The Children’s Humanities Festival starts nearly a week earlier than its parent fest, the Chicago Humanities Festival. Events run October 24 through November 2 at the following venues: Art Institute, Michigan and Adams; Chicago Children’s Museum, Navy Pier, 700 E. Grand; Gallery 37, 66 E. Randolph; Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State; Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E. Balbo; Music Institute of Chicago, 1490 Chicago Ave., Evanston; Sherwood Conservatory of Music, 1312 S....

When developers announced plans in 1998 to build a mall on a 75-acre soybean field at U.S. 12 and Long Grove Road, local residents tried to block the plan. Old-timers remembered that there had once been a small cemetery on the old Deer Park farmstead, although the gravestones had been removed decades before and the land plowed under. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The cemetery was marked on the old plats, says M....

FRED HERSCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fred Hersch doesn’t get to the tunes of Cole Porter until the last disc of his forthcoming three-CD set, a mostly solo outing called Songs Without Words (Nonesuch), and they make an apt finale: Porter’s songwriting epitomized elegance, and no pianist in modern music plays more elegantly than Hersch. Every note sits perfectly in place; his chord voicings demonstrate a quiet but thrilling attention to balance and nuance; and even his most propulsive rhythms display an unruffled command worthy of James Bond....

Virtually every pianist of the last 50 years has been influenced in some way by Bud Powell–though relatively few of Powell’s contemporaries and only a handful of those that followed managed the balance of intensity and control that set his early recordings on fire. In fact, by the late 50s, when Hod O’Brien headed down from Massachusetts to New York, not even Powell could regularly summon the resources that had birthed his best music....

ISAAC HAYES & CYRUS CHESTNUT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first glance, this listing looks like a misprint. Isaac Hayes is the doyen of sexy 70s soul-funk spectaculars, with his ever-present shades and growling, insinuating voice; though he doesn’t read music, he’s given the world Hot Buttered Soul, Black Moses, and of course the theme from Shaft. Cyrus Chestnut is a bookish-looking neoclassical jazz pianist with a degree from the Berklee College of Music; his field training included early-90s stints under rigorously demanding bandleaders like Betty Carter and Wynton Marsalis, both of whom have spoken out against exactly the kind of hedonistic black pop Hayes exemplifies....

Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards is only 24, but on her striking debut album, Failer (Zoe), she demonstrates an eye for detail that can only improve with age. In “Westby” the virginal narrator has a fling with an older married man, and the damage is laid bare in striking imagery (“I dance dirty for you ’cause it turns you on / And I’m a little bleeder with white pants on”). And in “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” an ambling folk rocker about a clueless A and R rep trying to manufacture a pop star, Edwards’s parched, raspy articulation imbues each line with clenched-teeth contempt....

One of Louis Faurer’s stated goals was to “transform adversity into victories of love and hope.” His photographs of New York street scenes, most shot between 1946 and ’54, document the alienating effects of city life. Champion, New York, N.Y. is a lonely image of a well-dressed man standing in the middle of traffic, his confused eyes searching beyond the frame. In Deaf Mute, New York, N.Y. a deaf man has stopped a young woman on the street, and her plaintive stare suggests an awareness that she can never understand his plight....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Web master of the Internet site that hosts Kaboom: The Suicide Bomber Game (the more bystanders you wound or kill, the higher your score) told the New York Times in December that the game has been played about 875,000 times since its introduction in April; other offerings on the site include Extreme WTC Jumper, Sniper’s Revenge, and Pico’s School (modeled after the Columbine shootings)....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the word “fucking,” as employed by U2 singer Bono during the live Golden Globe telecast in January, was not indecent language: Bono did not use it to describe a sex act but rather to intensify the word “brilliant.” And two weeks later, a state court of appeals in Austin, Texas, ruled that giving someone the finger in traffic does not constitute disorderly conduct, since the gesture is no longer provocative enough to incite an “immediate breach of the peace....

No Type, Just Face The small picture in the lower left-hand corner of the front page–an AP file photo–reminded us of last fall’s scuzzy, belligerent, shirtless, tattooed William Ligue Jr. The 35-year-old Ligue was photographed sneering at the cameras as police hauled him in after he and his teenage son jumped out of the Comiskey Park stands to pummel the Kansas City Royals’ first base coach. The caption said: “Comiskey troublemaker’s ‘extreme makeover....

“I met this chick on campus two months ago,” says Northwestern student Sean Pawley, aka No Doctors guitarist Chauncey Chaumpers. “She was like, ‘Aren’t you one of those No Doctors guys?’” Enjoying this taste of notoriety, Pawley chatted her up, asking what she knew about his band. Well, she said, “I heard you guys take acid every day and don’t know how to play your instruments.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sharon Lewis sang in church growing up in Fort Worth, and as a teenager in the late 60s she idolized Tina Turner. But she didn’t consider a music career until 1992, when she performed in a faculty and staff revue at Northwestern University. Inspired by the praise she received, Lewis auditioned with local bands; her first club gig was in ’93 at Buddy Guy’s Legends, fronting a blues aggregation called Under the Gun....

COPTIC LIGHT 4/5, FIRESIDE BOWL Jon Fine (most notoriously of Bitch Magnet, with pre-Seam Sooyoung Park, and most recently a touring member of Don Caballero), Kevin Shea (a former Chicagoan and member of Storm and Stress), and Jeff Winterberg make ferocious, luminous instrumental music that doesn’t sound exactly like rock ‘n’ roll but most definitely is. Though people are bound to guess they improvise, they don’t: the two songs they sent me, “U....

The Vagina Monologues, which has been running at the Apollo Theater since the fall of 2000, recently welcomed Marcia Wallace (better known as Carol from The Bob Newhart Show) to its summer lineup. Previous Chicago casts have included Erin Moran (Happy Days), Loretta Swit (MAS*H), Kim Fields (The Facts of Life), Dawn Wells (Gilligan’s Island), Mayim Bialik (Blossom), and Leila Kenzle (Mad About You). A rotating cast of celebrity guests, many of whom are out-of-work TV stars–hmm, where have we seen that formula before?...

The musicians in the Malian ensemble Tinariwen are members of the Tuareg, an ancient group of nomads that has crisscrossed the Sahara for centuries. In the early 90s the Tuareg staged armed rebellions against the governments of Mali and Niger, which galvanized the people’s music; both Tinariwen and Ensemble Tartit, the best-known Tuareg musical acts, formed in refugee camps during the unrest. While Tartit employs the most rustic of tools–call-and-response vocals, syncopated hand claps, elementary rhythms played on a hand drum called a tinde, and simple licks bowed on a single-string violin–Tinariwen has embraced electric guitars from the West....

TRAVIS “MOONCHILD” HADDIX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in Mississippi in 1938 and based in Cleveland since ’59, guitarist Travis Haddix first put his name on the international blues map with five albums for Ichiban in the 80s–but the label has since folded, and those albums are tough to find. Though Haddix has been releasing records through his own Wann-Sonn imprint for more than a decade now, they’re not much easier to track down, and that’s a shame: despite occasionally thin production, the Wann-Sonn discs effectively showcase his improbable approach, which yokes 12-bar primitivism to soul-blues sophistication....

Like a shark, Zbigniew Karkowski is always on the move. The 45-year-old Tokyo resident has lived in five countries since leaving his native Poland in 1979, worked with collaborators spanning the noise spectrum from inaudible (Francisco Lopez) to annihilating (Merzbow), and used sound sources as diverse as a Japanese temple’s wooden floor and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. And like a shark’s bite, Karkowski’s music makes a mark: Whether manipulating white noise into lulling waves with Lopez on the double CD Whint (Absolute) or marshaling an episodic assault of muffled radio voices, deep bass pulses, and piercing whistles on the three-inch CD Consciously Unconscious, Unconsciously Conscious (Metamkine), he uses sound to create a physical impact....

Thirty-some years ago, New York’s jazz vanguard was dominated by blustery saxophonists modeled on Ayler and Coltrane. Then a new saxophone style from Chicago hit free jazz like a missile. Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton’s staccato articulation and leaping wide intervals soon became a signature sound of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the co-op that nurtured them, and from there went on to influence wind players around the world....

A few months ago, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage went to New York from his Colorado home to present seven programs of new and recent films, six of them at the Museum of Modern Art, which has offered retrospectives of his work since 1970. Brakhage hasn’t been invited to Chicago in 20 years, even though he taught at the School of the Art Institute in the 70s, and his films are shown here infrequently....

Overnight Overnight portrays Duffy as a sort of indie-film Caliban, ranting about the treachery of the movie business and raving about the vastness of his talent. Perpetually clad in bib overalls, a six-day beard, and a baseball cap with a Boondock Saints logo, he never misses an opportunity to remind his little entourage that he’s the golden goose. “Success has nothing to do with how you live your life or how you treat your friends, really,” he says privately at one point....