French composer Kasper Toeplitz erases distinctions–between acoustic and electronic, performer and composer, music and sound. He’s no friend of the instrumentalist; he’s written that “the instrument is only a tool,” and his growing body of work bears that out. His Branca-esque guitar project Sleaze Art created a huge, amorphous, lumbering din on a phalanx of electric guitars and basses, and he’s written equally slippery pieces for orchestra, in which harmonic ambiguity and dissonance produce a different but similarly excruciating tension....

Brian LeTraunik teaches Chicagoans to stab, hit, and tackle each other without actually hurting anyone. The founder of the fledgling Chicago Stage Combat Academy, he’s been fascinated by stage fighting since he saw a swashbuckling rendition of The Three Musketeers when he was 12. Nine years later, as an actor in another Three Musketeers production, the Hoffman Estates native saw a fellow cast member get hit by a sword and receive a nasty gash in his forehead....

George Axelrod’s 1966 black comedy about sexual hysteria and the American dream presents a view of southern California that rivals Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust in its savagery and satirical insight. Tuesday Weld, in a career-defining performance, plays a luscious high schooler whose Mephistophelian classmate (Roddy McDowell) promises to get her everything she wants, and though the movie is sometimes too dark to be simply funny, a good bit of it is flat-out hilarious....

At the age of 11, I was the editor, publisher, chief correspondent, and paperboy for a mimeographed sheet called the “Eagle,” which reported all the news of my block in Lansing, Michigan. I believed this to be the most local publication of all time, until I saw 1544 West Grace, a seven-year-old zine that comes out two or three times a year and is devoted to life in and around a Lakeview two-flat....

On paper the dot-com game seemed easy. But Brett Singer and Simeon Schnapper discovered it was harder than it looked. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when the Nasdaq started to crash in the spring of last year, the money people stopped returning their calls. “It was depressing trying to get funding in a really turbulent time,” Singer recalls. “We had a sound idea but no experience and not a lot of industry expertise....

Aceyalone was a founding member of the Freestyle Fellowship, a group that countered gangsta culture with jazzy beats and abstract rhymes in the early 90s. He released a couple solo discs later that decade; they seemed groundbreaking at the time but now sound unnecessarily cryptic and subdued. But by 2001, when he released Accepted Eclectic, he’d developed an intriguing new persona–an easygoing guy with a mile-wide cranky streak. On “I Cant Complain” he responds to all manner of evil and injustice with the mantra “I’m healthy, I’m alive, I can’t complain....

TARAF DE HAIDOUKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 80s, Belgian producers Stefan Karo and Michel Winter were so inspired by field recordings of Romanian Gypsy music released by the superb French folkloric label Ocora that they set off for the small village of Clejani to find the musicians. Like American blues enthusiasts John Fahey and Dick Spottswood, who went looking for lost southern bluesmen like Skip James in the early 60s, Karo and Winter managed not only to track the musicians down but to bring their music to a wider audience through tours and recordings....

Where all too many performers pummel their audiences with alienating stylistic innovations, keeping people at a safe distance, writer-performer Barrie Cole plays with her medium to draw her audience closer. One of the first pieces I saw her perform was a short monologue, “The Else,” packed with Gertrude Stein-ian linguistic pyrotechnics. Yet for all the sophisticated, sometimes baffling wordplay, Cole never lost her emotional connection with the audience. Even more impressive, she never let her story get away from her....

A third-floor window was wide open and hot air was blowing through the room last Sunday at the American Indian Center on Wilson. Chris Drew, executive director (and just about everything else) at the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, which makes its home in a warren of dilapidated rooms there, kept an ear cocked toward the window and the street below. The front door was locked, and Drew was listening for latecomers to his free screen-printing workshop for artists....

Friday 5 WARLOCKS This fantastic psychedelic rock band, which spent its early years sharing members with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and touring with the likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, turned a lot of heads with last year’s Phoenix (Mute/Birdman). My head had already been turned by their 2000 self-titled debut EP, though, and I expect their next album, forthcoming in 2005, to rock me like a candy-colored hurricane. The trippy Dead Meadow joins the Warlocks on the bill, and you can expect a moment of loudness from each band in honor of their early boosters, Greg Shaw and John Peel, both of whom died last month....

The University of Illinois men’s basketball team is a fully credentialed member of the Chicago sports fraternity, and the Fighting Illini earned their place on merit. Over the years they’ve been the same head cases and chokers as the Cubs and White Sox; whenever they’ve had a terrific team it’s always come up a little bit short (in marked contrast with DePaul, whose great teams have come up a lot short)....

On their 1977 debut, Pink Flag, Wire took punk’s reductive aesthetic to its extreme. The English quartet used the studio like a belt sander to grind 21 brief songs down to their essential elements: sneering vocals, jagged minimal riffs, and coarse, distorted textures. Two subsequent LPs, Chairs Missing and 154, thrived on the tension between arty experimentation and catchy lyricism, but in 1980 that pressure split the band in two; singer-guitarist Colin Newman and drummer Robert Gotobed collaborated on several records of crisp, sarcastic pop songs while bassist Graham Lewis and guitarist Bruce Gilbert, under the name Dome, made a series of drifting, droning LPs well suited to watching barges rust....

It’s been 35 years since Bonnie Koloc first appeared on the scene. Fresh faced and silver voiced, the Iowa-bred singer-songwriter headed to Chicago in 1968 to break into the folk and blues clubs that flourished in Old Town and on Rush Street and Lincoln Avenue and quickly became one of the city’s top artists, headlining such fabled rooms as Mr. Kelly’s and the Earl of Old Town. Her voice, with its bell-like upper register and dusky low tones, recalls Joan Baez and Judy Collins; earthy humor and passionate intensity simmer beneath her cool, elegant demeanor....

Birdbrain is an odd duck. Though the title of this evening-length deconstruction of Swan Lake suggests comedy, it’s not really funny–but it’s not tragic either, since all the Sturm und Drang of the movement produces no emotion whatsoever. Presumably that irony was intended by choreographer Garry Stewart, artistic director since 2000 of the 37-year-old Australian Dance Theatre, based in Adelaide. In an interview he talked about the difficulty of “making contemporary dance in a culture that is focused on sport and television....

For more than a decade Kevin Spacey has been trying to build a biopic around reptilian pop singer Bobby Darin (1936-’73), and his determination pays off in this glorious mess of a movie. The production numbers and nightclub showstoppers are impressive not only for Spacey’s impersonation of Darin but for their skillful evocation of musical moments from the golden age of Hollywood, which are a world apart from postmodern exercises like Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera....

Checkerboard’s New Lease on Life Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An in-depth February 17 story in Crain’s Chicago Business, which outlined the Checkerboard’s financial difficulties and reported that “the majority” of the club’s clientele was U. of C. students, had been brought to the attention of Shannon Pope, a senior associate with HSA Commercial Real Estate, which acquires and manages property on behalf of the university....

Checkmate! The city’s policy is that if you accumulate three tickets your car can be booted. If it gets booted you have to pay off your tickets or it will be towed. If it’s towed you have to pay not only the tickets but the towing and storage fees or it will be sold, or crushed and sold for scrap. If it gets sold the city won’t even deduct the proceeds from your fees and fines–it just keeps dunning you....

Any short list of the finest musicians in modern jazz that doesn’t include Chris Potter should be viewed with suspicion. When he joined trumpeter Red Rodney’s band as a teenager, Potter already showed a remarkably mature understanding of his primary instrument (tenor sax) and the demands of improvisation. Despite his youth, his style sounded fully formed, but it turned out he was only getting started. Now 32, Potter has further honed his technique, extended his conceptual reach, and sharpened his solos into models of emotionally charged musical intellect....

Quick–name one physicist to whose calculations you would entrust Hyde Park. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the first controlled atomic chain reaction–on the University of Chicago campus on December 2, 1942–the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (November/December) recalls that the chain-reaction pile “was not supposed to be built in the city. No one wanted a meltdown in Hyde Park….The pile was to be built in a forest preserve 20 miles southwest of Chicago’s Loop and to be completed by October 20....

“Passing a law commanding Amtrak to stop losing money is like shaking a baby to make it stop wetting its diaper,” writes Chicago attorney and Amtrak Reform Council member James Coston in “Railgram” (January). “The failure of the airline industry to earn a profit over its 75-year lifetime should tell us something about the futility of expecting Amtrak to make a profit, particularly over a five-year timeline as specified by Congress in 1997, for the airlines have been the beneficiaries of one of the largest taxpayer subsidy programs in the history of American socialism…....