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Chicago Architecture: Ten Visions Back in 2000, when the show’s participants were chosen, the proposed title was “Millennium Chicago,” but like the park, its opening was delayed until this year. Tigerman’s idea was that all the entries would express alternative visions of the dream and/or nightmare that might be Chicago’s future, separated in each gallery by a diagonal truss. Ronald Krueck’s starkly minimalist The Rectangle: Vision of the Essential is an enigmatic all-white room bisected by a giant white rectangle that hovers over the heads of visitors like a blade, while Eva Maddox’s Chicago Public Education: Future Learning Environment seems less a piece about architecture than a meditation on Howard Gardner’s concept of seven types of human intelligence....

This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 3, through Tuesday, August 14, 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. Downtown 81 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scripted by rock critic Glenn O’Brien and directed by photographer Edo Bertoglio, this kaleidoscopic tour of the NYC underground was shot in 1981 under the title New York Beat, then lost for many years before being released in 2000....

Friday 5/9 – Thursday 5/15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 10 SATURDAY The rock band and visual spectacle known as P1xel and the Chronic Network is unveiling its eponymous glam-inspired rock opera on the roof of a parking garage at 55th and South Ellis tonight because, according to the singer, guitarist, and University of Chicago student who calls himself P1xel, “there is not one single adequate rock venue in all of Hyde Park....

The city’s annual literary festival runs through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, and children’s activities at bookstores, public libraries, and other venues. Some events feature this year’s “One Book, One Chicago” selection, Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies. All are free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www.chicagopubliclibrary.org, or contact the hosting venues....

The seventh annual First Nations Film & Video Festival, showcasing work by contemporary Native American artists, runs Friday through Sunday, November 21 through 23, at the American Indian Center of Chicago, 1630 W. Wilson; North Park University, 3225 W. Foster; and Truman College, 1145 W. Wilson. Tickets for all programs are $5; for more information call 773-275-5871. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Native American stand-up comic Charlie Hill got his first national TV exposure in America on Richard Pryor’s ill-fated NBC show in 1977 and on the Johnny Carson show the next year, offering sharp material about Injun stereotypes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (“Take my land–please!...

A friend showed me the article, “Backstabbers,” in your April 13, 2001, edition. Ordinarily I just ignore such stories. However, the part in this one referring to me just isn’t true, and it doesn’t make sense. Therefore, my response: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (Parenthetically, the writer’s aside that I “didn’t return phone calls for this story,” is a typical half-truth. The fact is that one phone call was left on my answering machine, saying only that Paul Newey told the caller some (unexplained) story and said that I could verify it....

Koreans’ Pet Peeve The letter noted that some cultures abstain from the cows and pigs that Americans gorge themselves with, and that people in many cultures, including Koreans, eat much less meat of any kind than we do. “Although we may not choose to practice customs or traditions of others, we also do not have a right to judge them.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By the pugnacious standards of Hollinger International editors, Cooke’s reply was remarkably conciliatory....

In the sweet, slow-paced first scene of Darren Callahan’s The Numbing of Audrey Green, it’s 1957 and a bright eight-year-old girl eavesdrops on her father as he repeats a strange, irresistible chord on the piano. Seemingly tailor-made to snare grown-ups raised on A Wrinkle in Time and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” this quasimystical hook quickly drags the reader into a violent, sexy saga of embezzlement, murder, and abandonment–not to mention watery supernatural subway stations through which people who may or may not be dead wander and swap identities....

Femme Fatale By my count, Femme Fatale is Brian De Palma’s 26th feature, and as I watched it the first time two months ago I found myself capitulating to its inspired formalist madness–something I’ve resisted in his films for the past 30-odd years. De Palma’s latest isn’t so much an improvement on his earlier work as a grand synthesis of it–as if he set out to combine every previous thriller he’d made in one hyperbolically frothy cocktail....

Mea Culpa The code of ethics couldn’t be clearer. It begins, “First, do no harm.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nate Carlisle, a 2001 grad now working for the Tribune of Columbia, Missouri, didn’t buy that. “I thought reporters’ job is to report relevant facts,” he responded. “Just what does the phrase ‘strong likelihood of harm’ mean? That there’s a 50-50 chance of harm?...

Like the hip-hop pioneers who initially inspired him to make music, Nobukazu Takemura has always found ways to adapt technology to his own needs, whether he’s creating viscous soundscapes with turntables or reconfiguring electronic samples. On his recent all-electronic album, 10th (Thrill Jockey), the Osaka experimentalist feeds Japanese lyrics by longtime collaborator Aki Tsuyuko through speech synthesis software–a medical technology that translates written input into spoken words. Takemura manipulates the program to get an unexpectedly wide pitch range, so the vocals are far more expressive than the robotic deadpan it usually produces....

Operatic comedienne Sharon Carlson returns to the local cabaret scene this week after an absence of some 20 years. Long one of Chicago’s most reliable character actors (not to mention occasional motivational speaker, WTTW pledge-drive pitchwoman, and singing-telegram deliveryperson), Carlson is known for starring roles in such shows as Neil Simon’s drama Lost in Yonkers at the Royal George, Bubbe Meises at Northlight, and the 1982 hit Summer Stock Murder at the Theatre Building, in which she delivered a Jeff Citation-winning performance as not one but three endangered divas....

At 1800 hours on a recent Saturday Colonel Angelo M. DiLiberti sits in the bar at Rex’s Cork and Fork in Saint Charles waiting for the spies to come in from the cold. One by one they enter, through both the front and back doors, shedding coats and scarves as they case the dining area for colleagues and greet them with conspicuous displays of handshaking, backslapping, and saluting. Many in the group–mostly retired military intelligence officers, with a sprinkling of ex-CIA–have brought wives no longer willing to be widowed by their husbands’ classified careers....

THE TEMPEST, Barat College of DePaul University. Shakespeare’s late romance is most often interpreted these days as a parable on colonialism and freedom embodied in a story of redemption. I’ve yet to see a production that doesn’t cast a black man in the role of the half-man/half-monster slave, Caliban, and that includes this one, which features the capable Warren Jackson. Instead of ending with Prospero’s valedictory epilogue, this production, directed by Karla Koskinen, closes with Caliban in possession of both his foster father-master’s magic staff and the island paradise that Prospero stole from him in the first place....

Last October, when Low Skies played the Empty Bottle to celebrate the release of its debut full-length, The Bed (Flameshovel), the band had seen three multi-instrumentalists and a guitarist come and go in just three years. “It was always such a bummer to have new members come in and have to revisit all of these old songs and have to play them over and over so they could get the parts right,” says front man Chris Salveter, who formed the group with drummer Jason Creps in the fall of 2000....

We may forget that the most radical rethinking of Marx and Freud found in European cinema of the late 60s and early 70s came from the east rather than the west. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a headier mix of fiction and nonfiction, or sex and politics, than this brilliant 1971 Yugoslav feature by Dusan Makavejev, which juxtaposes a bold Serbian narrative shot in 35-millimeter with funky New York street theater and documentary shot in 16....

Something’s not quite right with one of the walls in the back room at Zg Gallery. It has molding not only across the top and bottom but over the whole surface–white plaster strips, each with a different design, each tilted a bit off horizontal. And the wall itself leans backward, further unbalancing the patterns. This work, Ben Butler’s Sediment, made in collaboration with Rena Leinberger, is a humorous take on excessive decoration–the patterns seem self-generating, potentially infinite....

Chamber Full of Soul Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the past Junior has professed his love of vintage soul and Brill Building pop, but with the new album he’s finally managed to make music that lives up to its models. “I grew up listening to soul,” says Junior. “It’s what my parents listened to. I figured out how to do it myself this time....

O’Hare is great, everybody uses it–but it just can’t seem to grow without a certain amount of deception. Justice McLaren of the Second District of the Appellate Court of Illinois wrote in an April decision upholding part of a seven-year-old lawsuit filed by Du Page County and some suburbs against the city of Chicago: “Documents support the plaintiffs’ allegation that the City devised a four-part master plan that included new runways but announced only part of that plan, calling it the ‘World Gateway Project,’ without disclosing its intention to reconfigure and construct new runways....

Chicago Theatre Company’s staging of Gavin Lawrence’s workplace ensemble piece has been transplanted from its south-side home to the main stage of the Noble Fool Theater downtown–and under Douglas Alan-Mann’s direction, the production has lost nothing in the move. The action takes place over a single day in the back room of a flower shop in Washington, D.C., where six African-American men prepare flowers for display. With one exception, they’re young....