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Addie Prewitt hates her job. She’s a copy editor for the Chicago-based National Association of Libraries, where the beige walls of her workplace simply are not to her taste. She’s disgusted with her demanding, leering boss, Coddles. She’s annoyed by her zombie coworkers. As a matter of fact she’s disgusted and annoyed by just about everything. She goes through life like a younger, female Ignatius J. Reilly, finding fault with everyone in her orbit while all remain stupidly oblivious to her woes....

Subterfuge and suspicion are intertwined in Kerry Tribe’s black-and-white film installation Untitled (Potential Terrorist), a response to the post-9/11 profiling of possible terrorists. The silent 16-millimeter film runs continuously in a spare white room, showing a series of one-minute screen tests by 29 Californians who posed as terrorists. They’d answered an ad Tribe ran in December 2001 seeking actors for “an untitled silent 16mm experimental film for UCLA.” The only requirement: “Must look like a terrorist....

Mamma Mia!, at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. Powder puffery spun into sickly sugar, this Abba retrospective regales us with 22 tunes (inexplicably excluding “Waterloo” and “Fernando”) by the Swedish songbirds, who peddled bubblegum from the early 70s into the 80s. The finale, a full-throated salute to disco madness, is thrilling but shows what’s wrong with this musical: nothing else is as much fun. Unlike a Sondheim ballad, the only context “Dancing Queen” needs is a concert stage....

MANODHARMA TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa lived in Chicago he took his cues from Ornette Coleman, who opened the door onto free jazz in the late 50s, and hard-bop altoist Jackie McLean, who stepped through it. His Indian heritage didn’t really evidence itself in his music. But a few years ago, around the time of his move to New York, Mahanthappa began an association with Vijay Iyer–an Indian-American pianist based there–and together they’ve undertaken an explosive and exciting investigation into Indian-inspired jazz....

Film critic Ted Shen has perhaps unintentionally stumbled on one of the most terrible blood libels and outrageous statements regarding Israel perpetuated by Palestinians and their supporters in his review of the film Gaza Strip (Critic’s Choice, April 19). Based on this narrative, the Israelis are accused of deliberately poisoning Arab women and children. This propaganda echoes the centuries-old anti-Semitic canard that Jews poison Christian children. Such baseless, ridiculous, and despicable lies that have been propagated by high-level Palestinian officials as well as Chairman Arafat’s wife Suha do not even deserve to be dignified by a defense....

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I have not read Michael Eric Dyson’s book, Between God and Gangsta Rap; perhaps I should, but just based on the information given in the article about him [March 16], I don’t think I need to in order to express my opinion on the subject. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My opinion? Well, as much as I agree that we should not alienate our children, I do not think that we need to give any validity to rap and hip-hop, not as it stands today; and as Mr....

Egypt’s pyramids baffled even ancient Egyptians: ruins of a third dynasty (2686-2613 BC) funerary temple in Saqqara impressed and mystified nineteenth dynasty observers many centuries later. Hieroglyphic graffiti at the site include kudos from visitors, as well as critiques of other graffiti: “My heart is sick when I see the work of their hands,” wrote one visitor, who signed himself “a clever scribe without equal among many men of Memphis.” In travel notes from 1849, Gustave Flaubert griped about “the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere” on pyramids he visited....

This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists this year include John Starrs, Julie Caffey, Michael K. Meyers, Michael Martin, and many other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 13th annual Rhino Fest runs through October 13....

Few contemporary songwriters understand and appreciate the mechanics of a good song like Robbie Fulks, and even fewer can tweak those conventions as willfully as he can. He’s proven that his talent transcends idiom, with his pop-minded Geffen album Let’s Kill Saturday Night and last year’s eclectic Couples in Trouble, and though his latest offering, 13 Hillbilly Giants, is a collection of country covers, it’s pretty special. Rather than revisit songs by the usual Merles, Hanks, and Bucks, Fulks chose 13 obscurities from a mix of well-known artists (Dolly Parton, Wynn Stewart, Bill Anderson) and shoulda-beens (Jimmy Murphy, Gordon Terry, Dave Rich)....

Last year I devoted an entire column to horrifying true stories of desperate and/or depressing holiday sex. This year, at the suggestion of a reader, I’m devoting the space to my readers’ favorite, fondest, and most cherished (sex-related) holiday experiences. Enjoy. Which brings us to the holiday memory. At Christmas he came to visit. Something about being in my parents’ home, all that pumpkin pie and wholesomeness, made us randy. When we got into bed that night, sex finally felt like we had always imagined it!...

KEVIN COYNE 8/16, SCHUBAS Though there is a wholesome European looseness of line about the art of Englishman Kevin Coyne, his wonderful music is strongly rooted in old American weirdness. The painter, poet, fiction writer, occasional actor, and former drug counselor has been at it since the 60s, when he sang white-boy blues in the band Siren; after a hiatus that straddled the 80s and 90s, he’s begun rewarding his long-suffering cult following (which includes Joan Osborne, Nick Cave, and Lou Reed) with regular output again....

New York-based choreographer Susan Marshall is not what you’d call a romantic. Her bracing vision in Sleeping Beauty is more despairing than affirming: she sees attempts to rescue others as controlling and uses the classic fairy tale as a commentary on our culture. It’s disturbing to watch the prince manipulate Sleeping Beauty–hauling her by one foot, arranging her in various poses, pulling her head forward, clasping her from behind around the shoulders and waist and then pulling her head back....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, it is necessary to say that the choice of Soldier Field as the site to construct a new “bowl” has been unfortunate for the architects, Lohan Caprile Goettch. The historic Beaux Arts spats under the 21st-century modern “bowl” creates an awkward relationship between Chicago’s past and its future that I hope will not become a precedent for token future Chicago preservation....

Sometime between 8 and 8:30 PM on March 20, attorney Patrick Donnell was heading home from the Loop on a northbound 147 bus. A police officer stopped the bus at Chicago and Michigan and told the driver he’d have to take a different route. Donnell looked out the window and saw several more officers milling around the intersection. Wanting to know what was going on, he stepped off the bus....

Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution Rigoberto Romero, beginning with his tendentious 1975 series “With the Sweat of a Millionaire,” deploys an aesthetic that might be termed “sunny proletarianism” in portraits of workers at rest–of a woman beaming over her humble but substantial meal, of two field laborers grinning next to a stalk of sugarcane they’ve split open and written their names on (incidentally reminding us that literacy for all was one of the revolution’s more successful bequests)....

A few mornings a week around ten o’clock, Angela and Frank Stritzel unlock the gate over their Western Avenue storefront, Stritzel’s Appliances. Angela’s window display, which changes twice yearly, currently features a meticulously ordered regiment of slightly faded toys: police cars, locomotives, flying machines, fake stuffed owls and fighting cocks, a demented chihuahua, a plush seal balancing a beach ball on its nose, a motorcycle-riding monkey, and a plastic duck decoy sitting inside an opened oven....

While rapidly developing technology has allowed electronic music to sound less and less mechanical over the last two decades, the patently artificial sounds that Kraftwerk introduced on albums like Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine are as popular now as ever. The seeds the German group planted have flowered in many forms over the years–including hip-hop (via Afrika Bambaataa’s electro-funk), synth pop, and Detroit techno. But recently a new crop of artists in the U....

Born in Mississippi in 1943, James “Boo Boo” Davis started drumming at age seven, playing in the Lard Can Band–a family act, named after his makeshift instrument, that toured the state and even backed a young B.B. King. Davis later moved to Saint Louis, and in 1972 formed the Davis Brothers with his siblings John and S.L. on guitar and bass; for 18 years they held down a weekend gig at Tubby’s Red Room, one of East Saint Louis’s most fabled jukes....

Atalee Judy is a choreographer for the 21st century, citing as the motivating force behind her “Logotype” series her generation’s culturally induced attention deficit disorder and resultant fixation on jingles and logos. Each piece in the series, she says, came out of a single symbolic image: a bar code, the schematic female figure that graces women’s rest room doors, something uncomplicated but resonant in her mind. After that Judy comes up with the sound design, then the video projections, and finally the dancing, which she considers an adjunct to every other element....

Friday 12/20 – Thursday 12/26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since 1996 the Chicago-based peace group Voices in the Wilderness has sent nearly 50 delegations to Iraq to witness the effects of UN economic sanctions and illegally deliver medicine and other supplies. Last month the U.S. government fined the group $20,000 for exporting goods without a license, but VITW has no intention of paying up....