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The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility to Chicago’s downtown theater district. With Love in Your Arms and a Knife in Your Heart...

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Secret Past Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brotzmann began art school in his hometown of Wuppertal in the late 50s, and he was heavily involved in the Fluxus movement in the early 60s; for several years he worked with Korean-born artist Nam June Paik. But by the mid-60s art had taken a backseat to music. “It was a question of time, and I’m not Superman,” he says....

COME ONS 3/15, BEAT KITCHEN This trio plays sweet 60s pop ‘n’ soul so period perfect I keep expecting them to turn up on an Austin Powers sound track; instead they’ve released their second album, Hip Check!, on Sympathy for the Record Industry. They’re charter members of Detroit’s incestuous and lively rawk scene: drummer Patrick Pantano, a veteran of Rocket 455 and Andre Williams’s Motor City band, plays in the Dirtbombs; singer and bassist Deanne Iovan is a former Dirtbomb herself and played drums in the Gore Gore Girls....

If you don’t have time to keep a blog or a paisley-covered diary, haven’t been able to get your significant other to complete Philipp Keel’s fill-in-the-blank journal All About Me, and can’t interest your parents in picking up their dusty copy of Bob Greene’s To Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come, there’s always Susan Rose to take down your memories. Rose is a personal historian, which basically means she’s a biographer for hire....

Leonardo had Mona Lisa. Pablo Picasso had Dora Maar. Dave Cooney’s muse, his ideal of feminine grace, was the 41st mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a few weeks he’d finished a portrait that was so “honest-to-God gorgeous” he decided to present it to Byrne in person. One morning, Cooney and a cop buddy stopped in at City Hall and lingered outside the mayor’s office....

BUSKER SOUNDCHECK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like those dingy storefronts that get torn down to make room for condos, Busker Soundcheck have been around so long they’ve become almost invisible–but when they go, a little piece of Chicago will go with them. After 11 years and more than 750 shows, guitarist Paul Kamp, bassist Chris Klein, and drummer Dan Sopher have decided to call it quits....

Ciao for Now He didn’t go alone. His longtime number two, David Radler, resigned as president and COO of Hollinger and publisher of the Sun-Times, and lesser executives also tumbled. They all departed in what could be construed as disgrace. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hollinger International allows that the payments hadn’t been “authorized or approved by either the audit committee or the full board of directors of Hollinger....

JANUARY To help its 100-odd members write mystery stories with the bite of truth, the local lit group Sisters in Crime brings in expert speakers to address everything from hostage situations and tactical operations to forensic dentistry. Today at 11 AM representatives from the Plainfield police and fire departments will discuss All You Ever Wanted to Know About Arson and Were Afraid to Ask. The free event takes place at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore, 7419 W....

Video maker Ondi Timoner spent seven years tracking two rival 60s-retro guitar bands from San Francisco, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, as mutual admiration curdled into a personal feud between their respective leaders, Courtney Taylor and Anton Newcombe. Apparently the conflict was never much more than a publicity stunt, but the contrast between the men’s career trajectories is illuminating: the Warhols, a relatively genial unit, played the industry game and became festival favorites in Europe, while the BJM, a showcase for Newcombe’s feverish creativity and self-destructiveness, continues to slug it out on the club circuit (the band plays this Saturday at Bottom Lounge)....

Both condemning and confirming class snobbery, Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1878 smash hit fuses Romeo and Juliet with Punch to produce a topsy-turvy romp. Rudy Hogenmiller’s respectful revival for Light Opera Works aims at nothing more than fidelity to Gilbert’s wit and Sullivan’s joy. No one on this busy stage confuses looking funny with being amusing; even better, no one assumes that a self-consciously melodramatic plot just needs a little camp to make it work....

LARVAL, MARK CUNNINGHAM’S CONVOLUTION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a founding member of the no-wave band Mars–the most uncompromising and noisiest of the four groups included on the legendary Brian Eno-produced compilation No New York–Mark Cunningham knows better than most how to create tension in music. But although he supplied the numbingly forceful bass lines in Mars, for most of the last two decades he’s used the trumpet to get under people’s skin....

By Ytasha L. Womack Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This is the first time I’ve ever seen people bumping the radio in their cars,” said Qabah R. Cowen, store manager at the popular George’s Music Room. Callers have flooded Power 92’s lines, thanking deejays for playing new songs. “I’ve made the switch and I’m never going back!” shouted one excited woman. “They sound like they’ve been freed from slavery or something,” says Jay Alan, Power 92’s programming director....

Every time I drive past here I’m reminded of my ordeal that began one infamous night. I was coming home from a very drunk party here. This club was called Boondocks at the time. I don’t know how I managed to get home, but seeing four stop signs lined up in a row made me think, “Man, I had better stop.” I finally made it to Lincoln Park, parked somehow, and lurched all the way home to my apartment at three in the morning....

When Chicago’s 1968 Democratic National Convention erupted in violence over the war in Vietnam, Bill Siegel–then six–watched the news on television at a cabin in northern Minnesota as his family argued around him. His aunt, a delegate for Eugene McCarthy, eventually stormed out the door and drove to Chicago, and Siegel says he still remembers his mother’s disgust when candidate Hubert Humphrey drew the curtains of his Hilton suite on the mayhem below....

Picnic, Griffin Theatre Company. In his opening-night curtain speech, Griffin coartistic director William Massolia noted that William Inge’s 1952 drama runs 90 minutes without intermission, whereas “his contemporaries Tennessee Williams or O’Neill or Arthur Miller…would keep you here three hours.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » True enough, but Massolia’s remark reveals the weaknesses as well as strengths of this chestnut about parochial prejudices and late-summer passion....

The kids getting dropped off by their parents on a Saturday morning at Lake Forest’s Gorton Community Center look like they should be heading for the swing set. Instead, they’re headed to a basement room for an advanced chess class. Lokhova nods her head. “If you make a queen,” she says, “you lose the game.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lokhova, who lives in Wicker Park, has led Gorton’s Chess Wizards program since last July....

IMA ROBOT 10/3, THE VIC It’s more than possible for a bunch of irritating poseurs with intentionally awful haircuts to make a great record (cf the Faces, the Dolls, the Pistols, etc), but Ima Robot’s Virgin debut misses the mark by a handful of tunes and a couple layers of irony. The irritating part, however, they’ve got down cold. Reports have it that these LA-based new-wave revivalists are capable of giving up the goods live, though–apparently front man Alex Ebert’s spastic twitch is quite persuasive, and having a pair of pros (whose combined credits include Beck, R....

LYDIA LUNCH 3/8, ABBEY PUB Detractors have dismissed Lydia Lunch as a one-trick pony for decades, but the singer-writer-artist-model-actress-comedienne is in fact a polymath who’s due some props. She’s outlasted a good many of her 80s collaborators, outlived a few, and continues to draw blood with her wisecracks as other peers (paging Hank Rollins) have themselves turned into punch lines–if her wasted spitting vamp persona has become something of a cliche, blame her imitators....

It’s hard to imagine a messier or more eccentric take on 9/11 and the Bush administration’s various wars on terror than John Green’s political farce, in which three women set out to achieve world peace by “taking the balls” from a trio of testosterone-poisoned world leaders. Set in an alternate universe remarkably like our own, the story provides plenty of opportunities to poke fun at dim-witted, self-serving warmongers, all of whom use organized religion to rationalize murder....