Charles Ives once declared that it wasn’t composers’ fault they were limited to ten-fingered pianists. Disregarding those limitations, American composer Conlon Nancarrow wrote an extensive series of studies for player piano whose rhythmic complexities are beyond any human performer: they have a breathtaking mathematical complexity yet don’t sound like abstraction for its own sake. Nancarrow began his musical life as a jazz trumpeter, and many of the studies use jazz, blues, or boogie-woogie bass lines (though some other line that strays from the jazz style is always weaving around)....

Two years ago the pop-culture journal Hermenaut published an issue on the phenomenon of “fake authenticity.” “Will there ever be an end,” wrote editor Joshua Glenn, “to the spectacle of (white, middle-class) people draping themselves in exotic fabrics, bribing sherpas to haul them up mountains, spending $15 for turkey-burgers in urban hunting lodges, ooh-ing and aah-ing over macaroni paintings by schizophrenics…[and] fetishizing people darker and/or poorer than themselves?” The indie-rock world, with its dowdy eyeglasses and gas station jackets, has its share of problems with this sort of spiritual myopia–so thank God for bands like Strawberry, a local act that prides itself on authentic fakery....

Quick-Change Artist The full band never even got a chance to rehearse the new material before the session, and Molina shook things up further by inviting six additional musicians–most of whom the rest hadn’t worked with before–to join the fray. They discussed the arrangements in the studio, ran through each song once or twice, and then recorded nearly everything live, including some impressive harmony vocals. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

La Salle-Peru, Illinois On the other hand, everybody at the bar in Monari’s 101 Club (101 First St., La Salle, 815-223-0101) possessed the other qualities of people in small towns–they were friendly and conversational. Located next to the railroad tracks by the Illinois River, Monari’s is a restaurant as well; some say it has the best food in town, or towns. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Located near the house where D....

United They Stand Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They met for lunch on a recent Wednesday at Ann Sather in Andersonville. Most in the group were artistic directors, used to ruling their own domains, and “the meeting was a little quiet at the beginning,” Evans says. “But by the end it was like nobody wanted to leave. It was fun just having a dialogue....

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Kim Garza’s Evanston bakery, like most retail establishments in the country, was empty. But by 1 PM, says Garza, “there were about 15 people in here. They were sitting on the windowsills, they were sitting on the floors, sitting on the tables. Some people were crying; we ended up laughing about some things. It was just a place where people came to get a cup of coffee and just be....

Why can’t they admit they were wrong? Conroy has written a meticulous chronicle of the evidence of police torture–a trickle at first but eventually a mountain–to which the state’s attorney’s office has never responded. But he’s not first to point this out. Back in 1989 Warden was editing Chicago Lawyer, then a muckraking monthly newspaper. That March, “Torture in Chicago,” a front-page story by Mary Ann Williams, asserted, “Authorities empowered to investigate such [torture] charges–the state’s attorney of Cook County, the U....

Why Pick on a Winner? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I moved to this neighborhood in large part because of the fine reputation that Boone School has earned under the leadership of Mr. Zavitkovsky, whose reform of the math/science and reading curricula has greatly enhanced my son’s education. Mr. Zavitkovsky’s achievements are all the more impressive when one considers that Boone is seriously overcrowded....

Before he split for New York last year, Chad Taylor, the drummer who anchors the various Chicago Underground groups, was one of the most elegant and open-minded percussionists in town. In every context, from one-off gigs with Dutch reedist Sean Bergin to playing pop behind the Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop to his regular work with local tenor men Fred Anderson and David Boykin, he finds ways to fit in without compromising the traits that make him great....

Paul Shambroom: Evidence of Democracy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shambroom’s 35 images at the Museum of Contemporary Photography include 8 others of town councils from his “Meetings” series and 26 from his “Nuclear Weapons” series. Born in New Jersey in 1956 and now living in Minneapolis, Shambroom writes in a statement that both series explore power and that the “Meetings” images are linked to the “long-standing artistic tradition of rendering the powerful,” which includes “European court painting, early American history painting, and the many versions of the Last Supper....

These 20 short videos (some transferred from celluloid) are all engaging, and a number are excellent. Camera (2001, 8 min.) was inspired by a dream veteran director David Cronenberg remembers from his youth, in which he grew old while watching a movie. Some young kids wheel a 35-millimeter camera rig into a home and prepare to shoot a single image of a middle-aged actor; at the end Cronenberg presents the image in all its horrifying banality, linking cinema with the process of dying....

Arrangement for Two Violas If a play like Susan Lieberman’s elegant, plainspoken Arrangement for Two Violas–about two gay doctors in 1938 Wisconsin–opened anywhere in Kansas, its audience would be greeted by a picket line. Members of Fred Phelps’s Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church regularly protest any performing-arts event within a day’s drive. (When I was a student at Kansas State University, Phelps’s minions protested every musical my friends and I ever appeared in, including a uniquely ungay production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum....

Driving through Rosebud, South Dakota, on a 1972 road trip, Roger Brown came across an old gas station festooned with murals. A hand-painted sign on the front read “Artists Museum,” while one on the side of the building advertised the “World’s Fastest Scenic Artist.” The photographs he took that day documented the genesis of an idea: it was at this site, he said 25 years later, that he began to think of creating a permanent home, and a name, for his burgeoning collection of folk and fine art and other objects....

Though the band has never enjoyed Metallica’s success or Anthrax’s occasional moments of trendiness, Slayer outstripped its more famous contemporaries long ago through sheer cussed sleeves-rolled determination. Surprisingly, it’s chugged along evilly without attracting much wrath from PMRC types–in the same way that fundies hit J.K. Rowling while ignoring Philip Pullman’s gleeful blasphemies, W.A.S.P. caught the moral outrage that would’ve been better aimed at Slayer. But there’s no doubt the band knows its worth: as long ago as 1991 they were in retrospective mode with the amazing double live album Decade of Aggression, and they made their career-spanning-box-set move last year with Soundtrack to the Apocalypse....

The White Sox returned to town for their home opener last Friday looking very much the snakebit team they’ve been since they were swept by Seattle in the 2000 playoffs–since the 1919 Black Sox scandal, truth be told. Though picked to contend with the Minnesota Twins for the American League Central title this year after obtaining starter Bartolo Colon and bullpen closer Billy Koch during the off-season, the Sox opened by losing three in a row to the lightly regarded Royals in Kansas City–each game more aggravating than the one before....

In an age of high-tech, high-priced Disney extravaganzas, this intimate, inexpensive, inventive little show is a treat. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a one-legged toy soldier who falls in love with a ballerina doll, this hour-long production by Germany’s Meininger Puppet Theatre features a single storyteller (played here by American actor Jeffrey Burell) who draws the audience into a dream world–a dome he creates from a parachute. Surrounded by this makeshift tent, viewers watch as the story is told through shadow puppets and film projections....

I’ve decided to install a water-filtration system in my house. As background, the EPA’s attempt to reduce the nation’s polluted air by introducing an additive into our gasoline supply has had the unintended effect of polluting the groundwater in the wells and reservoirs of 49 states. The culprit is methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a suspected powerful carcinogen. The better filtration systems remove MTBE, along with trihalomethanes, lead, mercury, lindane, atrazine, asbestos, benzene, and the microbiological contaminants cryptosporidium and giardia....

Charles Busch, author of the gender-bending fringe hits Psycho Beach Party and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, went mainstream with this crossover Broadway success, playing here in a national touring edition staged by Lynne Meadow (artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, where the play premiered). Packed with Jewish-mother gags, New York in-jokes, and sometimes arcane literary humor–including the culture-vulture heroine’s improbably perfect pronunciation of such names as Hermann Hesse, Gunter Grass, and Thomas Mann–The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife stars Valerie Harper as Marjorie Taub, a middle-aged Riverside Drive matron gripped by depression following the death of her psychiatrist....

Souleymane Cisse’s extraordinarily beautiful and mesmerizing fantasy is set in the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) long before it was invaded by Morocco in the 16th century. A young man (Issiaka Kane) sets out to discover the mysteries of nature (or komo, the science of the gods) with the help of his mother and uncle, but his jealous and spiteful father contrives to prevent him from deciphering the elements of the Bambara sacred rites and tries to kill him....

For years the Chicago Park District’s Theatre on the Lake was a wasting asset, used only by community theater groups based in the neighborhood parks for annual productions of Brigadoon or The Mousetrap. That changed in 1996, when staff led by Marj Halperin, then director of the Park District’s marketing and program support, made it into the theatrical equivalent of the Grant Park Music Festival: a publicly underwritten venue that made professional performances available to people who might not otherwise see them....