Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s tempting to think that Johnson’s broader canvas is a function of his years writing novels and short fiction, genres in which the theatrical constraint of compression doesn’t necessarily apply and in which the writer may move seamlessly from interior monologue to dialogue to descriptive passages. But it’s also true that Johnson’s fiction, with its heightened, comically grotesque situations and quirky exchanges between characters, lends itself well to staging....

“You love making us write, don’t you?” says an eighth grader after being assigned to write two pages on Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. “But why?” he asks, though he continues copying down the assignment. She and I had met in this very building, at 4600 S. Hermitage, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, ten years earlier. She was an eighth grader dreaming of becoming the first in her family to go to college, the sixth of nine children raised by a single Mexican-immigrant mother....

Need Band, Will Travel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dome generally deals in the soulful side of acid jazz, but Andreus’s specialty is reinterpreting Chicago soul from a hip-hop perspective–while his falsetto is reminiscent of one of his avowed father figures, Curtis Mayfield, he can also confidently ride a modern breakbeat. He writes bona fide melodies (instead of merely stringing together melismatic swoops and dips), and his vocal range adds to the drama of his material–as on “Daddy Please,” the most arresting song on Street Troubadour....

No Such Lunch It’s wholesome, it’s heartwarming–and the little guy triumphs in the end. Hollywood has only nibbled at previous BAT competitions, but this year’s is too good not to option. Nine months after forlornly leaving town, Skip Bayless is the toast of Chicago. The first expatriate ever to claim the honor, he’s the champion of the XXII Hot Type BAT competition. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was almost one year ago to the weekend,” he said....

Young Chicago pianist and composer Ryan Cohan offered us a taste of his music four years ago, with a self-produced debut called Real World; it’s been a long wait for the sequel, Here and Now (Sirocco), but worth it. On nine new compositions, Cohan makes good on his early promise–his writing has leaped forward in maturity and command, while retaining his first album’s healthy balance of tradition and innovation. His current sextet features trumpet and two woodwinds, and Cohan distinguishes himself with painterly use of the latter, most frequently pairing tenor or soprano sax with flute....

Nifty Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not long ago I turned up my nose at Bailiwick’s cavalcade of “cock teasing masquerading as theater.” But as the gay community continues its wholesale abandonment of the radical sexual politics that once launched it toward liberation–embracing instead neocon ideals and heterosexist norms in its hunger for assimilation–I’ve come to see the Bailiwick nudie shows as critical instances of cultural resistance....

Last Saturday night at Cal’s Liquors, under the el tracks at Van Buren and Wells, bike couriers Brent Olds and Mike Morell sat at the bar sipping bottles of PBR and prepping for the Chicago Loop Criterium. Because you need a permit to hold a sports event on city streets and because participants routinely break traffic laws, alley cat races are illegal. Since the Loop Criterium involved a large group of riders circling the same territory again and again, chances of a bust were higher than usual....

On the third floor of the Arlington Park grandstand M. Scott McMannis, the dean of Chicago handicappers, is teaching Warren Weaver, former hunch bettor, how to play the races like a pro. But McMannis, who’d also taught business administration, still considered himself a teacher, and handicapping seemed like a natural adult-education subject, since you have to be 17 to make a bet. He organized seminars at a Howard Johnson’s across the street from Arlington, charging ten bucks a head....

If Michael Jordan’s early years were about his mixing athletic ability with creativity, the first set of NBA championships about his adjusting that creativity to a team concept, and the second set about getting back on top and establishing his legacy once and for all, with teammates more specialized and complementary in their roles than ever before, then his latest comeback is about almost nothing but determination. He isn’t as creative as he used to be because his body no longer lets him do all the things his mind imagines....

BOGGS 8/30, SCHUBAS; 8/31, FIRESIDE The Boggs’ daft, passionate, eloquent, and frenetic We Are the Boggs We Are (Arena Rock Recording Co.) is a pretty successful attempt to do for (or to) old-timey string music what the Pogues did for (or to) trad Irish music–though you’d never guess this from the cover, where one band member sports a tight striped tee and a vintage English art-school mop and another flips through a mag with fellow New Yorkers the Strokes on the cover....

Techno-Babbling Brook Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “People that go into that place don’t want to hear electronic music,” says Block. “So I wanted to do something that might sound pleasant too.” She constructed Transgenesis from a single feedback tone: she slowed it down into a pulse, which she then ran through a series of electronic filters, recombining and tweaking the processed sounds. Block sees the result, similar to the sound of rushing water, as analogous to the conservatory’s idealized simulation of nature....

In recent years the Reduced Shakespeare Company has performed a condensed version of the Bible, squashing the whole holy writ into less time than it takes to read the Book of Job aloud, and a similarly reduced version of American history. But the hubristic show that put this company of wise fools on the map in the late 80s was their attempt to do all of Shakespeare’s plays, plus a couple poem cycles, in 97 minutes....

THE KEN & JIM SHOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bassist Ken Haebich and saxist Jim Gailloreto, both veterans of several musical demimondes–mainstream Chicago jazz, classical chamber composition, and of course the wedding circuit–have come up with a flexible format for this concert series, capitalizing on the variety of their experience without drawing directly on any of it. For a few months now they’ve appeared every Sunday at Nevin’s Live, a surprisingly commodious performance space connected to an Evanston restaurant, and each time they’ve invited a surprising combination of guest artists to join them in a night of extremely impromptu music....

Three, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. Described as “an exploration of the world around us through the eyes of three sardonic men,” this evening is more comedy showcase than play: each performer holds court for 20 or 30 minutes, with a rookie announcer to introduce them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kyle Kinane is possibly a Steven Wright-Eminem love child. This deadpan perennial art student sums up his life in the title of his would-be autobiography/self-help book, “How to Live in Your Parents’ Basement Until You’re 30, Never Get Laid and Not Kill Yourself....

This is Barry Quigley’s nightmare: It’s 95 degrees in Chicago and everyone with air-conditioning has it cranked to high. The Byron nuclear power station south of Rockford is running at full steam, pumping out 2,500 megawatts of electricity to the midwest grid. Quigley, a senior reactor operator, is at the helm in the plant’s control room, supervising other operators who are watching banks of lights, display screens, and alarms. Quigley’s shift is nearly over, and so far it’s been an easy day....

Rock, Pop, etc. TONY BENNETT Fri 8/16, 8 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook Rds., Highland Park. 847-266-5100. STEVE COOPER ORCHESTRA Free ballroom dance concert at Chicago Summerdance. Sun 8/18, 5 PM (preceded by dance lessons at 4 PM), Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, Michigan between Harrison and Balbo. 312-742-4007. GIPSY KINGS Sat 8/24, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212. PATRICK KELLY Free in-store performance....

Films by Ernie Gehr Given that position, it’s genuinely stupefying that only a tiny number of film professors have specialized in the vital, vibrant American avant-garde movement, which dates back six decades. Not only have these films opposed the values of mainstream culture almost by definition, one of the defining characteristics of the best works is that they make conscious references to the filmmaking and viewing processes. When Maya Deren shows herself peering out of a window in her landmark 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, she acknowledges that filmmaking mediates between viewer and external reality: the glass signals not only her consciousness, interposed between her eyes and the world, but the filmmaking process, with its lenses and rectangular frame, that expresses that consciousness....

Mia Francesca owner Scott Harris teamed up with Patrick Concannon (Don Juan’s, Don Juan on Halsted) and Kevin Karales (Savor, Frontera Grill) to transform the former Bar San Miguel into PLATIYO, a contemporary Mexican dining room. The similarities to Don Juan’s and Frontera Grill are unmistakable: designer Nancy Warren (North Pond Cafe) painted the walls in rich tones of blue and red, then suspended brightly painted plaster animals from the ceiling....

Monster’s Ball With Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger, Sean Combs, Mos Def, and Coronji Calhoun. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ultimately this picture is about guilt and absolution, and if it were simply a Hollywood movie without any art trimmings it might try to figure out some way to give us the absolution without any guilt. Someone once remarked that Hollywood gives us an uncrucified Christ, and Monster’s Ball comes pretty close to giving us a comparable sleight of hand, because most of the guilt it portrays turns out to be inherited....

On July 25 the Chicago Park District faxed a memo to Michael Lash, director of the city’s Public Art Program, notifying him that his agency’s services would no longer be needed. Beginning last August, Lash, PAP project coordinator Lee Kelley, and an 18-member advisory panel had spent eight months trying to choose an artist to create an outdoor sculpture for the proposed Soldier Field Veterans Memorial. But the fax only confirmed what Lash and Kelley had long suspected....