Bremen Freedom at the Athenaeum Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fassbinder’s comedy comes as a shock, however, especially to those who know him mostly through his films, which examine the wounded soul of post-World War II Germany. Then again, as Samuel Beckett proved, a bleak landscape is a perfectly fine setting for a comedy. The 1971 Bremen Freedom is based on the life of a real woman in the early 1800s....

Fresh From the Old School “I don’t think in those terms,” he says. “Wherever your studio is, that’s where you’re an artist. You take yourself with you–I am where I am. What is this business that you have to be in a certain place, especially in the late 20th century?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even so, Barnes didn’t make the cut in the MCA’s recent exhibit “Art in Chicago: 1945-1995,” an omission that puzzled both Schulze and critic Dennis Adrian, another early booster of the “Chicago Style....

HIS MAJESTIE’S CLERKES AND THE CHICAGO BAROQUE ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anne Heider, director of the Chicago-based a cappella choir His Majestie’s Clerkes, first learned about Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s C-major Te Deum–an elaborate arrangement of a Christian hymn of thanksgiving–more than two decades ago, in a graduate course on Baroque performance practice. Unlike the French composer’s D-major Te Deum, the C-major is rarely performed these days–in part because the only available edition of the score calls for two choirs and two orchestras, which may scare off most conductors....

The yellow brick building at 6128 S. Kilpatrick in West Lawn contains two apartments and a basement recreation room. The roof over the entry porch has a slight tilt to it–a Prairie School touch perhaps. With its pine tree in the front yard and garage on the alley, the building resembles thousands of two-flats that dot Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods. “I came to this country 40 years ago with no clothes to wear,” said Speredakos this past May....

Mad Shak Dance Company and the Dance COLEctive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some dance is easy, as easy as water: it washes over you and that’s it. But some dance, keeping its distance, requires time and effort–not so much thought as full investment and attention. That’s the kind of dance done by Molly Shanahan, artistic director of Mad Shak, and Margi Cole, head of the Dance COLEctive....

Becoming a restaurateur was far from Richard Mott’s mind back in 1981 when he was studying finance at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. As preparation for a career in corporate America, he made a bid to run a student coffee shop for a class project. “To stake out on your own–to be in business for yourself–was considered heresy in those days,” he recalls. “But I came to enjoy the independence, not having anyone tell you what to do....

SANDRA BINION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A woman irons for 20 minutes while a jazz bassist riffs. Women scrub the floor for 20 minutes to the accompaniment of a string quartet. Make no mistake: Sandra Binion’s performance pieces are boring. But, then, so are watching the sunset, gazing at the stars, and listening to the ocean. Like these activities, Binion’s work can offer a kind of spiritual solace, as time slows and overlooked trivialities come to seem monumental events....

SHAVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On “Try and Try Again,” a life-affirming ditty about suicide on his latest album, Billy Joe Shaver hollers so damn joyfully you’d think he just shimmied out of the abyss himself. Careerwise, it ain’t far from the truth. Until he released the hard-rocking instant classic Tramp on Your Street in 1993, he was still best known for writing most of the tunes on Waylon Jennings’s 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes (reissued recently by Buddha)....

Mariko Mori To call Mori’s art, however she produces it, superficial, excessive, cliched, or solipsistic is too easy. She might be a poseur hiding behind a beautiful but completely false facade, like a second-rate singing sensation hiding behind buff, lip-synching models the way Milli Vanilli did. But in fact Mori manipulates the elements of late-20th-century culture–empty-headed media stars, virtual reality, and dehumanizing techno capitalism–to create highly critical, beautiful art. Like Cindy Sherman in her “Untitled Film Stills” and Carrie Mae Weems in her narrative photography, Mori uses self-portraiture and stereotypical images and themes to explode stereotypes, creating new meanings....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Not that anyone would consider the opening work of the first concert dull. It was the Chicago premiere of John Adams’s orchestral work Century Rolls, and it proves if nothing else that Adams hasn’t lost his taste for surprises. Following the swerves and mutations of his style over the last couple of decades has been like following a soap opera: he’s gone from the most sternly austere of the minimalists to his current mode of garish postmodern extravagance, and with each new twist he’s set the entire classical community in an uproar....

Stupid Kids Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause is both the inspiration and the principal referent for this fast-paced yet thoughtful Roadworks Productions offering. First seen in Chicago in spring 1999 (a year after its off-Broadway premiere) and now remounted as part of the Theater on the Lake’s summer season, John C. Russell’s play–like the film–is a study of teenage identity crises....

The move from the cabaret-size National Pastime Theater to the spacious Ivanhoe main stage has diminished neither the charm nor the intimacy of this innovative entertainment, which combines the spectacle of a traditional three-ring circus with the intellectual stimulation of a bona fide play. Now expanded to two hours, the show has also added personnel, enabling the tireless cast to perform in the aisles as well as onstage (if you’re sitting in the right seat, you may find an upside-down web dancer smiling at you from less than a foot away)....

By Jeffrey Felshman What was the fuss about? Weinstein had fired an editor. Cockburn wrote that In These Times culture editor Josh Mason “has received the order of the boot from Jim Weinstein,” claiming that it was because Mason had “accepted an article by Russian left oppositionist Boris Kagarlitsky that had dared raise the name of Leon Trotsky.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cockburn attacks everybody–that’s why we love him....

Women in the Director’s Chair International Film and Video Festival See Critic’s Choice. (HotHouse, 7:30) The 45-minute documentary Motorcycle Diaries is a series of missed opportunities to delve into the experiences of women who ride motorcycles. Loosely linked interviews representing stops on a road trip taken by director Diane Howells and cinematographer Samantha Schutz are intercut with footage of competitions, riding clubs, and special events–all set to energetic music. But the commentary, which extends into voice-overs, is mainly rah-rah platitudes elicited from the various enthusiasts and pros....

Friday 7/16 – Thursday 7/22 Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is meant to be recited by a son, but more and more wo-men are taking on the role. Today Rochelle L. Millen, professor of religion at Wittenberg University in Ohio, will discuss gender issues in Judaism at a lecture called Millennium Momentum: Women’s Rights and Rites in Jewish Life. The discussion runs from noon to 2 at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, 618 S....

JAAP BLONK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As serendipitous or profound as improvised music can be, it’s not always the most scintillating thing to watch. That’s why a live show by Dutch sound artist Jaap Blonk–an extreme vocal acrobat who takes great pride in the strange expressions he can twist from his singular mug while he’s performing–is a treat. (Check out the hilarious interactive “Blonk-Organ” page on his Web site, www....

JOHN DAVIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When a man steps up to the microphone with an acoustic guitar, he carries not just the instrument but a heavy bundle of preconceptions. If he’s black, it’s assumed he’ll play the blues–ever tried to find Ted Hawkins’s records in the R & B bin, where they belong?–and if he’s white, he must be a folksinger. But for some time now, John Davis, a librarian from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the taller half of MTV stars the Folk Implosion, has managed to leaven that load with unexpected elements of punk, pop, and poetry recitation; he even nods to the Ramones in the title of his second (and better) album, Leave Home (Communion)....

Lead Stories In April Rene Joly, 34, filed a lawsuit in Toronto against several drugstore chains and the Canadian defense minister, charging that they conspired to kill him by putting poisons in his prescriptions and a microchip in his brain. In May he told reporters, “Genetically speaking, I’m a Martian,” having been cloned from material recovered from NASA missions. The college-educated Joly apparently impressed some reporters with his eloquence and respectable demeanor, but one defense lawyer said Joly “has watched too many episodes of The X-Files....

RON SEXSMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s easy for a performer like Ron Sexsmith to get overlooked in this era of instant gratification. He sings soothingly, his lyrics are refreshingly prosaic, and his beautiful melodies insinuate themselves in memory without your even noticing. But as his recently released second album, Other Songs (Interscope), proves, this former bicycle messenger from Toronto has quietly become one of the most exciting singer-songwriters of this decade....

Happiness They are present in their tiny studio performance space as the audience gathers, tying their shoes, checking their props, offering wine to their guests. Once the piece starts (which seems to happen almost as an afterthought), they don’t adopt personae or don costumes in an attempt to transport us to a fictional land or a distant time. Rather, they clip themselves to straps screwed into the rafters and simply dangle, staring patiently and smiling at friends in the audience, content to do nothing for a god-awful long time....