Garage on Fire! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Horizontal Action crew–Killings, Uncle Ted (aka Brett Cross), and Billiams (aka Baseball Furies drummer Matt Williams)–came up with the idea for the Blackout not long after they started publishing. “We thought, ‘Why not take all of these bands that we’ve been interviewing and have them play here on one night?’” Killings says. “They were bands that couldn’t really afford to go on tour or didn’t think they were popular enough to do so....

Hambone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the performances are superb, though A.C. Smith goes a bit over the top as Henry: when he bugs his eyes out after drinking a potion, it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of racist stereotypes of African-Americans as fools. Of course Henry is a fool, but like Falstaff he’s a fool with a serious purpose, and mugging undercuts that. Freeman Coffey has the solid authority necessary for Bishop even though Johnson doesn’t give him the dramatic legs to stand on for his big scenes in the second act....

David O. Russell’s 1999 Three Kings still seems slightly miraculous, a Hollywood action movie that mercilessly satirizes American greed and mendacity during the gulf war. Bringing it to the screen so taxed Russell he swore he’d never attempt anything like it again, and true to his word, I ª Huckabees is smaller and more cerebral, a philosophical comedy about man’s place in a universe colonized by Targets and Wal-Marts. A nerdy organizer (Jason Schwartzman of Rushmore) finds his wetlands-preservation project being co-opted by a glad-handing executive (Jude Law) of the Huckabees retail chain and hires two “existential detectives” (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to find meaning in his life....

To the Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is, however, news value in the fact that there is growing dissatisfaction among radio consumers. Arbitron research shows that listening levels have declined steadily over the past few years, with dramatic declines among 12- to 24-year-olds. A study conducted earlier this year by the Future of Music Coalition found that by a better than ten-to-one ratio, radio listeners believe that DJs should be given more airtime for songs they think will be of interest, rather than be required to mostly play songs of artists backed by record companies....

Over the two decades Lauren Deutsch has been photographing jazz musicians, she’s found that often her best pictures aren’t necessarily the sharpest or the most rigorously composed. She likes the ones that evoke the spirit of the music–sometimes through the demeanor of the musician and sometimes through the texture of the image. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Deutsch, who’s executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, says Harlem photographer Roy De Carava is her hero....

Dear sirs, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article was a slash piece with the author slashing away at my Church and my religious beliefs as if she and her conspirators were legitimate judges of religions, which she and they are not. The Scientology religion, founded by well-known humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard, is a practical technology of the spirit which revives the spiritual nature of man and the individual, when applied exactly....

Things are looking up at the Space, Chicago’s newest hole-in-the-wall incubator of adventurous new plays. In the past few months Half Cocked Productions, which runs the Space, have put up new drywall, found a few extra chairs, and replaced their four clamp-on lamps with a small grid of track lighting. They’ve left the diarrhea-and-cream linoleum-tile floor as it was, perhaps so they won’t be accused of getting too tony. In celebration of their minirehab, the company has reopened Arik Martin’s brutal, darkly comic drama Serendipity, which premiered in January....

ROGER CLYNE & THE PEACEMAKERS 5/3, METRO He may have written the theme song to one of the funniest shows on TV (Fox’s King of the Hill), but these days Roger Clyne produces some of the most breathtakingly earnest roots rock since John Mellencamp got rich. The guy leans on his harmonica like an emphysema patient on an iron lung, and clearly hopes to earn his native Arizona desert a place next to the Boss’s Jersey boardwalks in the public’s heart....

Ken Loach’s 2002 feature about a poor 15-year-old boy living in a seaside town in western Scotland is a real heartbreaker; like The Bicycle Thief and Rebel Without a Cause, it confronts the tragedy of someone trying to be a good person who finds that the world he inhabits won’t allow it. Liam (played by teenage soccer pro Martin Compston) has a mother in prison; his sister loves him but can’t understand why he gets into so many fights, just as his mother’s lover can’t understand why he refuses to slip drugs to his mother in prison....

By all rights this scrappy late-night fusion of hip-hop music and short-form improv should have completed its life cycle a dozen performances ago. But six months into an on-again, off-again run at WNEP, The Beatbox shows no signs of stagnation. As eager to please as ever, DJ Rene Duquesnoy looks expectantly at the audience every time he licks his fingers and flips the records on his turntable, and director Zach Ward’s six cast members lose themselves in the music and the moment by riffing imaginatively on a single audience suggestion....

If you’ve never been to Chris and Heather’s Record Roundup and Collectibles at 2034 W. Montrose, you don’t have much time to remedy your situation. Chris Ligon and Heather McAdams are closing down their country-themed LP and tchotchke store and moving to Delaware. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Heather and Chris started the store as an outlet for all the stuff they had accumulated–much of the merchandise comes from their own collections, gleaned from flea markets and estate sales....

Whenever Jeff Dorchen returns to Chicago from his current home in Los Angeles, I’m reminded of the enormous hole he left in our performance scene. Keenly intelligent and politically audacious, he’s an actor, singer, musician, and writer, creating everything from full-length plays to folk tunes. All these talents come together in his “one-man play with songs,” The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain, which premiered here in 1995. The title character is an aging, cranky, disillusioned singer waiting in his shoddy home for the arrival of the great folk historian Alan Lomax....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is probably no point in appealing to the Shrubites on the basis of human compassion. Their level of comprehension of the nature of human civilization was arrested at the stage of “I have clubbed an antelope to death, and I will keep it for myself, even if it rots before I can eat it all myself....

Lately it seems like every week another local institution goes under, and with each, something intangible is lost: an era ends, a dream dies. Zum Deutschen Eck went in January. I lived directly across the street before I worked at the Zum. My neighbors didn’t like the place. Those damn songs played late into the night, and you wouldn’t want to make the mistake of leaving your car in their lot–they’d tow you, even after hours....

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s mind-boggling silent masterpiece of 1926 was thought to have been lost for 40 years until the director discovered a print in his garden shed. A seaman hires on as a janitor at an insane asylum to free his wife, who’s become an inmate after attempting to kill herself and her baby. The film’s expressionist style is all the more surprising because Japan had no such tradition to speak of; Kinugasa hadn’t even seen The Cabinet of Dr....

Being Beautiful, Bailiwick Repertory. McKinley Johnson and Stephanie Newsom’s musical (somewhat revised since its premiere last summer at the Chicago Theatre Company) succeeds on the strength of its offbeat subject and lively performances. Johnson himself plays Afton, a black sharecropper’s son transformed into gender-bending nightclub star Aftrina in 1940s Chicago under the tutelage of gay grande dame Lonette (Duwane Pendarvis) and his proteges, Ellen (Langstan Smith) and Leslie (Eric Jorgensen). Aftrina’s reckless youth–and the tragedy that forces him back into the closet–is recalled in flashback in 1970 by the middle-aged Afton (Sanford E....

By Ben Joravsky and Melody Rodgers In some ways it’s amazing the project got as far as it did. For one thing, the county, facing a budget crisis brought on by too many public-works projects, can’t afford it. For another, it didn’t really need it. True, the county’s domestic-violence court, now in dilapidated and cramped quarters at 13th and Michigan, was supposed to move to the new building, but there are other solutions to its problems....

The 12th annual festival, which runs through November 11, offers dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by writers and scholars on the theme of “Words & Pictures,” as well as movies and musical and theatrical performances (see 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. Washington; Chicago Historical Society, Clark at North; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier, 800 E....

Clarinetist Don Byron has earned a reputation as a stubborn individualist by repeatedly confounding the expectations of his audience. Although he’s ostensibly a jazz musician, over the past decade and a half his recordings have investigated klezmer, funk, hip-hop, Latin music, and opera; recently, as artist in residence at New York’s Symphony Space, he’s interpreted the music of Henry Mancini, Sly Stone, and the Sugar Hill Gang. Byron insists, correctly, that his eclecticism isn’t the mark of a dilettante–there’s no reason to doubt that his explorations are heartfelt, and he’s yet to embarrass himself....

Alice is 60 and Wonderland is a burlesque club in Jim Hornor’s extremely loose adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic for UMA Productions. In this staging by Mikhael Tara Garver, the premise seems little more than an excuse for lots of running around and overacting, and the script’s assumption is offensive: that the “personhood” of a 60-year-old must be validated by a bunch of thespians half her age. Though Julie Mitre is appealingly frail as an Alice with plenty of problems–a father who abandoned her in childhood, a daughter who’s disappeared–her almost woodenly naturalistic acting is completely at odds with the other performances....