Now that the Art Ensemble of Chicago has disbanded, the world has little choice but to heed the individual offerings of its former members. In the case of Roscoe Mitchell–who 30 years ago founded the quartet that evolved into the Art Ensemble–the opportunities have been plenty, thanks to the startling array of solo and group projects he has led over the years. Trumpeter Lester Bowie wore the lab coat at Art Ensemble performances, but his coconspirator Mitchell was (and remains) the true scientist: in the 1970s, Mitchell undertook a systematic study of the saxophone’s secrets, charting the vagaries of overtones and false fingerings and the limits of breath control and technical abstraction–a process that he documented on a piece called “S II Examples” and that has informed all his performances on saxophones ranging from baritone to sopranino....

RUSTY AND RICO, Colored Lights Productions, at Cafe Voltaire. Rusty is a Central Park prostitute, Rico a mayoral wannabe. After professing to love each other, you’d think they’d repair to the nearest hotel instead of lingering to dance under the stars, play childish pranks on alfresco diners, and revel in the specialness of their relationship. But they don’t, and that turns out to be a big mistake. Recalling her girlhood ambitions, Rusty is now ready to play a more aggressive and public role in Rico’s life....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, N: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Always happy to promote healthy attitudes about vaginal discharge and fragrance. While some twat-shy breeder boys cry “fish” out of sheer cunniphobia, there are indeed instances where the woman in question does have an actual honest-to-goodness odor problem. Ladies: if your boyfriend adored eating out his last five girlfriends but won’t get near your pussy without a snorkel, maybe the problem is yours....

At first Seam’s lengthy hiatus, which began last spring with the departure of longtime bassist Lexi Mitchell, had an air of permanence. But then singer/guitarist Sooyoung Park took off for Korea and returned by summer’s end with a new bassist–William Shin, a Canadian expatriate–and the painful breakup with Mitchell as grist for his song mill. Logically enough, Seam’s forthcoming third album, Are You Driving Me Crazy? (Touch & Go), is a bleak statement of emotional strain embodied by guitars that mewl with melancholy, bitterness, and unsure resolve; Park’s lyrics, a combination of numbness and bile, are masterfully reinforced by the music....

“Marriage can be understood as a kind of insurance policy that promotes economic and physical well-being,” writes William Harms in the University of Chicago Chronicle (September 28), summarizing findings of U. of C. sociologist Linda Waite. Among them: marriage prolongs life, especially for men. “Married men live, on average, 10 years longer than nonmarried men, and married women live about four years longer than nonmarried women. Married men live longer because they adopt less risky, more healthy lifestyles as a result of the commitment brought on by marriage, and married women live longer due to improved financial well-being as a result of marriage....

Valley Song If Athol Fugard didn’t exist, to paraphrase Voltaire, it would be necessary to invent him. Western theater needed a clear voice to help sort out the muck as the leaders of South Africa’s National Party sank their country into a cesspool of hatred, intolerance, and militarism. Fugard fit the bill. His plays are perfectly straightforward: the problems are unambiguous, and an audience rarely needs to wonder where its sympathies should lie....

One of Stefan Brun’s earliest memories is of his grandfather putting on a puppet show in his folks’ living room in Munich. “There was a puppet here and a puppet here,” Brun says as he holds his hands up on either side of his face, “and his head was in the middle. He was a very funny, expressive man.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brun’s grandfather was the German actor and director Fritz Kortner....

The tremulous strains of the mandolin, a favorite Mediterranean folk instrument, are familiar to composer Robert Lombardo, who grew up in a Sicilian household. A while back the Roosevelt University professor met up with Dimitris Marinos, the Greek emigre who’s made a name for himself in this country and Europe as a mandolin virtuoso. Impressed with Marinos’s pyrotechnics, Lombardo wrote a number of pieces with his skills in mind. The latest is Orpheus and the Maenads, a concerto for mandolin and orchestra commissioned by WNIB that will be premiered at this weekend’s Chicago String Ensemble concerts....

There’s not much irony present when Dale Watson sings, “I’m too country now for country, just like Johnny Cash / Help me, Merle, I’m breaking out in a Nashville rash.” However, the Austin-based honky-tonk stalwart’s biting indictment of Nashville’s general artistic bankruptcy belies the fact that Watson hasn’t given up on Music City just yet. On his superb debut album, Cheatin’ Heart Attack (Hightone), he plays the kind of music he likes to listen to–songs full of heartbreak, despair, and booze a la Buck Owens, Faron Young, and Merle Haggard....

Lately a lot of suburbs have been passing antimonotony ordinances. These are intended to prevent developers from filling up a subdivision with block after block of more or less identical houses. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Landscaping laws vary from village to village, but they all are intended to promote the creation of a landscape dominated by closely cropped swards of mostly alien grasses....

Martha Ehrlich: Martha Ehrlich’s series “One Hundred Paintings,” now at Space Gallery, consists of 100 eight-by-eight-inch plaster blocks snaking around the walls. Into each one is set a smaller Masonite board bearing an image–but all the images seem to be the same. A man seen in profile is seated at a nondescript gray table resting his right cheek in his hands. His brow is furrowed, and his right eye is in such deep shadow we can’t tell whether it’s open or closed....

Benjamin Britten The Britten Edition is an enormous venture–14 titles so far, and no end in sight. It will evidently preserve on CD every scrap of Benjamin Britten’s music all the way back to his first piano lessons. I didn’t think he was entitled to this kind of enshrinement. But that’s just me being old-fashioned, thinking back fondly to the days of my youth when all the really cool people wrote off Britten as an establishment hack....

Iggy Pop Metro, April 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iggy is still with us, having done away with the peanut butter and raw meat, but leaving much of the rest of his act intact, if somewhat more disciplined and structured. The times have caught up with him, and he who once seemed so unutterably bizarre is now smack in the center of mainstream pop-music culture....

When the Cottage first opened its doors back in the fall of 1974, two of its most notable features were location–it was in the heart of the culinary wastelands of Calumet City–and the fact that it had a female chef. No one had ever thought about opening a fine-dining spot in south suburbia, let alone in a town primarily associated with raunchy bars and corrupt small-time pols. And a woman’s place may have been in the hash-house kitchen, but haute cuisine was strictly a male preserve....

Waves are smashing against the breakwater behind the Shedd Aquarium and it’s threatening rain as a small cell of demonstrators gathers for its usual Sunday protest against the museum. The group carts out signs and poles and rests them on a narrow section of sidewalk backing up to the Oceanarium, the $45-million home of the Shedd’s marine mammals. “Oceanarium My Ass,” reads the T-shirt worn by Steve Hindi, the 39-year-old leader of the group, the Chicago Animal Rights Coalition (CHARC, pronounced “shark”)....

THIRD PARTY: A MOONLIGHT MATING GAME OR MIDSUMMER APPROACHES . . . , Party Productions, at the Theatre Building. David Dillon has cranked the handle on his money-making Party machine a third time, and the results are truly depressing. Party itself always struck me as a case of the emperor’s new clothes: starved for any sort of positive representation, the gay community good-naturedly embraced the production, ignoring the fact that it’s ultimately a rather shallow comedy....

Roscoe Mitchell’s New York-Detroit Connection Mitchell remains a vital figure in jazz. When New York’s premiere new-music club, the Knitting Factory, moved to a new location earlier this year, it featured Mitchell in two opening-week performances–one with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the other with his sextet, the Note Factory. Delmark recently released a fine new CD, Hey Donald, on which he leads a quartet. And in coming months Mitchell, who formerly taught at the University of Wisconsin and still lives in Madison, will be touring the U....

For those hoping to catch up on their theatergoing during the holiday fortnight, Reader critics offer their recommendation of shows running at least through New Year’s; check Theater listings for schedules, prices, addresses, and phone numbers. Bubbe Meises: Grandma Stories No matter that the season proclaims joy and rebirth, director Billy Bermingham continues to preach apocalypse, pulling no punches in his caveats to a society gone to shit. If the methods seem extreme, the plays’ aim is true and their daring unequaled in Chicago theater....

To Albert Williams: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With all due respect for your talents as a theatrical critic, I feel I must respond to your review of Shakespeare Repertory’s Troilus and Cressida (“So Foul and Fair a Play,” February 3). My performance as Patroclus was singled out as the one “black mark on an otherwise superb production” for its “hackneyed” effeminacy. Normally I would never quibble with an unfavorable review, but your comments call into question my integrity as both an artist and a human being....

Love Ironically, Love was a different story. Where most bands intoned overt political slogans and messages of brotherly love, Love’s lyrics were often cryptic, dark, and intensely personal. Likewise, their music never fit snugly into the prominent styles of the day. It was too terse to be psychedelic, too restrained to be hard rock, and too odd to work as pure pop. It was idiosyncratic–like its chief architect, Arthur Lee....