Chicago tends to hemorrhage talent: new Albuquerque residents Brett and Rennie Sparks aren’t the first bright lights to split the scene and they won’t be the last. But as Chicago artists go, they were remarkably self-contained anyway. Though their last couple albums have certainly benefited from contributions by Jeff Tweedy and Andrew Bird, the couple did after all ax their drummer in favor of a machine and have recorded everything since 1998 or so on their home computer....

Martin Mull: Hindsight While illustrators like Norman Rockwell offer images of an impossible childhood utopia, other artists mine their childhoods for works that balance wish fulfillment with hints of nightmare. Martin Mull and Scott Anderson, two artists of different generations, both accompany their quests for an idyllic past with the recognition that it never really existed, pairing fantasy utopias with suggestions of the artificiality of any imagined paradise. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Loic Wacquant was a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago when he joined the Woodlawn Boys Club at 63rd and Woodlawn in 1988. He thought the club, a boxing gym that served the surrounding community, might provide a good point from which to study the social lives of young men in the ghetto. An acolyte of fellow Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu, he wasn’t planning on sparring himself. He was a thinker, not a fighter–a student with a bright academic future....

The Kronos Quartet has never had much use for the decorum and stylistic purity expected of a classical string ensemble, but on last year’s terrific Nuevo (Nonesuch) the group pulled out all the stops, transforming itself into something just short of a pop band. The album surveys the broad range of music, from classical to kitsch, produced in Mexico over the last century–an idea inspired by the disparate sounds that violinist David Harrington heard in the streets on a stroll through Mexico City....

Lead Stories Recent Strandings Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Olean, New York, in July, Robert Fyfe, 44, fell into a silt and mud pit at a gravel company and could not free himself for 60 hours. In Raritan Township, New Jersey, Jim Kahlke, 36, was locked in an ATM vestibule on Thanksgiving night and wasn’t discovered until a bank employee arrived for work the next morning....

Quite possibly this is the wildest nightlife thing I’ve ever done, and I did it in college! Being here reminds me of this. Some friends and I decided that we wanted to go streaking in the evening. There were about ten of us. We had helpers who didn’t want to streak but held our clothes while we went into these places on campus. Some of us had masks on. I think we wore shoes....

“Dave Van Ronk is one of my favorite men,” Rosalie Sorrels once said of the folk troubadour who died last February. “He’s got such a gentle heart, but he shows it in this real strong, brave kind of way.” The same could be said of Sorrels, who’s headlining a tribute to Van Ronk that also features Spider John Koerner, Mark Dvorak, and Chris Walz. Sorrels came of age in Boise in the 50s, enamored of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, and her songs are populated by winos, death row inmates, homeless children, and single mothers (like herself)....

Schadenfreude comes from a long line of Chicago comedy iconoclasts. Like the Annoyance and the Upright Citizens Brigade, this six-member troupe won’t leave the theater until boundaries are broken, taboos are shattered, or–at the very least–the audience is doused with fake blood as an unsuspecting patron’s still beating heart is ripped out in a ritualistic sacrifice to the gods of offbeat sketch comedy. At last year’s Chicago Improv Festival, Schadenfreude transformed their headlining slot into a full-on theatrical happening with their own warped take on Andy Kaufman’s landmark Carnegie Hall performance, inviting guests that included a professional cheerleading squad from Naperville....

On the stretch of Ashland that runs from Back of the Yards to Englewood, between 50th and 63rd Streets, vacant lots and storefront churches outnumber shops and homes, and pedestrians are few and far between. But a few scrappy shopkeepers hawk their wares there anyway–some because they’re committed to the neighborhood, others because they got stuck there. They put their goods out on the street and hope the city doesn’t bust them for blocking a public walkway....

When he stepped off the elevator, he thought he heard ringing. A phone ringing. A phone was ringing, that’s for sure. It was like his piss hitting the toilet. At first you don’t even notice it, then some guy’s standing next to you in the john at Mitchell’s and suddenly that steady stream is the only thing you hear. He told his legs to hurry. They were old and tired and he had to wear support hose to bed and elevate his feet, and he walked as fast as he could....

Former Dismemberment Plan front man Travis Morrison realizes that most indie rockers don’t need to be argued out of reelecting George Bush. Instead he spends his first solo album, Travistan (Barsuk), analyzing the ways in which politics and history impinge on the personal lives of himself and his mostly white, reasonably privileged cohort. On “Che Guevara Poster” he nonjudgmentally contrasts collegiate armchair leftism with his granddad’s socialist (and racist) past; on “Born in ’72” he scrutinizes his white-male liberal guilt with the same insightful candor he formerly brought to bear on his romantic/sexual agendas....

Trib Picks Its Fights The Tribune had taken a poll, and the poll revealed less public opposition to expansion than meets the eye. But there wasn’t much to the poll either. The Suburban O’Hare Commission, which exists to keep O’Hare no bigger than it already is, spotted an opportunity and promptly issued a public statement labeled “Tribune Spins Poll to Suit Editorial Bias.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What these numbers seem to be telling us is that if you live five miles from O’Hare you probably think of it as a convenience, and if you live a mile away you probably think of it as a nuisance....

What a difference a couple of years can make. In April 1996, when Mark and Mary Jurczyk bought a run-down bar called Manny’s Place at 2500 N. Ashland, the neighborhood near the intersection of Ashland and Fullerton lacked what anyone would call ambience. In spite of the longtime presence of Rudi’s Wine Bar, this corner of Lincoln Park was known less for fine French bistro than for short-order Mexican grill....

Born and trained in China, the Zhou brothers, who came to Chicago in 1986, make collaborative art that reflects a mix of Eastern and Western influences. They’re best known for their paintings, but their prints are equally strong, as can be seen in the exhibit of mostly woodblock prints at Oskar Friedl. Several untitled works in their “Water Lily” series juxtapose a vertical dark band and a lighter rectangle; in one, the left band is a deep maroon with barely visible darker markings, and the aqua field at right is interrupted by flowing white lines–thick ones suggesting lilies, thinner ones ripples in water....

These testosterone-inflated fleshbags inspire the same sort of perverse adoration as skater boys who’ll never care as much about a warm body as they do about their precious boards. They front like they don’t give a flying fuck, and the moral of most of their songs is that they have no morals: stay out of other people’s business, do what you gotta do, live life free of fear and hassle. With their debut EP, Street Gang, they drew a lot of flak for openly ripping off Suicide, but the sound of their first full-length, A....

10 Years of Strictly Rhythm–Mixed by “Little Louie” Vega To be sure, Strictly Rhythm is not as aggressively experimental as Warp. And some might argue that there aren’t six discs worth of story to be told about a genre as formally unadventurous, if not regressive, as house often seems to be. But if 1999 proved anything, it’s that house–from Basement Jaxx to Armand Van Helden to Tuff Jam to DJ Funk to Faze Action–has become as variegated as any other music you’d care to name, in or outside dance culture....

Jerry Lazar paced back and forth beside the ring, hoping for a chance to prove himself. From looking at him you’d never have guessed that he was the lightweight champion of Tuesday Fite Nite, a weekly exhibition at the north-side nightclub Zafire. He was short and thin, weighing 140 pounds and standing five feet, six inches. His cheeks were smooth and round, and at 24 he spoke with the gentle voice of a boy who’d just entered puberty....

Arshad “Sony” Javid says he started on caffeine when he was 11 months old. He loves coffee. It fuels him from the moment he gets up, and it remains his obsession seven days a week as he oversees his growing java empire, the Cafe Descartes chain, which includes a new roasting facility and coffeehouse in Rogers Park, five coffee stands on the UIC campus, and one stand at Northeastern Illinois University....

“Pledges of allegiance are marks of totalitarian states, not democracies,” Brown University anthropologist David Kertzer told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently. “I can’t think of a single democracy except the United States that has a pledge of allegiance” (reprinted in the “Progressive Review,” July 2). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Does sprawl deny home buyers what they want? Not according to a national survey of 2,000 people who bought a primary residence in the last four years, conducted last January for the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors (www....

Composer Frank Abbinanti came of age in the 1960s, when art and politics were all but inseparable. He studied piano with Frederic Rzewski, a disciple of Cage and Stockhausen who wrote a piece called The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, and his composition teachers were Ralph Shapey and Ben Johnston, both men of originality and candor. Over the years he’s championed the works of Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Cornelius Cardew, and other left-leaning European avant-gardists, and he’s summed up his ideology thus: “I’ve never believed in art for art’s sake....