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You never know what you’re going to get with Thomas Lehn. On recent recordings the German analog synth master has effortlessly adjusted to radically different contexts. In Konk Pack, his anarchic trio with drummer Roger Turner and multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson, he’s a dervish, frantically uncorking stabs, smears, and blasts. His approach on Dach (Erstwhile, 2001), a trio outing with trombonist Radu Malfatti and violinist Phil Durrant, is the polar opposite: the music is slow and barely audible, as Lehn carefully turns knobs and plugs in patch cords to create tones that fit perfectly with the acoustic rattles, scrapes, breaths, and thwacks of his partners....

Waving Goodbye, Naked Eye Theatre Company, at Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Jamie Pachino’s new work (developed with the assistance of a grant by the prestigious Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays) is a beautifully written portrait of loss, rage, change, and the terror–and joy–of trusting another person in the wake of personal cataclysm. The story moves back and forth in time as teenager Lily Blue (Liesel Matthews) grieves the death of her beloved mountain-climbing father (Brian Shaw) in a fall....

On Elephant (V2/Third Man) Detroit’s White Stripes continue to blast out their stripped-down antidote to radio’s pop confection and bombast. But viewed against any more substantial background the current saviors of rock ‘n’ roll might not seem like much more than a good singer-guitarist and an impressively workmanlike drummer riding a clever concept. The new album cover relies once again on Jack and Meg White’s trademark color scheme (tricked out just a bit with fancier costumes and more self-conscious poses), and what’s on the inside hasn’t changed too much either....

When he gets around to writing his autobiography, drummer Bill Bruford would do well to divide it into two volumes: one to cover his early career, when he provided the smooth surge that powered iconic art-rock bands Yes and King Crimson, and one to detail his ongoing transformation into a British version of jazz drummer Tony Williams. Like Williams before him, Bruford has become a respected veteran at a relatively young age, filling out his bands with excellent up-and-coming players and leading from the back of the stage with vision and authority....

If a corporation could go to prison, the Archer Daniels Midland Company would now be under lock and key instead of extolling nature in its new commercials. In 1996 the Decatur-based food-processing giant pleaded guilty to violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. It admitted to conspiring with four Japanese and Korean firms to fix the price of lysine, an amino acid used mostly as an animal-feed additive, and it paid a $100 million fine, at that time the largest in antitrust history....

Self-publishing is a great way for the poor and obscure to lose their shirts and go nowhere, but there are exceptions. Take local musician and mystery writer Darren Callahan. When I interviewed him in 2003, Callahan had sold several hundred novels through his Web site (www.darrencallahan.com) and he was trying to get a trade publisher interested in his trilogy, “The Audrey Green Chronicles.” A year later nobody’s inked a contract, but he has an agent, and Visions and Voices has optioned a Callahan play for its 2005 season....

OCTOBER David Nelson’s controversial 1988 painting Mirth & Girth, which depicted the late Harold Washington in women’s lingerie, won’t be on display at the Chicago Histor-ical Society today, but just about anything else you can think of related to Chicago’s first black mayor will be. The new exhibit, Harold Washington: The Man and the Movement, includes, among other things, a recreation of Washington’s Hyde Park apartment, a desk used by him during his tenure in the U....

In “The Conversion,” one of eight short stories collected in Katherine Shonk’s first book, The Red Passport, an American named Tom travels to Pushkin, outside Saint Petersburg, to visit a Russian couple he and his ex-girlfriend befriended while living abroad. Their house is full of relics of his failed relationship–his ex’s clothes, her books, her computer, her spice rack, all turned over to their friends after the breakup. As the visit turns awkward and sour, these shards of his past become an oppressive reminder of the fractured connection between Tom and his Russian friends, who’ve got problems of their own, thank you very much....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cresswell, who’s 24, credits her interest in other cultures to her own unsettled childhood and adolescence. Her parents divorced when she was an infant, her father died when she was 12, and around the same time her mother was deemed temporarily unfit for parenting. Cresswell spent two years in a foster home, and after her mother regained custody in 1992 the two moved from Berkley, Massachusetts, to Deltona, Florida, a small city on the edge of Orlando’s sprawl where Cresswell says she felt stifled....

Most of the eight video shorts on this program are compelling and amusing portraits of individuals whose lives are defined by their obsession with food. The protagonist of Michelle Lewis’s Defating (2000) compares herself to a junkie as she feeds on ice cream right at the freezer, a dark image that captures the power of her compulsion. Food and sex dovetail in Sarah Shapiro’s Jelly (1999), which parallels the filling from a jelly doughnut with red lipstick and nail polish, and in Nwenna Kai’s Donne-moi a manger, which superimposes fruit, faces, and bodies to create a polymorphous sensuality....

With relatively little fanfare, 41-year-old saxist Kenny Garrett has emerged as one of the more important jazzmen of his generation. Since his move to New York in the early 80s, he’s given critics and audiences good reason to expect great things from him–but his trajectory from there to here has been interesting nonetheless, encompassing an unexpectedly wide range of the music’s history, from the swing era to late-80s electric fusion. At 18, Garrett went on the road with the Duke Ellington band (then under the direction of Ellington’s son), and a couple years later joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra in New York; these gigs gave him a foundation in ensemble playing that most modern players never get, and put him in touch with several of jazz’s most inventive veterans....

The Naked Spur With James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, and Millard Mitchell. With Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O’Connell, Jack Lord, John Dehmer, Royal Dano, and Robert Wilke. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All four films collapse the usual distinctions between landscape and architecture, classicism and modernity, and even at times painting and drama–though Muri Romani has no landscape in any ordinary sense and The Naked Spur, shot entirely in natural exteriors (apart from a cave where the characters find shelter from the rain), has no architecture....

Marianna Runge is both the epitome and the antithesis of the Chicago monologuist. Like hordes of her colleagues, she’s decided to turn her life story into a performance piece. But while many of her peers merely demonstrate their eagerness to get really upset in front of strangers, Runge thinks her way through her confusing life and leaves the emotional response to the audience. At times this approach feels a bit stiff and stagy, but her candor and intelligence more than compensate....

Bob Clarke doesn’t want to say he told them so, but he did. Over the past few weeks stiff east winds have sent the lake crashing hard into and over the multimillion-dollar steel and concrete wall the city recently built to protect the shoreline just south of Belmont Harbor. The waves have smashed into the corrugated steel face of the wall, shot up and over the concrete, and washed out the gravel running path and dirt behind the wall....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, Ravenswood and Portage Park have much in common. They are both neighborhoods with good housing stock and quickly escalating property values. Both Ravenswood and Portage Park are adjacent to other neighborhoods with some new commercial development–Lincoln Square in the case of Ravenswood and Old Irving in the case of Portage Park. Neither Ravenswood nor Portage Park, however, has its own nice stores, trendy coffee shops, or yuppie restaurants....

There are two at O’Hare airport, one inside the Museum of Contemporary Art, and now one anchoring downtown Evanston’s new 18-theater movie complex. They aren’t gift shops or snack shops; they’re Wolfgang Puck cafes–downscaled versions of the chefs famous Asian-fusion restaurant Spago. And in the last few years, Chicago seems to have become a target market for them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Puck first expanded his operation beyond fine dining back in 1993....

For almost 40 years Joe Sener has been trekking to the Owasippe Scout Reservation in western Michigan to camp, fish, hike, and shoot at targets. And for the last few months he’s been fighting leaders of the Chicago Area Council of the Boy Scouts who want to sell the camp. “To me it’s unbelievable that anyone would even consider selling Owasippe,” says Sener, a 50-year-old corporate vice president with Baxter International who lives in the far western suburbs....

Waiting For the Sunrise, Real Rain Productions, at the Athenaeum Theatre. There’s way too much going on in Richard Ford’s “world premiere” (a phrase that’s starting to give me stomach cramps). The rivalry between two brothers–power-hungry politician David (John Fenner Mays) and cuddly professor Arthur (Michael Kass)–is depicted as a medieval duel, a good start. David is scheming to get his brother fired so that the younger man will agree to run his campaign....

For more than 15 years Janet Bean considered making a solo record, but her insecurities kept her from taking the plunge. She’s always been more comfortable as part of a group, playing integral roles in two of Chicago’s finest–Eleventh Dream Day (as a singer and drummer) and Freakwater (as a singer and guitarist). “I’m so lucky that everyone in those bands is so great,” she says. “In a way that’s almost what was so daunting about making a record of my own, because then it might be revealed that I was the weak link....

This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 2, through Thursday, August 15, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for film center members, and $3 for SAIC students. For further information, call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended, and unless otherwise noted, all films will be projected from 35-millimeter prints. Following is the schedule for August 2 through 8; a complete festival schedule is available on-line at www....