Hal Hamburger is gone! I can’t believe it. Putty, she’s gone too–Hal Hamburger’s girlfriend–my cousin, you know. It’s through her that I met Hal Hamburger (what a guy!). Of course, I knew of Hal Hamburger way before I met him. Everyone in town knows about Hal Hamburger. We’re like brothers, Hal and me! But Hal Hamburger was big on France. “It’s probably like French,” said the student exchange man. “I’ll bet it’s almost the same thing....

One 19th-century historian called it the “oldest piece of art” made in Chicago, and in 1976 the Tribune described it as “probably the first so-called statue” in the city’s history. Yet you won’t find it in an art museum or park. The three-foot-high, 3,000-pound boulder–which has a carved face, a hollowed-out top, and two holes on either side–is on permanent display at the Chicago Historical Society, where it once served as a drinking fountain....

After four decades and six rental locations, starting with a one-room icehouse, Highland Park’s Suburban Fine Arts Center finally has a home worthy of its aspirations. Two years ago, when the local American Legion Hall was slated to be torn down to make way for a bank, arts center supporters floated a petition asking the city to save it while they put together a capital campaign. Last month SFAC moved into the 1950 brick structure, which is set at an imposing angle on a downtown corner of Sheridan Road....

A Phoenix Too Frequent, Writers’ Theatre Chicago. Though Christopher Fry penned this odd poetic drama more than 50 years ago and set it in ancient Greece, the play’s ironic, irreverent tone gives it a decidedly Gen-X feel. Dynamene, holed up in the tomb of her recently deceased husband, mock-heroically prepares to follow him into death (her husband’s brain, she laments, “was an ironing board / For all crumpled indecision”). Her horned-up servant Doto can’t stop thinking about sex long enough to shed a tear for the deceased–though she does sob over a good pair of shoes she foolishly gave away....

Nat Ward, left, was photographed in June 2000 by Jon Lowenstein as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. I interviewed him the following February in his loft apartment, which he shared with a roommate and a vast assortment of interesting objects, including three motorcycles and two partially disassembled pianos. When I got there I knew I wanted to go study abroad, someplace where they had a language I didn’t know....

Bitten by the Fuckdog Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cole, a playwright, lawyer, former CIA employee, and cofounder of CoHo Productions, a not-for-profit Portland theater company, had an itch to go back east and wondered if there might be a job for him out there that wouldn’t require election. “My friends in Oregon and I started talking about the NEA,” he says. “After the disillusioning experience with the congressional race, I didn’t want to embark on a fool’s errand, but they didn’t think it would be an issue....

The midwest’s great cities can be alienating, and these two urban essays articulate disturbed relationships between people and landscapes through imagery and editing. In the hour-long black-and-white film Still/Here (2000), Christopher Harris suffuses the blighted north side of Saint Louis with a powerful melancholy, lingering on rubble-strewn lots, decrepit buildings, and empty streets, while footsteps and a continually ringing phone on the sound track suggest lives interrupted by the devastation. Holes in a movie theater marquee are powerfully evocative, but even more impressive is the film’s sprawling, almost chaotic form: its calculated incompleteness truly matches the subject, and Harris’s long takes imply–not without a hint of anger–that the ruins of his hometown are eternal....

It’s not just the wealthy who are trying to find a way around campaign finance reform, but unions, environmentalists, and others seeking to turn Bush out of the White House. Organized labor, writes David Moberg in In These Times (August 25), is “helping to create new progressive constituency groups that will play much of the role that the Democratic Party filled–at least in theory–before campaign finance reform cut off the flow of soft money to political parties....

Daughters of Memory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If an artist’s goals are to entertain, provoke, titillate, and repel us, then Chris Seibert and Ivana Bevacqua have hit the mark in Split, a monologue written by both that Seibert performs and Bevacqua directed. An ingeniously staged investigation of “the muse”–the subject of all the pieces in this movement-theater series, “Daughters of Memory”–Split employs a single elegant prop that begins scattered around the space and ends in a relatively tidy bundle; Seibert’s manipulations of it capture the way the mind gathers, unpacks, and gives order to ideas....

As a clinical thanatologist, Nash tries to demystify death. “I want people to use the words ‘dying’ and ‘death.’ They usually say ‘expire,’ but that’s not right. Milk expires. People die….We live in a death-denying culture, where every death is conceived of as a physician’s failure to cure. But death is a natural part of the life cycle. Someone has to be a leader, and I think it’s health care.”...

Fiddler on the Roof, Light Opera Works, at Northwestern University, Cahn Auditorium. “To life” indeed. There’s a ton of it, not to mention heartbreak and wisdom, in William Pullinsi’s warm revival of this nearly flawless musical. Its universality comes from specifics–its scripture-citing, God-fearless milkman rich in daughters and poor in everything else. Isolated its setting may be, but this Jewish hamlet is still part of history: it’s 1905, when the first major rebellion will be launched against the latest pogrom-crazed Romanov....

How Low Will He Go? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three centuries ago, there would have been another option: a warm bath, enough pressure on the jugular to put him out, a couple quick swipes of the knife, then a long apprenticeship with a singing master and the potential for a life of fame and fortune as a castrato. In these more enlightened times, Benkendorf will take what comes–perhaps a beautiful tenor, perhaps an unmanageable croak....

The jazz organ trio has undergone a revival in recent years, thanks mainly to the contributions of three different types of musicians: surviving veterans from the soul-jazz 60s, acid-jazz keyboardists (notably John Medeski) influenced by the old stuff, and modern players like Larry Goldings and Sam Yahel who take a sly, cool approach to the instrument. And then there’s Joey DeFrancesco. He belongs to the younger generation, but he neither downplays the Hammond B-3’s big and blowsy emotionalism nor indulges in acid-jazz textures; he simply plays it the way Jimmy Smith (the premier exemplar of the style and a fellow native of Philadelphia) did in his prime–which is saying a lot....

A dozen young folk in bright thrift-store duds got on the Blue Line at Jackson and took seats in pairs, trying not to laugh–at least not yet. Their intent was in fact to chortle in unison when the doors opened at each subsequent el stop, in a performance-art project called the Great Guffaw, staged by School of the Art Institute grad and employee Meg Duguid. The forced hilarity was supposed to elicit real, contagious laughter from the unsuspecting public, but on the evening of January 30, the Loop was filling with sloppy snow and the bundled, sweaty rush-hour commuters were having none of it....

Moon Over Buffalo, Stage Right Dinner Theatre. The success of a farce is generally gauged by how much the audience laughs. By that measure, the matinee performance I saw of Stage Right Dinner Theatre’s Moon Over Buffalo, directed by Catherine Davis, was a failure. Set on the road with a touring production led by two aging stars who believe Frank Capra is coming to offer them one last chance at movie stardom, Ken Ludwig’s script brims with slamming doors, shrill yelling, mistaken identities, drunkenness, recently discovered affairs, and the confusion of the hard of hearing....

Sketchbook ‘One CollaborAction Theatre Com-pany describes its second annual festival of short plays as “a progressive mixed-media theatrical bazaar.” That’s just the sort of verbiage that makes me fear a theatrical cocktail made up of one part incoherence and two parts pretension, served with a twist of exhibitionism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before the show begins an announcer informs us that “drawing is another way of thinking” and notes that, since the pieces are staged in various locations around the theater, we may find our view obstructed from time to time....

PEOPLE OF THE NORTH 2/7, EMPTY BOTTLE With last year’s Each One Teach One (Jagjaguwar), psychedelic freewheelers Oneida convinced some of us that this whole rock mess still had a little life left in it after all. Since bassist Baby Jane “can’t get the entire three weeks off” for a west-coast tour, drummer Kid Millions and keyboardist Fat Bobby are going it alone from Brooklyn to Idaho as People of the North....

The Antigone, Mom and Dad Productions, at Heartland Studio Theater. No play packs more themes or admits more interpretations than Sophocles’ Antigone–not even prequel Oedipus Rex. There’s no simple solution to the clash Antigone experiences between familial and political loyalties, and the play’s myriad subconflicts–rationality vs. religion, state vs. individual, public vs. personal obligation–echo the issues of the emergent European nation-state. Often the work’s knotted ambiguities get reduced to a battle between virtuous sister and villainous king, but this evenhanded production avoids that trap....

Garbage day in Virginia Beach fell on Wednesday when Joe Grillo and Laura Grant were in high school. Students at a private art school, they bonded one afternoon in 1995 when, along with Laura’s younger brother, Billy, they accidentally set a neighbor’s house on fire with homemade fireworks; soon they were spending all their time together, taking acid and making collages and paintings out of stuff they found at thrift stores–or in the trash....

Belfast Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hughes has been living in the United States almost continuously since 1989, but like every good Irish expat writer since Joyce, she clearly has a need to confront the demons of her native land. According to a program note for Belfast Blues, that need was galvanized by the September 11 attacks and the pending battle in Afghanistan: Hughes knows about life in a war zone....