It’s true, all true. Those rumbles and rumors about what John Podmajersky III is up to in what some used to call East Pilsen–the area along and around Halsted between 16th Street and Canalport, where his family is said to own about a hundred buildings–are pretty much right on. Just ask him. Is he now calling the neighborhood the Chicago Arts District–without any official sanction from the city? Yes. Has he removed longtime resident artists from first-floor spaces along Halsted?...

Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, about a dystopic future in which books are outlawed and firemen employed full-time as book burners, offers a compelling critique of TV culture and our society’s ongoing discomfort with critical thinking. But it translates well to the stage because Bradbury knows how to tell a great story and create complex characters: a fireman who comes to doubt his way of life, the seductive young woman who goads him into reflection, an aggressive, manipulative fire chief who secretly loves books....

Because both bands are Welsh, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci are frequently mentioned in the same breath as the more popular Super Furry Animals; in fact they’re a much older band, formed in the mid-80s by school chums in Carmarthen, Wales, and their cool 60s pastoralism is worlds apart from the Animals’ anarchic techno-pop. Their first three albums–Patio (1994), Bwyd Time (1995), and Barafundle (1997)–were written in Welsh, and the English lyrics on last fall’s superb How I Long to Feel That Summer in My Heart (Mantra) might as well have been, so woven are the vocals into the tapestry of textures drawn from English folk rock and the late-60s Kinks....

Watermelon-shaped welcome signs, yard-goose costumes, and crocheted toilet paper covers are just a few of the things that won’t be available at this weekend’s Renegade Craft Fair. Organized by Sue Blatt, Kathleen Habbley, and Christina Brazinski, the daylong fair is designed instead as a showcase for what they call the DIY underground crafts movement. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the popularity of magazines like ReadyMade and Web sites like Knitty....

Family expectations clash with the prospect of personal happiness in this biting 2001 comedy by first-time Israeli writer-director Dover Kosashvili. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi), a graduate student in philosophy, comes from a clan of traditional Soviet Georgian emigres who want him to marry a virgin and raise a family; their mission becomes more urgent when they discover his clandestine affair with Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), an older divorced mother from Morocco. Kosashvili is himself a Georgian emigre to Tel Aviv (in fact the protagonist’s mother is played by the filmmaker’s, Lili Kosashvili), and his treatment of Zaza’s earthy relatives and their pack mentality is alternately fond (as they scout out potential brides) and harsh (as they cruelly confront the two lovers)....

Three years ago Pat Schneider received one of the highest service awards the University of Chicago Hospitals offers its employees–the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for outstanding public service. Then two months ago the university eliminated the midwife program she’s part of. The midwives see themselves as a bridge between the fast-paced, often impersonal world of doctors and their patients, many of whom are intimidated by that world. While doctors might spend five or ten minutes with a pregnant patient per visit, the midwives will spend up to a half hour....

It all started back in October of last year. I’d been going to these singles mixers at museums to meet people, and I went to one here–right after I joined an online dating service. I got home that night and checked my e-mail, and there was a message that said, “I saw you at the Art Institute.” That’s all it said. I clicked on this man’s profile, and there was no photo, and it was a little creepy, so I never answered....

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe may have been interred in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery in 1969, but he remains the great undead of modern architecture. He lives on in his serene temples, such as Crown Hall and the IBM Building, but also in a thousand cheap knockoffs–the sterile glass skyscrapers of the past three decades and their own bastard offspring, cut-rate concrete towers like Grand Plaza and Superior Place. Mies had been given a blank slate....

There’s no easier way for a draft-ager to piss off dad (or our Francophobe president, if your name’s Jenna) than to learn and howl the lyrics to the eponymously titled debut from Paris synth punks Operation S. All in French–save lingua punca like “paranoia mafia” and “so sexy”–the record serves as an overdriven answer to the synth-heavy wave-punk sound of Portland’s glorious Epoxies. But where the Epoxies write songs around their keyboards, here synths double the guitars–making the band essentially a souped-up incarnation of the No-Talents, the ’77-style rawk outfit in which lead singer Cecilia and bassist Iwan cut their teeth....

BRAVE COMBO 12/21, FITZGERALD’S This show, by the popular roots band Brave Combo, is a Christmas party; expect holiday hijinks ad nauseam. Their latest release–a live album, Kick-Ass Polkas, recorded in Cleveland on Hal-loween–includes 12 tracks of inspired, wildly energetic polkas drawn from the Polish, Mexican, Slovenian, Czech, and German repertoires. They know damn well Chicago’s a big polka town, so although it’s not the only trick in their bag, I expect it’ll be a prominent one here....

NATIONAL TRUST 7/26, HIDEOUT Lord knows there’s reason enough to be glad the 70s are long gone, but I kind of miss the optimism about free love and, occasionally, smooth, studio-crafted water-bed music like that found on the National Trust’s Thrill Jockey debut, Dekkagar. Since I wasn’t old enough to appreciate it properly on the first go-round, this release by Neil Rosario, Andy Cunningham, and Mark Henning, plus multiple percussionists Brian Deck and Bryan Aldrin, is perfectly timed....

Kurt Weill, Elmer Rice, and Langston Hughes’s 1946 “Broadway opera” (based on Rice’s 1929 play) has never been as warmly embraced by either opera or musical theater as the similarly ambitious Porgy and Bess–and the work’s long overdue Lyric Opera premiere shows why. Both the material and this production suffer from second-act slump, stretching the story out too long after its tragic climax. But the two-hour first act is a marvel–lyrical and ironic, ominous and joyful, heartbreaking and hilarious....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, there’s a consensus about Profiles in Courage (1956), which established JFK’s intellectual credentials and helped make him a credible presidential candidate. We’ll get to that. Yes, we know who did most of the heavy lifting for the book–we’ll get to that too. The principal controversy, apparently, has been what to call the curious process by which the book came to be....

During coverage of the recent Columbia space shuttle tragedy, the subject of the importance of conducting medical experiments in space came up. How does performing experiments in zero gravity aid in scientific and medical research? –theremin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since the end of the Apollo moon-launch program in 1972, the answer’s gotten vaguer. Depending on who you ask, the rationale might be: (1) Because the space program provides technological spin-offs valuable for terrestrial applications....

William T. Vollmann has been called one of the most important writers in North America, but is he important enough to foist a 3,352-page treatise on violence on the reading public? McSweeney’s thought so: last year its publishing arm issued Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down in a seven-volume boxed set that was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Now Ecco Press has boiled it down to a handy 734-page abridgment....

A Rare Talent Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This being real life, he didn’t. Instead his friend and collaborator, jazz bassist Tatsu Aoki, played a mournful tribute; scriptures were read in English and Cantonese; and his grieving brothers, Allen and Philip, did their best to celebrate his life. They talked about his childhood in Skokie and Evanston. The plump, shy fourth child of immigrants, he took up athletics to overcome physical and social shortcomings and then surprised everyone by growing into a six-foot, one-inch varsity football player, the only Asian on the Evanston Township High School team, and handsome enough to make a cheerleader swoon....

Cheesed Off Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local underground cartoonist Stuart Helm picked up the phone one day last winter and found a Kraft Foods attorney on the line. “I’m an admirer of your work,” the lawyer said, “but we think you should change your professional name.” It wasn’t “Helm” that had Kraft curdling; it was the cartoonist’s alias, King VelVeeda, a nickname he’s used as his signature on artwork for 13 years and on his Web sites, cheesygraphics....

NOVEMBER According to the Justice Department, some 630,000 people will be released from prison this year–including 30,000 in Illinois. Where the ex-cons will land, their level of rehabilitation, and whether society is prepared for their return are some of the topics to be covered at the Community Renewal Society’s fifth annual State of Race and Poverty Conference, Repentance and Recon-ciliation: The Reintegration of Ex-Offenders Into Our Communities. The conference, with a keynote speech by Seventh District congressman Danny Davis, takes place today from 8 AM to 1 PM at Covenant United Church of Christ, 1130 E....

The debut novel by H.G. Carrillo, Loosing My Espanish (Pantheon), is a rarity: a more than 300-page, meditative, virtually plotless narrative that’s engaging throughout. High school teacher Oscar Delossantos is about to be dismissed, for murky reasons, after 22 years at a Chicago Jesuit boys’ school. He uses his final days there to lecture his students–“exilados, Babcocks, Tylers, too poor to get the fuck out”–on the history of Latin America, from Columbus’s incursions to the politics of his native Cuba....

Secretly Canadian started out like most indie-rock labels: some “record-collecting nerds,” in this case a trio of them attending Indiana University in 1996, wanted to be involved with music in some greater way than simply buying it. The imprint, then as now based in Bloomington, Indiana, got off to a running start, releasing two dozen albums and singles in two years, but soon the owners hit the wall. They’d fallen in love with the act of putting out records–but they were still losing their shirts....