Martin McDonogh, the prolific young Anglo-Irish writer responsible for such international hits as A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West, has two great strengths as a playwright: a fine sense for how the Irish talk and behave and a knack for telling dark comic stories. In fact the two gifts reinforce each other. Capture the contradictions of the Irish soul, and you can’t help but be hilarious and heartbreaking. Entwine tragedy and comedy, and you’re well on your way to re-creating the Irish spirit....

The Producers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That was in 1989, when Panik and his pals Mixx Massacre (aka Alberto Espinosa) and MC Vakill (aka Donald Mason) were calling themselves the Dead Poets Society. In 1991, Panik, then 19 and in his fifth year of high school, dropped out and retreated to the basement of his parents’ house in Logan Square to teach himself hip-hop skills....

Undercover Journalism’s Last Call Even now, I see no particular reason to disbelieve Greene’s columns but swallow what he said about them later. One’s no likelier to have been a pose than the other. Greene’s nonchalance put him squarely in a long tradition of Chicago journalism. There are no rewards for plodding sincerity in popular histories such as John McPhaul’s Deadlines and Monkeyshines and Ben Hecht’s Gaily, Gaily. As Hecht wrote of Charles MacArthur, each of them an inspiration for later generations of newspapering youth: his “antics” were “gay and macabre…he would defend a cause with his life, but he would speak of it mockingly, if at all....

ZURDOK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the rock-en-espanol bands that’ve made inroads in the States recently–bands like Cafe Tacuba, Aterciopelados, and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs–have distinguished themselves by incorporating elements of their native musical traditions. But if they didn’t sing in Spanish, you’d never know Zurdok were from Monterrey, Mexico. On their new Maquillaje (Universal Latino) they sound like unabashed Anglophiles, setting Beatlesque hooks and vocal harmonies in expansive production a la OK Computer-era Radiohead....

Anybody who’s done time in the restaurant industry knows the correct knee-jerk reaction to a roomful of customers cooking their own food: “Suckers.” And a shabu-shabu restaurant–where customers get a plate of raw meat, vegetables, tofu, and noodles and a pot of boiling water to swish it all around in–sounds like a recipe for the food-as-enforced-fun experience whose appeal to the bored and tasteless has made a fortune for chains like Ed Debevic’s and Benihana....

Malian husband and wife Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia, who met as students at a school for the blind, have been experimenting with the circular, blueslike patterns of their native music since the early 90s. Specifically they’ve been narrowing the gap between their own traditions and the blues rock of America: although the insistent but gently articulated riffs favored in the music of countrymen like Ali Farka Toure and Habib Koite cascade through their tunes, Bagayoko and Doumbia prefer to play them on electric guitars, and they frequently add little improvised stabs that sound like they could have been recorded at Chess Studios four decades ago....

Duke Ellington’s aide-de-camp Billy Strayhorn, who wrote some mighty beautiful tunes and whose elegance and refinement surpassed even the master’s, has been the subject of a revisionist campaign in recent years. Because Ellington sometimes succumbed to the odious yet common jazz bandleader’s practice of taking sole composer’s credit for works his colleague coauthored or wrote outright, Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu in Lush Life portrays him as shoving Strays out of the limelight....

The second annual edition of this showcase of sketch comedy, presented by Posin’ at the Bar, features more than 50 local and out-of-town ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints. The festival runs through January 25 at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont. Performances are Wednesdays-Thursdays at 7:30 and 9 PM; Fridays-Saturdays at 7, 8, 9, and 10 PM; and Sundays at 4, 5:30, 7, and 8:30 PM....

Sometimes I think the very best dances induce not excitement but meditation. Watching the Merce Cunningham Dance Company last spring at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I fell into a slumberous state that only enhanced the poignance of the dancing. Eiko & Koma, the husband-and-wife team who won a MacArthur fellowship in 1996, seem to aim for a similar result. The piece they premiered last summer and are bringing here this weekend, When Nights Were Dark, confines the two in what New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff called a revolving “shiplike structure” festooned with leaves and other vegetation (they used a similar set in The Caravan Project, an outdoor work shown here in fall 1999)....

Give Peace a Chance Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The museum’s headquarters are now in the golden-domed field house at Garfield Park. There’s office and storage space galore, Rivet-River says, but the “most exciting” thing is that all of the city’s field houses are potential galleries. Founded by muralist Mark Rogovin and philanthropist Marjorie Craig Benton, the Peace Museum promotes nonviolent solutions to social problems through education and exhibits....

Himself as Herself Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1966 Gregory J. Markopoulos became one of the first avant-garde filmmakers to take up teaching when he founded the filmmaking department at the School of the Art Institute. But after he moved to Europe the next year his films became nearly impossible to see in North America, and while New York, Toronto, and Berkeley have hosted Markopoulos retrospectives since his death in 1992, there’s been little interest in opening one here....

Rebecca Lepkoff Three major tendencies in the history of photography–the photo as portrait, social document, and autonomous art object–are all held in splendid balance in Rebecca Lepkoff’s 18 vintage prints now at Stephen Daiter, her first one-person show in Chicago. She’s been interested in photography since the 1930s and has documented principally the neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where she grew up. Daily, (Banana Cart), 1940’s shows a street from a second-story window....

Director Sam Jones set out to document a recording project by the innovative and critically acclaimed country-rock band Wilco, then stumbled onto one of the bigger music stories of 2001 when Reprise Records decided the album wasn’t a moneymaker and abruptly dropped the band from its roster. This black-and-white film is beautifully shot, and its early scenes, set in the band’s Chicago rehearsal space, have an intuitive feel for the excitement of creative discovery....

With just a few days to go before Tuesday’s aldermanic election, here are some predictions and observations about various wards from a few pundits and politicos. Fourth Ward: “You got Toni Preckwinkle, the incumbent, and Norman Bolden. Hmm. Bolden is a salesperson or something for WGCI. He should have R. Kelly as campaign manager. They’re still playing his CDs, you know. Stuff sells–why not? Preckwinkle will win.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Standing in the lower lobby of the Hilton Chicago waiting for the doors to open on the 13th annual Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition, Asher Brauner advises Homajeet Singh on how to approach the biggest bargain book sale in the world. “It’s sharp elbows time,” he says. “If you get there before someone else, you may get the book. If you wait, you won’t.” In the distance a bell rings....

KEVIN DRUMM WITH STEVE BUTTERS & GLENN KOTCHE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In theory I shouldn’t even be able to preview a free-improv performance: with no scores, directives, or structures, anything can happen, right? But the reality is that even the best improvisers have trademark licks and tricks, from Evan Parker’s serpentine circular breathing to Mats Gustafsson’s pops and whistles. Chicago experimentalist Kevin Drumm is one of a few performers who really can transform themselves from gig to gig....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month Great Britain’s home office, deciding on the proper compensation for an innocent man who’d served 11 years in prison, ruled that he was entitled to about $1.1 million but ordered him to reimburse the prison about $63,000 for his room and board. The exonerated man, Michael O’Brien, was outraged: “They don’t charge guilty people for bed and board....

Continued from last week… Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re on a post in Iraq, as I was, nighttime is usually pretty chilled out. People lounge around and play cards or tell stories. We lived in tents with electricity, so by the time we’d been over there for eight or nine months, people started buying TVs and PlayStations. The way each camp is set up there are a couple of perimeters–there was one huge perimeter around the Tallil Air Force Base–and then it’s sectioned off....

Renter Beware Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heck, a little handshake with Satan might have kept the city from dropping in on March 21 to check out someone else in the building, leaving a cease-and-desist order for V&V just one day after Devil’s Sonata started previews. It might have prevented a visit from the cops, brandishing a Sun-Times article about the show, 15 minutes before curtain on opening night, when the audience had to swear that none of them had been asked to drop a dime in the donation box....

Ed Tracy never served in the military, but he knows about military preparedness. Two weeks before the opening of the Pritzker Military Library he commanded a construction crew and a staff of two as they readied the 5,000-square-foot Streeterville space for inspection. While workers vacuumed plaster dust and the receptionist–a former marine corporal–fielded a call from the mayor’s office, Tracy firmed up the opening weekend’s guest list and armed himself against incidental queries into the Pritzker family fortunes with a preprinted four-page Q and A with the library’s namesake....