By Sergio Barreto Morgan and Clements have been rehearsing with Kipniss for a week on the theater’s small stage. It’s only 12 feet deep, though it looks deeper from the audience’s point of view. Hidden behind drapes are two “bridges”–sections of scaffolding that run eight feet above the stage–where the puppeteers stand. Between the bridges are wooden bars where the handmade marionettes, which stand three to four feet tall and weigh 25 to 30 pounds, hang from hooks when they’re not being used....

I doubt you’ll hear a more impressive debut album this year than Another Mind (Telarc) by Japanese pianist Hiromi Uehara (Berklee College of Music, class of ’03). The opener, a wickedly eddying tune called “XYZ,” bursts out of the gate like Funny Cide on uppers–it’s an all-acoustic trio performance powered by the same energy that ran classic fusion bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever. The nearly manic “Dancando no Paraiso” (an original, like all the songs here) takes Brazilian rhythms up into sixth gear; on the somewhat more reflective title track, Hiromi (she’s gone the single-name route, in part to protect American tongues from her last name and vice versa) crafts a dark, modern song from the distinctly Japanese intervals set out in the track’s brief introduction....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet while U. of C. economists and other market bolsheviks believe they’ve squared the circular argument (“People must not want x, else there would be a thriving market for it”), it won’t do here to say that we simply get the media for which we’re willing to pay–or, as Henderson suggests is more accurate in this case, that we’ll pay for the media we’re willing to “put up with....

It’s Saturday morning, and two dozen guests are sitting down to breakfast at Woodlawn’s Living Room Cafe. A bowl of fresh fruit salad is served as a starter, followed by heaping platters of pancakes, sausage, and scrambled eggs with cheese and vegetables. At various tables in the large storefront dining room–brightened by a colorful tile mosaic covering one of the walls–guests chat cheerfully with one another. But after breakfast is finished something strange happens: the diners volunteer to help clear and wash dishes....

My boyfriend wanted to take me here one night. I’m not really into punk or metal, but I like to dance and hang out. As soon as we walked in I loved that it was a bit outside of the norm. It was black leather and chain-link fencing with cool people and great music. There were handcufflike things protruding from the wall, and the music and our dancing was crazy and sexual....

By Ted Kleine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A staffer in Dillard’s office says the senator is worried about protecting the privacy of voters. If people choose not to vote in a particular race, that’s their business–machines shouldn’t be announcing it to the world. Looming precinct captains could intimidate voters into returning to the booth and completing their ballot, Dillard’s staffer says. “He truly believes this is a voter’s rights issue....

As you might have read two weeks ago in Michael Miner’s media column, Hot Type, Reader music editor Kiki Yablon recently fielded a call from 2K Sounds, a label in Woodland Hills, California, that entered into a joint-venture agreement with Virgin Records earlier this year. The label representative, Alex Waterworth, asked Yablon if she or any of her writers would agree to send him demo tapes of local artists they thought could “make it....

Poked and Growing Up Butch Believe it or not, this is funny. Actually, under the direction of Jim Zulevic, all the best sketches in Poked are sexual–not surprising since GayCo’s forte is personal rather than political comedy. In one of the best bits, Andy Eninger, John Bonny, and Tim Sniffen sing sadly about the perils of polyamory while huddled together in bed, making light of a situation that even the gay community tends not to talk much about....

No Such Thing The Sleepy Time Gal Considering these two films together is a breach of reviewing etiquette: movies that premiere in theaters are supposed to be in a different category than movies that premiere on TV. I first saw the Munch film, about a woman dying of cancer, last fall on video at the Vancouver international film festival, and I remember looking forward to seeing it on the big screen....

Actor-director Weil Richmond quit New York’s prestigious Circle in the Square Theatre School after one semester, walking out in the middle of a speech class after getting in a fight with the teacher. As Richmond gathered his things and headed for the front door, the teacher, who’d followed him into the hall, yelled “You’ll never do anything in theater for the rest of your life!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Uptighty Whiteys Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friedman had been hired to do two 45-minute performances back-to-back. He had planned a 30-minute show (including bits like “Jewpac & Dr. Dreidel” and “Here Comes the Cracker”) followed by 15 minutes of Q and A, and the first performance seemed to go off without a hitch. But halfway through the second, just after his “W.I.T.E. Radio” sketch, a couple of faculty heavies showed up to tell him he was through....

Robert Davis and Michael Langlois are unusual not only because they collaborate but because their paintings, based on photographs, have a steamy, soft-edged sensuality opposed to the cool distance of most works painted from photos. A portrait of emperor Haile Selassie seems to vibrate with an almost out-of-control lushness and depth despite its apparently sedate dark greens and browns; captivated by its radiance, one almost forgets the significance of the subject....

Age has treated Lenny LaCour better than the record business ever did. The 70-year-old musician-promoter wears a pressed gray suit, accented by a maroon tie, as he sips coffee in a booth at a pancake house near his Melrose Park home, and a full head of jet-black hair complements a thin W. Clement Stone mustache. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In Chicago, Lenny was one of the early pioneers of pushing and creating rock ‘n’ roll,” says local soul historian Robert Pruter, who has written about LaCour for the British magazine Now Dig This....

Andrew Bird Discovers Pop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The record he purchased that day was the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, a rock album distinguished by its psychedelically expansive production. “I thought, ‘OK, this is technology put to good use,’” he says. “Two years ago I would’ve scoffed at overdubs or anything digital.” And what do you know: The Swimming Hour, which arrives in stores on Tuesday, employs a series of delirious string overdubs....

Theatre of Western Springs artistic director Tony Vezner thought the script for Dearly Departed, by David Bottrell and Jessie Jones, was a hoot when he first read it a year ago–“the darkest, most campy, goofiest comedy I’ve seen.” He knew right away he wanted to direct it, and put it on the schedule as the last play for this season. Then, last fall, he saw Kingdom Come, a movie version of the play starring LL Cool J and Jada Pinkett Smith....

Now that’s what I call patience. From the Trust for Public Land’s January 5 issue of the “Chicago News Bulletin” (www.tpl.org): “Nearly 40 years after Chinatown’s only public park was demolished to make way for the Dan Ryan Expressway, the South Side neighborhood is celebrating the creation of a six-acre jewel–Ping Tom Memorial Park.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Accountability = caring. “I started teaching in the Chicago Public Schools when I was 19, and I’m 73 now,” says Barbara Sizemore, dean emeritus of the DePaul University School of Education (Catalyst, February)....

The great F.W. Murnau directed only one real blockbuster in Germany, just before coming to America to make his masterpiece, Sunrise: extravagant in every sense, Faust (1926) is laden with exquisite references to Dutch, German, and Italian painting, and it was rivaled only by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in driving the UFA studio toward bankruptcy. Like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which opened in New York at the same theater some 40 years later), this extraordinary piece of artistry and craftsmanship integrates its dazzling special effects so seamlessly that they’re indistinguishable from the film’s narrative, poetry, and, above all, metaphysics....

Acclaimed Polish troupe Teatr Cogitatur pulls off a tour de force of chiaroscuro lighting, physical performance, and arresting image in this haunting tribute to a tragic artist and his breathtaking, terrifying visions. Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin, a contemporary of Schiller and Hegel, died addled and obscure in 1843 but has since been recognized as a talent in the neighborhood of Goethe or Rilke, an ecstatic classicist also significant to avant-garde critical theory....

I’m always surprised that protostoner sci-fi art-skronk band Chrome and its visionary guitarist, Helios Creed, don’t get name-checked more often. If you’ve always admired punk’s fuck-you-I’m-making-noise attitude but don’t want to give up your Hawkwind records (or your chemical mind expander of choice), you still can’t do much better. Over the decades their anything-that-works Lone Gunmen aesthetic has come to look downright prescient. The band was founded in 1976 by Damon Edge, Creed joined after the first album, and the relationship between the two set the tone not only during the band’s tumultuous, off-and-on career but throughout its protracted breakup (involving a fight over the name, among other things)....

Strange but true: nobody in this country has been as dedicated for as long to the legacy of the Nuggets collection as the Swedish have. Though they’ve all worshiped slightly different heroes, bands like the Nomads, Union Carbide Productions, and the Hellacopters have kept the flame burning brighter than anybody in Detroit or elsewhere for the better part of two decades. The Hives are just one of a pack of Swedish acts working similar territory today–but they’re the first to break into the American mainstream....