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Sleep Jerusalem Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A teenage quartet when they debuted with Volume One on the indie Tupelo in 1990, Sleep didn’t do many interviews or tour much–their biggest U.S. sojourn to date was opening for Hawkwind in early ’94. Sometime in ’90 or ’91 the original second guitarist, Justin Marler, set off for Alaska to become a monk. And the remaining three members spent much of the middle of the decade trying to get out of their deal with Earache, the metal label for which they’d made their second record, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, in 1992....

House/Lights It’s easy to dismiss the Wooster Group’s House/Lights as indulgent art-world posturing. Seven actors careen through 90 disjointed, aloof minutes never betraying an emotion and rarely finishing a thought–when they bother to speak at all. Instead they fling set pieces back and forth, dance drunkenly, pant, whisper, recite bits of a Gertrude Stein text, or imitate video images. Director Elizabeth LeCompte–as though bent on creating the coolest of McLuhan’s cool media–combines video wizardry, an eclectic soundscape heavy on symphonic strains and computer noises, a tangle of microphones that distort performers’ voices, and a slick industrial set that resembles a cross between Dr....

DIANOGAH 10/3, EMPTY BOTTLE Two basses and drums are the perfect instrumentation for those of us who came of age listening to a lot of screechy, trebly 80s metal and now worry about hearing loss in the higher registers. As Mike Watt and Kira already proved years ago with their groundbreaking bass duo Dos (and as Tortoise continue to prove), guitars are nice but just not…necessary. On their first full-length, As Seen From Above (Ohio Gold), Chicago’s Dianogah twist their threads into a range of sprawly and brawling songs that manage to echo both June of 44 and the Meat Puppets....

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 16th year, runs Friday through Thursday, October 15 through 21, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln; and Burnham Plaza, 826 S. Wabash. Tickets are $6 for children and adults, $4.50 for Facets members; various discounts are available for four or more tickets. For more information call 773-281-2166. Programs marked with a 4 are highly recommended. Upsidedown Mountain...

At many restaurants, speaking Spanish is a sure sign of a limited future. Dishwashers and prep cooks from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Central and South America often don’t get a shot at the higher paying, higher prestige jobs of sous chef, chef de cuisine, or executive chef. Not so in Emilio Gervilla’s family of tapas restaurants. “All of my chefs originally worked with me at Ba-Ba-Reeba!,” says Gervilla, “and they’re all Spanish-speaking Mexican guys....

In the 80s Chicago was filled with nightclubs like the Roxy, the Raccoon Club, CrossCurrents, and Boombala, most of them little more than glorified neighborhood bars with small stages where a handful of broke performers could pool their resources and put on eclectic, eccentric variety shows. Part showcases, part testing grounds for new material, these cabarets provided exposure and stage experience for a generation of young comics, singers, and writers, among them Mark Nutter, James Finn Garner, and Nora Dunn....

Raghubir Singh: River of Color Contemporary Indian photographer Raghubir Singh does not manipulate his images as far as I can tell; this is relatively straight photography. Yet his color sense reminded me of the earlier tradition of hand-painting photos. Indeed, Singh refers to that tradition (and others in the history of Indian art) in the introduction to his book River of Color, which accompanies this Art Institute exhibit of 86 of his photographs, most from the last two decades....

Mr. Zhao With Shi Jingming, Zhang Zhihua, Chen Yinan, and Jiang Wenli. With John Hurt, Christian Bale, Daniel Benzali, James Faulkner, and John O’Toole. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the Little Animals, the directorial debut of Jeremy Thomas–the producer of major films by Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, and Nicolas Roeg, among others–surfaced at Cannes last year, eliciting a mainly favorable review from Variety’s lead reviewer, Todd McCarthy, but apparently not much else....

The Great Fire The Great Chicago Fire began on October 8, 1871, and burned for almost two days, laying waste 2,200 acres of the city. Eighteen thousand buildings were destroyed. A third of the city’s population was left homeless, and nearly 300 people died as strong southwest winds urged the flames on and Chicago’s largely wooden dwellings were ravaged. Yet the severity of the disaster has been trivialized by kitsch mythology....

ARNOLD DREYBLATT/LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS & ALAN LICHT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Minimalism isn’t always the cool, dry thing academia has led many to believe it is. The guitar playing of Loren MazzaCane Connors revolves around tiny, fragile, bluesy gestures that drip with emotion and long bent notes that resonate like sobs; both his older, gentler work and his newer, amped-up efforts convey the same sort of introspective, elegiac beauty....

Captured at www.cocaine.org/coke.html Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a rule of thumb, it is profoundly unwise to take crack cocaine. The brain has evolved a truly vicious set of negative feedback mechanisms. Their functional effect is to stop us from being significantly happy for any length of time. The initial short-lived euphoria of a reinforcer as powerful as crack will be followed by a “crash....

Space Until recently, theater at Steppenwolf has almost always represented the triumph of substance over style. Growing away from its ferocious and messy youth, the company settled into a comfortable, respectable middle age but still sporadically integrated some of its early rock ‘n’ roll roots with six-figure production values. Landau’s Space, however, reflects the company’s disturbing recent tendency to subordinate text and performance to lavish effects. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Choreographer Brian Jeffery, the 37-year-old founder of the experimental dance company Xsight!, has earned lots of kudos over the years for his group’s daring performances, which meld movement, music, and theater into shows that defy easy categorization. But increasingly, acclaim is not enough. “When a show is done, it’s gone,” he says. “Unless you were there you missed it. I’m not left with anything. As I get older that’s been a problem....

By Chris Larson But the district hadn’t publicized its plans. Fearful that the conservatory could be lost, a number of groups–including Friends of the Parks and Bethel New Life, a community-development organization–formed a loose coalition to mobilize public support. “We had, a number of years before, identified the conservatory as one of our community assets–a sorely neglected one,” says Mary Nelson, Bethel New Life’s president. The coalition held a press conference at the conservatory, declaring it a national treasure that had to be saved....

Paul Thek An untitled painting from 1974, part of a display of Thek’s notebooks and two-dimensional works from 1970 to 1988 at the Arts Club of Chicago, is directly inspired by such photos. Thek paints the earth at the center of four actual sheets from the International Herald-Tribune, surrounding it with black, but he leaves enough of the newspaper exposed to show some of the more mundane concerns of the day: an article on a pop singer, an ad for Ashland Oil, a notice that the British Oxygen Company has acquired four million shares of Airco Inc....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Wall Street Journal reported in April on the growing academic discipline of “whiteness studies,” whose pioneering professors and students met recently at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the aspects under study: Spam diets, gun shows, the white dominance of shopping malls, and the Internet. Rejecting the suggestion that whiteness studies lacks seriousness, a doctoral student said, “They said that about Madonna studies, too....

Concerning Truth It’s become a cliche to argue that such a unified vision is no longer possible in our doubting, secular, image-saturated age, and it’s true that we cannot return to a past based on a faith that few now share. But as I viewed the three-part “Concerning Truth” exhibition–curated by Pablo Helguera, a former Chicagoan who recently moved to New York–I found myself wondering if fragmentation, doubt, and the denial of originality and authenticity were not themselves becoming cliches....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest; now it’s hosted by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the Rhino Fest celebrates its tenth anniversary with shows by such local notables as Theater for the Age of Gold, Lucky Pierre, Plasticene, Cin Salach and Ten Tongues, Antonio Sacre, the Penlight Theater, and members of the Neo-Futurists and Theater Oobleck, as well as the Curious cabal....

STEVE LACY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few musicians have dedicated themselves as thoroughly to understanding the complexities and nuances of Thelonious Monk’s music as soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy has. He played with the man himself back in 1960, later formed a Monk repertorial group with trombonist Roswell Rudd, and has recorded numerous Monk programs over the decades–including several brilliant duo albums with pianist Mal Waldron and the 18-minute medley that kicks off his Solo: Live at Unity Temple (Wobbly Rail), recorded in November 1997 in Oak Park....

Technically it was Sunday morning, but Bishop Don “Magic” Juan Campbell was nowhere near church. Just after midnight on December 3, Chicago’s most notorious preacher man led a posse of his colorful pals to the stage of the East of the Ryan nightclub on East 79th Street. Campbell, who’d turned 49 on November 30, was the guest of honor at the “Famous Player Chicago Millennium Birthday Celebration.” The former pimp is now an ordained minister, but he’s still proud to call himself a player....