Friday 7/25 – Thursday 7/31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1914 activist and songwriter Joe Hill–aka Joel Hagglund, a Swedish immigrant turned Industrial Workers of the World organizer–was arrested for a double murder in Utah. Labor leaders insisted he’d been framed by mine bosses, but Hill refused to provide an alibi for the night in question and was found guilty. His case became a cause celebre for everyone from Helen Keller to President Woodrow Wilson, whose call for a stay of execution was temporarily granted by Utah’s governor, but Hill was executed by a firing squad in 1915....

Downtown is growing but fragile, according to Eugenie Ladner Birch in the Journal of the American Planning Association (Winter). “Only seven cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Norfolk, San Francisco, and Seattle) had downtown growth rates that exceeded those of their MSAs [Metropolitan Statistical Areas] in the 30-year period” from 1970 to 2000. She notes that Chicago’s downtown population grew from 56,048 in 1990 to 72,843 in 2000–one-seventh of the city’s population growth in that time and the largest numerical increase of any downtown in the country....

Of Chicago’s many house DJs, probably the most popular–in town, in the country, in the world–is Derrick Carter. In fact, he’s become something of an ambassador for both the city and the style. A DJ since age 13 (spinning at the Basement) and a former buyer for local dance emporium Gramophone Records, Carter currently runs the Classic label with fellow producer and DJ Luke Solomon; last summer the pair issued Thanks for Coming By…(Classic), a double-CD mix of catalog highlights, and in October, Philadelphia’s 611 Records put out the Carter-helmed “About Now…”: Sixeleven DJ Mixseries V....

Grandaddy’s obsession with run-down technology–the band’s 2000 disc, The Sophtware Slump (V2), features two songs about an abandoned, alcoholic robot–echoes Radiohead’s dystopian outlook but subtracts the dyspepsia. Like the word robot itself, front man Jason Lytle’s version of the future is quaint and homely, the way yesterday’s tomorrows look to us today. Recorded at Lytle’s home in Modesto, California, the band’s fourth full-length, Sumday, retains the basement-tinkered feel of past albums, but Lytle has streamlined his DIY ELO: guitar, bass, and drums now lock into a flat, moderate chug, with Casio chirps and low-tech bleeps punctuating rather than redirecting the songs....

After Sparrow L. Patterson finished writing the first version of her debut novel, she threw it away. “That was really hard for me,” she says, “because it was done, but it wasn’t right.” It didn’t accomplish her plan to “immortalize somebody and heal.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Synthetic Bi Products, which was published by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books last fall, is a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of Orleigh, a bisexual 18-year-old who lives in west suburban Geneva in the early 1990s....

On September 11, 2001, Alexander Garvin was on the train from New York to New Haven, Connecticut, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He got word of the disaster while in a cab riding from the station to the Yale campus, where he teaches in the architecture school. As the day progressed–he had to lead two classes before he could return to Manhattan–he recalls being overcome by “horror and fury....

Pelican The Fireside is small, as a bowling alley or a rock club, and it’s not much of a challenge for a band to project all the way to the back wall. But it looked like Pelican had shown up planning to shake the paint off an aircraft hangar. I remember thinking: These guys had better be excellent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brothers Bryan and Larry Herweg play bass and drums, respectively, and Laurent Lebec and Trevor de Brauw both play guitar....

Though house DJ Miles Maeda lived in Chicago for most of the 90s, becoming one of the most popular jocks on the midwest rave circuit, his move to San Diego in 1998 was probably inevitable. Maeda’s spinning has always felt more west coast than midwestern: his style is slightly slippery, whereas typical Chicago house is squared off and forthright, and his sets share the blissfully tripped-out ambience of such San Francisco-based clubland neopsychedelicists as the Hardkiss Brothers....

Lead Stories People Different From Us Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April a Ralphs Supermarket in Livermore, California, promised a free ham to anyone buying $50 worth of groceries, but 33-year-old Rachael Cheroti raised such a fuss when her total came to only $48 that the manager gave her one too. According to police reports, Cheroti then demanded even more hams, arguing that she spent a great deal of money at Ralphs every month....

Lead Story Crisis Averted Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November the school district of Spurger, Texas, called off one of its longstanding homecoming-week traditions–a day when boys dress like girls and vice versa–after parent Delana Davies protested that such behavior might lead to homosexuality. It’s “like drugs,” she said. “You do a little here and there…eventually it gets you.” Instead, officials said, students would be encouraged to wear camouflage hunting gear....

I was here with my brother, Damien, and a couple of guys from work one night drinking Sam Adams. Three girls dressed up like cheerleaders were handing out samples of Smirnoff Ice. We asked the bartender to give us all his empty bottles so the girls would think we were big Smirnoff fans. We had a display set up, and when they walked up I lied and said, “It’s my brother’s birthday....

I went onto the Drudge Report today and read something that must be a bunch of shit or a complete hoax: “MAG: 25% OF NEW HIV-INFECTED GAY MEN SOUGHT OUT VIRUS, SAYS SAN FRAN HEALTH OFFICIAL.” Is there any truth to this? The link was E-mailed all over my office today, and it makes gay men look awful if it’s true. Can you prove or disprove Matt Drudge’s outrageous claims? I sincerely hope that it’s not true and that Matt Drudge’s “journalist” badge is revoked!...

Rarely has nature seemed more fragile than it does in E.W. Ross’s 53 small landscape drawings at the Chicago Cultural Center, which resemble tiny, dreamlike dioramas. In The Frog’s Agony, a dying creature perched on a branch recalls the recent massive dying off of frogs around the world–a possible sign of looming ecological catastrophe. But the drawing is gentle, romantic, not at all preachy: Ross carefully renders tree bark in pencil and uses watercolor to add sensuality....

The Servant of Two Masters, SummerNITE, at the Theatre Building Chicago. The “anything goes” attitude characteristic of commedia began as a reaction against the strict theatrical conventions of the time. With this 1743 play about pompous fathers, befuddled servants, and two pairs of lovers–one traveling incognito–Carlo Goldoni attempted to rein in some of the form’s slam-bang humor. But SummerNITE’s production acknowledges commedia’s original spirit, playing squarely to contemporary sensibilities. Thus suitors in knee breeches and tricornered hats court a miniskirted, Walkman-toting, Britney Spears look-alike....

Since you’ve already covered the Bush family’s relationship to the Nazis (thank you), I thought maybe you’d also cover another timely topic. I’ve heard many times and in many places (but none mainstream that I can think of) that George W. Bush was AWOL for at least a year from the National Guard during Vietnam (after “jumping the line” to get a slot in the guard in the first place). For some reason (I’m not sure why), I have trust in the Straight Dope....

Via Dolorosa By interpreting the conclusion of one of his own plays in this monologue–which Hare has performed himself up until this Apple Tree Theatre production–the playwright not only shows he’s very consciously conveying messages in his works but calls attention to how he closes this one, an account of his three-week journey to Israel. He ends by intoning its title, but just before that he asks, “Stones or ideas?” That is to say, what’s more important, the tangible or the conceptual?...

A View From the Bridge Eddie Carbone–an Italian-American longshoreman with a more than avuncular passion for the niece who lives with him–ultimately decides to betray everything in his life to prevent her from leaving him to get married. If you feel I’ve now spoiled the ending, don’t worry: Miller does much the same, providing a narrator, the lawyer Alfieri, who foreshadows the action with all the subtlety of Brechtian supertitles. Playing the part, John Mohrlein has the thankless task of intoning, “I could see where this was headed” and “So Eddie Carbone faced his destiny–though what did a man like Eddie Carbone know of destiny?...

Friday 12/21 – Thursday 12/27 “Experimental film long on imagination but short on budget” is how the Chicago Underground Film Festival describes the work of Cleveland filmmaker Robert C. Banks Jr. He started scratching film with a pen in 1978 when, he says, he “didn’t even know who Stan Brakhage was.” Over the years he’s painted, written on, bleached, and made collages from film, then combined the results with found and new footage to explore such subjects as racism, commercialization, and representations of women in contemporary America....

THURSDAY, MAY 30 9:30 Sophomore Showcase at Zanies hosted by Daniel Tosh, with Tammy Pescatelli, Mark Ryan, Kyle Kinane, Eddie Gossling, Leon Rogers, and Kevin Bozeman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 10 Schadenfreude and Sean Cullen at Black Orchid. PM Fresh Mugs 2 at Zanies hosted by Jimmy Shubert, with Jim Ruel, Frank Townsend, Martha Kelly, Brendan Small, Damonde Tschritter, Judah Friedlander, and Patrick Spring....

I ‘m a sucker for hip-hop. I like to watch it, I like to do it (in my own limited way, of course). And this troupe, headed by Viola E. Elkins, is a charmer. When I saw them on a Dance Chicago program a year and a half ago, they were a large group–some 30 people–who moved to the music’s intricate rhythms in synchrony, creating an amazing impression of power and speed....