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Chris Mills’s late-90s output on Sugar Free was basically alt-country twang burnished by the occasional neosoul horn riff; last year he made an audacious leap, stylistically and professionally, by starting his own label, Power Pop Records, and releasing The Silver Line–a self-produced, self-financed album that allowed him, he says, to explore artistic directions that the more traditional-minded Sugar Free folks had been leery of. Mills’s lyrics are as uncompromisingly dark as ever (except on the treacly title tune), but the pop elements in the music, submerged until now, have sprung to the surface, and at times the result is unsettling: on “Suicide Note,” the harrowing death rattle of a beaten-down busker, Sgt....

Bigger than you think. “In 2000, the EITC [earned income tax credit] provided roughly the same level of federal assistance to low-income families nationwide as the TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and food stamp programs combined,” reports Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution (“Rewarding Work Through the Tax Code: The Power and Potential of the Earned Income Tax Credit in 27 Cities and Rural Areas,” January). Chicago’s public and private campaigns to increase awareness of EITC have borne fruit....

Eat your heart out, Henry David Thoreau. According to the Illinois Natural History Survey “Reports” (Autumn), on June 29 and 30, more than 160 scientists participated in a “biodiversity blitz” at the Robert Allerton Park, which is west of Champaign-Urbana. Among other things, they were seeking “to break the temperate zone blitz record for species found in 24 hours, 1,905 species found at Walden Pond in 1998.” Final numbers from Allerton Park are not in, but the tentative count is more than 2,000 species....

When I found Chicago filmmaker David Thomas last Thursday, he was planted in front of a computer at the River West video editing house where for four days he’d been trying to cut 14 minutes from his first feature-length movie, MC5: A True Testimonial. He’d eliminated 10 minutes of footage so far, and was struggling mightily to find the last few disposable moments. “It’s pretty slam-bam all the way through,” he explained....

Director Harley Cokeliss has spent the last 36 years in London, but he keeps coming back to Chicago. Raised in Humboldt Park, Albany Park, and Skokie, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966 with a degree in psychology. Though he considered film schools in New York and LA, he thought going overseas would be romantic, so he applied to, and was accepted at, the London Film School....

An uninformed listener to Greg Kelley’s two-year-old solo CD Trumpet (Meniscus) is as likely to think he’s hearing hail on a tin roof, an alarm buzzer, steam escaping a tea kettle, or the snorts of an elephant with sleep apnea as he is to think of the titular instrument. Using only his horn and the microphone (which he strikes with the bell to get bassy thumps), Kelley has reimagined the trumpet’s possibilities as radically as Keith Rowe has the guitar’s or Rhodri Davies the harp’s; the only other trumpeter doing anything similar is Berliner Axel Dorner....

Instant Festival Brian Posen teaches improv at Second City, Columbia College, and Act One. He writes and performs in his own sketch comedy troupe, Cupid Productions. But he never thought of putting together a sketch comedy festival until he was recovering from a particularly rough year. Last February, his mentor Martin de Maat died. “He gave me my job at Second City,” says Posen. “I took over his classes at Columbia College....

Isaac Adamson first introduced Billy Chaka, a reporter for the fictional Cleveland-based teen magazine Youth in Asia, in his 2000 debut novel, Tokyo Suckerpunch. In Suckerpunch Chaka’s sent by the magazine to cover the Under-19 Handicapped World Martial Arts Championship in Japan, where he gets tangled up with yakuza while investigating the murder of a cult film director and becomes involved with a mysterious, beautiful woman. In the follow-up, Hokkaido Popsicle (2002), Chaka’s back East for some editor-mandated R and R, but when a Tokyo rock star dies mysteriously, Chaka’s on the case–and soon dodging some nasty yakuza and getting involved with a Swedish stripper....

MC Paul Barman’s giddy 2000 EP, It’s Very Stimulating (Wordsound), wasn’t exactly a hit with underground MCs–exuberance is about as credible in hip-hop these days as courtesy toward the police. Over jolly beats and cartoonish samples (provided by producer Prince Paul) Barman goofed on his geeky Jewish-intellectual persona, as he spouted “My sex life is pathetic! That’s why I fantasize in four out of five songs!” and claimed “My pissed-off jimbrowski / Turned three colors like Krzysztof Kieslowski....

MUSTARD’S RETREAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ann Arbor-based folkies Michael Hough and David Tamulevich, better known as Mustard’s Retreat, have a talent for transforming quotidian details–household chores left undone, snow accumulating beneath a darkening sky, a roadside phone booth–into poetry; the lucidity and resonance of their images recall William Carlos Williams’s dictum “No ideas but in things.” Some of the duo’s early albums rely heavily on what Tamulevich has called “sad boy songs…about the angst of youth and heartache,” but their most recent CD, 1997’s The Wind and the Crickets…and the South Texas Moon, and the Tune From an Old Country Waltz (Palmetto), sounds relatively optimistic and centered, with the willowy interplay of their guitars gently buoying the aching sweetness of their vocal harmonies....

Scritti Politti It’s not an illusion: everything really does happen faster in the Information Age. And though it’s nice in theory to be able to access untold resources with the click of a mouse, faster is not always better. The Renaissance man has been swamped by a sea of unlimited, unsorted information–our sense that there’s just too much to know and do out there seems to have dwarfed our drive to be well-rounded....

RICHARD ASHCROFT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s good to know that one can sell seven million records, live in an English manor worth a half million pounds, be routinely compared to Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison, and still take the cramped stage of the Double Door with something to prove. These two sold-out shows, rescheduled from November, will be the first U.S. concerts by singer-songwriter Richard Ashcroft, whose old band the Verve scored a Top 40 hit in the summer of 1997 with “Bitter Sweet Symphony....

Plasticene’s set, sound design, and video projections are striking in this in-the-round physical-theater production, and its five committed performer-collaborators are full of energy. A Beckettian crossroads at the center of the space and what looks like a scaffolding for hanging create high stakes, and Abu Ghraib has made the subject–the relationship between colonizer and colonized, guard and prisoner–more than timely. But under Sharon Gopfert’s direction, the show fails to connect. Though clearly there’s a story being told, we can’t tell what it is....

I am dubious about a claim my girlfriend made about a human swallowed by a whale and surviving, and I’d like to know if you can help me research it. Apparently she heard as a child that in the UK in the 1800s a man fell overboard and was swallowed by a whale. A day or two later the whale was caught by a crew that had no idea there was a man inside....

Could you give me the straight dope on “toxic” mold? I’m a home inspector and the science on this latest home hysteria seems a bit off. Nobody seems to know when/why/how the stuff turns up or turns “toxic.” I’d never heard of this stuff five years ago but now it seems like it’s everywhere. 9 Real estate industry: More panic. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mold made headlines again a few years later....

Recently in your on-line archive I read your column on why white people don’t look more alike, which interested me from multiple angles. The first stems from the experiences of people with Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder which has “face blindness” as one of its symptoms (and which I myself have). Face blindness refers to both difficulty in reading faces and in recognizing people by their faces. In other words, most people look alike to us....

I saw the dance troupe Jump Rhythm Jazz Project perform for the first time last spring and was so taken I went back a few nights later to see it again. The program opened with artistic director and principal choreographer Billy Siegenfeld and his longtime partner, Jeannie Hill, in a romantic and humorously barbed song-and-dance version of “Night and Day” that took Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire into new territory. I didn’t want that piece to end, but, despite a few too many moments of group rushing to and fro, everything that followed proved to be equally intriguing....

When Mick Jagger sang “I’ll come to your emotional rescue,” it sounded like he was already on his way. But on Windsor for the Derby’s brand-new album, The Emotional Rescue LP (Aesthetics), it’s the singer who sounds like he needs help. Guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist Dan Matz seems contented enough at the start of the record–on “The Same” he says that when he hears his lover call his name, “Every other love is put to shame”–but during the tracks that follow he slides into a deep pit of regret and disconnection....

Nobody strings lights on a branch better than the Chicago Botanic Garden, where clusters of white-lit trees sprout in gorgeous electric detail as part of the garden’s annual Celebrations! A Festival of Flowers, Lights & Music. I dropped in on a frigid night last weekend to take a look, but just as I was admiring the effect, the spirit of Scrooge unrepentant appeared. “Do you think this is good for the trees?...

From the rear of the stage in the theater at the new Beverly Arts Center, it looks like someone got the proportions wrong. The stage is too big. It stretches out toward the audience like an ocean, overwhelming the mere dozen rows of seats that sit facing it like so many chairs on a distant strip of beach. “It’s deeper than the Steppenwolf stage,” says architect John Morris. “By six feet....