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In 1857 Abraham Lincoln was a has-been ex-congressman. Illinois had zero miles of railroad. Fewer than 30,000 people lived in Chicago….And Robert Kennicott founded the Chicago Academy of Sciences, now celebrating its 140th birthday and its status as the city’s oldest museum, according to a recent press release. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In a racially just world, black athletes should not be expected to hold to a higher standard of behavior than whites,” writes Northwestern political scientist Adolph Reed Jr....

The Lesson and The 1979 edition of the Concise Oxford Companion to Theater smugly announced that theater of the absurd–the darkly comic style of drama that rose out of the ashes of World War II–“seems to have spent itself.” But the sad truth is that theater of the absurd never died–it was absorbed into mainstream America, where it haunts us in the form of robotic bureaucrats, virtual love affairs, and automated phone systems that aim “to serve you better” by making you hold for a quarter of an hour....

Filmmaker Eisha Marjara was born in India and emigrated to Quebec as a child; in this engrossing 1998 autobiographical film she ponders her ethnic identity, the power of pop culture, the nature of femininity, and her mother’s failure to balance East against West, all the while embarking on a wild (and perhaps imaginary) search for Helen, an Indian film star who played the vamp in hundreds of Bollywood musicals. Marjara mixes photos, home movies, film clips, and footage of her journey through the teeming Bombay of the mid-90s, digressing from one topic to the next in a sequence that becomes increasingly resonant and finally supplying an epiphany of sorts when the pivotal events of her life are revealed....

We parked our car in a lot at the eastern end of the Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve and started walking west through a stand of red pines. The Chicago area is not famous for red pines, and these, all the same age and size, planted in neat rows, strongly suggested the involvement of the Civilian Conservation Corps. I don’t know for sure that they planted this little patch of artificial forest, but I know they planted a lot like it....

Gaining Control If you’ve tumbled down the well of self-loathing and crawled back up, and out of that wrung literature, why would you hand the tale to some fat Manhattan house that wishes you were Danielle Steel? Last autumn Moats sent Coles the manuscript. He didn’t respond. “From what I know of him, it didn’t seem in character to hear nothing at all,” she says. She tried again at a different address....

Landscape architect Clifford Miller and historian David Wendell are standing at the edge of a clearing in a wooded yard in Highland Park having a polite disagreement about whether this is a good example of the genius of Jens Jensen. Wendell thinks it is. He points to the open area, the curving lines, the stepped border culminating in a row of evergreens. Miller looks at the same manicured lawn and border, the same wall of hemlock and Austrian pine, and takes exception....

LEON FLEISHER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Almost 33 years ago, when Leon Fleisher’s career was in the midst of a spectacular ascent, the pianist was struck by a mysterious ailment that rendered his right hand too clumsy to play. (Long thought to be psychosomatic, the problem was later diagnosed as repetitive stress syndrome.) It was tragic: he was regarded as the most musical and intellectually probing pianist of his generation, an heir to the legacy of his mentor Artur Schnabel....

Five years ago University of Chicago Laboratory Schools drama teacher John Biser was talking about Langston Hughes with some parents at a school performance. The couple, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who’d been involved with the Weathermen in the 1960s, mentioned that Hughes had been a guest teacher at the schools in the 40s–a time when the poet was being blacklisted as an atheist and a communist. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When I spent a day in Brisbane four years ago, it struck me in terms of climate as well as social ambience as being the Mississippi or Louisiana of Australia. That’s only one of the reasons why this grim, passionate, and graphic love story about two highly dysfunctional young individuals–a chain-smoking asthmatic (Peter Fenton) and an irritable, promiscuous, and possibly crazy victim of eczema (Sacha Horler), both unemployed–reminds me of the tale about a doomed couple that forms half of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms....

Why do television news directors air throngs of anonymous Americans hopping and hollering behind a reporter as he delivers a live dispatch from a crime scene or other news site? In contrast to nonprofit Channel 11–which airs prerecorded station IDs from calm, smiling citizens–Chicago’s commercial stations open a less quiescent window on the world beyond the news anchors’ sets. Does leaping into the frame of a live shot for a moment of airtime nourish attention-starved Americans, those who’d otherwise never be seen on TV?...

Maria Tallchief signed on to do a cameo as legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in the 1952 Busby Berkeley-Esther Williams swimsical Million Dollar Mermaid, then started to worry about authenticity. Her boss and first husband, New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine (another Russian), sent her to Pavlova’s onetime understudy, Muriel Stuart, to learn Pavlova’s style and mannerisms. Tallchief perfected the moves, only to find that though the script called for her to dance The Dying Swan, Hollywood wanted her to “liven it up” with the pyrotechnic choreography Balanchine had created for Tallchief as the Firebird, the role that confirmed her as America’s first homegrown ballet superstar....

Dear Ms. Levine: We do not have dressing rooms for musicians. Liver dumplings made from “table scraps” is absurd. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Referring to our musicians as something you might see “on SCTV” is degrading. Our musicians wore authentic German costumes, very expensive and not comedic at all. They played songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Daisy,” “Edelweiss,” and “You Are My Sunshine....

Upstaged Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Becker says details of the new arrangement are still fluid, but in early October SAIC and Performing Arts Chicago inked a deal to bring innovative artists and events to Chicago, and she expects Susan Lipman, executive director of PAC, to play an important role in whatever productions are mounted at the former Goodman space. “We are not turning the theater over to Susan,” says Becker, “but she will certainly have access to it....

Redmoon Theater’s eighth annual Winter Pageant may be the most nonconforming, nontraditional holiday show currently playing in Chicago. The Winter Pageants have always been nonreligious by design, but this year not only are Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanza never mentioned, winter gets only scant attention. This year’s pageant is based roughly on the Logan Square mural depicting three firefighters in angels’ wings who gave their lives putting out an apartment fire in the mid-80s–though it might be more accurate to say that fires and firemen are only the jumping-off point for a gorgeous, sprawling work about the beauty of spring, the despoiling of nature, and the growth of cities....

Cathal Coughlan One of the most apt terms ever applied to Irish-born singer-songwriter Cathal Coughlan is “churl.” He leads a side project called Bubonique and entitled one of its records Trance Arse Vol. 3. He’s fond of song titles like “Ray of Hope, Hoe of Rape” and “Be Dead,” and he’s got an audible jones for those high priests of churlishness, Ministry. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coughlan’s headlong rush to obscurity began in 1984 with his band Microdisney, an engaging group destined for oblivion until cofounder Sean O’Hagan hit it comparatively big with the High Llamas....

Improvisational comedy–developed in Chicago in the 30s and 40s by Viola Spolin and popularized in the 50s and 60s by her son, Second City cofounder Paul Sills, among others–experienced a growth spurt in the late 80s and early 90s. Second City’s long monopoly on improv was first challenged by upstart companies such as ImprovOlympic and the Annoyance Theatre. Then the city was flooded with talented performers and directors determined to prove wrong the Second City dogma that improvisation was mainly a way to generate material for comedy sketches....

DEEPER CONCENTRATION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A year and a half ago, the San Francisco-based Om Records released the compilation Deep Concentration, which trumpeted two trends in underground hip-hop. One was the complex crossover between hip-hop and electronica, exemplified by production-oriented cuts from Q-Burns Abstract Message and the Angel. The other, paradoxically, was the celebration of that most basic of hip-hop basics, the turntable, and that’s the focus of the comp’s recent sequel, Deeper Concentration....

Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s too bad Time, the senators, and even the Entertainment Software Ratings Board don’t bother distinguishing between games featuring complex strategies, made and marketed for adults, and games that require no more than twitching your trigger finger. Still, it can’t be denied that hellish violence is as integral to these games as dice are to craps....

Harlem-based writer Latasha Natasha Diggs is no “remedy poet.” She hears them all the time at readings, poets whose “personal remedy is to get up on the platform and read some of their pieces. Someone who’s just releasing their opinions and emotions, who’s in it for the moment. They just want to tell about which man left them or why the system is so fucked up towards the black man or just some straight-up pussy shit....

“You know the thing I hate the worst about radio personalities?” talk-show host Jay Marvin asks as he walks up State Street to the WLS AM studios. “They’re all full of themselves. They’re not human. You ever notice that? They’re all manufactured—including me.” Marvin was born Marvin Jay Cohen. His father, Stuart Cohen, was a fairly successful Hollywood talent agent who divorced his wife in 1959, when Marvin was six years old....