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You’re on the top of a hill, wearing your black pants, black soft-soled shoes, black apron, and white shirt. You’re next to a station set up with a silver rectangular bucket of ice, plastic pitchers of water and iced tea, straws, sugar and artificial sweeteners, creamers, coffee warmers, stacked glasses, piles of napkins, and sliced lemons. You can’t squeeze the lemons into the water anymore because the juice stings the tiny cuts in your fingertips from opening twist-off beer bottles....

In 1980 Marc Smith was just another poet yearning to express himself onstage. But when he tried to break into the Chicago poetry scene, he discovered he wasn’t welcome. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Smith organized it as a three-part show: an open mike, feature performances by visiting poets, and finally a competition in which novices took on award-winning veterans. He selected judges from the audience at random, and in a bow to our beatnik ancestors, observers snapped their fingers to express displeasure with performers....

By Michael Miner “When one finds it inadequate or in error about events and persons one knows,” Greeley wrote in his review, “one becomes suspicious of the whole enterprise.” He concluded that Man of the Century is a book “rich in anecdotal detail” but whose “frequent inaccuracy and occasional meanness make it untrustworthy. Caveat emptor.” “I begin with what he says about himself, as people would assume he was at least right about that....

“By far the most controversial feature of the brownfields initiatives is not that of liability reforms but of lowering the standards for cleanup,” writes Stephanie Goldberg in the Chicago-based ABA Journal. “The object is not necessarily to restore the land to a pristine state but to make the risks of toxicity consistent with its future use; in other words, to protect the public from undue risk, not from risk itself.” Says Jim Van der Kloot, an environmental scientist with U....

By John Corbett Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But that hasn’t kept a stampede of educators, music snobs, and New Age music healers from touting–and hawking–the miraculous powers of Mozart and, by extension, other classical composers. This is the Mozart-effect effect. For instance, you can now purchase pianist Valery Lloyd-Watts’s Music for a Better Brain, a CD that features “selections by the great masters of pattern and structure,” including not only Mozart but also Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Scarlatti, and Telemann, and promises to “stimulate your ability to think abstractly....

For those hoping to catch up on their theatergoing during the holiday fortnight, Reader critics offer their recommendations on shows running into the new year (most have special New Year’s Eve performance-party packages). Check listings for addresses, phone numbers, schedules, and prices. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Expertly directed and perfectly cast by Michael Halberstam, George Bernard Shaw’s Candida at Writers’ Theatre Chicago is one of the most sophisticated, intelligent, and entertaining romantic comedies in recent memory....

Let’s call him Jesus. He doesn’t want anybody to know where he was for 15 years, between 1985 and January of this year. He’s got a good job now and a family, so why jeopardize the good name he’s been building up? But he was in prison. He did something stupid and irrevocable as a kid, and he spent a lot of time in some of the toughest joints in Illinois....

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore It’s so delicious. And understanding that wicked pleasure, director Dexter Bullard has transformed an over-the-top Jacobean play into heavily eroticized slasher theater. Who would have thought that John Ford’s 1633 ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore could be so much fun? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most often directors use the gorgeous language and excessive corruption of Ford’s drama to stage an ironic morality play: the amoral greed of the Italian aristocracy transforms the story into a fable of misplaced love and tragic undoing....

The Baron in the Trees It was in Signora Ingrosso’s modern Italian literature class that I fell in love–not only with the devastatingly witty Signora Ingrosso but with Il barone rampante (“The Baron in the Trees”), Italo Calvino’s breathtakingly imaginative, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking 1957 novel. Set in the 18th century, it revolves around a young nobleman named Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo who climbs up into the trees one day and never comes down....

IMMORTAL LEE COUNTY KILLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back when I was doing college radio it wasn’t uncommon for DJs to play a 45 rpm record at 33–most of us believed Motorhead sounded better that way–or an LP track at 45. The song “Killer 45,” from the Immortal Lee County Killers’ forthcoming Estrus debut, The Essential Fucked Up Blues, sounds like the latter, and the only way I know for sure that it’s supposed to be that way is that I got it on CD....

MOHAMMAD REZA LOTFI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The dearth of Middle Eastern music in America is certainly due in part to our own government’s stigmatization of all things Islamic, but in recent decades Islamic culture has turned on itself as well. In Khomeini’s Iran, for instance, public performance and distribution of music was almost immediately banned as “anti-Islamic,” and artists like Mohammad Reza Lotfi, who in the relatively liberated late 70s had emerged as one of the country’s most important composers of Persian classical music, found themselves under the suspicious eye of the fundamentalist state....

Architect Bruce Goff said he threw out all preconceived notions of what a building should be when he started a project. The Myron Bachman house, at 1244 W. Carmen, proves his point. This was a typical 1890-vintage two-story wood house before Goff remodeled it in 1947 into a combined family residence and recording studio. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goff was an internationally regarded architect known for tailoring his buildings to each client, often using common materials in unconventional ways....

Imagination to Image American Modernism: From Stieglitz to Today A.H. Wall defined pictorial photography in 1896 as not “a representation or a portrait of a particular scene” but as “a picture”–an autonomous work of art. Most pictorialists rejected combine printing and other devices as too artificial yet adopted even more painterly techniques in their attempts to validate photography as a fine art. In the early part of this century, as pictorialism became more and more self-indulgent and mannered, some former pictorialists and a group of new photographers rejected fuzzy focus and the application of tinted oils to the print in favor of a crisp, sharp-edged look thought to be truer to photography’s inherent nature; this was the movement now called modernism....

ROGER McGUINN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A local boy who made good, Roger McGuinn has long been acknowledged as a pivotal figure in rock: as the brilliant (and by most accounts autocratic) leader of the Byrds, he married traditional American music to 12-string electric guitar, creating a sound that would influence everyone from Bob Dylan and the Beatles to Tom Petty and R....

Welcome to the fourth and final part of Savage Love’s very special “How Sleaze Is Lived in America” series, Sleazy Anonymous Gay Meetings. (I would like to thank the Pulitzer Prize committee in advance for their consideration.) This week we hear from gay men who met their true loves in bathhouses, in porn video booths, at jerk-off parties, and in toilets at the late, great Penn Station. But before we begin this week’s column, I would like to thank my friend, colleague, and former college roommate, Ann Landers....

BELLRAYS 6/9, EMPTY BOTTLE This California quartet has been cutting a swath of buzz through their home state and, last spring, through South by Southwest with their fresh and genuinely unusual blend of what they call “Maximum Rock ‘n’ Soul.” The high-powered garage band is fronted by Lisa Kekaula, who has taken her most essential vocal lessons from Aretha Franklin. Other better-known bands (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Delta 72) who’ve tried to wed the R & B shtick to fierce indie rock have generated some exciting moments but fallen short of really convincing anyone that they have soul....

Fern Valfer curated the show of selected paintings by Chicago artist Lorraine Peltz for Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery. “As an artist myself, my choices are influenced by things I struggle with in my own work,” Valfer says. “When I look at imagery, I look for intensity.” Peltz’s work “stays with the viewer because of the juxtapositions, the way realistic images float on a sort of atmospheric space. There’s a dreamlike quality about the background and then a hard-edged clear area that’s often the focal point....

A friend told me about a woman who had a tumor removed from her ovary (or something in that area), and the tumor had hair and teeth. She was young and I think a virgin, so this couldn’t have been the beginnings of a baby. Have you heard of this happening, or is my friend pulling my leg? –MelGag, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The tumor we’re talking about here is called a teratoma....

What defines a successful film festival? Judging by the noises the media make about this topic, a successful festival is one that launches some Hollywood producer’s latest studio release–and allows him to expand his swimming pool. Anything that might get in the way of such a project–the art of film, say, or the curiosity of a festival audience about what’s happening elsewhere in the world–is to be discouraged in the pages of the trade papers, which generally set the tone for the mainstream....

Friday 5/22 – Thursday 5/28 23 SATURDAY See them ride their bikes up curbs and down stairs. See them plunge through a narrow tunnel called “the patch collector.” See them pedal up a ramp and over a car. No, they aren’t punk-rock mountain bikers a la Missy Giove–they’re police officers from the city’s bike patrol, and today a number of them will compete for prizes at the second annual Police Bike “Cop”-etition....