DRUMS AND TUBA 8/31, EMPTY BOTTLE; 9/1, FIRESIDE BOWL These guys billed themselves as Just Drums and Tuba before adding a guitarist, who still seems a bit slighted. Really, this is a pretty dead-end way to name a band, no matter how unconventional the instrumentation–would Suicide have gotten anywhere as Keyboards and Voice? Would the Dirty Three have made it as Drums, Guitar, and Violin? Fortunately, they take the imagination they saved naming themselves and put it into their music: their latest LP, Vinyl Killer (coproduced by Ani DiFranco and released on her Righteous Babe label), jumps from restless party music, touching on Cajun and ska, to twitchy space rock....

PEDAL STEEL TRANSMISSION 1/18, EMPTY BOTTLE The local band Pedal Steel Transmission are celebrating the release of their second album, In the Winter It Makes the Dead Grass Look Green. From time to time the quartet relaxes into a sort of rural-Stereolab idling in the driveway, but the eerie space blues “Sempiternal Tryst Detente” pushed me gradually to the edge of my seat. And when the band finally revs up, it really rips: on “Her Dream” or on the introductory “Sorted,” guitarist Dan Schneider and pedal steel man Gary Pyskacek torture their strings into a screeching riotous glory....

Since the era of Dziga Vertov, avant-garde filmmakers have argued that narrative reconstruction of history is inherently false, that the past can be assessed only through a thoughtful examination of the present. In this vein, Florian Wüst’s Oh Mother Earth, Dear Fatherland (1999, 34 min.) considers German war memorials–sculptures of fallen soldiers who seem ready to fight again, tributes that honor both Holocaust victims and their murderers–and wonders how his country can acknowledge its complex history without trivializing it....

My relatives who lived during World War II insist that all the scrap-metal and rubber drives, supposedly done to preserve resources for the war effort, were only for propaganda. None of the metal and rubber collected was ever used for anything. Is this true? –Anthony Allen, Los Angeles Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1942, when the first scrap drives were organized, the war was far from won, and frightened civilians at all levels were anxious to do something, anything, to help....

Saxophonist Dave Rempis is best known so far as a member of the Vandermark 5, where he replaced Mars Williams back in 1998. His initial contributions on alto brought a hint of west-coast cool to the group’s molten performances, but before long he added tenor to his arsenal and cranked up the heat. The quintet’s breakneck tunes, improvisational vehicles though they may be, are as tightly mapped out as Chicago’s streets, and Rempis fits himself neatly into Vandermark’s grid system....

“From the 1940s until her death in 1984 Mabel Mercer was regarded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Leontyne Price as the definitive cafe singer, an artist who struck a deep personal chord in nearly everybody who came to hear her,” writes James Gavin in his chronicle of cabaret, Intimate Nights. The nonprofit Mabel Mercer Foundation, founded in 1985, honors her contributions with an annual high-profile showcase for her artistic heirs; this wingding is traditionally held in New York or San Francisco, but this year it comes here, offering local admirers of this fragile yet tenacious art form an unparalleled opportunity to sample its finest practitioners....

“November seems to be a bad month for people involved in labor,” says social worker Robert L. Hopper, reciting a list of names and dates off the top of his head. “On November 11, 1887, the Haymarket martyrs were executed; in 1974 Karen Silkwood was killed; on November 5, 1916, several Wobblies were killed in Everett, Washington; in 1919, timber worker organizer Wesley Everest was lynched by a mob in Centralia, Washington; and on November 19, 1915, Joe Hill was executed by authorities in Utah....

MIA DOI TODD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Los Angeles songwriter Mia Doi Todd delivers her strange, smart lyrics in a style so mannered it makes her timbral sister Joni Mitchell sound like a scat singer. On her third album, Zeroone (City Zen), she sets her meticulous phrasing inside minimalist acoustic guitar patterns–a combination that really shouldn’t work, and yet lines like “Nakedly we lie in an ecstatic embrace / Trying not to come too quickly / One minute rise / Plastic bagged lubricated safety tube” fit into the relentless two-note riff of “Digital” with an architectural precision....

This is not the first time Racine Art Museum executive director Bruce Pepich has been asked to compare his new building to the attention-grabbing Calatrava addition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, just 20 miles north. “I’m not going to say anything on the record about either of our two suburbs, Milwaukee or Chicago,” he jokes, adding that “Milwaukee created a world-class building that is an attraction in and of itself.” As for the Racine museum, which opened last month on Main Street in a $6....

While fiction writers are busy imagining an apocalyptic showdown between man and machine, Chicago’s own Peter Blasser is demonstrating how the two depend on each other by making music with his homemade electronic instruments, called shinths. A shinth is an exposed circuit board with no electronic inputs that produces sound when a human touches it with his fingers and places a conductive spoon that’s hooked to an amplifier in his mouth, sending a small dose of voltage through his body....

“Our responsibility to the coming millions,” the president said, referring to Americans in the next century, “is like that of parents to their children….In wasting our resources we are wronging our descendants.” We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves for being smarter than Teddy Roosevelt. We’re in no better position to predict the 21st century than he was the 20th. We don’t know what inventions will transform the next hundred years. We don’t know what our descendants may need or want....

XIU XIU 7/19, EMPTY BOTTLE This introspective San Jose quartet can’t seem to shake a cloud of tragic overtones, from the name of the band–derived from ultrasad movie Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl–to the chronicle of anguished insomnia (by band member Lauren Andrews) that makes up the booklet for its debut full-length Knife Play (5 Rue Christine). This multi-instrumental combo (electronics, mandolin, guitar, gongs, harmonium…) sometimes sounds as if it could be a neo-new-wave pop band, or a postmodern improv group, or even a Roxy Music tribute, if only it had just a little less trembling lower lip....

Sophie’s Stories But I didn’t think about it, and here I am. The best I can do is apologize, Sophie, because all in all I really didn’t care for Sophie’s Stories. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that it’s your fault. I don’t object to your taste in literature. Well, maybe a little. The first of the three pieces, an adaptation of Marjorie Weinman Sharmat’s “Walter the Wolf,” is strenuously naive: a PC fable in which young Walter learns–of all things!...

Josh Deth was working as a brewer at Goose Island a few years ago when he and some friends started scouting the city for a place to open their own brew pub–a “lefty, political” kind of place to be called the Revolution Brewing Company. He had experience in the business at the now defunct Golden Prairie microbrewery on Elston as well as Goose Island, and even went ahead and bought some scrap equipment....

If New York-based playwright Michael John Garces had written nothing but this 1999 two-act drama, he would have contributed more to the American stage than most playwrights do over a lifetime. His taut, Spartan style masterfully blends the poetic naturalism of Chekhov, the indeterminate menace of Pinter, and the streamlined brutality of Mamet, and Garces finds in unremarkable characters souls as complex, compelling, and enigmatic as any in the greatest works of theater....

ARS VIVA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six years ago, violinist and conductor Alan Heatherington was ousted as the head of the Chicago String Ensemble, a chamber orchestra he’d founded in the late 1970s. But instead of getting mad, he got even: by 1998 his next baby, the midsize Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra, was drawing crowds of several hundred, which dwarfed the CSE’s biggest audiences....

When Catalina Romero bought her Little Village home back in 1973 she thought she would live in it forever. “When we moved there my husband didn’t want to move,” she says. “He said it was too much money, and he didn’t like the house. I told him, ‘That’s all right. I can buy the house. I can put it in my name, and you can move in and pay rent.’ My daddy, he sent me a telegram with the money from Texas the next day....

Aunt Nancy and the Doggie Tales, Cornservatory. West African Anansi folktales save the day in Edward A. Thompson’s kids’ adventure. Meenah and Shelby are visiting world-traveling Aunt Nancy (a cheery Michelle R. Thompson-Hay) and odd, accident-prone Uncle Herbert (a comically blundering Kelvin Davis) when they discover that their dog, Jamal, is the last of a rare and expensive breed. It seems a mysterious stranger aims to dognap Jamal (played by Heather Meyer with such energetic cuteness and cleverness we can’t blame him)....

For Kathleen Foley, owner of the seven-month-old shop Wine Crier, inspiration came in the form of a bottle of wine she received 14 years ago. A 1978 Chateau Lynch-Bages, to be exact. “The owner of my company gave a bottle to everyone as a way to celebrate a good year,” she recalls. “It was like drinking velvet….I said right then and there I wanted to go to school to learn more....

Dix Versions at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, April 12-28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Compagnie Kafig’s Dix Versions delivers not one perspective but ten. For 90 nonstop minutes these nine dancer-athletes engage in a riot of competitive break dancing, gymnastics, and contortions. They offer no apologies for departing from “serious dance”–just full-out dancing to a pounding techno beat straight from the 80s. Yet the message is unmistakable: whether isolating different parts of the body so each dancer seems divorced from himself or spinning around on their heads until the audience is dizzy, Compagnie Kafig paint a picture of a world out of control, their own work the graffito on the picture: Fuck art, let’s dance!...