Dead Man Talking Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This would not be grist for The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (finally coming out next year), but Breen was hooked. “I spent a lot of time tracking down the proper nouns of the document,” he says. “And they came out pretty well. By the end of my research I felt you could trust at least the structure of the story....

Now in its 40th year, the troupe has branched out from the classic jazz-dance creations of its founder, who’s turning 80 next summer, to embrace the choreography of company members and national figures alike. Two new additions come from local choreographers. Randy Duncan’s Sister Girl, a dance for five women, is set to an original score by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, while Entropy, an ensemble piece by Davis Robertson of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, plays with the notions of chaos and order....

In France, world music isn’t just a record-shop rubric, it’s a vibrant cultural force, and the Vive la World package tours have come to represent an annual report on the state of cross-cultural affairs there. The four acts on this year’s bill all traffic in pan-African fusion, with mixed results. The highlight of the program is Belgian-born singer Natacha Atlas, whose family heritage blends Egyptian, Palestinian, Moroccan, and Sephardic components. Over the last decade she’s built a career mixing traditional Arabic music with Western dance forms, singing in Arabic, French, and English and collaborating with the likes of Jah Wobble, Transglobal Underground, and Temple of Sound....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a Japan Times article in August, habitats for very low-maintenance pets are currently popular among Tokyo twenty- and thirty-somethings: The Antquarium is a five-inch-high ant farm filled with a nutritious blue-green gel suitable for both tunneling in and eating (the price, about $30, doesn’t include ants). Holo Holo is a small plastic tank of algae- and mineral-fortified water containing five or so tiny scarlet shrimp; the water never has to be changed, and the shrimp never have to be fed (besides the algae, they eat the bodies of other shrimp as they die off)....

I’m really tall for a girl–6’1″–and my college roommate Kari is too. We both have dark hair, and people mistake us for sisters, sometimes twins. She’s a stay-at-home mom with two kids, so when she came to visit me for the weekend I was expecting a kinda low-key, early evening. Then Kari suggested we go to Rush Street. We started out with a group of eight, but our two cabs got separated, and the other cab ended up I don’t know where....

In the vast, dead space of the Allstate Arena last March, a few hundred people turned out to watch the Chicago Skyliners, the city’s representative in the minor-league American Basketball Association. The announcer confused the team with the new XFL football franchise–referring to them as “the Enforcers”–and a pregame rendition of the national anthem sounded like a dirge. But Mike Naiditch, sitting courtside on a folding chair, looked like the happiest man alive....

Despondent over his bad grades, an eight-year-old boy from a privileged Tehran family plans to kill himself by jumping off a high-rise. On the rooftop he encounters an armed man recently released from prison who’s intent on killing the business associate who sent him there and then himself. When the man suspends his mission of vengeance to return the boy to his family, the relationship between the unlikely companions oscillates between camaraderie and distrust....

Win Moe was standing outside the sliding glass doors of the pale pink Holiday Inn in downtown Fort Wayne, puffing on a cigarette. His free hand was jammed deep in the pocket of his baggy brown jeans, his shoulders were hunched, and a knit cap was pulled low over his ears against the chill of February 2001. Black stubble indicated he hadn’t shaved in days, the station wagon parked behind him suggested a degree of domestication....

Last year’s EP I Conjure Series (Secretly Canadian) gave the impression that British singer Scout Niblett was deliberately sabotaging her songs, trying to scuff up the offhand beauty she revealed on her stunning 2001 debut album, Sweet Heart Fever. Niblett’s raspy vocals have invited comparisons to Cat Power’s Chan Marshall; despite her sometimes wobbly intonation, she’s really closer to PJ Harvey. On the EP her words came spilling out of her mouth in excited bursts that seemed driven by her naive drumming: when she flailed, her voice strained to match the arrhythmic cacophony; when the bashing slowed down, her voice softened....

The truly silent cinema of avant-gardists requires no accompaniment–silence deepens the viewer’s imaginative involvement. In Sidney Peterson’s neosurreal The Cage (1947) an artist (played by two different actors) removes his eye in an attempt to stop seeing conventionally, and the result is a deranged romp through San Francisco that includes reverse motion, anamorphic squeezing, inanimate objects that move, and narrative ruptures. Stan Brakhage’s spectacular hand-painted Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999) fills the screen with flickering shards of red and orange that present a universe ablaze with energy....

Ron Roenigk was in a meeting on August 20, discussing the fate of the Sulzer Regional Library, when a local librarian burst in. The city, she breathlessly announced, almost in tears, was loading up boxes of books–hundreds and hundreds of books–and carting them off to be destroyed. Sulzer supporters–many of whom are members of the advisory group Friends of Sulzer Library, which sponsors lectures, concerts, and poetry readings and has raised almost $100,000 to support them–see the leaky roof as a symbol of the central office’s indifference, condescension, and jealousy....

For the past few months American kids have been pummeled with lefty entreaties to vote: Punkvoter.com, the 21st Century Democrats’ Young Voter Project, and Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising Tour are just a few of the projects trying to harness the country’s youthful energy. But only one Web site is taking advantage of all these riled-up youngsters–many of whom are below voting age–by siccing them on their parents. ConvinceYourMom.com, launched by J....

“I’m all right brain,” says Eric Aubriot, the French-born chef and owner of Aubriot restaurant in Lincoln Park. “I’m creative, and French cooking in France doesn’t allow for that much. It’s more about control and consistency.” The 30-year-old opened his namesake eatery four years ago. This summer he launched two new ventures: Tournesol, a bistro in Lincoln Square, and Eau, a late-night lounge. And while the menus at all three restaurants appear to consist of standard French fare, he takes liberties that his forefathers might not encourage....

Celebrating its centenary, Dublin’s Abbey Theatre is touring the drama that brought it renown and controversy in 1907. J.M. Synge’s rhapsodic masterwork exposes the blighted inhabitants of a seaside dump in County Mayo, where cruelty is taken as courage and a peasant lad who kills his father becomes a hero. (It’s the strangest coming-of-age comedy ever.) Rather than being lifted up by Synge’s lyrical script, Ben Barnes’s staging seems to carry the weight of nearly a century: this Playboy is a dark, pitiless retelling of an already ugly story....

I’m sort of surprised that you dismiss the work of Freud as mere quackery in your recent column about B.F. Skinner. No doubt Freud’s theories and the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis remain open and controversial issues. But accusing the father of psychoanalysis and one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century of quackery is simply “Freud-bashing” and serves no purpose. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Freud has always had his detractors, but the public didn’t hear much about them until the Masson controversy of the early 1980s....

Rock, Pop, Etc. LUKA BLOOM, CHILDREN’S HOUR All-ages. Fri 5/9, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. COLD, DEPSWA, LOVEHAMMERS Sat 5/3, 7:30 PM, 115 Bourbon St., 3359 W. 115th, Merrionette Park. 708-388-8881. EDGEWATER SINGERS perform “Harmony & Discord: Relationships in Song”; free admission. Sat 5/10, 7:30 PM, Immanuel Lutheran Church, 1500 W. Elmdale. 773-561-4766. REGGIE HARRIS, GREG GREENWAY & TOM PRASADA-RAO Fri 5/2, 8:30 PM, Byron Colby Barn, 1561 Jones Point Rd....

YEAH NO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The slightly built Chris Speed stands tall among the ever burgeoning population of excellent New York saxophonists, contributing to a number of downtown bands (led by John Zorn, Myra Melford, and Dave Douglas among others) while leading two or three of his own. In the best known of these, the quirky quartet called Pachora, Speed restricts himself to clarinet and shares the front line with saz, the Turkish long-necked lute–the better to explore the Balkan muse that inspires the band’s compositions....

Reedist Matt Darriau is best known for his work in the Klezmatics and for jazzing up traditional Balkan music with his Paradox Trio; he formed Ballin’ the Jack as a repertory band in 1998 to explore his growing love for early swing music. Darriau was joined by a terrific crew of New York jazz-oriented genre-hoppers on the group’s debut, Jungle (Knitting Factory), which focused on the compositions of Duke Ellington, expertly simulating the band leader’s voicings and meticulously articulating his melodies, with concise solos that were true to the architectural integrity of the ensemble performances on the original recordings....

The “astral jazz” of the early 70s has a lot to answer for, from the would-be cosmic meanderings of latter-day drum ‘n’ bass (4hero’s Two Pages, the bulk of Good Looking Records’ output) to the tepid “broken beat” of groups like Jazzanova. But Jason Swinscoe, the mastermind behind London downtempo troupe the Cinematic Orchestra, avoids most of the pitfalls of Alice Coltrane worship by augmenting his lush textures with understated grooves and an icy demeanor that thaws with repeated contact....

City of neighborhoods–for raccoons too. Jill Riddell in Chicago Wilderness (Summer) on recent radio-collar studies of raccoons: “Raccoons raised in a forest preserve tend to remain in that preserve, while raccoons born inside the urban matrix will likely continue to reside in the city or suburban neighborhood they are familiar with.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail....