The three performers in 500 Clown Macbeth–Adrian Danzig, Paul Kalina, and Molly Brennan–have all done good work elsewhere, especially Danzig in Lookingglass Theatre’s highly athletic 1999 production of The Baron in the Trees. But nothing they’ve accomplished alone has matched the fearless work they do together in this smart, hilarious show, based on the premise that three fools are trying to perform Macbeth without costumes, a proper set, or full knowledge of the script....

The 2002 edition of the Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s annual marathon showcase of emerging talent features a slew of local fringe theater and performance companies and solo artists. The Abbie fest was founded in 1989 to honor the late anarchist author of Woodstock Nation and to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock music festival. “Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins XIV” offers a steady flow of entertainment while seeking to foster a communal spirit among performers and audience (which may be enhanced by sleep deprivation)....

Now in its 30th season, Evanston’s Bach Week Festival has made quite a dent in J.S. Bach’s vast output. To keep the program lively, music director-founder Richard Webster often includes music from some of Bach’s near contemporaries as well: one highlight of this year’s edition is the chorale “Lobe den Herren” by Johann Kuhnau, a lawyer-turned-composer who was Bach’s predecessor as cantor in Leipzig. It’ll be performed on Friday at Saint Luke’s Church by two of the most expressive bel canto singers in town–soprano Patrice Michaels and bass Douglas Anderson–along with the Bach Week Festival Chorus (a mix of choristers from Saint Luke’s and other area churches), under the direction of Webster, who’s known for his firm grasp of late Baroque style....

Friday 11/29 – Thursday 12/5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 30 SATURDAY Dan Decker, founder of the Center for Script Development and author of the writing handbook Anatomy of a Screenplay, spent four years researching his first play, An Evening With Will Shakespeare. In addition to discovering that the Bard contracted syphilis at age 24–hence all those references to poxes on houses (“pox” being popular slang for the disease, which at the time was incurable)–he also claims to have figured out whom all those sonnets were written for and why....

From www.where_is_raed.blogspot.com/ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read thru it wondering if Mr. JOHN F. BURNS is reporting news from the same baghdad I live in. Nothing in the news about it, and no one at work making any “look at those poor deluded souls going at it again” comments (which is one of two responses to this sort of thing, the other being “I wonder how much money are they getting as a ‘thank you’ gift from saddam”)....

“Politics is about enmity,” says Seventh Circuit federal appellate judge and Hyde Park resident Richard Posner in the New Yorker (December 10). “It’s about getting together with your friends and knocking off your enemies. The basic fallacy of liberalism is the idea that if we get together with reasonable people we can agree on everything. But you can’t agree: strife is ineradicable, a fundamental part of nature, in storms and in human relations....

My father used to counsel me not to believe anything I read in the papers. I always took this as hyperbole, but this week’s City File by Harold Henderson [August 16] makes me wonder. Of his seven points, I have concerns about four. The first and most egregious is his quote from the Peoria Journal Star concerning House Bill 5793, that the bill would “prohibit state inspectors [of factory farms] from taking pictures to document their investigations....

The strongest of J. John Priola’s 17 photos at Schneider, six images of San Francisco windows seen from the outside at night, provocatively place the viewer in the position of voyeur. The window is invitingly open in 15th Street, 2nd Floor, and the details we can see–an orchid, a poster with the words “Chicago International”–arouse a curiosity that won’t find answers. The window in Kearney Street is covered by curtains, yet the silhouettes of plants inside are visible on the sill....

The Kills’ excellent new album, Keep on Your Mean Side (Rough Trade), shows once and for all that the White Stripes comparisons this male-female duo’s been saddled with are superficial and unfair. While the Stripes draw from a broad range of American roots music, the Kills narrow their pickings to the blues tropes of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, filtered through the sensibilities of Royal Trux and Captain Beefheart (whose “Dropout Boogie” they made over as a twisted stomp on last year’s debut EP for Dim Mak, Black Rooster), adding pop flourishes and noise bursts to assert their own identity....

Stage shtick might not seem like a dangerous thing to take too far, but the members of Luftwaffe have without a doubt passed the point of no return. J1 Statik and B9 Invid are a self-styled two-man nihilist militia, adhering to the credo “Solipsist before all else.” They live in a world where, according to the printed “lyrisch” for “Ideoscape in Pluroform,” “The Monarch, God, and Empire are fictions generated by the plurarch” (the band’s term for an all-encompassing evil akin to a conspiracy theorist’s “They,” which can only be defeated by a “fascist renaissance”)....

This is the perfect place to bring a second date. I usually do coffee or lunch for the first date. I’ve been around the world, and I have yet to find a more romantic or delicious spot than here. Yes, it was awfully romantic watching the world float down the Mekong River from the rooftop bar at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh while sipping bubbly and devouring Death by Chocolate....

Six years ago J.J. Hanley noticed that her three-year-old son, Timothy, was acting strange. “He was not speaking, and he wouldn’t look at me or anybody else,” she says. “He wanted to be alone all the time and had some repetitive behavior and a sensitivity to certain sights and sounds.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hanley’s son’s condition steadily got worse. After seven months another doctor diagnosed Timothy as mildly autistic....

I’m in my 30s and I’ve had a fair bit of sexual experience. Not much surprises or shocks me, sad to say, but this time I’m stumped. Here’s what happened: I was at a club with someone I’d met a few weeks prior and we were getting pretty steamy. We were off in a corner, watching the band. He placed me in front of him and then freed his “member.” He took my hand and put it on his penis–and this is where you come in, Dan, because questions raced through my mind: Was I supposed to jerk him until he came?...

Usually I love your open, honest, thoughtful advice, but what you said to Momma Violates Poppa, the sexually frustrated pregnant woman whose husband won’t sleep with her, was as cruel as what her husband’s doing to her. Yes, it’s possible that her husband’s just plain not turned on. But no sex with the love of her life for nine months? I think that deserves more than “Maybe you’re just too ugly for him right now, sweetie....

On any given day, all you were likely to find were a couple of spotted alley cats asleep on the banister, maybe a handful of tattered souls sipping warm beer out of the bottle, and always the sweet, antagonizing old lady behind the bar. I always felt for the vendors. Not so much because they were walking ghetto streets at midnight pawning umbrellas during a drought. More because of the tongue-lashing they were about to receive from that sweet old lady behind the bar....

Susan Harris was working a temp job last month the day the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. She heard about it from a friend, then checked the Internet. Sure enough: the prize had gone to Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz–stunning news to the former editor. Northwestern University Press, where Harris worked for nearly 17 years, most recently as its director and editor in chief, is Kertesz’s only publisher in English....

Friday 11/30 – Thursday 12/6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Design is very client based; you have to constantly perform for the client. Sometimes those are happy collaborations, but sometimes it’s kind of constraining,” says School of the Art Institute professor Maud Lavin, author of Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design. Her book tour has attracted a lot of design people, so she’s added a miniseminar to each event that she calls “Winning the Design Lottery,” in which participants imagine they’ve come into a pile of money to finance a design project of their choice....

From STANKmag.net Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the “closes” (that’s what we publishing types call getting an issue out to the printer) at the magazine where I used to work, we would play this little game called “Who’d Ya Rather?” The rules were pretty simple. You’d be given two candidates. Both pretty vile. And you’d have to indicate which one of the two you’d sleep with if you had to repopulate the world and why....

Updated August 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sox stakeholders may have been looking at a Bump and Run Formation [A], or BARF, occurring just after the All-Star break. This is an indicator of excessive speculation in which a chart rises too far too fast. The chart pulled out of the bottom only to reverse and then reverse again. The market climbs a wall of worry, and the white line is starting to look like a classic Head and Shoulders Top Reversal Pattern [B], which is a powerful negative indicator, especially if a prior uptrend has been established....

Perfect for someone on your list. The Illinois Natural History Survey (“Reports,” Autumn) has just published the 501-page book The Chewing Lice: World Checklist and Biological Overview, available for $35. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Senator Obama? Salim Muwakkil reports in the November 10 In These Times that “Chicago’s substantial Black Nationalist community” has problems with Barack Obama, now running as a Democrat for the U....