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If Eric Bachmann’s work as lead singer and songwriter of the great 90s band the Archers of Loaf was a way for him to vent at the world, then his present incarnation as front man of Crooked Fingers allows him to step back from that anger and take a more reflective look at his surroundings. These days Bachmann’s a crooner of the Tom Waits school; on Crooked Fingers’ modest, eponymously titled 2000 album and especially on last year’s beautiful Bring On the Snakes, he croaks out songs like “New Drink for the Old Drunk” with a broken-voiced insouciance that infuses his downtrodden characters with heart while sidestepping corniness....

Concerning both Lance Kinz’s letter and Fred Camper’s response [May 18]: I find it sadly comical that Camper thinks his reviews for Feigen Gallery are worth their weight in relation to Kinz’s clear statement about leaving Chicago in part due to “no interesting art writing.” Why does Chicago have so few and good critics? Why do larger art magazines like Art in America and Artforum only have one writer each from Chicago but numerous in other cities?...

The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria Although he’s achieved only limited recognition in America, Arrabal is a major figure in France, where he’s lived in self-imposed exile since the 1950s (though he was for a time officially prohibited from entering Spain). His complete plays have been published in 19 volumes in France, and his works have been staged in Europe almost continually since 1959, when his first play–The Tricycle, a surrealist fable about a childlike murder–was produced in Paris....

Harder Than It Looks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goehl underestimated how long it would take to edit more than 80 hours of raw footage down to a concise 66-minute portrait. He’d planned on doing it himself, but veteran editor Kathleen Dargis read about Goehl’s project in this column and offered to help. She agreed to accept deferred payment, and the pair spent more than a year putting the film together....

In his notes for Hollis Resnik’s debut CD, Make Someone Happy (M.A.M. Records), Broadway composer Michael John LaChiusa compares the Chicago-based singer to Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. But if Resnik recalls anyone, it’s the brilliant young Barbra Streisand. With gutsy dramatic instincts and a voice that can be big and brassy or soft and smoldering, Resnik eschews standard cabaret fare for an offbeat repertoire of little-known new material (by LaChiusa and Chicago-bred songwriter Lou Rosen, among others) and reinterpreted chestnuts by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein (a playful cool-jazz version of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” from The Sound of Music), Weill and Brecht (a smoky reading of the cynical “Barbara Song” from Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of The Threepenny Opera), Bock and Harnick, Stephen Schwartz, and Jule Styne, whose tender ballad “Make Someone Happy” (from Do Re Mi, with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) is a stunning showcase for Resnik’s high belt....

Lead Stories On the heels of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in September due to engineers’ failure to standardize units of measurement between the metric and the English systems, a U.S. government report in December revealed that a 1998 test of mock nuclear warheads failed because a contractor had accidentally installed dead batteries in them. And at a speech in February in Albuquerque, the project manager for the Cassini interplanetary cruiser now heading for Saturn dismissed critics concerned about the danger of the craft, which blasted off with 72 pounds of plutonium in 1997 and approached earth again in August 1999....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s 15th annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe runs through 11/20 at the Curious Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Theatre Branch, 7001 N. Glenwood. Admission is $12 or “pay what you can”; for information and reservations, call 773-274-6660. Following is the schedule through 9/27; a complete schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Jenny Magnus’s solo performance Cant is described as “a new meditation on inclines and their slants when it comes to comfort, responsibility, and the terror of love....

Snow White (and Rose Red) and the Seven Dwarves, Comedy-Sportz. In this retelling of the classic, intended for kids two to eight and directed by Katherine Gotsick, Snow White and Rose Red are fraternal twins and rivals in the “Kingdom Idol” contest (a parody of American Idol). Of course the sweet one is Snow White (Lindsey Banks), favored to win by her best friend, Bradley (Rene Duquesnoy), and most of the kingdom....

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argues that the men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were neither cowards nor lunatics in the ordinary sense. “They were men of faith–perfect faith, as it turns out–and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.” Two centuries later we have even less need....

Who’s That Doctor?, Hi-Volt Theatre Company, at Stage Left Theatre. Half-assed production values, story lines, and special effects are so central to BBC sci-fi that a parody of such programs does bloody well to play the fool at every turn. This send-up of cult favorite Dr. Who, staged by Harry Bauer, has the buffoonery down, from anthropomorphic space monsters to fashion-victim villainwear to dawdling teleplay; best is disaffected stagehand Mr. Bottles, stomping on- and offstage midscene to change backdrops or reorient robotic sidekick K9....

Silvia Marani’s 94-year-old mother calls her daily from Bologna to advise on the preparation of the ragu at Merlo Ristorante, the romantic establishment Marani and her husband, Giampaolo Sassi, opened in December. Part of an age-old tradition of female cooks who guard one of Italy’s most sophisticated cuisines, Marani has been preparing ragu under her mother’s watchful eye for as long as she can remember. As the ragu simmers for four or five hours, Marani instructs one cook on the preparation of the fresh pasta, while another learns to fashion sumptuous pastries and a third observes the fine art of antipasti and secondi....

Swiss police officer Arnold Odermatt, now 77 and retired, photographed traffic accidents in the canton of Nidwalden from 1948 to ’90. Most of his oeuvre is collected in municipal files and insurance-claims folders, but 43 arresting prints are now on exhibit in Gallery 139 at the Art Institute. They depict crashes but no casualties–Volkswagens become sculptural incidents in sylvan Alpine settings. His favorite human figures are white-gloved colleagues signaling drivers, and among the oddities is a uniformed officer doing a handstand in the middle of an empty highway, his impulsive pose framed by rigid lines of traffic lanes, guardrails, and overhead power lines....

The musical 1776 opens in the Pennsylvania statehouse, where it’s oppressively hot and the unpopular John Adams is making a poorly received pitch for independence. In the production mounted this summer at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Kevin Gudahl dominated the stage as the overbearing Adams, sweating and carrying on. Only the most discerning theatergoer would’ve paid any heed to Ron Keaton–the actor portraying congressional janitor Andrew McNair–sweeping up on the outskirts of the action....

Buy More Buildings Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story could be one of those melodramas popular in the Uptown’s heyday. The theater, at 4814 N. Broadway, was built in 1925 as part of the Balaban and Katz chain, designed by Rapp and Rapp to accommodate vaudeville and film. At 46,000 square feet, it’s the largest freestanding theater building in North America, with the fourth-largest seating capacity–4,381....

Charles LaBelle has always had an uncanny ability to see beauty in the urban morass. His show at Bodybuilder and Sportsman starts with five photographic images called “White Nights,” translucent prints mounted on light boxes that look like glowing black-and-white negatives. The three standouts capture the unseen essence of cheap motels. In Ambassador Hotel the white light streaming from the windows contrasts vividly with the building’s sterile facade, the spectral glow reminding us that urban motels perform vital, if often unsavory, functions....

CHICAGO STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago String Quartet debuted George Perle’s Brief Encounters last May at a tribute to the 84-year-old DePaul alumnus that was part of the university’s centennial celebration–and usually such a new work wouldn’t see another performance for a long while. But after less than eight months, the CSQ–arguably one of the two best quartets in the midwest, along with the Vermeer–is playing Brief Encounters again....

The nonprofit glass–half full or half empty? According to a recent Donors Forum of Chicago report, “A Portrait of the Nonprofit Sector in Illinois,” in 1990 in Illinois there were 6,287 nonprofit organizations–hospitals, colleges, universities, service providers. By 2000 there were 9,767, a 55 percent increase. (These figures don’t include small nonprofits, just those that were registered as 501(c)(3) organizations and filed form 990 with the IRS.) Nonprofit revenues rose 85 percent in the decade, from $19....

“Churches are not transforming people but rather servicing them,” says Sylvia Ronsvalle of Empty Tomb, Inc., in Champaign (www.pnnonline.org). She’s coauthor of a new study, “The State of Church Giving Through 2000,” which found that benevolent giving–contributions that support the broader mission of the church–reached its lowest point since 1968 in 2000, while giving for internal operations of the congregation remained strong. “People are concerned about keeping the lights on and the staff paid at their churches, which are valid needs....

Deva Suckerman’s 36 paintings on found wood at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology show solitary meditators in somber colors floating on abstract backgrounds. The works flirt with New Age kitsch, but their ingenuousness is compelling. The woman in Offering I holds a flower, but the wood on which she’s painted is broken jaggedly across the top and worn in the middle, making the flower stand out. Still is done on multiple wood panels on three levels; the viewer is often looking past one panel’s edge to another, yet the line of the woman’s dress continues across them....

Sylvia With Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Amira Casar, Andrew Havill, Lucy Davenport, Blythe Danner, and Michael Gambon. Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. In college it always seemed like the guys who were poets got more girls than the prose writers. The assumption was that poets had all the romance and sensuality associated with their medium working for them. Poetry, after all, isn’t just a block of printed material; it’s an activity, and one that can turn people on sexually as well as spiritually....