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Brave Engineer: The Real Life Casey Jones Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Solo performer Paul Turner may be a witty writer with a gift for spinning fascinating, sometimes fantastical yarns. But his greatest asset is that he speaks from the heart. The best moments in his shows are always those in which this quintessential southern Illinois good old boy lets down his guard and we see the man behind the macho masks....

“Landlords must accept Section 8 vouchers and certificates from tenants,” according to a recent press release from the city’s Human Relations Commission, “unless the landlords have a legitimate non-discriminatory reason not to do so.” The city’s fair-housing ordinance prohibits discrimination based on source of income, and Section 8 vouchers and certificates, which often serve as the lifeline for public-housing residents trying to move into the private-housing market, are considered a source of income....

DECEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In order to drive home the reality of AIDS, the Humboldt Park-based prevention project Vida/SIDA enlisted HIV-infected people in the community to work with a group of Latino artists–including storyteller Ramon Lopez and experimental media artist Cesar Sanchez–to create pieces that reflect their experience. The opening for the new exhibit Circulation/Circulacion kicks off at 5 with a World AIDS Day candlelight vigil and walk from Division and Western to the Puerto Rican Cultural Center at 2739 W....

Friday 10/24-Thursday 10/30 25 SATURDAY Today is National Make a Difference Day. Instead of simply making a greater effort to blue-bag their recyclables, today conscientious citizens will join members of Americorps’s City Year program for their annual City Year Serve-a-thon. Volunteers will spend the day working on community projects all over the city, including creating neighborhood gardens, clearing lots, and painting and renovating buildings. The goal is to complete more than 20 large-scale projects in areas like North Lawndale, Austin, and Humboldt Park....

Greil Marcus Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (Henry Holt) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a scattered prose style that suits his historical method, Marcus keeps circling back to the image of the mask as a key to the American ethos. The poker face starts out as the handiwork of the Puritans and becomes something of an heirloom that, as it passes from generation to generation, is frequently employed by hucksters and demagogues, sometimes to deceive, sometimes to conceal fear....

Pamela Hobbs: Captive Beauty Risa Sekiguchi The spatial contradictions and perceptual ambiguities Hobbs sets up establish her photos as dream images, liberating the viewer’s imagination. Unmooring her images from real space and time, she forces each viewer to try to resolve their issues of scale. In Number two, the space between the doll and the house seems weirdly compressed; this does not feel like a scene one could walk through. The front steps of the house beckon–but can be seen only through the bell jar....

Daryl Hall Last year, when Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach fused muses for a collaborative LP and tour, they extended a long-standing pop tradition: since as far back as the 70s, rock/pop luminaries have come together to twine their creative tendrils and see what unique flora might spring forth. These collaborations have ranged from the indie underworld (Yo La Tengo/Jad Fair) to the avant-garde (Frank Zappa/Captain Beefheart) to the mainstream (Neil Young/Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan/the Grateful Dead), and while the results have varied in quality, they generally succeed in stirring up media coverage and public curiosity....

Griffin Theatre Company reprises its acclaimed adaptation of Gail Carson Levine’s 1997 novel–which, according to the American Library Association, is now second only to the Harry Potter books among young readers. Unlike previous portrayals of Cinderella as a victim with good karma, this Ella is a heroine who must embark upon a dangerous quest to break a lifelong spell that forces her into unconditional obedience. Along the way she finds wisdom, maturity, and of course a handsome prince....

Karen Reimer Virginia Meredith: Born Again Karen Reimer’s 28 embroidered works at Beret suggest a desire to remake the world–or at least printed matter and some handwritten notes–in cloth and thread. Reimer often reproduces pages from books with black thread on white cloth, but she’s also made fabric replicas of candy wrappers, a parking ticket, a Popeye’s soft drink cup, receipts, and a completed crossword puzzle, using colored fabric and thread to re-create the color in the original....

By Peter Erickson “Hello,” he says, and continues reading. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a kid Charet bought comic books from Acme and from the A-1 bookstore in the Loop. “This was a cluttered shop with thousands of magazines piled in the center of the store. It was haphazard. Sort of like my store. Acme was more a rare-book store. A-1 had stacks of old 50s comics....

Most of the commercial images surrounding the winter solstice are highly domesticated: cheery elves in furry red suits fulfill our every need; a glowing fire is securely contained by a fireplace; neatly wrapped packages hold sufficient supplies from Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean to last us the rest of the winter. But Jellyeye, Chicago’s unique percussion-movement troupe, conveys an older, far more primitive vision of the change of the year, in which fires burn out of control, physical needs are a ravaging hunger, and the gods must be appeased by rituals that recall the cruel vitality of spring....

ALIEN FASHION SHOW 11/20 & 21, LIQUID This aggressively generic California cocktail-rock outfit accents tired, shallow swank with tired, shallow alien imagery and makes a stab at cleverness with a Kiss cover–“Detroit Swing City”–that probably was a lot funnier in the pitch meeting. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JOHN HAMMOND & DUKE ROBILLARD 11/20, BUDDY GUY’S LEGENDS Veteran acoustic bluesman John Hammond seems to have dropped the Jr....

ANSON FUNDERBURGH & THE ROCKETS 9/3, BUDDY GUY’S Legends This fine Texas-based blues band gives its guitarist top billing, but he’s not the hoary grandstander that might suggest–the recent Change in My Pocket (Bullseye Blues & Jazz) is dominated by Sam Myers’s distinctive stuffy-nosed bellowing and Delta-learned harp blowing and the lively tinkling of pianist John Street. You’d doubtless notice Funderburgh’s absence if he suddenly vanished, though–and not just from the audible hiss of his empty channel mixed miles over everything else, either....

John Wickenberg at Perimeter, through February 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in 1944 in Coleman, a small northeast Wisconsin town, Wickenberg now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. In childhood he drew from nature; he also copied Rembrandt etchings and popular book and magazine illustrations. Later, he especially liked DŸrer. His hope, he told me, is to “give the viewer an opportunity to slow down and see in a different light....

Now in its sixth season, Bailiwick Repertory’s sturdy, openhearted production of John Reeger and Julie Shannon’s musical celebrates the courage of sailors from northern Michigan who braved Lake Michigan’s November gales to bring Chicago its first Christmas trees in the 1880s. Rooted in the experiences of a real family, the plot draws strength from its fascinating details about Great Lakes sailing, including a recipe for the disgusting slumgullion stew. Reeger’s book solidly re-creates a world that was uncertainly making New World accommodations to Old World traditions....

Irwin D. Dammers pilots his Harley Heritage Classic down the back roads of Highland Park, heading toward the oasis of the Highland House restaurant. The sky threatens rain, but Dammers is in a summer-Sunday state of mind–and that means hitting the road on two wheels. With the wind flapping his ponytail, and gunning his Harley past 60 miles an hour, Dammers shouts to his passenger that he sees–but does not fear–the cop up ahead on the right....

To the editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am a dedicated, year-round bicycle commuter and I commend the city for its plan to encourage and promote safe cycling through the addition of bicycle lanes. As Todd Savage’s article of October 22 clearly illustrates, the removal of bike lanes on the stretch of North Halsted from Belmont to Broadway signifies the need for communication amongst the proponents of bike lanes and the residents who oppose them....

By David Harrell Kutten says he hasn’t played his alto saxophone enough to notice whether cryogenic treatment has improved it, but he believes his tenor sax is significantly better. Not only do the very highest notes seem to be “released” and more readily available, but there’s “more evenness of response and an increased tonal palette throughout the range of the horn. It’s easier to make the notes sound the way you want them to....

By Neal Pollack Some of the larger ones, Chamizo says, took him more than two years to complete. Others look like he shot them off in about two minutes. They depict many of the interests Chamizo has accumulated in his 61 years: baseball, Cuban music, Latin-American history, and the movie Casablanca, which he’s seen more than 100 times. Some are portraits of his friends and business neighbors. Quite a few feature colorful quotes he’s heard while listening to sports talk shows on the Score....

Cricket fans usually need a magnifying glass to find something on their favorite sport in the newspaper. That may be particularly galling with the coming of the World Cup of Cricket, which is sometimes billed as the third largest sporting event on earth, just behind World Cup Soccer and the Summer Olympic Games. The tournament is now being played in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Netherlands. The inaugural match took place May 14 in London, and the final match will be played June 20 at the same site....