Actors Are People Who Lie to You, Aardvark, at Bailiwick Arts Center. Despite the title disclaimer, quite a few non-Equity truths emerge from this scrappy, 75-minute late-night “fantasia,” a collaboration between veteran playwright Robert Patrick and newcomer Andy Cobb. Actor-writer Cobb embellishes Patrick’s 26-year-old off-Broadway script with his own insider’s take on the embattled (store)front lines of off-Loop theater. Actors takes the form of a mock tribute to grunt player Arnold Bliss (Jon Collins, one of eight in Aardvark’s appropriately nonunion cast)....

Taking the bus was Bill Wendt’s only way to get to Schaumburg on a recent Tuesday night. This near-west-sider is car-free and didn’t think it made sense to traverse the 25 miles on his one-speed bicycle. Wendt takes on numerous causes. The Maxwell Street Market, for instance. A letter to the editor that recently appeared in the UIC Flame blamed the death of the market on a land-grabbing UIC administration’s “monomania: everything for the university, nothing else counts....

SWEET HOMECOMING CHICAGO For the record, Self is an ordinary Joe. You could pass him on the street and not look twice. But it just goes to show you: there’s more to good dance than meets the eye. One might say that good dance meets the heart, or meets the soul, or even meets the gut. Self–a local boy who made it big in NYC and came back for the Link’s Hall Homecoming Series–creates choreography that meets the heart....

Jan Erkert & Dancers and James Kelly Choreography Project Watching two of the opening programs in the six-week Dance Chicago ’95 fest, I felt like crowing about how Chicago choreographers balance so well on the fine line between entertainment and instruction. But then that formulation began to crumble. What’s entertaining and what’s instructive? Is entertainment fun and instruction boring by definition? Or do we actually prefer instruction when it comes to dance, because meaning is easier to grasp than pleasure?...

When saxophonist/drummer/trumpeter/visionary Hal Russell died in September 1992, the future of his NRG Ensemble was certainly called into doubt. Then at a memorial tribute a few months later, NRG took the stage with multiwind player Ken Vandermark in Russell’s place, and the group hasn’t looked back. De facto leader Mars Williams may lack the vaudevillian panache with which Russell charmed his audiences, but musically the group has taken its founder’s basic ideas and sharpened them to a deadly point....

ONE FOR THE ROAD and You have to wonder why Public Trust Theatre Company is presenting two such wildly different one-acts on the same bill. Harold Pinter’s One for the Road is a dry, cruel drama; The Beggar’s Opera Cabaret! is a campy, all-female version of John Gay’s satire of early 18th-century English life. With only one (well-received) production, Hard Times, to its credit, an identity crisis is not what Public Trust needs....

I’ve never quite understood the point of rock criticism. What is there to say, really, about a rock song? It rocks or it doesn’t. Occasional attempts at a higher kind of criticism, freed from the burdens of mere subject matter, generally result in pretentious mush. (One thinks of Greil Marcus and winces.) The manifestos (there are said to have been 150 in all, written over a three-month period) were strange and passionate little statements....

Come here often? I SAID, COME HERE OFTEN? “In other experiments, anurans (frogs and toads) living near highway noise could not determine the direction of sound sources as well as those living in quieter places,” reports Ronald Larkin in Illinois Natural History Survey Reports (January/February). “The males near highways altered their calling and spaced themselves differently when attempting to attract females. We obtained similar results by playing recorded highway noise from loudspeakers,” thus verifying “that it was the noise generated by the highway traffic and not other kinds of pollution or indirect causes that affected the anurans....

The regular season began and ended at Bill Veeck Stadium with a Bo Jackson home run. Once a Sox fan accepted the idea of a man with an artificial hip playing baseball at all–much less hitting home runs–there was something neat and tidy and almost foreordained about that, which is pretty much how the White Sox’s first-place finish seemed when the season was over. The best team won; how many years was it supposed to take, anyway?...

When he turned 40 Miles DeCoster bought five table-hockey sets. They were the kind with players controlled by rods and knobs; three had players made of sheet metal the rest were plastic, and the rinks were all different sizes. For more than a year Miles spent practically every night running passing drills alone down in his girlfriend’s basement. He would have been unbeatable if he’d had any competition, but his girlfriend wouldn’t touch the game and he couldn’t find anyone else to play with....

NEW MUSIC AT THE GREEN MILL The concert was well attended. I was lucky enough to find a seat at one of the booths, but found myself standing occasionally to see over people. For the $2 cover one could put up with much worse. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The concert began with two works by John Austin. The first, Five Pieces for Oboe and Piano, was written in 1971, the oldest work on the program by far....

ASALTODIARIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Add to those influences the fact that much of Mexican life happens in the plaza and the street (because of the friendly weather conditions) and the result is an environment in which art, religion, and everyday life are effectively integrated–so much so that the “creative” life and “regular” life (whatever that is) are often indistinguishable. This environment has nurtured street performers, dancers, and performance art in general, and in particular a young dance/performance troupe (formed in 1987) known as Asaltodiario, which appeared at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum as part of “Del Corazon: Mexican Performing Arts Festival 1994....

Surprise is a central element of horror. The monster that is merely scary emerging from a creepy bog is terrifying when it lunges out of the pink and blue cabinet in the baby’s nursery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dowd has been slipping herself lately, devoting a Bob-like run of three columns to her snit with Barneys department store. And she hands nearly a quarter of her July 7 column over to her old friend Bob, who she says is “writing a book on the foibles, feelings and fears of turning 50....

Nick Colionne, who spent his childhood listening to Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix, and George Benson, never planned to play the guitar. “My stepfather played the guitar, but we were never allowed to touch it. He caught me banging on it one day, and he said, “You want to learn how to play?’ I was too afraid to say no.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the age of nine Colionne started performing at parties, then at schools in his west-side neighborhood....

Dear Editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The January 13 Culture Club presented the continuing saga of William Rickman, president of the increasingly irrelevant Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookselling empire. Once again we hear of Mr. Rickman’s wrenching decision to lay off more employees because he’s unable to compete with the new philistines on the block. Meanwhile, his job remains secure (but perhaps if Kroch’s management had been shaken up years ago, they wouldn’t be in their present state)....

In the early 1920s William Walton, still a teenager and barely on the first leg of his composing career, caught the attention of the formidable glitterati siblings, the Sitwells. “Adopted” into the family, he was encouraged by the poet sister, Edith, to collaborate with her on a thoroughly modern piece of theater. The result was Facade, which startled the audience when it premiered in 1923, but is now considered one of the most engaging works in English music....

Manipulating gutbuckety noise, hook-laden melody, and deliberate obscurantism, Memphis’s Grifters have forged a striking sound that exploits the notion of tension-and-release. Over the course of three albums–and especially on the recent Crappin’ You Negative (Shangri-La)–this quartet has taken unusually strong and oddly arranged melodies full of jarring twists, shifts, and explosions and managed to disfigure them further. While the music on their debut, So Happy Together (Sonic Noise), tended to bury the band’s catchiness under tons of purely extraneous, almost defensive sound, the new stuff employs disjointed structures, heavily fractured classic rock ‘n’ roll riffs (a la the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), and cheapo distortion drizzle with purpose–as distractions that make the hooks more elusive....

Jennifer Markowitz directed the first staging of Will Kern’s understated dark comedy, and I never understood why the folks at Famous Door didn’t hire her to redirect the play whenever the cast changed significantly, as it seemed to do every few months or so. Instead they left this intelligent, honest work, about a hellish day in the life of a beleaguered Chicago cab driver, in the hands of a series of foster directors, some better than others, which meant that the long-running Hellcab has not been consistently excellent....

Samuel Beckett’s bleak plays never seem more at home than in raggedy little storefront theaters in ratty old neighborhoods. Which I suppose is why the poor but earnest folks at Splinter Group (located in the only-marginally rehabbed section of Wicker Park at Damen and Division) have had such luck with Beckett. Every spring for the past three years they’ve presented Buckets o’ Beckett, an evening-long celebration of his shorter work; this year, to mark the show’s final week, Splinter Group is reviving its production of Krapp’s Last Tape....

By James Ballowe In separate portraits of James and Dorothy apparently taken when James was about 20 and Dorothy in her mid-teens, the siblings look strikingly alike. But James’s pronounced eyebrows accenting cool Germanic good looks do not translate well to Dorothy. She sits stiffly in a flowered dress, her hair close-cropped, her eyes dark and brooding. She seems not to know what to do with her thick arms and wrists....