Cloud Gate artistic director Lin Hwai-min chose calligraphy as the inspiration for his new hour-long piece, Cursive, which explores the mysteries of communication. Though it’s unlikely that Western audiences will understand the work’s projected Chinese characters, the projections would often be unreadable to Eastern viewers too: depicted in part, they’re too abstract to be identifiable. Lin seems to say that speed, direction, and weightedness have meaning in calligraphic writing as in dance–even when we don’t know precisely what that meaning is....

Director Sean Graney has a knack for amplifying and even distorting a play’s subtext, creating a kind of neo-expressionism. But for Peter Shaffer’s 1973 psychological drama to work, the subtext must remain hidden: the characters conceal their own motives as they search for others’ in this play about a burnt-out psychiatrist, Dr. Dysart, trying to discover why his incommunicative 17-year-old patient, Alan, blinded six horses with a metal spike. From the opening moments of this Hypocrites production, the characters wear their traumas on their sleeves–a particularly problematic strategy for Alan’s troubled parents, who would never advertise the depth of their emotional turmoil before the psychiatrist’s accusatory gaze....

Gary doesn’t offer a typical architecture tour, which is what makes it interesting. With most of its buildings in varying states of deterioration, there’s always something new to see. But don’t get too attached to any particular structure–it may be gone by the time you go back. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Continuing south on Broadway, check out the Gary state bank building (now Bank One), the monolith at the southwest corner of Fifth and Broadway, then the Genesis Towers (the former Hotel Gary) one block south....

I’m trying to figure out exactly what aspect of the old Lincoln Park Carlos Flores is nostalgic about (“Puerto Rican Days,” July 12). A place with peeling paint, boarded-up windows, For Rent signs, and garbage in the streets? A place where “a shove, a step on a sneaker, or a sideways look could provoke a fight”? With illegal drag racing and apartments with rickety, dangerous back porches and walls defaced with graffiti?...

On Ivy’s second album, 1997’s Apartment Life, the New York trio pulled off a small miracle, nailing the kind of effortless effervescence most power poppers can only aspire to. Multi-instrumentalists Andy Chase and Adam Schlesinger (also a member of Fountains of Wayne) and Paris-born vocalist Dominique Durand (Chase’s wife) alternated between Motown-on-the-Mersey firecrackers like “The Best Thing” and “Get Out of the City” and more downcast but no less beguiling tracks like “Back in Our Town” and “I Get the Message....

You know what’s super fun to do when you’re bored? Take a pregnancy test! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Try not to pee for as many hours as possible because then the hormones that indicate pregnancy will be denser in your urine. Read the directions in their entirety before beginning. Remember those tests you had to take in junior high with the instructions that say “Read all questions before answering”?...

Mavis Staples’s voice has coarsened over the years, but on Have a Little Faith (Alligator), her first album in eight years, she recalls the sanctified funk she recorded for Stax in the 70s and her early folk-gospel work with the Staple Singers on Vee-Jay in the 50s; on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” she returns to her very roots, singing the first song family patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples taught his children (the arrangement is credited to him)....

Last Friday morning English artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey fussed over their sculpture Specific Natures in the window of the former Mort Cooper store on State Street. The piece consists of a pair of densely molded, lifelike nudes–one male, one female–created from living grass. As Harvey misted the work with water and Ackroyd wiped smudges from the windows, they seemed a strange hybrid of shopkeepers and undertakers–the reclining sculptures looked like verdant corpses lying in state and literally going to seed....

Paul Burch plays drums in the ungainly Nashville pop band Lambchop, which is often reductively categorized as alternative country, but it’s as the leader of the hard-country quintet WPA Ballclub and on his own that he’s made his greatest contributions to the Music City’s C & W roots revival. His most recent release, which isn’t terribly recent, is Last of My Kind (Merge), an ambitious solo disc on which he adapts a series of scenes from Tony Earley’s novel Jim the Boy; throughout, Burch’s guitar strums and forceful harmonica invoke the one-step dance cadences and gospel-tinged music of the white rural south....

Gravy Train!!!! “Dear God: I knew you would eventually punish music geeks my age for the garage-rockabilly-retro faddism we have committed, and I was ready for the lash. Still, don’t you think turning the music underground into one long flashback to the junior-high dance is laying it on a little thick?” On the other side of the Abbey Pub’s bathroom door, the pitiless DJ pitched another 80s pop smash into my fiery pit....

From the Other Side More than 25 years ago, when I was living in a beachside bungalow in a suburb of San Diego, I eventually realized that the bungalow across the alley was a halfway house for Mexicans who’d just made it across the border. I had to figure this out on my own because none of my neighbors ever even alluded to the place or what it was. The constant arrival and departure of new faces was perfectly obvious yet completely unacknowledged–in fact, everything in the surrounding elysian landscape seemed to encourage one not to observe it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After high school he worked for a while as an apprentice at an ad agency, but eventually he gave up drawing, got married, and worked a series of factory and contractor jobs to support his family. For the past eight years he’s been a dock supervisor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He created a dummy comic book called The Circle Unleashed, a chronicle of the adventures of four African-American superheroes led by John, a 159-year-old ex-slave who’d been captured by aliens after the Civil War....

Taboo By Jonathan Rosenbaum I’m honoring the request of New Yorker Films to refer to Taboo by its English title, but according to a Japanese friend, “taboo” isn’t an accurate translation of its original title, Gohatto–a somewhat old-fashioned term that means “against the law” or “against the laws.” (One fascinating aspect of the Japanese language from a Western perspective is its lack of distinction between singular and plural nouns, which injects ambiguity into many titles....

A Duchampian Romp, Even Such stalwart passivity in an artist isn’t very dramatic. But writer-performers Greg Allen and John Pierson handily apply the Neo-Futurist aesthetic–“a fusion of sport, poetry, and living newspaper” and “non-illusory, interactive performances”–to their slippery subject in A Duchampian Romp, Even. It’s not the slickest or funniest show to come out of the Neo-Futurarium; Allen’s take on Freud, humor, and Freudian humor–Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which...

On Halloween, Redmoon Theater set up a 476-foot table made of doors on Kedzie Boulevard and invited the neighborhood over for a potluck dinner. Only half the chairs were designated for the living, however; the rest were laden with memories and objects of the dead. An array of spoons, lace, and an iron was a tribute to two grandmothers; a chair commemorating a fireman was bound with rope. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Hey Mr. DJ, I thought you said we had a deal I thought you said, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch your record” And I thought you said we had a deal –They Might Be Giants, “Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal” (ASCAP) But the truth is that payola isn’t really back–it’s just back in the news. Payola has been a constant and universal part of the economy of popular music for about the last 125 years, and the likelihood that legislators will be able to do anything constructive about it is about as high as the odds of winning the war on drugs....

Guy Adkins skips off with the show in the Writers’ Theatre Chicago production of George Bernard Shaw’s witty, wacky, and deliberately talky Misalliance. First performed in 1910, the play is about propriety and pretense, brains and brawn, and sex and the generation gap. Adkins, fresh from a stint as Hamlet at the Court Theatre, is compulsively watchable and utterly prissy in the role of a mismatched young aristocrat. All nervous hands and secret smiles, he nearly stops the show by going from white to danger-zone blush at will–as if all he has to do is open up the blood-pressure throttle....

Mark Morgan’s biggest claim to fame so far is that he’s sold T-shirts for cheese-metal spaz Andrew W.K. (They were friends in Michigan and both separately moved to New York.) His own band, Sightings, is loud and raucous too, though not in the 1,000-watt manner of W.K.’s band: on the trio’s no-fi, no-title debut for Load Records, Morgan’s unintelligible mental-patient rants cut through the constant tuning-fork-in-electric-socket guitar solos OK, but they’re sometimes overwhelmed by the bass, which sounds like the distant roar of a forest fire....

The Blackhawks’ season appeared to be peaking at the perfect moment. With owner-superstar Mario Lemieux back on the ice after a three-and-a-half-year layoff, the Pittsburgh Penguins were coming to town, bringing the Hawks their first capacity crowd at the United Center since a bunch of Detroit Red Wings fans filled the place early in the season. Owner Bill Wirtz, in a move of bold generosity for him–if an obvious gesture for anyone else–allowed the sold-out game two Sundays ago to be televised on the team’s cable outlet, Fox Sports Net Chicago....

The tale of the tape says the Illinois attorney general race should be the biggest mismatch since Peter McNeeley threw in the towel against Mike Tyson. John Schmidt (Harvard man, ex-associate attorney general of the United States) versus Lisa Madigan (Loyola University law ’94, first-term state senator). But Madigan’s father, Illinois house speaker Michael Madigan, is putting in the fix. Take a dive, Johnny–March 19 is not your night. Lisa’s getting a title fight against Republican Joe Birkett; you’re getting a one-way ticket to Palookaville....