VITAL SIGNS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A kinetic flow of energy can become its own message: a play’s words can be less important than the power an actor puts behind them. In Vital Signs no single ingredient–the poetic script by William S. Carroll, solo performance by Carl Barnett, or percussion, vocal, and guitar score by George Blaise–seems destined for glory. But as staged by Hrukhti Men Ab for the Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre, the three elements fuse into a power-packed piece of anguished art, a 75-minute stream-of-consciousness confessional by a young black man....

The police blotter in Palos Hills, a middle-class suburb southwest of Chicago, rarely offered anything graver than juvenile pranks and DUIs. There hadn’t been a homicide, said police chief William Shanley, in his 22 years on the force. Marsha Norskog was terrified. During the next few days she couldn’t bear to tell her own parents what was going on. “My mother would call and I would just say that Hillary is fine....

Dreaming Lucia TurnAround Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Joyce’s experiments with stream of consciousness and psychic fragmentation can be seen as reflections of the disorientation of Lucia’s mind; one eminent critic has declared that Finnegans Wake “is [Joyce’s] anguished response to his daughter’s gradual retreat from reality [and] a desperate parody of Lucia’s disastrous compulsion.” Joyce guiltily felt that “whatever spark of gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and has kindled a fire in her brain”; he tried long and hard to minimize her condition as an oddity to be assuaged with a new fur coat or an arranged marriage....

SHELLAC, MX-80, TAR, SIX FINGER SATELLITE LOGAN SQUARE AUDITORIUM, SEPTEMBER 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » America’s pastime was the theme of this Albini-palooza. The title was a reference to Ted Williams’s 1941 batting average. All four bands on the bill–Six Finger Satellite, Tar, MX-80, and Shellac–wore baseball uniforms. Peanuts and hot dogs were sold, and recorded snippets of baseball crowd noise were played between sets....

I have just read Paul Pekin’s article “Screwball,” about his trip to one of our games [August 2]. I’m also sorry that we could not offer Mr. Pekin the exact same experience that he had as a child, going to his first major-league game way back in the 1890s. So few things are the same as when we were children. I’m sorry that Mr. Pekin holds us responsible for tarnishing his distant, and dim, memories....

Soprano Brygida Bziukiewicz has a sweet, limpid, breathtaking voice, nicely suited for the role of exquisite sufferer in the tragedies of Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini. The former Miss Poland, a regular on Chicago’s operatic circuit and a prima donna with the local Lincoln Opera, has gathered quite a following at the relatively young age of 29, and one of her admirers is filmmaker Jeffrey Hoge. A Columbia College graduate, Hoge heads an outfit called Opera Films, Inc....

“Caffeine” once described this trio’s recklessly wired sonic buzz perfectly: balls-to-the-wall free-improvised music that rarely took a breath. Yet over the course of their two-year existence, reedman Ken Vandermark, pianist Jim Baker, and percussionist Steve Hunt have stretched their kinetic attack to the point where tension-and-release, peaks-and-valleys density is as crucial as their unflagging energy. Caffeine takes models like Alex Schlippenbach’s trio with Paul Lovens and Evan Parker or Cecil Taylor’s with Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille and smears them with other, outside sounds: Vandermark, for example, who plays tenor sax, clarinet, and bass clarinet, dumps out seemingly incongruous but highly effective bits of lopsided R & B honking, his Braxtonian probes segueing into guttural, choppy blurts....

Guitarist Carlos Johnson is a fleet-fingered picker who wraps a shimmering B.B. King-like timbre around asymmetrical melody lines; he augments this breezy virtuosity by laying sharp staccato notes amid his leads to keep things from getting too smooth. Johnson’s repertoire runs the gamut from jazz classics like Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” to original compositions often based on time-tested blues standards (his “Leavin’ on the Next Train’ is an emotionally charged variation on “Goin’ Down Slow” as interpreted by Bobby “Blue” Bland and, later, Junior Wells)....

The second annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Friday through Sunday, July 21 through 23, at the Congress Hotel, 520 S. Michigan, and Saturday, July 22, at the International Cinema Museum, 319 W. Erie. Tickets for all programs are $5, with the exception of the Kenneth Anger and Ivan Stang programs, which are $8; a $40 pass will admit you to all festival screenings and events, and a $20 pass will admit you to five regular programs....

Some of the world’s most celebrated discoveries occur through sheer providential chance. Fleming had his petri dish. Vincente Arriaga had a box of Tuna Helper. Arriaga, a grocery clerk on the west side, was stocking shelves last week when a robber shot him in the chest. The bullet hit the Tuna Helper he was holding and Arriaga suffered only a small flesh wound, proving what consumers had previously only suspected....

Civic Orchestra of Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daniel Barenboim is likely to be remembered for devoting a lot of time to the Civic Orchestra, the CSO’s apprentice ensemble. He’s invigorated its playing, and he’s also asked visiting world-class maestros, such as Pierre Boulez, to conduct it. With such caring yet critical attention the Civic’s latest crop of musicians is bound to be recruited by important orchestras here and abroad....

Despite the emergence of bands like Sloan and Jale from Nova Scotia and Eric’s Trip from New Brunswick, it’s probably too early to declare “cod rock” an official movement. But even if their sound isn’t trendy yet, Jale merit your attention. They’re a quartet of women capable of some fine harmonizing, though they’re not denizens of the popular sweet-voiced-girl-group ghetto, where the shtick consists of singsong soprano over bland, fuzzed-out hooks....

When Chicagoans Beth Lynch and Scott Lynch-Giddings cast Louisa May Alcott as a character in her own novel, they found an intriguing solution to a sticky problem: the sweetness and untrammeled celebration of family ties in Little Women, the coming-of-age story of a tomboy and her sisters during the Civil War, might be a little wearing on a cynical modern audience. The enthusiastic students in this Wisdom Bridge/Roosevelt University production freshen the sentimentality and enliven the famous vignettes of homemade plays and sisterly pranks, but it’s Alcott’s interwoven narrative that shows how radical these independent girls were for their time....

The classical music of northern India has been passed from generation to generation by gurus who teach directly rather than through a notational system as in the West. That’s why much of it is improvisational, with performers embellishing on established ragas and talas or subtly inventing new ones. A raga is a melodic pattern that’s associated with a time of day, a season, or any other noteworthy occasion; a tala is the rhythmic pattern of a raga, often determined in performance by a drummer’s improvisational skills....

A daily dip into the stacks, leading up to our 50th anniversary in October A mother takes to podcasting wondering if CPD did “a cover-up or are they just this damn incompetent?” The Reader received two Association of Alternative Newsmedia nominations for best feature story and one for the Block Beat. Introducing the ChicagoReader.com, the Reader‘s shiny new digital home Finally, Mad Ave gets its own set of principles. How a legal storm capsized a petition to free a man who’s been imprisoned for three decades....

Composer Elodie Lauten has consulted the I Ching–the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes”–every day since 1975. “At this point,” she says, “I no longer have to consult the book for the reading.” Composer John Cage made the I Ching famous among musicians by throwing coins to arrive at random procedures for his music. Lauten, however, is more interested in the oracle’s meanings than in its randomness. In her Tronik Involutions she depicts 12 of the book’s hexagrams in music that’s mellow, modal, detuned, rhythmic, cosmically expressive....

Prejudice Four years ago a small band of local black gays and lesbians fought to march in the parade and finally got in after threatening to sue under the city’s human rights ordinance. Staring out the train window, I wondered if I’d encounter animosity. How would I react to being called a faggot? What if someone threw a beer can or a bottle at me? Would I keep marching while blood dripped down my face?...

Nine months ago it was a promising mess. After a major overhaul, which lopped off nine-tenths of the melodrama, Nomenil’s first piece, Pushin’ Up Roses, delivers on that promise. In this condensed version of their bit of theatrical mischief, writers Allen Conkle and Courtney Evans still refuse to play nice: they create an absurdly fetid, adolescent, lesbian-thrasher subculture in which the terminally belligerent yet painfully shy Rose tries to rise to the top like pond scum....

Americans are eating more and more fish–upwards of ten pounds of seafood per person per year since 1987, compared with less than seven pounds in the early 70s and five to six pounds per person the rest of the century. We also ingest another five pounds of canned fish–salmon, tuna, and sardines–every year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Modern refrigeration and shipping methods make super-fresh fish available in Chicago and other inland places, which boosts cost and consumption....

In spite of his theatrical training and experience, monologuist Frank Melcori trashes much of its implied aesthetic, favoring an almost offhand delivery that is probably not much different from how he tells someone a story in confidence over a few beers. If you’ve ever been repelled by actors strutting egomaniacally across the stage, projecting their voices to the back row in an elaborate display of artifice–a practice that the theater tradition regards as necessary–Melcori’s infinitely more relaxed manner of delivering the goods can put you on his side right away....