Li Lin Lee: Barbie Meets the Talismans While there are abstract painters who explore the possibilities of line, it would be a mistake to say that Mondrian’s or Barnett Newman’s paintings are “about” line: their effect is to transport the viewer, partly through painterly nuances not apparent in reproductions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The variety of elements undercuts the authority of any particular shape....

It’s hard to imagine a route that’d take a musician from underground rock at its most serious and severe to goofy song suites about barnyard animals, but bassist and singer Ethan Buckler has traveled it. As the bassist for Louisville’s Slint, Buckler contributed to the influential album Tweez in 1989; the following year he formed the far more lighthearted King Kong. (More lighthearted than Slint isn’t saying much, granted–better to call King Kong’s silly, danceable indie funk Slint’s polar opposite....

Counting the recent World Without Tears (Lost Highway), Lucinda Williams has put out three records in the past five years–that’s as many as she made in the 18 years preceding 1998’s flawless Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Steady touring, increased popularity, and critical acclaim have surely helped ease some of the business hassles that slowed her down in the past, but what the new album really makes plain is that this notorious perfectionist has become a little easier on herself–it’s her loosest work to date....

Last week’s Hot Type column, especially as regards its metajournalistic role, went at best halfway [October 10]. You pointed out the hypocrisy of right-wing shill R. Novak (aka “the prince of darkness,” if memory serves me) and hinted at the despicable natures of much of the Bush administration. But you neglected to point out that after the mainstream press pointed out how Valerie Plame had been betrayed by the very government she was serving, the conscienceless flacks in the press mounted a full-throttle campaign of smear and character assassination against her husband....

Cincinnati’s Mr. Dibbs is the leading member of the turntable crew 1200 Hobos as well as the touring DJ for Minneapolis hip-hoppers Atmosphere, but he’s probably best known for a pair of peculiar 12-inches he made in the late 90s. “231 Ways to Fry an Egg,” issued on Four Ways to Rock in ’98, is a ten-minute tour de force stitched together from fragments of electric blues-guitar solos, nightly-news sound bites, and jazz horns; if DJ Shadow had preferred gutbucket funk to the orchestral sound track variety, his early stuff might have sounded something like this....

The campaign to persuade Mayor Daley to appoint Pat Hill superintendent of police was started by political maverick and cabdriver Steve Wiedersberg. “I got the idea after police chief Terry Hillard said he was stepping down in August,” he says. “Crazy, huh?” In the last 15 or so years Hill has repeatedly criticized department policies and programs. She’s pointed to problems in CAPS. She’s complained about affirmative action efforts. She’s joined the Reverend Paul Jakes on his marches against police brutality....

Bela Tarr’s seventh film, a melancholy meditation on social disorder and senseless violence, begins with an enigmatic scene in a bar. Janos Valuska, a postman in a small Hungarian village, recruits three patrons to enact the heavens’ rotations. One man serves as the sun, vibrating his fingers to simulate its rays, while the other two play the earth and moon. Valuska sets them spinning about each other, stopping them to simulate a solar eclipse....

Maybe there’s nothing women can do about men being “hardwired” to lust after other people. Maybe all we can expect is for them not to act on that instinct. Maybe we just have to “get over it.” But can you give some advice on how? Maybe it’s “natural,” but can you give us a pep talk to make us accept it? –No Clever Acronym Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Michael Miner But like Rick Blaine explaining why he came to Casablanca for the waters, Marx says he was misinformed–by his own rudimentary research. “I think I was wrong. I did a clip search. I found she’d never been quoted. I was on deadline. I believed that was the case,” he says. “If I made a mistake I made a mistake. Somebody called me after the fact and mentioned she’d been on 20/20....

Midway through its run, Second City’s 88th revue has added updates impaling Trent Lott and sending up cocaine sales at Burger King. In fighting form, the Second Citizens remain unabashed, confronting an abusive superpatriotic music teacher, mealymouthed ministers, the intifada, and a know-nothing president. Ruthlessly pursuing common sense in the service of some terrible swift satire, director Joshua Funk has inspired his six zanies to tackle the state of our disunion....

Golden Boy Odets wrote Golden Boy during a demoralizing stint in Hollywood, where–like many of his fellow Group members–he’d moved, hoping to create a celluloid “folk theater.” Instead he discovered that his artistry was coveted to produce marketable, formulaic scripts. Suddenly on the front lines of the battle between art and commerce, Odets reimagined his struggle in a fictional counterpart: skinny, cockeyed, monstrously ambitious amateur boxer Joe Bonaparte, who grew up feeling like a freak because of his immigrant family’s poverty, his crooked eyes, and his devotion to the violin....

Alice in Wonderland When Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project adapted the story for the stage, as Alice in Wonderland, these threats, particularly the sexual threat, came to the fore. Their Alice is an inmate of an insane asylum of the Marat/Sade-One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest variety, and her trip to Wonderland a psychotic episode acted out by supercilious doctors, power-mad nurses, sociopathic orderlies, and fellow inmates. Making Alice crazy is one way to approach the central dramatic problem of the story: a main character who doesn’t grow or change or take charge of her own fate but simply awakens to find that her adventures were just a dream....

A line of yellow cabs is double-parked along Ohio Street, blinkers flashing. But they’re not waiting for passengers–they’re waiting for lunch. For the last three years, Nigerian-born Lookman Muhammed has been feeding a steady clientele from the back of his custom-heated truck, which is usually parked in one of the last few spaces at the east end of Ohio, just yards away from the inner drive. The food comes directly from the kitchen of his tiny Rogers Park restaurant, Toham....

I don’t want to oversell Woody Allen’s 31st feature, which I happen to like. The script is full of holes, most of the one-liners are weak and mechanical, and the plot—a nightclub magician gets two of his hypnotized subjects to steal jewels for him—is so deliberately stupid and contrived that one can probably enjoy it only by pretending it’s a routine, low-budget second feature on an old-fashioned double bill, which is obviously what Allen intended....

Chicago-area schools are by far the most segregated by income in the country, according to 1997 figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, compiled by Myron Orfield in his new book, American Metropolitics. In order for every elementary school in the Chicago region to have an equal proportion of students eligible for free lunches, 95 percent of these children would have to change schools. This “dissimilarity index,” a standard measure of segregation, is only 64 percent in Cleveland, the next most segregated region....

Casanova preferred oysters, Cleopatra raw honey. And we’ve all heard about the libido-enhancing properties of asparagus, strawberries, and artichokes. But salmon? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reynolds–who spent 25 years as a chef, instructor, and finally vice president at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York–is the closest thing Chicago has to an expert in the field of culinary aphrodisiacs. In honor of Valentine’s Day he’ll wield that expertise next week with a slide show, lecture, and tasting on the subject, organized by the Culinary Historians of Chicago....

Maybe it’s something in the water, but lately the Scandinavian experimental-music community has seen an increase in the same sort of cross-stylistic interaction–jazz improvisers working with laptop jockeys working with noise artists–that put its Chicago counterpart back on the map in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, there’s a connection. Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson has been visiting Chicago regularly since the mid-90s, and on his heels have come other broad-minded Scandinavian players, including guitarist David Stackenas, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and reedist Fredrik Ljungkvist; in 2000 eight Swedes and eight Chicagoans participated in an ambitious musical exchange project called Pipeline, collaborating for concerts both here and in Sweden....

He didn’t know it then, but the first time Tim Early ever went snorkeling he came within a few hundred yards of the shipwreck George F. Williams. It was August 1962, and Early was 15. “I swam right off where the Hammond Marina is now,” he says. “I was in the water a while, but I couldn’t see the Williams.” Later one of those friends located the wreck 20 feet under the surface, but Early didn’t get out to it until the summer of 1983....

No Mercy On July 5 the Tribune published a powerful essay about a mother driven to the ultimate act of love. For years 63-year-old Carol Carr had cared for her two sons while Huntington’s disease–which had already killed this Georgia woman’s husband–relentlessly destroyed them. But in June the suffering ended. She shot them in their beds. It’s a measure of where we stand as a society that a statement such as this–contradicting old-fashioned absolutes–could be published today in a major newspaper....

The circus should bowl us over. And the 134th edition of America’s longest-running show does just that. For those with a taste for loud noise and high-tech stunts, Ringling still features motorcyclists zooming around inside a metalwork sphere. Daredevil acrobat Crazy Wilson still spins on the Pendulum of Pandemonium. But this version seems less driven by such feats than others I’ve seen. For the first time in 20 years there’s a lion-taming act, though the beasts looked more cranky than ferocious....