Everyone has heard the great American folk legend of Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox. But I have heard that Paul Bunyan is nothing more than the invention of a lumber company–a corporate logo no more mythological than Mr. Clean or the Pillsbury Doughboy. I’ve tried searching this on the Internet, and I’ve found some sites that claim that the Red River Lumber Company did indeed create the character, whereas others say the company just took the legend and used it in their ads....

Hugh McGhee lives just off North Lake Shore Drive in a high-rise apartment complex whose location makes it ripe for condo conversion. According to tenants, Voice (or LTPC) did a good job of managing the property, pumping in about $7 million worth of renovations over the years. During the LTPC reign, the towers came to symbolize the surrounding Uptown community–an amalgam of races and religions that included refugees and immigrants from Africa, eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as U....

BAD ADVICE | The program for this late-night, long-form improv show includes caricatures of the four cast members looking exactly like the kids from South Park: moonfaced, big-eyed, noseless waifs. Tres apt, because Bad Advice picks up on South Park’s comic strategy of wrapping profane material in cute packages. Everything starts out seeming positively winsome–or at least middle-class–but then you meet the lady whose married boyfriend put an eggbeater through her head....

Cardiff Giant are the proverbial local guys made good: Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, who formed the troupe that brought thinking satire from Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap to a benighted Rogers Park, have gone on to win 2001 Obie and 2002 Tony awards for Urinetown, their musical salute to lavatories. Earlier musical efforts include Cardiff Giant’s 1992 AfterTaste, a show about fatal food, and the fretfully zany A Beggar’s Holiday, produced at Ann Sather restaurant in 1992, as well as LBJFKKK, whose title tells you all you need to know....

Although Islamic fundamentalism didn’t really take hold in Algeria until the late 80s, Cheikha Remitti’s music has been causing controversy there since at least the 1950s. In ’54 she recorded an unambiguous assault on the virtues of female virginity titled “Charrag, Gattaa” (“Tear, Lacerate”)–which would’ve been a bold move in the U.S. at the time–and throughout her career she’s approached all sorts of issues with similar bluntness. At 79, she’s the greatest living link to the early days of rai (Arabic for “opinion”), Algeria’s populist pop music....

Architecture is Chicago’s greatest art form, says Franz Schulze, professor emeritus at Lake Forest College and coauthor of the fifth edition of the reference guide Chicago’s Famous Buildings. “But the city’s attitude toward architecture has changed since the first edition,” Schulze adds. “The early editions looked at the skyscraper as the most important innovation since the Gothic cathedral. The editors were very modern in their prejudice. We’ve been more interested in looking at older buildings, and we’ve added whole neighborhoods like Pilsen and Bronzeville....

As Dave Kehr originally described it, “a classic example of the poetry of terror.” Georges Franju’s 1959 horror film, based on a novel by Jean Redon, is about a plastic surgeon who’s responsible for the car accident that leaves his daughter disfigured; he attempts to rebuild her face with transplants from attractive young women he kidnaps with the aid of his assistant. As absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale, this chilling, nocturnal black-and-white masterpiece was originally released in this country dubbed and under the title The Horror Chamber of Dr....

Buddy* told me that heroin is like love. It’s like love because it makes you forget that life is hell, and then it makes life hell all by itself. And I said I knew what he meant. Because love gets in you first because you let it and later because you can hardly tell it no. We said to them: Come to this place. It’s the only one you’ve got. Tell us every intimate detail of your life....

Guy Clark’s latest recording, The Dark (Sugar Hill), may be the singer-songwriter’s best work yet. Like fellow Texan Steve Earle, Clark tackles themes and expresses views that challenge the good ol’ boy machismo of C and W culture even as they celebrate its populist idealism. “Homeless,” set to a funeral-march cadence, is a series of stark street-life vignettes linked together by a chorus–“Get away from here / Don’t give ’em no money, they just spend it on beer”–that Clark spits out with caustic irony; in the antiwar parable “Soldier’s Joy, 1864,” a Civil War casualty endures a gruesome amputation by hacksaw....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know Kelly Anchors and Mike McKune well, and have worked with Sweetback from its inception. Along the way I have also worked with Steve Hickson, David Cerda, Pauline Pang, and Richard Lambert. From Sweetback’s first show, through Plan 9 From Outer Space and Female Trouble, and most recently The Birds (after a too-long hiatus), I have collaborated closely with Sweetback as a lighting designer and technical director....

LADYBUG TRANSISTOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like many of the lesser lights within the Elephant 6 posse–Of Montreal and Music Tapes among them–as well as some of the cutesy pop pretenders on the Kindercore label, Brooklyn’s Ladybug Transistor sometimes sound more like precocious kids dressing up as musicians than the real thing. Part of the problem is that these twentysomethings are plainly inspired by music made well before they were born–the Beach Boys, the Association, the Zombies, and the Left Banke–but that wouldn’t be such an issue if they could play: they often have trouble holding the bat, let along connecting with the ball....

This caustic satire about Japan’s amoral, profit-driven colonialism in Asia was released in 1993, before Japan’s economy collapsed, so the film has lost some of its edge. Takahashi (Henry Sanada) is an engineer dispatched by a construction giant to a military-run country–a thinly disguised Thailand–where his company is competing with another Japanese firm for a bridge-building contract. When a coup erupts, he, a coworker, and their counterparts at rival companies reluctantly band together as they try to escape....

Gloria J. Browne’s play about bickering generations is itself like a long-standing family argument: repetitive, wandering, and progressively frustrating. There’s enough melodrama in it to fuel a soap opera–which is what this production feels like given Kemati Perter’s awkward staging. The script skims over a rape, a murder, dementia, and the death of a brother, though really it’s about what happens to people faced with the failure of their dreams. Caroline (a nice, truculent turn by Lauren Wells), a gifted teenage pianist, is admitted to Juilliard but hesitant about going because she feels her life is following a script; her mother, Deborah (Makeba Pace), a failed writer, is desperate to learn the identity of her father before her mother’s memory, damaged by Alzheimer’s, can no longer reveal its secrets; and Deborah’s mother, Grace (Felisha McNeal), a once promising concert pianist herself, confronts her own impending decline and death....

Not in Our Name Unilateral action is so de rigueur these days. Last week, right after Mayor Daley’s surprise attack on Meigs Field, new Auditorium Theatre Council chairman Melvin Katten marched into the office of executive director Jan Kallish and ousted her–without so much as flashing a code orange to the ATC board. When news of the event reached longtime board members Sonia Florian and Betty Lou Weiss, they were furious enough to desert the cause....

Paul Thorn is a secular country singer these days, but as a child in Mississippi he sang in his father’s Church of God tent revivals, and that experience continues to color his music. On his records he favors midtempo, backbeat-heavy country rock that borders on cliched, but musical references to his background–gospel quartet harmonies, jubilantly percussive piano, rollicking praise-song rhythms–crop up throughout. And his lyrics, like a good sermon, mine profundity from everyday life, raising more questions than they answer....

On Inauguration Day, Stan Hollenbeck wore black. In a sports shirt, blazer, and boots, the bearded Hollenbeck looked like a funky priest about to preside over a funeral. “I want these people to see the mainstream, and I want the mainstream to see them,” Hollenbeck said. “It doesn’t make any sense to have them out of the Democratic Party. I think Nader showed that. We’ve evolved a two-party system over the years....

I’m a 27-year-old Jamaican man. I have lived in New York half my life but still have a very slight accent. For some reason this seems to drive women and men alike wild! Yesterday a guy followed me for five blocks after he heard my voice. I’m a good-looking guy, but for some reason I’m attracting all the wrong people. I get white gays and white women who want me to beat them and dominate them!...

I never thought I’d be defending a big Hollywood film, from DreamWorks no less, but I felt that Rosenbaum’s review of The Ring [October 18] exemplifies why a lot of readers dislike the provocateur critic. First off, let me say that I found the story silly, yet I found the imagery in the film as haunting and disturbing as any in the history of horror film, and some of its images rank alongside Bela Lugosi’s hand opening his coffin in Dracula and the shadow of Nosferatu creeping up the stairs in the silent classic....

I have a friend who continually insists that various historical figures were pedophiles. She’s made the accusations against such diverse individuals as Richard the Lion-Hearted, William Wallace, Julius Caesar, and James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. I find the accusation against such a beloved figure as Barrie particularly objectionable. I put it to you, o Great Dispenser of Wisdom: Was James Barrie a buggerer? –Pufnstuff, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Was Rachel Carson a fraud and is DDT actually safe for humans? According to Marjorie Mazel Hecht and [San Jose State University] professor J. Gordon Edwards at www.21stcenturysciencetech.com, DDT is safe and indeed saved and can save human lives, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is full of lies. According to them, the banning of DDT was politically motivated and went against the majority of scientific opinion. Yet I consistently hear how dangerous DDT is....