After architect David Adler graduated from Princeton in 1904 he went to Germany and then to France to study firsthand the historical styles he would later adapt in designing his elegant American country homes. While overseas he began to collect picture postcards–not the usual naughty Parisian lady stuff, but photographs and drawings of the great mansions and public buildings of Europe, which he often referred to as he worked. After he died, in 1949, the collection–about 500 cards–went to his sister and frequent collaborator, interior decorator Francis Elkins, who in turn bequeathed them to a California library....

The old investigator is bent and frail, and he leans heavily on his walker. But his brain’s still sharp, and it’s full of secrets, a few of which he now wants to tell. “I thought I’d take these secrets to my grave, but I changed my mind,” says Paul Newey, his voice gruff and commanding. “I’m 86 years old now–I don’t have much time left. I want the story out.”...

After the Annoyance Theatre lost its Lakeview space last June, cofounder Mick Napier discovered he couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking him about the future of the company. He says the only question he heard more often was “Do you have a cigarette?” Eventually he got so sick of fielding queries he got his response printed up on some business cards; when someone asked, he’d just hand them a card and walk away....

Interviewing the Dead, a Fictional Autobiography John Starrs, Johnny Mars, and Theater of the Catbird The Rhinoceros Theater Festival, now in its 13th year, isn’t the place for solo artists who expect to be coddled. All the performers, from the 30-year veteran to the greenest neophyte, get the same things: an empty stage and a time slot. If they need someone to direct, produce, design, stage-manage, or type up a program–even black out the lights–they have to do it themselves or bring in a friend....

Vans Warped Tour ’01 Subtonix, Pink & Brown Or was every song cut from an archetype they all knew by heart? The Vans Warped Tour ’01 seemed entirely of a piece, or rather five or ten pieces–a single idea, “punk,” jigsawed into a puzzle. Pop punk, skate punk, ska punk, ska-core, hardcore, New York hardcore, emotional hardcore, horrorcore, pop-hop, rap metal, punk metal, and so on. Lots of semimemorable variations on a few timeworn themes, a simulacrum of diversity to be sure, but a fascinating one....

His Non-Civic Duty I’ve known Brasler since we shared a dorm in college. I recall a heart on a sleeve and enthusiasms a little too pure to survive the grinding harshness of a big-city news desk. But Brasler created his own news desk, and he’s been educating teenagers there for nearly 40 years. “The vision of journalism I give my students is so different from the mainstream,” he told me. “I have such a bigger picture of journalism than it’s usually practiced....

Man Bites Watchdogs It’s far from alone in its beliefs. As media giants absorb one another to create behemoths–locally the Tribune Company is example A–some of the more progressive ants at the feet of the elephants have organized. CMW publishes a newsletter, holds conferences, and wants to create a program it can take into schools. The younger Chicago Independent Media Center–Chicago Indymedia for short–fights fire with fire. Part of a national network of similar outlets, it maintains a Web site “designed to promote alternative views that counter the corporate media’s distortions....

In the 1950s experimental composer Christian Wolff was part of the New York scene that included John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman. Cage in fact provided Wolff with his only formal instruction in composition, and Feldman was to become his lifelong friend; both men’s influence can be heard in his work to this day. Wolff often does without key signature or meter, or omits the clef so that a line can be read in any register; sometimes he casts off traditional notation entirely, relying on symbols that require the performers to invent meanings on the fly....

Jane Martin’s scathing critique of middle-American values offers a lesson in the art of taking responsibility and apologizing. Too bad Bush wasn’t at this Open Eye Productions show. In Martin’s 1994 script, three bumbling brothers gather in a toxic-waste dump to pay tribute to the girl that got away, but they end up prostrating themselves for the sins of the patriarchy. Martin spares no sacred cows, though (s)he–the playwright’s true identity remains the longest-running theatrical mystery since The Mousetrap–keeps things on a light middlebrow level: God visits the brothers in the form of a white-trash trinity....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The British magazine New Scientist reported last month that researchers at Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electrical Power Industry were studying whether compact nuclear reactors (the size of a broom closet, to be housed in a building’s basement) could provide electricity for densely populated office and apartment buildings in downtown Tokyo. The Rapid-L reactor was originally designed to produce electricity for moon stations....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An October San Francisco Chronicle dispatch reported that the parents of Amy Biehl–the 26-year-old Fulbright scholar murdered by a mob of black South African kids in 1993–have come to grips with the tragedy to such an extent that they’ve not only started a foundation in their daughter’s name to fund community projects in Cape Town but recently hired her two principal killers to work for it....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June, while the Bush camp was attempting to mobilize support for an invasion of Iraq, administration representatives were also working with Iraq, the Vatican, and a powerful bloc of dozens of Islamic nations to fight United Nations resolutions supported by almost all of America’s traditional allies; points of contention for the U.S. team included reproductive health services (because those services could include abortion) and sex education (because only abstinence should be taught)....

Princess Turandot, European Repertory Company, at the Theatre Building. Director Luda Lopatina’s contemporary rendition of an 18th-century Italian adaptation of an ancient Chinese fable seems an exercise in style. But that’s a pretty sterile excuse for a play–especially when the style is pastiche. It’s appropriate to Princess Turandot’s mixed origins but doesn’t correct the real problem: is this a human Punch-and-Judy show, full of slapstick battles that hurt no one, or a morality tale about fate and the illusions of love?...

HORIZONTAL ACTION ROCK ‘N ROLL BLACKOUT 4/25-27, BEAT KITCHEN Horizontal Action is a proudly skanky local zine that reviews porn and strip clubs almost as intensively as garage records. Their second annual Blackout festival, roughly celebrating the new “Killed by Breast” issue, features the New Bomb Turks (on Thursday the 25th); the Baseball Furies, who recently migrated from Buffalo; Detroit’s Clone Defects; and Greg and Jack Oblivian’s band the Compulsive Gamblers; visit www....

OK Go never pretended not to care about being popular. For many of their earliest gigs they plastered the city with big, sharply designed posters–I remember seeing one in mid-1999 and thinking, Am I supposed to know who that is? Within a year they’d finagled their way onto bills with the likes of Elliott Smith, the Promise Ring, and Sloan, and at the end of 2000, though they’d yet to make a record, This American Life host Ira Glass had personally invited them to play at live productions of the radio show in Boston and New York as well as Chicago....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI Rock, Pop, etc. BJORK, MATMOS Sold out; see Spot Check. Sun 10/14, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker. 312-419-0033 or 312-559-1212. ANI DIFRANCO, BITCH & ANIMAL Sun 10/21, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212. MICHAEL FEINSTEIN Sat 10/13, 8 PM, Lund Auditorium, Dominican University, 7900 W. Division, River Forest. 708-524-6942. HILLBILLIES IN THE CITY Miss Tiger’s Cabaret directed by Eric Hensley, with Lisa Rock, Angelique Evans-Manto, Kerry Lynn McSweeny, Stefan Mantyk, and Robby Nothstine....

Made at Fox on the heels of The Girl Can’t Help It, this inventive 1957 comedy by Frank Tashlin is his most avant-garde (surpassing even Son of Paleface) and probably his most political–and therefore one of his most misunderstood. Tashlin adapted a Broadway play by George Axelrod but reportedly discarded almost everything except the title, the advertising milieu, and star Jayne Mansfield. The film, shot in glorious color and CinemaScope, stars Tony Randall as a Madison Avenue executive who recruits Mansfield to endorse his product, and it presents a thoughtful and multifaceted polemic against the success ethic (a key line is “Success will fit you like a shroud”)....

[Re: “Shoot the Messenger” by John Greenfield, March 30] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I left the [bike messengering] profession in December of 1999, it was during a media circus surrounding the Union Station incident, which was the cherry on top of a shit sundae of a year. Many of the same issues raised weakly in the book of contention [The Immortal Class by Travis Culley], along with the others expressed more strongly by many of the folks Mr....

A First Amendment Showdown Rupert described the deal. Under the contract they’d all signed, the journalists would produce a book proposal shortly after McKevitt’s trial ended, submit it to the FBI for vetting, and then offer it to a publisher. He didn’t name them just then, but Rupert was working with Abdon Pallasch and Robert Herguth, of the Chicago Sun-Times. Herguth had replaced the book project’s original reporter, the Chicago Tribune’s Flynn McRoberts....

This 2000 Moroccan feature by Nabil Ayouch spins an engrossing tale about a quartet of filthy, glue-addicted boys who fend for themselves on the waterfront of Casablanca. The title character, who fantasizes about sailing to a mythical island, is killed by their former gang, and though his three sidekicks vow to give him a decent burial, their resolve is tested by squabbles, mixed signals from adults, and threats from the gang....