For the last seven or so years, Jeannie Mullner has been taking a disability van from her nursing home on the far north side to the Anixter Center, a social-service facility in Lincoln Park. There she and a few hundred other disabled people–some mentally disabled, others physically injured or blind, like Mullner–spend their days in classes, workshops, and discussion groups, or going on outings. On any given day at the main facility, a converted factory at 2032 N....

What Does a Bowling Ball Sound Like? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now Prater’s interested in releasing original material as well. Locust has already put out several discs featuring Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche and one by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm’s Lightbox Orchestra. But Prater wanted to do something more than put a microphone in front of some musicians, let them snort and scrape for an hour, and package the results....

Aly Bain and Ale Moller have both spent their careers exploring the links between musical styles. Bain fiddled for over 30 years with Boys of the Lough, whose repertoire included Scottish, Irish, and Northumbrian folk tunes as well as those of his native Shetland Islands. As a member of Frifot, Filarfolket, and the Nordan Project, Moller (a Swede born of a Danish father and a Norwegian mother) has blended jazz and Greek rembetika with Nordic folk material dating back to the Middle Ages....

With the radical right about two Supreme Court confirmations and one tax-code overhaul away from a complete repeal of the 20th century, punklings born too late to rant about Reagan are cherishing their moment of up-against-the-wall-motherfucker protest. But Santa Cruz’s Camper Van Beethoven, punklings themselves back in the Reagan era, were always either too smart or too restless to settle for simple agitprop; the lyrics to songs like “Joe Stalin’s Cadillac” weren’t particularly subtle, but the absurdity of the band’s world-folk-psychedelia hybrid suggested they were usually searching for musical and political spaces that had eluded colonization....

Talk about curses. Few teams, not even the Cubs, are more accursed than the Bears and their quarterbacks. For some reason it’s typical for sports franchises to have a hole in their fabrics that persists through generations. Both the Cubs and the White Sox have had problems at third base, with the Sox’ Robin Ventura and the Cubs’ current Aramis Ramirez two of the few to hold down the position with any dignity for any length of time since the days of Ron Santo and Bill Melton....

It’s an improbable sight, nestled among the new subdivisions along Aptakisic Road in the northern suburb of Long Grove, but there it sits, looking like a transplanted slice of the Napa Valley: an estate vineyard, with ten rolling acres of grapevines surrounding a brick-and-stone winery. Between 1990 and ’95 DiTommaso busied himself with preparing the lot for construction, taking down trees, excavating two large ornamental ponds, and surveying the sites of the houses....

Ed Ruscha The American commercial landscape was a major influence on Ruscha, as it was on the New York pop artists. He knew little of the fine-art world when he moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in 1956, at the age of 18, to become a commercial artist. And as Kerry Brougher says in an essay in the excellent exhibition catalog, the road signs Ruscha saw while driving to LA along Route 66 were a likely influence on his word paintings....

Though he was just a toddler in the early 70s, Christopher Lynch swears he can still remember sitting in the backseat of his grandmother’s Cadillac as she cruised the tarmac at Midway Airport. “She had automatic windows, and I remember playing with those windows and hearing the scream of the jets as we drove around,” he says. “Midway was dead then, but still there was an occasional flight. I remember how cool it was to hear the whine of jet engines and smell the fuel....

Scott Roberts and Jose Lerma Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lerma was born in Spain in 1971 and grew up in Puerto Rico, where he lives today. He writes that his Sock With Cum Stain refers to “Aktionist art from Vienna and plenty of 60s body-fluid art, but it is really about being 14.” It’s also obnoxiously confrontational, though I enjoyed the apparent macho joke in the checklist that identifies it as one of an “edition of 5....

Jack O’Shea: The Saga Begins, Hairy Calahan Productions, at the Breadline Theatre. “You see some crazy things on the street,” confides the hard-boiled cop in this James Cook comedy–which also confirms that crazy things can be seen in late-night theater. But it’s the audacious nonsense in this loosely plotted Jack O’Shea installment that makes the show work. O’Shea is an alcoholic with an anger management problem. You know this isn’t going to be the typical police detective tale when he addresses the audience in conventional gumshoe fashion but with booze in hand, no pants (they’ve been stolen by prostitutes), and his gun still smoking from shooting a dog....

A major filmmaker who has lived in Europe for the past several years, Jon Jost is back in Chicago for the first time in more than a decade to present two programs on successive nights at different venues. Among the most original, resourceful, and independent of American independents, with an awesome body of work to his credit, he’s recently been reinventing himself through digital video, with results that range from the soporific London Brief (1998) to the beautiful, endlessly fascinating Muri Romani....

Positive Spin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In New York the academy’s five-person staff had shared office space with War Child USA, the American branch of a British organization started to provide relief and opportunities for kids in war-torn countries. They’d been doing some work with local kids in youth detention centers, and one of their volunteers suggested to Hardman that Red Bull bring in DJs to instruct these troubled youngsters....

Psycho Beach Party, Open Eye Productions, at WNEP Theater. Charles Busch’s campy farce–written before the Northwestern University alum became famous with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife–makes for an almost perfect party show in the hands of director Jason Lubow and his rambunctious young cast. Busch spoofs two genres of 60s cinema: surf-sand-and-sex comedies (Beach Party, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini) and low-budget Psycho knockoffs (Homicidal, Strait-Jacket)....

I’ve been dating this man for about five months and he eats the nastyst shit in the world. Every night it’s crap like wopers and fries or he’ll buy a stake from the most gheto supermarkit he can find and eat it like it’s his last meal. He is fat and it grosses me out because I know where his fat comes from. His breath stinks like Taco Bell and his come tastes like shit....

NATIONAL TRUST 1/14, EMPTY BOTTLE The first release from the new project of former Dolomite front man Neil Rosario was supposedly two years in the making and funded largely by Vegas winnings–and it’s only a seven-inch single. But it’s a damn nice single: the polite rocker “Make It Happen” is suitably infectious, and the down-tempo wist generator “Cirile at the Peak of Yarn” is the best fake T. Rex tune I’ve heard in a long time....

Susan Overmyer says that because of the “physical and emotional violence” her family subjected her to as a child, she learned to be invisible. Her 18 sculptures at Artemisia, most parts of series, show she’s found a voice that’s the opposite of aggression: these elegantly crafted works are movingly self-abnegating. For the seven “Cradled” pieces, she carved cedar into cradlelike shapes that are smooth over much of their outsides but heavily scored within....

David Sedaris’s etched-in-acid account of his stint as an elf at Macy’s now enjoys nearly as much seasonal currency (via Joe Mantello’s adaptation) as A Christmas Carol, and if you look hard you can see the same sentimental underpinnings. Anyone who’s watched A Christmas Story will be familiar with the basic conceit: people, in this case department store elves and Santas, show their dark sides when trapped in the holiday pressure cooker....

In April Stephanie Sinclair donned an abaya, the black head scarf and cloak worn by women in Muslim regions, to take pictures of members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s al-Madhi forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City district for Time magazine. She told insurgents she was French–“You can’t tell them you’re American at this point,” she says–and didn’t have any major problems. Twenty-five of Sinclair’s photographs from Iraq’s front lines are featured in the Peace Museum exhibit “Occupation,” which opens tonight, Friday, October 22, and runs through the end of November....

We’re warned at the start of this evening of “paranormal illusions and theatrical seances” to “believe nothing and trust no one.” As if Dr. Zodiac really needed to encourage our skepticism–it’s quite a challenge to credit his claim that he reads minds with 99.7 percent accuracy. Though he does divine pretty well what his various volunteers are thinking, for the nonbeliever the show is little more than a puzzle–and trying to figure out the tricks is easier when we see him fumbling to make the magic work....

The African Diaspora Film Festival, making its Chicago debut after more than a decade in New York City, runs Friday through Thursday, June 20 through 26, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $7, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. The Paradise of the Fallen Angels Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A marvel for eye and ear, this superior animated feature by French filmmaker Michel Ocelot adapts a West African folktale about an inquisitive, fearless boy who breaks a beautiful sorceress’s spell over his village....