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Barry Merkin, who teaches classes in entrepreneurship at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, says that not long ago one of his best students tried to avoid him at graduation time. He finally cornered the student and asked about his plans. The student acknowledged shamefacedly that he wasn’t going to be starting his own business–he’d accepted a job with General Motors. Merkin surprised him by hugging him and saying how happy he was that he’d figured out that going it alone wasn’t for him and that he’d found a good job....

Friday 1/26 – Thursday 2/1 Native Americans have traditionally handed down their tribal history and culture through storytelling rituals held when birds and animals were migrating or hibernating and wouldn’t be disturbed. Tonight Potawatomi tribal coordinator John Warren will join leaders from other Northern Plains tribes for a storytelling festival called Winter: A Time of Telling. Other performers include Michigan’s White Thunder Drum and Chicago Urban Natives; there will also be traditional dances and crafts....

CARLO ACTIS DATO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the coolest things about good Italian jazz is its nonchalant disregard for genre: the musicians frequently lace their compositions and improvisations with everything from regional folk melodies to skronking free jazz to jaunty marching rhythms. And few of them do it with more panache than saxophonist Carlo Actis Dato. A mover and shaker on the scene since the early 70s, he’s played in countless ensembles, including the mighty collective called the Italian Instabile Orchestra, which floored the crowd at last year’s Chicago Jazz Festival....

School of the Art Institute professor James Elkins was a bit peeved earlier this year by a call he got from the folks at the National Arts Journalism Program. They were embarking on a survey of visual arts critics and wanted his opinion of the business. “Newspaper art criticism in America today is entirely disconnected from serious discourse on art,” he told them. Based on conservative ideas and marketing hype, he continued, “it has no impact at art schools; it is not read, except by people who subscribe to The New York Times and The New Yorker....

Monty Python has always been considered quintessentially British, but the comedy troupe has a key Chicago connection: Kim “Howard” Johnson, who’s written several books on the group since his comprehensive tome The First 200 Years of Monty Python was published in 1989. A founding member of the first resident ensemble at ImprovOlympic, Johnson also cowrote Truth in Comedy, a manual on Chicago-style improv, with late Second City and ImprovOlympic guru Del Close and ImprovOlympic cofounder Charna Halpern....

An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil Munroe’s first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, paired his flair for describing the mating dances of nerds with some clever ass kicking: his cute pair of worker-bee lovers discovered they had superpowers and set out to mess with their overlords. It made a quiet but not shabby debut on HarperCollins in 1999, but Munroe, who’d wandered into fiction writing after publishing a zine for several years, never really got comfortable as “Cultural Production Employee XKJ93” in Rupert Murdoch’s vast multimedia empire....

I’m a drummer and percussionist. I play here with Chicago Samba on Thursday nights. I’m from Brazil–most of the band is–and we play strictly Brazilian dance music. I lived in a city that’s right between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro called Belo Horizonte—“beautiful horizon.” My city is not as well-known but has a nightlife that is very spiced up by the music scene. It’s a good place to start your music career....

A year ago this month I was abducted by a tough-looking character with a filterless Camel dangling from his lips. He placed a callused hand on my shoulder and said, “Come with me.” I hesitated. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t get hurt.” “A couple of years ago I was sitting around thinking, ‘All I ever do is make stuff for clients,’” says K, a tall guy with a Dixie accent and hair that changes colors as often as the wind changes directions....

Say the Right Thing “Frankly,” Tribune columnist Clarence Page told me by E-mail, “I envy those who were able to react with remarkably measured, cold-blooded reason on the first day. I couldn’t do it.” Then he worried and warned. “Much of the world lives every day with the possibility of being bombed. Compared to them, we Americans have been lucky. Now their war is our war….This massive terror attack tests Americans in ways the United States has not been tested before....

As the name suggests, this program showcases the work of mentors and their students. But otherwise there are no common themes or goals. In fact, one of the mentors–Cindy Brandle, coartistic director of the Chicago Moving Company–created Duplicate out of the impulse to avoid any kind of concept. Dressed in simple black, she, Elizabeth Lentz, and Mindy Meyers produce a kind of line drawing onstage, a drawing complicated by its elaboration over time....

The Silent Film Society of Chicago opens its 2003 “Silent Summer” festival at the Copernicus Center’s lovely Gateway Theatre with a performance by the West End Jazz Band and a screening of Buster Keaton’s 1924 comedy masterpiece about a spoiled rich boy and his sweetheart who are stranded on an abandoned, drifting ocean liner, to be accompanied by organist Dennis Scott. As Dave Kehr once noted in these pages, “the situation is perfectly suited to Keaton’s natural sense of surrealism–everything is too big, too full, and too much....

On the first day of the second war with Iraq I was wound tightly in Saran Wrap from my ankles to my neck. My tormentress, who calls herself Jasmine, had the TV on, and we were watching missiles guided into buildings, satellite views of a burning city, generals discussing troop movements and the positions of battleships in the Persian Gulf. Already they were saying it was not a question of how to defeat Iraq but how to rebuild Iraq: whom to install in power, how to build a coalition that won’t mobilize the rest of the Arab world against America....

The Producers, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre. Mel Brooks’s stage adaptation of his 1968 film reverts to the anything-for-a-laugh, politically incorrect musicals of its 1959 setting, flaunting lots of offensive stereotypes, especially of gays and Germans. With its unapologetically melodious score and Eisenhower-era evening wear, this retro revel revolves around shyster producers who hit pay dirt when they least expect or want to. Its fulsome tribute to Broadway and the dreamer-schemers behind the producers’ neo-Nazi, lavender-hued pastiche is catnip to Brooks, a natural-born musical-comedy showman who found fame in Hollywood....

I read an article claiming that as weapon-control laws in England become ever tighter, the crime rate is increasing–that over the past 80 or so years the British government has enacted policies making it harder for individuals to carry any kind of weapon for self-defense, with the result, it was claimed, that you are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than in New York. In addition, you can receive a stiff sentence for defending yourself even if a burglar has invaded your home....

Among the Olive Groves, AOG Productions, at Theatre Building Chicago. Paul of Tarsus was controversial, passionate, brilliant, and rigorously principled. But you’d never know it from this tepid, slow-moving account of his life. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwright-producer Mark Kollar focuses on the years Paul spent being transported to and detained in Rome prior to his trial for treason. It’s not hard to see why the latter part of Paul’s life would be attractive to a playwright, if only because Paul spent much of this time with Luke, who acted as his defense attorney....

Judging by his stage name you’d probably guess that house producer Gabriel Rene makes gauzy, opulent music, full of shimmering liquid keyboards. So give yourself a cigar; you’re right. And have a martini too–it’ll go nicely with Aquanote’s decadent, soft-focus art-deco ambience. His beats and bass lines evoke a ritzy hotel lounge more than an electrically charged nightclub floor; he uses live vocals (provided by Zoe Ellis) and jazzy guitar runs that are as ostentatiously smooth as a red velvet suit, and woodwinds that might as well be sampled from the sound track to an Italian porn flick....

Damon Gough, the ill-sketched lad in question, is such a casual, low-energy sort of fellow it’s easy to mistake him for a mope. Yet in fact the even-tempered confidence of the singer-songwriter’s 2000 debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, was a welcome counterbalance to the confessional vein-leaking of your everyday acoustic open-mike warrior. And his two releases in 2002, Have You Fed the Fish? and the About a Boy sound track, were downright jaunty....

If you spend much time in the Loop, chances are you’ve heard them: an eight-piece group under the el tracks, playing in a head-turning style that crosses the syncopated pleasures of funky New Orleans brass with the precision and rich harmonies of modern jazz. In a city full of street performers, the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble seem to be on a different level, and they are. The eight young men are brothers, and they all learned to play music together, immersed from early childhood in the teachings of their father, trumpeter and composer Kelan Phil Cohran....

Friday 4/25 – Thursday 5/1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 26 SATURDAY The Chicago Greens–one of the groups that used to organize Chicago’s annual Earth Day festivities–started boycotting the event two years ago, when Com Ed became its primary corporate sponsor. This year Earth Day has been canceled altogether due to “today’s uncertain funding climate,” says the Chicago Earth Month Coalition, which is encouraging people to visit the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum on Sunday instead....

In the annals of rock history, Wayne Kramer will forever have a two-inch dick. “Wayne quite literally got the shaft,” says Cynthia Plaster Caster, who cast the MC5 guitarist’s member, as well as that of drummer Dennis Thompson, in 1969. The world’s second most famous groupie was still perfecting her gimmick. “He got the container that wasn’t designed to mix alginates in,” she says, “and if you mix it the wrong way it sets prematurely....