Friday 8/30 – Thursday 9/5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 31 SATURDAY It takes an IQ in the top 2 percent to qualify for Mensa membership. But you don’t have to be a genius to hobnob with Mensans–anyone with a spare sawbuck can hang at tonight’s meeting of Chicago Area Mensa, which will feature a lecture by engineer Dave Stybr on how he became a classical music composer....

Two middle-aged Chinese women squat on the sidewalk in front of the Dalcamo Funeral Home in Bridgeport. One slowly stirs a fire inside a red metal pot that’s slightly larger than a wastebasket, while the other scoops a handful of paper out of a plastic bag and throws it into the flames. The paper is printed with Chinese characters–it’s “hell money,” and it’s being burned so the relative who recently died can take care of himself in the afterlife....

Early lessons in property rights are straightforward. If a bully grabs your Tootsie Roll on the playground, you’ve been robbed. If he copies your book report, you’ve been plagiarized. Later in life it gets more complicated. Take the case of east-coast artist Peter Anton, who says the Field Museum stole his candy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anton’s been making sculptures that look like giant boxes of chocolates since 1995, when he plucked a truffle from his bedside stash and inspiration struck....

By Grant Pick Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Whittaker will also enabled Williams to become a certified member of the International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry, the volunteer-run group he cofounded. Based in a small office on 95th Street in Beverly, the group seeks to bind present-day slave descendants to their forebears, most three or four generations removed. “This isn’t to say we approve of slavery, but it helps us be proud of who we are,” says Williams of the nation’s only slave-lineage society....

LIVING END Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You have to wonder about a band that can filch countless hooks from rock records of the 50s, 60s, and 70s and then declare on the opening salvo of its debut album, “We don’t refer to the past / When showing what we’ve done.” This punk-pop trio from Melbourne, Australia, recorded two solid EPs of hell-bent rockabilly before Reprise Records, still scratching around for the next Green Day, signed them in the States....

Logotype vs2.1 at Ravinia Festival, August 28-29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s almost literally true that there’s no escaping Logotype vs2.1 once you enter Ideotech, a warehouse converted to a gallery and performance space. (Nor is this an ersatz developer’s “aren’t we like Soho?” soft loft; the space still shows its industrial origins.) When the house opens, a video collage is running, compiled of cartoons, logo-filled ads, excerpts of the dance to come, newsreel footage, and surreal close-ups....

When Harold Lloyd stopped in Chicago in the spring of 1923, publicists for his new film, Safety Last, wanted him to appear on the south tower of the Wrigley Building and dedicate its clock with a bottle of champagne. The stunt was modeled on the film’s heart-stopping scene in which Lloyd’s character–a lowly department store clerk–caps his ascent of a 12-story building by dangling from the minute hand of the clock on top....

The Violet Hour Steppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In The Violet Hour Greenberg also throws a lot of details at the audience, expecting us to put them all together but without supplying sufficient stakes. Set in 1919 on the fringes of the New York literary world, the play concerns John Pace Seavering, a young would-be publisher (ably played by peppy, preppy Josh Hamilton) fresh out of the army; his friend Denis McCleary, a talented but emotionally erratic Irish-American writer (an amusing Kevin Stark); and John’s sometime lover Jessie Brewster, an African-American singer (a role that gives the charismatic Ora Jones a chance to do several star turns)....

I was surfing through some porn and I ended up at one of those Webcam screen-shot galleries. Basically people talk girls into getting naked on regular cam chats and take a bunch of screen shots to send to a site that has tons of galleries. Anyway, I’m pretty sure one of the galleries has my ex-girlfriend in it. It really looks like her, but there’s some small chance it could be someone else....

Now beginning their third decade, Sonic Youth are aging better than any rock group I can think of. On their newest album, Murray Street (DGC), they continue along the trajectory established by 1998’s A Thousand Leaves: Where their 80s work had a hard, implacable drive, today they can make similarly motorik beats seem relaxed. And the sheets and arcs of guitar noise between tunes feel like reveries, more nuanced and musical than ever–the band seems to have control over them, rather than the other way around....

HIDEOUT BLOCK PARTY 9/5 & 9/6, HIDEOUT The Hideout started cutting back on live bookings in late 2002, and the schedule’s gotten even slimmer since the twin nightclub disasters of early 2003. But Tim and Katie Tuten appear to have funneled a year’s worth of pent-up enthusiasm into the club’s seventh annual block party. Nearly every act on the bills for this two-day festival, held mostly outdoors on the stubby little block of Wabansia where the Hideout hides out, could fill the bar on their own....

By Elizabeth Armstrong “My very good friend Jeffrey Byrd and his brother are sitting there, and his brother looks up at this gunman, and the gunman hits him on the head with his gun. Blood starts spurting everywhere, and we just fix our eyes immediately back on the ground, drilling holes into the cement. It seems like forever before they collect all their money in the cliched brown paper bags, and the gunman who was my personal robber–like a personal banker or something–stands at the door and says: ‘All right....

Rock, Pop, etc. BECK, FLAMING LIPS Sold out. Fri 10/18, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212. JEANNE COTTER Fri 10/11, 7:30 PM, St. Michael’s Catholic Church, 14327 Highland, Orland Park. 708-873-4627. RON HAWKING performs “His Way,” a tribute to Frank Sinatra. Fridays, 7:30 PM, Saturdays, 6 PM, and Sundays, 3 PM, Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, 111 W. Campbell, Arlington Heights. 847-577-2121. IN POTENTIA Free concert of electronic & acoustic music....

About Face Youth Theatre: In Real Life, About Face Theatre. Like its first two shows exploring the sexual orientations of young people, About Face Youth Theatre’s third effort is culled from a six-month workshop with about 50 Chicago-area “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, [and] questioning youth.” But this time the workshop also collected 75 stories from around the world on its Web site, and the show revolves around the influence of the Internet, weaving technologically oriented stories (finding first love in chat rooms) in with narratives set in classrooms and bedrooms....

Over the last three decades, bassist Alex Blake has worked with musicians of all stripes–Sun Ra, Dizzy Gillespie, the Manhattan Transfer, Billy Cobham, even Jimmy Buffet. In the 90s he developed his most important musical partnership, becoming a key player in Randy Weston’s groups. In the early 70s Weston lived in Tangiers, where he explored his affinity for African music; the hypnotic rhythms of Morocco have been key elements in his work ever since....

Book of Days Even so, we don’t go see a production of Hamlet for the thrill of the chase. We go to get a glimpse of God’s law at work. Because, in a Shakespearean context, when a divinely ordained king is killed, more than just the political order is thrown out of whack: the whole universe is shattered. (Hence the wild and uncanny weather that always accompanies the Bard’s regicides.) The point of the show isn’t to ferret out the culprit but to watch how God inevitably picks up the pieces, discarding a few while assembling the rest into a new order....

“Camera/Action” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography–an excellent survey of photographs and videos of performance pieces–demonstrates that while documenting performance art may not fully capture the originals, the documentation itself can convey feelings and ideas. Most of the 17 artists represented here use themselves as subjects, focusing on their own bodies, sometimes with narcissistic results. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Performance artist Chris Burden once had himself shot in the arm, but his seemingly masochistic work seldom comes across as self-involved, instead raising general questions about the nature of compulsion....

The Visit Claire’s terms are simple: if you want my money, commit ritual murder. And though the Brachenites express horror at her offer, they start buying that pricey booze and those colorful clodhoppers at Anton’s shop–on credit, of course. As their debt soars, Anton’s fate becomes inevitable. The real target of Claire’s vengeance, however, isn’t Anton but Brachen itself: he will die, but the town will have to live with its atrocity....

Busta Rhymes, Chingy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Longtime fans of Busta Rhymes should know better than to buy It Ain’t Safe No More (J Records, 2002)–the full-length has just never been the guy’s medium. In the mid-90s Busta’s brusque vocals colored so flamboyantly outside the lines, jarring against beats that were themselves garish scribbles, that he was best taken in one single at a time; anyone who demanded an hour of consistent anarchy after “Woo-Hah!...

It will be interesting to see how this 1950 political parody, being performed as part of the “Ovations!” concert series, will play in 2001. Written for Ethel Merman by songwriter Irving Berlin as a follow-up to Annie Get Your Gun, it spoofs such still timely targets as partisan bickering, pocketbook diplomacy, and the corrupting influence of money on government. Sally Adams, to be played here by Jo Anne Worley, is a Washington “hostess with the mostes’” who’s named by President Truman to serve as ambassador to tiny, neutral Lichtenburg....