring Bill and Hillary to inaugurate a White House craft collection. They asked Michael Monroe, then curator of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, to invite prominent artisans to contribute one recent work each, and between ’93 and ’95 six dozen pieces in wood, glass, metal, fiber, and ceramics were incorporated into the presidential residence....

The Countess He also would not have ignored his characters’ histories. Millais was a child prodigy who entered London’s Royal Academy in 1840 at the age of 11, its youngest pupil ever. It wasn’t long before he was rebelling against what he perceived as the stale, formulaic work championed by the Academy. In 1848 he teamed up with fellow students Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a collective devoted to “truth to nature....

Cinderella goes to the ball, dances up a storm, wins the heart of Prince Charming–and becomes the people’s princess by leading a revolution in style and sensibility. That’s the gist of this bouncy Broadway musical, cannily adapted from the 1988 John Waters movie. The setting is 1962 Baltimore, strictly segregated by race, class, and standards of beauty. “Cinderella” is Tracy Turnblad–plump but packed with personality–who becomes a celebrity when she appears on a local American Bandstand knockoff, “The Corny Collins Show....

Eight bodies entwine in a tableau that’s a cross between postapocalyptic anime and a fetish fashion show. A man in white lace stockings, high-heeled vinyl boots, and shorts enhanced with a Dirk Diggler-size prosthesis displays a red legend scrawled on his bare chest: Who’s Your Daddy? His teeth clamped onto one end of an American flag, he’s engaged in a tug-of-war with a woman wearing a hijab and a flowing skirt, a rifle tucked into her sash....