Acouple years ago, the performance collective known as Lucky Pierre checked into a local motel and watched classic Hollywood westerns for 24 hours straight. No, it wasn’t a conceptual performance piece–they were doing research for their 1998 show, I Married Wyatt Earp, a baroque, gadget-heavy romp through the iconography of the American Technicolor west. By acting out such oater cliches as tossing someone down the length of a bar and smashing a bottle over his head, all while maintaining emotionally neutral expressions, the performers wrung lyricism from kitsch....

Lifter Puller Until recently you could count the number of indie-rock tunes about club culture on one hand. But Lifter Puller, an indie-rock band from Minneapolis whose rough-and-ready guitar riffs, hardy snarl, and blocky rhythms make them close kin to Archers of Loaf, have written a dozen of them–a concept album, no less. Their new Fiestas + Fiascos makes wicked fun of rockers, hip-hoppers, and especially ravers as it hurtles through a string of songs that describe the most debauched evening this side of a Fourth of July party at the Kennedy compound....

Guitarist Pete Cosey’s first rehearsal with Miles Davis took place in a Portland hotel room in 1973. Davis would play a bit of a recording of the band’s performance the night before in Calgary, and Cosey would listen enough to get the gist of it, ask Davis what key it was in, and then move on to the next part. Cosey had only met Davis briefly before joining the band, and as the men listened to the tape, they made small talk, began to know one another....

Polish Movie Springtime Theresa Connelly’s first feature, described as an update on Hollywood’s working-class dramas of the 30s and 40s, explores the ties among a Polish-American family in Connelly’s native Detroit. Lena Olin is the strong-willed mother, Gabriel Byrne the quiet father, and Claire Danes their rebellious daughter, who takes up with a police officer. Connelly will attend the screening; the film is scheduled for a commercial release this summer. (7:00)...

Thompson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m sure that the cause that Fred Hampton Jr. fights for is well understood by the black community–where black babies die in their first year of life at twice the rate of white babies, black children go to schools that are more like prisons, police brutality is an everyday thing, the prisons are stuffed with black people living under inhumane conditions and forced into slave labor, and a black child is left to bleed to death outside a hospital emergency room while staff outside on a smoking break look on....

It’s been so long, I’d almost forgotten about that unique moment when a fan totally commits to a team. Understand, I’m not referring to a fan’s usual allegiance, impassioned though that may be, but to the deeper feeling that a team is going somewhere and taking the fan along with it, for better or–as is usually the case in Chicago–for worse. The Cubs certainly offered fans a joyous and successful season in 1998....

WILL KIMBROUGH, KIM RICHEY 7/28, SCHUBAS The first solo album by Will Kimbrough, a Nashville session man and former leader of the Bis-quits and Will & the Bushmen, sounds exactly like the product of an artist who’s trained himself in every small trend in American singer-songwriter rock of the last 30 years. This (Waxy Silver) nods to everyone from Alex Chilton to Neil Young to Tom Petty to Paul Westerberg, and there’s a dutifully Stonesy slide-guitar riff on “Diamond in a Garbage Can,” a paean to a teenage prostitute (“sitting in a puddle of beer”) that aims to be bittersweet but instead comes off as Bickle-esque....

The Decatur-Moscow Road Hurst knows Washington too. If Decatur is his hometown and Moscow the city that haunts him, Washington helped him decide to leave journalism. At an early age he was the city editor of the Decatur Herald & Review, then moved on to the AP, which sent him to Moscow in 1979, then to NBC and to CNN, for which he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993 CNN rotated him to Washington, and last year Hurst retired at 52....

By Ben Joravsky His ticket was a teacher–“her name was Miss Wright”–who used to take him and a friend to restaurants and museums. “If it wasn’t for her getting me and my friend Tim out now and then, there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t know. Tim’s a minister, by the way, living in Virginia. I’m real proud of him.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1977 he graduated from Cregier High School and enrolled at Loop College, intending to major in art....

By David T. Whitaker Over the last 50 years, Mother Vassar has lived in several of the row houses, places lost in the shadows of the redbrick high-rises that rose up around them in the mid-50s and of the imposing white high-rises, or William Green Homes, built in the early 60s. But she’s far from the only surviving witness to the birth of Cabrini-Green. Lillian Davis Swope moved to the row houses when she was 17 and eventually raised five children there....

Irving Penn: A Career in Photography It’s Penn’s special gift to communicate that aplomb consistently in his photographs while reminding us that, beyond the camera’s frame, life is a mess. Sometimes a mouse or a beetle will creep across the still lifes he arranged for Vogue in the 50s–which resemble nothing so much as 17th-century Dutch paintings, with foodstuffs galore amassed to prove how close the sensual and aesthetic appetites can be....

James Welling These works eschew both the idea of the photograph as a window onto reality and the modernist foregrounding of materials. In fact Welling’s blacks are so flat they seem to merge with the paper. Looking closely, one sees that the diagonal edges of the black bands are composed of very fine sawtooth patterns, a sign that at some stage this was a digital image made up of square pixels....

A most unlikely collection of political outcasts meets most afternoons in Lincoln Park, gathering around a computer and plotting changes. The case that has brought them together is a discrimination suit filed seven years ago by Richard Barnett and Eddie Read, two veteran black political activists. The legalese bandied about by lawyers in the matter sounds complicated, but in fact the case is about simple mathematics: though the proportion of blacks in Chicago increased in the 80s, the number of majority black wards decreased....

Chicago Improv Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now in its second year, this annual celebration of the art of improvisational comedy runs April 6 through 11, bringing together members of the improv scene from around North America for a week of performances and workshops. Featured out-of-towners this year include the Groundlings, LA’s leading improv ensemble, in their Chicago debut; the formerly Chicago-based Upright Citizens Brigade (now stars of their own show on cable TV’s Comedy Central); Minneapolis’s Brave New Workshop in a return visit; New York’s Burn Manhattan, led by former Chicago director Shira Piven; Montreal’s On the Spot; and many more....

The undead at Zion. Commonwealth Edison cut costs by closing its Zion nuclear plant. In a recent press release, David Kraft of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service asks the follow-up: “If ComEd couldn’t invest enough money and resources to keep the plant open and safe, what is their incentive to invest the resources necessary to keep the plant closed and safe, when they will not be receiving any revenues from generating electricity at Zion?...

Who needs another killer couple fleeing cross-country with cops in hot pursuit? Yet thanks to this 1998 Australian thriller’s aggressive and unnerving formal approach–jump cuts that hurtle us through the story like a needle skipping across a record and an inventive camera style that defamiliarizes characters as well as settings–the characters’ paranoia is translated into the slithery uncertainty of our own perceptions: this is the most interesting reworking of noir materials I’ve seen since After Dark, My Sweet and The Underneath....

Crooning the 30 or so songs she’s written so far, Anna Lynn Fermin can sound like Rosanne Cash or Suzanne Vega or Patsy Cline. Or “Jane Siberry and Victoria Williams,” she readily admits. Fermin is still forging a musical persona–one that’ll embrace “straight-ahead country and western as well as eclectic folk influenced by bluegrass and by the beat of flamenco music.” Right now what she has in her favor is a pure, agile, vibrant voice, the kind that helps pave the way to pop divadom....

At another time and under other circumstances, the Henry Field-Nancy Keene Perkins wedding would have been a high point of the international social agenda. The groom was a grandson of Chicago’s late Marshall Field and a nephew of the commander of the British navy. The bride was a Virginia debutante and niece of the legendary Langhorne sisters. Aunt Nancy was the wife of Sir Waldorf Astor and author of the celebrated comment “I married beneath me....

The Denver Broncos’ victory in Super Bowl XXXII was a reaffirmation of sport on almost every imaginable level. After 13 years of National Football Conference dominance in the National Football League championship game–a dynasty signaled by the Bears’ 46-10 thrashing of the New England Patriots, though the streak began the year before that–the American Football Conference finally broke through. For 13 years the better team not merely won but usually romped in the Super Bowl, seeming to remove all doubt from the outcome before the game even took place....

SCOTT FREE 6/30, BORDERS ON CLARK Borders’s PrideTunes 2000 series, a monthlong run of performances by gay and lesbian artists, closes with a bang this year: Chicagoan Scott Free dazzled me a couple years ago with his debut, Getting Off, a potent one-man eruption of fiercely articulate lust and rage hot enough to fry the family-friendly veneer off any middlebrow assimilationist troubadour in a ten-mile radius. The follow-up, The Living Dead, isn’t as pure an emotional blitz, despite raw outbursts like the title track and “Our Sensitivity” (“This is why they kill us / This is why they cut a slur into our backs / Drag us by the throat / Pistol-whip us / Stuff us into the trunk of a car / Stab us with a pitchfork…”), but it’s still impressive, and Free’s songwriting is wickedly efficient even when he gets tender....