Even before Kasey Chambers’s debut album, The Captain, hit U.S. shelves in 2000, Lucinda Williams was raving about the 24-year-old Aussie. Skeptics suspected that Chambers’s appeal with such middle-aged No Depression types owed much to her “exotic” air (oft-noted nose ring, New South Wales address); lyrics like “I’m not much like my generation / Their music only hurts my ears” stirred accusations that she was blatantly kissing up to her elders....

Lit Riffs: Writers “Cover” Songs They Love If the artists whose music provides the foundation for the book were asked to comment on the results, “That’s not what I meant at all” would probably come up a lot. But does it matter? It’s hard to imagine a higher compliment a listener can pay a musician than giving his work a vigorous dose of imaginative close attention. Rock lyrics are famously vague, but what if that vagueness is actually just the outline and it’s listeners who need to finish the picture?...

North Shore Fish, Paper Moon, at Theatre Building Chicago, and Alfred the Great, Theo Ubique Theatre Company, at the Heartland Studio Theater. Israel Horovitz is one of America’s most prolific, uneven dramatists. For every intense, well-written play like The Indian Wants the Bronx there are three like North Shore Fish and Alfred the Great that really could have used another rewrite. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » North Shore Fish–the better of the two–ruins a compelling story about a town’s major employer going down the tubes with a phony Hollywood-style plot involving a womanizing boss, a hard-assed government inspector, and a possible murder....

This summer Picador illuminated an overlooked chapter in American literature when it published a hefty biography of my old writing teacher and friend Richard Yates (1926-’92), the author of Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. I’d been keeping an eye out for the book ever since I was interviewed for it two years earlier, but I procrastinated for weeks before finally cracking it, because as anyone who’s read his fiction might suspect and as anyone who knew him well would testify, Yates was much better acquainted with the varieties of loneliness than joy....

Porchlight Music Theatre’s production of Promises, Promises, a fall sensation at the Theatre Building Chicago, is moving to Arlington Heights. This spoof of corporate power games anticipated Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in its hard look at office politics and sexual one-upmanship. Based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, the musical sardonically celebrates the slick survival of Chuck, an opportunistic midlevel insurance nerd who moves up the corporate ladder by lending his convenient apartment to his superiors for their extramarital trysts....

No points for guessing where Radio 4 are coming from musically: they share their name with one of the best songs on Public Image Ltd.’s classic 1980 album Second Edition. On their own excellent second record, Gotham! (Gern Blandsten), the Brooklyn quintet run through every trick in the postpunk book, from the Gang of Four guitar splinters of “Our Town” to the conga-led punk-funk of “Struggle” to the spiky dub of “Pipe Bombs....

Gem of the Ocean Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One is amazed. Here’s August Wilson after nine plays and 20 years, so near the end of his epic attempt to chronicle African-American life in each decade of the 20th century; here he is, closing in on one of the great imaginative gestures in contemporary theater, having created his own Yoknapatawpha County of the black urban experience....

Greg Dawe was photographed by Wes Pope in April 2000, as part of the CITY 2000 documentary project. I interviewed him about six months later. He’s shown standing in the CAVE–a computer-generated “automatic virtual environment”–at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab, where he works as a design engineer. My great-grandfather lived on what is now the border between Northern and southern Ireland. He drove a coach for one of the British royalty, who owned the estate immediately south....

A pickup truck pulled up to the curb outside 1541 N. Wells–or as close to the curb as it could get. It was January 1967, and 29 hours of blizzard had buried the city under 23 inches of snow. A tall, lean man two decades removed from the Guangzhou region of China unfolded himself from the cab of the truck and surveyed the condition of his new restaurant, a pizza joint called the Firehouse, which he’d soon rechristen the Golden Dragon....

Where did the phrase “built like a brick shithouse” originate? How can it possibly be considered a compliment? –Erik Smith, Hilton Head, South Carolina Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The book includes photos of privies constructed using a wide range of materials, including clapboard (by far the commonest), plywood, stucco, concrete, cedar shakes, logs, corrugated tin, scrap lumber, and of course brick. The brick shithouses are generally pretty impressive architecturally, but not even the most obtuse male is likely to see the spitting image of his ladylove therein–not unless she’s got a physique like a defensive line-man....

Daniel Cowing and Mary Ann Gulizia opened BOXCAR CAFE at LaSalle and Division with visions of families stopping in to enjoy sandwiches and milk shakes amid the couple’s toy trains and train-related art. Trouble was, there just wasn’t much demand for cereal and chocolate milk among the indigenous power lunchers. Then the city erected a bus shelter in front of the cafe, blocking street visibility and squelching plans for an outdoor patio....

ROCK, POP, ETC. includes hip-hop, funk, reggae, zydeco, cabaret, contemporary R&B, and some international pop. DANCE includes techno, house, electronica, ambient, and disco. FOLK & COUNTRY includes bluegrass and traditional Irish music. BLUES, GOSPEL, R&B includes traditional rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, and deep soul. JAZZ includes ragtime, swing, and fusion. INTERNATIONAL includes Indian classical music, African music, salsa, and ethnic folk genres. FAIRS & FESTIVALS are listed in a separate category without regard to music type....

A woman has come up from the audience in the back room at Pops Highwood and is standing on the stage with Ross “He Knows What You’re Thinking” Johnson. The woman, apparently chosen at random, is silent, concentrating. Johnson, who says he’s been “voted the top psychic entertainer in the world” by his peers, has asked her to focus on her best friend’s telephone number. In her mind’s eye, she’s punching it into a dial pad, one digit at a time....

Last fall the Chicago Opera Theater scored a critical and box-office success with a stylish staging of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, so it’s wrapping up this season with a revival of another Baroque opera, Handel’s pastoral Acis and Galatea. The current production uses a sterling 10-piece period-instrument orchestra, anchored by violist da gamba Mary Springfels and her Newberry Consort, that’s essentially a subset of Orfeo’s 24-piece group. And like Orfeo, it’s been modernized in extramusical ways–where the COT simply put Monteverdi’s characters in 20th-century clothes, however, here it’s using an innovative staging developed by Mark Lamos for New York’s Glimmerglass Opera, which recasts the shepherd Acis and his beloved, the nymph Galatea, as pampered suburban teens; Acis’s rival, the cyclops Polyphemus, is dressed like a miner or a mechanic, the lamp on his hard hat resembling the monster’s huge eye....

Selling out implies that an artist has some integrity, and that he’s relinquishing it to move product. But Andrew W.K. never had any such notions of virtue; he’s just a weirdo who perfected a familiar formula–big songs with big guitars, big hooks, and even bigger choruses–and decided to go for the gold. In the mid-90s, he was an angry rich kid in Ann Arbor with too much energy and too few outlets, and became a key figure in the Bulb Records crowd, making albums with noisy, hyperactive bands such as Galen, Beast People, and the Pterodactyls....

The only contemporary musician who can rock a trucker hat without looking like a jackass kicked around the R & B game for a decade until 2003, when Comin’ From Where I’m From (So So Def/Arista) earned the North Carolina-born soul man an audience beyond those who scrutinize liner notes. Before that Hamilton recorded two albums, one for Uptown and one for Soulife, that remain unreleased in the wake of each label’s collapse; his 1996 debut, XTC, hit stores but drew little attention....

Warblers’ EMS. “We don’t know exactly what happens in this maze of tall buildings,” musician and Loop bird rescuer Robbie Hunsinger tells Chicago Wilderness (Summer). Somehow during spring and fall migrations “the birds–a lot of thrushes, warblers, ovenbirds–get pulled down into these canyons then fly into lit windows and reflective glass, or else just become exhausted from circling and settle at street level. Which is one of the reasons it’s crucial to get there early because there’s a huge predator problem: gulls, crows, some rats....

Dutch improvisers Cor Fuhler and Gert-Jan Prins take improvisation to its logical end, getting creative not just with the arrangement but also with the production of sound. Both have spent years devising new instruments and technological mutations to make music with. Fuhler is still known primarily as a pianist, but he rarely tickles the ivories in any conventional manner. For his album 7 CC in 10 (Geest Gronden, 1994) he prepared his piano by filling it with junk: things like fishing line, bottles, and a box lid rattle around inside as he strikes the keys and strings....

BILLY JOE SHAVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fatal drug overdose of Eddy Shaver this past New Year’s Eve colors the words his dad sings on The Earth Rolls On (New West)–even though the pair made the album before his death. Most of the life-after-death tunes, including the gripping blues-rock title track, are actually about the passing of Billy Joe Shaver’s longtime wife, Brenda, but the tunes about the father-son relationship resonate longer....

58 Group Farley and Pfiffner’s Imprint (2001) shows both the possibilities and drawbacks of collaboration, contemplating directly the battle for primacy between sound and motion. After an initial moment with musicians and dancers frozen together at center stage, Pfiffner’s score begins with percussion, to which the dancers (six women and two men) respond directly and largely individually. Their walks and hesitations, lunges and pauses highlight the intersection between stillness and sound or stillness and motion....