For almost seven months, as they zipped about the northwest side looking for a vacant lot on which to relocate the Huntley house, David Murray and Bill Lavicka were tag team crusaders for the preservation movement. The deal they offered the city looked like a good one. “We basically said, ‘Give us a vacant lot and we’ll pick the house up and move it there,’” says Lavicka. “My dad told me, ‘You’re saving the world’s ugliest house,’” says Murray....

Music doesn’t get much more basic than this: the Tuareg group Ensemble Tartit combine call-and-response vocals, syncopated hand claps, rudimentary rhythms tapped out on the tinde (a grain-grinding mortar that becomes an instrument when fitted with a piece of goatskin), and three- or four-note licks played on a one-string fiddle called the imzad, and the cool, mesmerizing sounds that result evoke the endlessly rolling dunes of the Sahara. The Tuareg, or Kel Tamashek, are a nomadic people who’ve drifted through Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso for centuries but began facing systematic oppression in the late 20th century....

The fifth annual Festival of New French Cinema, presented by Facets Multimedia Center and French Cultural Services in Chicago, runs Friday through Thursday, December 7 through 13, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $7, $5 for Facets members. For more information call 773-281-4114. Bankrupt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eight young men in a nondescript neighborhood of Marseilles, excluded from the French mainstream because of their North African heritage, lose themselves in meaningless sex and petty crime in this often powerful 2000 feature by Kamel Saleh and rap star Akhenaton....

Since 1993 the Hispanic Democratic Organization has been the school-yard bully of Chicago politics, gleefully beating up independents on behalf of Mayor Daley’s political machine. But in the last few weeks HDO’s leaders seem to have settled on a new tactic for silencing local independents–honoring them. HDO was created ten years ago by Victor Reyes, then a Daley political aide and now a lawyer-lobbyist and chairman of HDO (he didn’t return calls for comment)....

Paul Fejos’s exquisite, poetic 1928 masterpiece about love and estrangement in the big city deserves to be ranked with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and King Vidor’s The Crowd from the same period, though it’s not nearly as well-known. Equally neglected is Fejos himself, a peripatetic Hungarian who made striking films in Hungary, Hollywood, Austria, and France in the late silent and early sound era before becoming an anthropologist–and making a few ethnographic films that are even harder to find....

What Lady Miss Kier was to the candy ravers in the late 80s and early 90s, Caroline Herve, aka Miss Kittin, is to a certain disaffected subset of modern Eurotrash. She met Michel Amato, aka the Hacker, on a dance floor in her hometown of Grenoble, France, but the two worked individually–she as a DJ in Geneva and he in industrial, techno, and hardcore bands–until 1997, when they recorded their neo-new wave single “1982,” the video for which made it onto German MTV....

Joan Lee: Ephemera By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Especially fascinating are the works that pair the drawing on the left with the monoprint on the right. Though these are mirror images, they can look quite different–it’s even hard to tell at times which is the original, because plant fragments have come off on some prints. The drawn half of A Deprived Dusk has an irregular mass of black ink in its lower portion punctuated by a line of milkweed seedpods; above them are an isolated large pansy and a “bouquet” of pansies–a motif that recurs often, as if Lee were offering us things she’s collected....

Herbert Delgado is tired. He’s just finished a meeting with his meat purveyor, and he’s got a phone call on hold. The 44-year-old chef and owner of La Fonda Latino Grill still has to go over the evening’s specials with his wife, Beatriz, and it’s already 11:30 AM; the lunch hour approaches. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That first restaurant was started by Herbert and his mother, Livia, in 1984....

Pucci: Sport–it sounds like a new perfume. But in fact it’s a crowd-pleasing, often humorous evening-length mix of dance and athletic games. Designed to be played in nine “innings,” this four-year-old work offers choreographer Peter Pucci’s takes on such endeavors as boxing, Frisbee throwing, surfing, tennis, badminton, and golf. Clearly Pucci has the sports fan in mind–the piece opens with a request that everyone rise for the national anthem. But his sly takes on choreographic classics and cliches reward the dance enthusiast....

Holly McPeak has chiseled biceps, strong and shapely legs, and a rear end that would make a baseball power-pitcher proud. Her cutting-board stomach is the only flat thing about her body. She’s the most beautiful female athlete in the world. Yet–please don’t laugh–her most beautiful asset is her mind. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Friday I finally got to see McPeak in the flesh, as the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour came to North Avenue Beach for the U....

Rock, Pop, etc. CRAZY CURT & THE FIREBALLS, LIL’ T-BONE, EILEEN BOEVERS TRAVELING TROUPE and others perform at a benefit for the Children’s Heart Foundation. Fri 4/26, 6 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 630-428-1298. MIKE ERRICO Free concert. Fri 5/3, 8 PM, Brune Patio, Elmhurst College, 190 Prospect, Elmhurst. 630-617-3230. HELLO DAVE, LLAMA, 56 HOPE ROAD 18 & over show. Sat 4/27, 8 PM, Park West, 322 W....

Bourbon at the Border Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet, with all these strengths, the evening comes to an unsatisfying end. The problem seems to be a central one in serious theater: one person’s tragedy is often another’s melodrama. Someone betrayed in a marriage embraces Medea’s murderous revenge more readily than a person without that experience, who may consider all that shrieking and child slaughtering somewhat over-the-top....

For the last two or three decades, politicians in and around Portage Park have pretty much done what they wanted with the business strips in their part of town. Then Adrienne O’Brien and a lot of people like her moved to the neighborhood. Now the neighborhood’s becoming a little more like Lincoln Park, and local pols are learning lessons their counterparts in Lakeview and Ravenswood learned long ago: gentrification brings greater expectations–that is, the richer the residents the more they demand....

A Phony License? Who Knew? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The license for the tiny space at 3209 N. Halsted, WNEP’s home for more than three years, had been held by its landlord, Wellington Properties, in the name of TurnAround Productions, a now inactive theater company. Earlier this year, says WNEP founder Don Hall, the two companies agreed that the license would be renewed in WNEP’s name....

“I learned how to knit when I was six,” says Debbie Stoller. “But it was another 30 years before I actually liked it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stoller, who’s 41 now, tried a few more times in her 20s and 30s–once under the tutelage of her grandmother in the Netherlands–but ended up with little more than a closet full of wool and one unfinished sleeve....

In the annals of noise few speaker shredders have kicked up as violently assaultive a din as the New York trio Borbetomagus, who’ve been at it for two and a half decades now. While saxophonists Jim Sauter and Donald Dietrich and tabletop guitarist Donald Miller use a battalion of effects pedals and high-powered amps, what makes them unique among noisemongers is that the roots of their sound tend to be organic–there’s nothing more human than breath....

Maria Arndt What makes Bernstein’s drama unique even today is that its central relationship is not an adult love affair but Maria’s enduring love for her teenage daughter, Gemma. Children–particularly female children–don’t figure this prominently in Ibsen’s major works (with the exception of Hedvig in The Wild Duck). In fact Ingmar Bergman did away with the juvenile characters altogether in Nora, his stage adaptation of A Doll’s House, perhaps an acknowledgment that they’re more set decoration than three-dimensional beings....

This year’s edition of the Highland Park Historical Society House Tour is a one-man show for a hometown boy. Architect Robert E. Seyfarth was born in Blue Island in 1878, but moved to Highland Park in 1912. Between 1909, when he opened his own office, and his death in 1950, Seyfarth designed 54 Highland Park houses–more than any other architect–and well over 100 throughout the North Shore. He started out in the employ of George W....

Barrie Cole and Theresa Sofianos both use the word “obsession” when discussing their relationship with the printed word. “I’ve always checked too many books out of the library,” says Cole, a performance artist and playwright who grew up in Evanston. When she was a child, she says, “whenever we’d go to the city, we’d go to a used bookstore and our parents would let us pick out one book. It was exciting to choose the book and let the book choose you....

Bicontinental muckraker Greg Palast says his first undercover investigation was at the University of Chicago, spying on economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. In 1975 Palast was a graduate student in the business school and investigating machine hacks and utilities for labor unions. His aim was to learn the business better than the businessmen, and pass the knowledge on to shop stewards and activists. Best of Chicago voting is live now....