This spring Edna Pardo finished another of her guides to the city’s budget. For more than 20 years she’s been quietly putting out “A Guide Through Chicago’s Tax Maze” for the League of Women Voters–making her a legend among the watchdogs who pore over budgets in an attempt to hold the city accountable for the way it spends our money. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pardo believes it’s important that the public understand what happens with tax money at the local level, especially now, with President Bush cutting federal taxes....

Michael Stumm stalks his meager opening-night audience like a gleeful rat. Rail thin, skittish, and inexplicably menacing in a rumpled poplin suit and limp polka-dot tie, he’s frolicking through Jim Strahs’s dizzying and disjointed monologue How to Act, offering a torrent of questionable advice to would-be actors. “Topic: anal leakage,” Stumm announces. “What are you doing about it? All the greats suffered.” But before we have a chance to consider our rectal health, he makes it clear that most everyone’s career is doomed anyway....

The spastically hype-happy British press has already compared this Merseyside sextet to far more famous Liverpudlians, but though the band’s eponymously titled debut overran the UK last summer, here in the U.S. (where it was released on Columbia in March) the going has been slower. The disc kicks off with a two-note bass bounce that builds to a dervish whirl before manly harmonies determinedly repeat, “We’ll set sail again / We’re headin’ for the Spanish Main....

Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky wrote many of his works quickly, hoping to make the money to pay off his debts. As Vladimir Nabokov notes in his Lectures on Russian Literature, Dostoyevsky seldom reread what he’d written or reshaped the beginning of a novel to accommodate later changes. Indeed, the complexity of Dostoyevsky’s characters may well have had something to do with his hectic writing schedule. If a character contradicts himself, very well: he contains multitudes....

With a Little Help From Her Friends Not an especially gutsy establishment, Columbia University’s Pulitzer Board likes to deal in results. The Tribune had been studying the death penalty since 1999, and twice had become a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its reporting on the subject without winning. But at the end of his term Governor Ryan–who’d given the Tribune credit for opening his eyes–cleared out death row. This Monday the Tribune’s Cornelia Grumman won a Pulitzer for a series of editorials arguing for capital punishment reform....

In both his visual art and his music, Peter Brotzmann has waged an endless battle against the notions of perfection and control. Metal Landscape (1963) and Painting With Metal Foil (1962), two pieces of artwork reproduced in the catalog to his recent show “The Inexplicable Flyswatter,” have been accumulating rust and corrosion since Brotzmann signed off on them–four decades later, they’re still works in progress. His new album with Thomas Borgmann, William Parker, and Rashied Bakr, The Cooler Suite (Grob), underwent a similar process: its source is an unbalanced, overloaded soundboard cassette from a 1997 concert that sat around Borgmann’s apartment for five years, and the consequent dropouts and distortion actually amplify the music’s desperate energy....

“With African art people usually think of masks and sculpture that are used for tribal rituals, religious purposes, kings’ and chiefs’ regalia, or objects of everyday use in a village setting,” says Columbia College art history professor Kate Ezra. “They don’t think of Africa as being part of the contemporary art world.” For the new exhibit “Contemporary African Art 1950-2000: Reframing Tradition” Ezra and her student curators had to limit their search to local collections to economize, but she says she was “surprised by the extent and richness of the pieces that I found....

The sixth edition of this annual celebration of the art of improvisational comedy brings together performers from around the U.S. and from our allies abroad–think of it as a coalition of the comically willing. (Chicago, of course, is heavily represented.) This year’s festival, the largest yet, is divided into several series–Mainstage, Showcase, Sketch, Solo, Duo, and Fringe–as well as an all-night improv session, an adult-oriented “Blue” show, a series of daytime Lunchbreak performances (presented in conjunction with the city’s cultural affairs department), and numerous special events, including forums and workshops....

Improvisers have always been the daredevils of theater, leaping onstage without a clue what they’re going to do once they get there. Always looking for the next big thrill, the higher high, the more dangerous stunt, many of them took to long-form improvisation, creating a 30- or 40-minute show based on a single suggestion. A marathon improv is just the next step. Seasoned improviser Andy Cobb has gathered a handful of other improv fiends for such an event, among them Mick Napier, Ed Furman, Craig Cackowski, T....

1210 Hours Our platoon leader gets something on the radio. Beyond this boundary is the alleged governor’s mansion, and surrounding the governor’s mansion is an alleged battalion of PRA, the Grenadan People’s Revolutionary Army, the tatterdemalion force that assassinated Maurice Bishop, the leftist prime minister. The PRA, with the help of Cuban advisers, was building an airfield that the Reagan administration viewed as a Soviet arms pipeline to Nicaragua and El Salvador....

Kicked Out of Heaven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I want to live in the Three Arts Club. I’d have a room of my own in the landmark Gold Coast building, two meals a day without ever having to cook, and the company of 90 inspiring sisters of all ages–dancers, singers, musicians, actors, painters, sculptors, and photographers, come from all over the world to work and study at Chicago institutions like the Joffrey, the Lyric Opera, and the School of the Art Institute....

Anthony Rubano doesn’t need to start a fire to assert his masculinity. But he recognizes that man’s need to control flame persisted long after he stopped killing his own meat and burning it outside the cave. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I am actually very poor at barbecue cookery,” says Rubano, who grew up in Buffalo Grove and got a master’s in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....

Although the dandelions were out in force in Washington Park, the weather was unseasonably cool. But the chill in the morning air didn’t discourage the players, who’d been waiting all winter long to take to the pitch and compete for runs and wickets. In their white shoes, shirts, pants, and V-neck sweaters, the all-male assembly looked more like caddies than athletes, but their careful stretching routines suggested that something seriously athletic was about to happen....

LIARS 10/25, EMPTY BOTTLE; 10/26, FIRESIDE BOWL The Liars’ debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (Blast First/Mute), released last fall, did more to reclaim New York’s title as a capital of joli laid rock ‘n’ roll excitement than almost any other contemporaneous contender. The Liars are inspired by a continuum of waves (new, no, and neo new) to foster restlessness rather than ensure familiarity (keep your Strokes to yourself)....

Tale of the Tiger “The pinnacle of his career was creating Tony the Tiger, one of the most celebrated and successful icons in the history of our industry,” said an in-house memo to Burnett employees eulogizing Tennant, who’d joined the agency in 1950 as its first full-time radio and TV writer-producer. Advertising Age mourned, “He was the creative director on many of the early campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes, and in 1952 he created the ‘Tony the Tiger’ character for Kellogg’s Co....

What’s the deal with Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge? I always thought he was just a nut job who ate too many mushrooms. But now I hear that the whole thing is fiction. Did Castaneda ever go to Mexico and eat peyote with an old Indian? Are any of his books true? Or is the whole thing completely made up? Teachings, published in 1968 by the University of California Press, purports to be the first-person account of a UCLA anthropology student who meets an old man named Juan Matus at a bus station on the Mexican border while on a field trip looking for medicinal plants....

THOMAS LEHN & GERRY HEMINGWAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes to free improvisation, analog synthesizer is not the first instrument that comes to mind–but given its vast sonic potential, maybe it should be. Just like a saxophonist or pianist, a synth player must be intimate with his machine, must know from experience and practice how to manipulate its thicket of patch cords, in order to communicate and respond to rapidly shifting musical ideas....

As the Black Cloud Lifts . . . Is it all gone with the wind? From former editor Nigel Wade, in 1997 (said on WTTW): “I’ve spent ten years in communist countries, and I don’t believe collectivism works.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times is no stranger to turmoil, but by any standard the recent developments have been remarkable: Black and Radler humiliated and ousted, Cruickshank promoted from vice president of editorial to publisher, and everything Hollinger owns possibly going up for sale....

The sixth annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, continues Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21. Screenings will be at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $7, $3 for Film Center members; for more information call 773-562-6265. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended....

Bobby Conn is a Kim Fowley for our time. Fowley is little more than a footnote in rock history–his career as a producer and manager certainly hasn’t made him a household name–but in the late 60s he put out a series of solo records that provided a vivid premonition of the adventurous, sex-positive, drug-friendly, persona-swapping music of David Bowie, T. Rex, the New York Dolls, and all the other glam kings and glitter queens who would follow....