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Few music documentaries manage to capture the spirit of their subjects; this 49-minute video about avant-garde pianist Matthew Shipp, whose influences range from jazz to classical but who’s been written up in a heavy-metal magazine, is a rare exception. Though director Patrick A. Gaucher supplies the usual mix of performance footage and comments from players, critics, and record producers, he uses a variety of techniques, from jump cuts to superimpositions to oblique angles on interviewees, to decenter and energize his subjects....

By Tori Marlan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Connet’s clients–collectors, dealers, museums, and owners of heirlooms–bring him their worn and torn treasures by appointment only. He cleans off the decades or centuries of corrosive grime and then either restores or conserves them. “With restoration,” he explains, “you rework something the way it was originally done–you reweave a tapestry, reknot a carpet, replace a section of quilt....

FLYING LUTTENBACHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a perfect world, when Chicago “post-rock” showed up on the international music map in the mid-90s Weasel Walter’s Flying Luttenbachers and other denizens of the city’s neo-no wave underground would have taken their rightful place as the swaggering, leering, id-driven hot foil to the cool formal playfulness of Gastr del Sol or Tortoise. As the intertwined discographies of the players attest, these genre-busting subgenres are really two sides of the same coin....

I used to compile the music listings for this paper. I’m glad I don’t do it anymore–deciding what category certain artists belong in has turned into an ontological riddle. As more musicians trample over the boundaries between jazz, free improvisation, rock, noise, electronic music, and contemporary classical, it’s not only more difficult to label their work, but doing so misses the point altogether. Icelandic guitarist Hilmar Jensson is a perfect example: he got his start playing jazz and came to America to study at Berklee, where he became friendly with broad-minded players like drummer Jim Black and reedist Andrew D’Angelo, who round out the trio he brings to Chicago this week....

How Many Stagehands to Screw in a Lightbulb? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carpenter Geoff Pender says his situation is typical of the 17 employees the union represents. An art major who worked on a lot of theater sets, Pender, 29, came to Chicago after graduating from Indiana’s Earlham College. He freelanced briefly at storefronts around town before being hired by the Goodman. “Starting pay for a carpenter at the Goodman right now is $11 an hour,” Pender says....

John Theodore was working as a news and sports producer at WGN when news of the death of former Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus came over the wire in the fall of 1972. As a student at the University of Illinois, Theodore had read Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural, whose hero, Roy Hobbs, is based on Waitkus. “I always knew that as a Philly in 1949 he was shot by a deranged girl,” says Theodore, a South Shore native and Cubs fan who saw his first game at Wrigley in 1955....

Henry 5 Numerous heavy hitters have weighed in against the king. Swinburne called him a heartless egoist. To Yeats he was “as remorseless and undistinguished as a natural force.” Harold Bloom seconded Yeats’s characterization of Henry as an “amiable monster.” But the movies have been good to him: Olivier and Branagh loaded their cinematic portrayals with enough noble patriotism to make Dick Cheney look like a peacenik. The most interesting productions navigate between these extremes, somehow convincing the audience to care about a self-described Christian monarch who sends his friends to the executioner, threatens his enemies with rape and dismemberment, and orders prisoners of war up for slaughter....

Lobby Hero, Goodman Theatre. Likable loser Jeff, the protagonist of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2001 off-Broadway hit, is a security guard working the graveyard shift in a Manhattan high-rise–his first job since getting dumped by the navy for smoking dope. Jeff is the kind of dude people tell their problems to, but when he gets drawn into his friends’ messes he turns out to be a class-A fuckup. He has a crush on rookie cop Dawn, who regularly drops by the building with her burly partner-mentor, Bill; but when Jeff tells Dawn that Bill regularly visits a party girl on the 22nd floor, he stirs up trouble....

In the 1990s, Chicago filmmaker Denis Mueller produced several documentaries that focused on the darker moments in American history–films like The FBI’s War on Black America, John Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisitions, and Citizen Soldier: The Story of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. By 1997, Mueller says, he was looking to make a film about the nature of history itself–“how it relates to society and how it’s approached with different points of view....

A cautionary figure for painter Robert McCauley is 19th-century British explorer John Franklin, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended when his ships got stuck in the ice–and rather than learn how to survive from the natives, the men starved. “If you go into nature with a sense that you’re better than the people already there or the animals or the flora,” McCauley says, “you’re going to be in for trouble....

Schadenfreude, Wing & Groove Theatre. There are several brawls in Schadenfreude’s new late-night sketch show, along with pointed political commentary, rock music, a raunchy mnemonic to remember the names of important aldermen, and Justin Kaufmann’s infamous sparkly underwear. The show is loud, funny, and outrageous, and it knows its audience: hip urbanites in their 20s and 30s. One of the few troupes to take on local politics, this six-member ensemble–Kaufmann, Mark Hanner, Kate James, Sandy Marshall, Stephen Schmidt, and Adam Witt–manages to be simultaneously chaotic, smart, and funny....

The unexpected success of the Shins’ 2001 debut, Oh, Inverted World, which sold over 100,000 copies, can’t be attributed simply to the fact that “New Slang” showed up in a McDonald’s commercial and an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; it was immediately obvious that the Albuquerque quartet (whose leader, James Mercer, has recently relocated to Portland) had stumbled onto something special. Mercer’s zigzagging melodies are at once complex and unforgettably catchy, and the band’s spacious arrangements–laden with deft, delicate vocal harmonies evocative of the Beach Boys and the Zombies–fill the air like laughing gas....

There is a common scene on TV and in the movies where there has been a murder. The body has been removed, but its outline is preserved on the floor in white tape or chalk. Do the police really do this, or is it only done for dramatic effect? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have no personal knowledge of this. When you’re the quiet, careful type like me, they never find the body....

As a frustrated Cubs fan who fears that another deep, dark slide will consume the second half of this season, I call for a brief but important time-out. I interrupt our agonizing debates over Dusty Baker’s social commentary, a replacement for Corey Patterson, and the recent slip from first place to remember a friend. Summer after summer, the steady and trustworthy voice of Vince Lloyd brought Cubs games to the colorful stadium of our own minds....

Since its founding in 1989, Warp Records has reigned as one of the most influential and groundbreaking electronic-music imprints. Its early 90s “Artificial Intelligence” series provided a template for what’s now called IDM, or “intelligent dance music,” and over the years the British label has introduced loads of new voices, including the wiggy drill ‘n’ bass of Squarepusher, the fractal beat science of Autechre, and the sybaritic electro-funk of Jimi Tenor....

After more than ten years as Channel 32’s alpha male news anchor, Walter Jacobson handed over his chair to Mark Suppelsa on September 7. It was the second time that Jacobson had relinquished the top anchor spot at a major Chicago station. He isn’t leaving us just yet–he’s a new Sunday morning host and still a full-time commentator–but this is as good a time as any to glance back at his unusual career....

In 2000, when Gregg Bordowitz went to Durban, South Africa, the enormity of that country’s AIDS crisis seemed hopeless. Of the 25 million HIV-positive Africans, over 4 million were in South Africa. Few South Africans could afford the drug cocktail that’s reversed death rates in the U.S. and Europe or the variety of medications that fight the opportunistic infections that actually cause death in AIDS patients. Their best hope was generic drugs manufactured in Brazil, Thailand, and India, which cost pennies on the dollar compared to name-brand ones....

Friday 1/4 – Thursday 1/10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 5 SATURDAY Mike Schratt is convinced the U.S. government possesses technology that would halt aging, allow travel at the speed of light, and get you from Chicago to LA and back for around 11 cents. But, in thrall to the oil industry, the government won’t make the technology public. Electromagnetic propulsion, which Schratt calls the “Holy Grail of the Air Force,” was developed with our tax dollars, and therefore, Schratt believes, we have the right to know about it....

Ten years ago, when Red Red Meat was opening for the Smashing Pumpkins, the predictability of being an arena-rock warm-up act compelled them to turn a spirit of perversity loose in their music. Instead of making heads bob in unison by playing their infectious songs straight, they began shadowboxing with them, ducking and feinting around the hooks while crowds scratched their heads. Red Red Meat’s fallen dormant, but founders Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella have preserved that same subversive attitude with Califone, whose recent music has encompassed folky strumming and Beefheart-ish clatter, live sets of Rolling Stones covers and anachronistic sound tracks for silent movies....

Cat Power’s new You Are Free (Matador) may be about liberation, as the title suggests, but not in any positive sense of the word. In song after song Chan Marshall’s characters quit, hide, run, or just fade away rather than struggle to fix their situations and find real peace of mind. The album opens with “I Don’t Blame You,” a song about a tortured rocker (possibly Kurt Cobain) with whom Marshall solemnly empathizes....