To get to the Vacant boutique at the Marshall Field’s mothership this month, you can take the main elevator straight to the ninth floor. Or, if you get directions from some crackhead, like I did, you can wend your way through the forest of expensive furniture on the eighth floor, find the special escalator that goes up one more level, then cut through the rug department, so desolate the employees lie down on the merchandise....

My first impression of cornetist Rob Mazurek upon hearing the Chicago Underground Orchestra’s 1998 release Playground (Delmark) was that the guy had a lot of nerve. Where did he get off putting the label “underground” on a band whose sound was the direct outgrowth of commercially successful 60s recordings like Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” and Herbie Hancock’s score for Blowup? My second take was that he was a marvelously lyrical, deeply swinging soloist....

As a grammar school student, artist Raye Bemis would return a creased piece of paper to the teacher and request a perfect sheet. “The pristine surface was my starting point,” she explains, “and something on it would somehow interfere with my taking crayon to the surface. The blank piece of paper represented the unknown in a way, and that’s what I seek today; that’s why I avoid art history references or anything that feels like I’ve experienced it before....

“Still going, still maintaining,” raps Atmosphere’s Slug on “Give Me,” three tracks into his brand-new album with producing partner Ant, God Loves Ugly (Rhymesayers Entertainment/Fat Beats). “Still standing in the land of snow and purple rain, and / I’m still waiting for my dates to kiss me or slap me / ‘Cause there ain’t no way I can be happy when I’m happy.” And in case you think he’s kidding, on “Hair” he sharpens the point: “I wear my scars like the rings on a pimp....

Father Michael Davitti doesn’t think he ended up in Chicago by chance. He believes that providence, greeted with an open mind, has guided him on a journey from Italy, where he was born in 1943, to Africa to the Saint Therese Chinese Catholic Mission, a small church near the heart of Chinatown where for the last three years he’s been the pastor. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the next decade Davitti did things he thought would make his work as a missionary more effective....

The 13th annual Chicago Humanities Festival, this year themed “Brains & Beauty,” runs through November 10 and offers dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by writers, artists, and scholars (see schedule below), as well as film screenings and theatrical and musical performances (see separate listings in this section and in Section Three). The following events take place at these locations: Alliance Francaise, 54 W. Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan and Adams; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was first performed in 1962, at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral–built alongside the ruins of the original, destroyed during the Battle of Britain in 1940. The English composer, an ardent pacifist, had left for the U.S. in 1939, not to return until ’42; he dedicated his requiem to four friends killed in the war. Its text juxtaposes the traditional Latin mass for the dead with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who died in battle at age 25, just seven days before the end of World War I....

“To protect Lake Michigan we have to protect the land that drains into it,” said Lake Michigan Federation director Cameron Davis in an interview last month. He favors replacing Meigs Field with a nature park to be called Sanctuary Point. Among other things, the federation would like the Chicago Park District to construct wetlands that would help purify the runoff from nearby parking lots serving Adler Planetarium and the 12th Street Beach....

When guitarist Corey Harris hit the national scene in the late 90s, he seemed a likely candidate to lead the growing acoustic revivalist movement among young African-American bluesmen. Since then, however, he’s proven more interested in expanding what his audience thinks of as “blues” than in hewing to tradition. His latest, this year’s Downhome Sophisticate (Rounder), melds southern American and Afro-Caribbean roots music with greasy funk grooves, electrified hip-hop, and occasional forays into wild-hearted rock–but rather than present his idiosyncratic fusion as a break from the past, he connects all these genres, the blues included, to the history of the African diaspora....

Voters in Rogers Park almost got to vote in the upcoming election on whether they want the U.S. to go to war against Iraq. Donna Conroy led a group of activists in an attempt to get the following referendum on the ballot in the 49th Ward: “Should the citizens of this ward oppose an invasion of Iraq by the United States?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Thanksgiving she and the other activists began circulating petitions to get the question on the ballot....

The rear lobby of the Cook County Administration Building is one of those sterile, soporific institutional spaces where calming colors are used in an attempt to conceal the architectural discord between, for instance, the faux grandeur of the high ceilings and the bland escalator openings. Other artists who’ve installed work here have chosen bold, attention-getting colors, but Yvette Kaiser Smith’s two large crotcheted fiberglass sculptures blend into the space while subtly critiquing it....

On the cover of the book published last year by Laleh Bakhtiar and her sister Rose is a photo of their mother in a stylish suit and pumps–perched atop a camel. Helen of Tus: Her Odyssey From Idaho to Iran tells the story of Helen Jeffreys, one of the first American-trained nurses to work in Iran. “Her father was the mayor of Weiser–it’s a small town near Boise,” says Laleh Bakhtiar, the 64-year-old production director of Kazi Publications, an Islamic book distributor on Belmont that specializes in translations of classical texts and poetry....

Night Coil For Jones, everyday reality is simply too boring to bother with. His most polemical work–and his best known in Chicago, where it’s been a perennial October favorite–is Seventy Scenes of Halloween, a series of blackouts in no particular order showing a young middle-class couple at home on Halloween. Here “reality” is represented by a constant stream of disjointed images and white noise from the couple’s TV–a reality that’s as skin-deep as the facade of white-bread suburban bliss in this 1980 anti-Reagan diatribe....

Julia Rhoads’s Endplay has plenty of comic hooks. In the opening, two dancers wearing crash helmets crawl toward each other on all fours from opposite sides of the stage until, after an eternity, they collide head-on and topple over. Then the two of them stagger into an epic if accidental battle of the helmets. When they’re joined by seven others, this amusing, Beckettian piece takes us on a perpetual-motion journey whose point seems to be the pointlessness of one-upmanship; Elizabeth Lentz is particularly killing as a Martha Stewart type whose tea-drinking style places her far above the hoi polloi....

At least this calculatedly familiar show leaves you humming all 22 melodies–more than can be said for many Broadway exports, where you’re lucky to remember one. Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, and Catherine Johnson’s Mamma Mia! remains an elaborate if distracting excuse for a simulated Abba reunion, as a bride seeks her real father while her mother readmits love into her heart. Oddly, the songs in the connect-the-hits plot retain their lyrics, which can make the numbers preposterously inappropriate for the story at hand....

Mauldin on the Attack Mauldin’s first cover, Dorfman remembers, was one of Daley “in a Keystone Kops getup seated like a little kid cutting paper dolls out of the ‘Chicago Press,’ except that the cutouts spelled ‘We Love Mayor Daley.’ We used that cartoon again in June of 1971, surrounded by the editorial-page masts of all four dailies–with the heads of the editorials endorsing Daley for a fifth term.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Following up last year’s surprise hit Grapefruit Moon: The Music of Tom Waits, Davenport’s offers a revue of tunes by another rock poet–Leonard Cohen, Montreal’s answer to Jacques Brel and Bob Dylan. Cohen’s deadpan baritone has given his work a gloomy image. But this cabaret set proves that the cult icon’s bravely confessional songs, sexually charged and permeated with Christian symbolism and mordant humor, can also be exhilarating. Keyboardist and conductor Dan Stetzel has arranged the music for four fine singers and a crisp five-piece rock band, giving the harmonically simple material impressive rhythmic variety....

Rene Lozano is standing in front of a noisy Doberman explaining why single-handedly capturing a pack of nine dogs is not such a big deal. “Nine times out of ten the pack is gonna be chasing a female in heat,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s a pack of stray dogs, or owned dogs. All the male dogs are looking for the female.” Lozano gestures at the Doberman. “All I need to do is find the female....

Live Skull and Come were two of the most intense guitar bands of the indie-rock era, but it was the way Thalia Zedek’s anguished wail fought the din that made both bands stick for me–then as now, few vocalists could convey emotional turbulence with such economy and power. After Zedek and guitarist Chris Brokaw split with Come’s rhythm section in the late 90s, the band such as it was experimented with “cabaret” tours, and for the first time Zedek had the opportunity to sink into her songs instead of straining to get out in front of them....

The Best Defense: Ignore the Offense But this was Dinges’s first letter, the cheery progress report he’d written May 2 and sent to all the local newspapers. His mood soon changed. On May 5 he read an op-ed essay in the Tribune under the headline “Not too late to stop Soldier Field giveaway.” The author was Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago who hinted that the stadium project was un-American....