During the 27 years that Wally Conrad was the supervisor at Brooks Park, the once little-used ball field at 7100 N. Harlem was transformed into one of the city’s finest recreation facilities. It was Conrad who organized the wide range of activities there–gymnastics, wrestling, boxing, arts and crafts, swimming, softball–which won him the support of two generations of residents of the communities around the park. Claypool in particular has been singled out for praise by Mayor Daley....

BEYOND THE FRIDGE The 12 scenes in Beyond the Fridge (in part directed by Phil Setren) are essentially an extended meditation on women, men, and food. Kotin mixes performance with film to drive home some of the conscious and unconscious motivations of her character, Laurel. But absent is a serious examination of the despair and sense of powerlessness under the relentless male gaze her character seems to feel. Instead Laurel is a princess of denial, indulging her unfocused passion and sense of impotence in the consumption of chocolate, the pursuit of a modeling career, and finally the creation of a fitness video in which she shows women how to hide or augment various parts of their physiques while making love, enthusiastically demonstrating in a Victoria’s Secret-style teddy....

Reaching Loda Prairie took me a couple of hours. I’d set out alone on a Tuesday morning on a whim, driving south without precise directions for how to get there. I hadn’t been to this small preserve in years, though I had the vague memory that it was northwest of the town of Loda, about 35 miles north of Champaign. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The region is now noteworthy mostly for its extraordinary flatness....

Hamid Drake & Michael Zerang Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every year since 1991, the duo of Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang has rung in the new season–not the New Year–in a quietly spiritual and wholly ancient fashion. Drake and Zerang, both percussionists par excellence, play a wealth of instruments that come from the southern tip of Africa, the Middle East, and the subcontinent of India, among other places....

IN THE BOOM BOOM ROOM For everyone else out there who can’t imagine a production of In the Boom Boom Room having anything of importance to say to a contemporary audience, Thunder Road will show you something you never thought possible. On the page Boom Boom Room seems a tedious exploration of a well-worn theme: the bright-eyed, good-hearted dreamer sucked dry and left broken by an abusive world (I confess I’ve never been able to finish the script, seeing in it only faux urban lowlifes, condescending guilty-male feminism, and out-of-nowhere gritty poetic monologues)....

Lynn L. Fischer: Back in high school when my lab partner and I dissected a cat in advanced biology, I was astonished to come upon a kidney. It was a gorgeous blue, crisscrossed by red and yellow veins. How strange, I thought, that something so beautiful lay hidden so far under the skin. And yet, like everything else inside the cat’s body (including her unborn kittens), it was also vaguely repulsive....

CHICAGO MOVING COMPANY A pastiche of text and movement, most of it written and choreographed by Shineflug, divided into nine sections, On Surviving is eclectic, ironic, and steeped in a kind of mysticism that hasn’t been popular in 20 years. Veering one way and then another, it cancels itself out over and over–which I assume is the point. The title of the first section, “Keep Putting One Foot in Front of the Other,” is a piece of tired old advice for tired old people, but the dancing is vibrantly alive and joyous and childlike....

LOVE SUCKS The neoromanticism of the 1960s has given way to increasing cynicism about the mysterious ways in which love seems to move, an antiromantic attitude reflected in David Wesley Graham’s two short plays at the Playwrights’ Center. But their collective title, “Love Sucks,” belies their prodigious humor and compassion. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first, Maybe Love, opens with a quintessentially romantic situation: Ben and Stormy, the best friend of Ben’s wife Sheila, have been indulging in an orgy for three straight days in a borrowed apartment....

LUC HOUTKAMP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alone onstage Luc Houtkamp pushes at the edges of even postfreedom lyricism, as he painstakingly investigates the gamut of sounds uniquely possible on the tenor saxophone. This is sonic exploration stuff, reminiscent of Roscoe Mitchell’s rigorous a cappella exploration of previously unclaimed badlands on the saxophone landscape. (Many tenor players, for example, work the “flute tones” of their instrument, manipulating the notes just above the written range of the saxophone into an entire extra octave; Houtkamp takes this a step further to create a viable octave in the piccolo range–a startling, and ethereally lovely, effect....

“When I first started to play djembe [an African drum], the brothers thought a sister shouldn’t play. It was just that women don’t play,” says Regina Perkins. “But I bought a drum and learned how to play it. . . . Then I started to street-perform. Finally the brothers had to give respect where respect was due. I could play, and they started to ask me to come along.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Ben Joravsky Vazquez, city officials counter, knows the answer quite well. “He was warned that he had to clean up his lot or face the consequences,” says Terry Levin, a spokesperson for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, which towed the cars. “He was basically running an illegal junkyard, storing cars to cannibalize the spare parts. It was a safety hazard.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I buy old cars, keep them in the back, fix them up, and then move them up front where I sell them,” says Vazquez....

“I grew up as a classic atom bomb baby,” says 36-year-old artist Gregory Green, the son of a military air traffic controller. “When I was a little kid in France we did “Duck and Cover’ underneath the school desks. Living in Europe, I was literally living in the battlefield of the cold war.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the front window of the gallery Feigen Incorporated, Green has hung a jumbo-sized recipe for organic LSD....

In the 1950s musical polymath Gunther Schuller coined the term “third stream,” primarily to describe a synthesis of jazz and classical music. Three and a half decades later the concept is no longer new, but successful examples remain relatively elusive: among music theorists it’s this century’s version of the Holy Grail. Does that make crusaders of this Canadian-American trio? Maybe; in any case few improvising ensembles steer so close to a balanced fusion of jazz and new-music elements....

SIGHT UNSEEN Margulies uses a quirky, disconnected structure for his play, skipping around between Nick and Patricia’s farmhouse, where Waxman tries to rekindle the old romance; a London art gallery, where Waxman is interviewed by a pesky German journalist; his studio in 1975, where Patricia posed for him and he became infatuated with her; and his bedroom two years later, following his mother’s funeral, where he rejected Patricia. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

From the outside, the old Victorian three-flat at 3241 S. Indiana seems ready for the wrecker’s ball. “After a while it’s no longer progress to tear down old buildings. It becomes desecration,” says Rivers. “This building is faced with Joliet limestone, which is rare–they stopped using this kind of limestone in the early 1880s. There’s so much history in these buildings. There are names and voices and people from the past....

The festival concludes this weekend with screenings at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets can be purchased by phone (644-3456), by fax (644-0784), or through the World Wide Web (http://www.ticketmaster.com), all of which entail service charges, or at the theatre box office an hour before show time. General admission to most programs is $7.50; $6.50 for students and seniors; $5.50 for Cinema/Chicago members (the exception is the Best of Fest screening, which costs $10)....

Brian Frye’s ten-minute short is in four sections, each a roll of film shot at a San Francisco location, each manipulated in a different way. But what looks at first like film experiments or formalist exercises soon becomes surprisingly moving. In the first roll, Frye takes straight images of a street and alternates them with other images of the street superimposed on one another–these shot from slightly different angles, sometimes through a color filter....

Like her previous works, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s fifth film, her first in 35-millimeter and her first narrative feature, is both beautiful and difficult (1995). The difficulties begin with the title: this is not a tale, and it doesn’t really concern love–though one of its points of departure is “The Tale of Kieu,” the 19th-century Vietnamese national poem of love. Set in San Francisco, the story focuses on a Vietnamese writer named Kieu who works for a women’s magazine and as a photographer’s model to help support her family back in Vietnam....

Alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe doesn’t fit easily into any musical camp, and his success stems in large part from this stylistic slipperiness. Blythe’s earliest soundings came on some uninhibited “live” albums, and some of his latest as a temporary resident of the World Saxophone Quartet; both reveal the high-blown harmonic freedom that marks a great deal of “avant-garde” jazz. Yet even in these surroundings Blythe’s solos maintain an earthy connection to the jazz tradition thanks to his love of roots rhythms and highly directed melodies....

Ballet Chicago’s Close Call Rumors were spreading swiftly late last week about a possible shutdown at Ballet Chicago due to a money shortage. But over the weekend new funds came in from members of the troupe’s board of directors and other friends of the organization, and a conference call between members of the board’s executive committee on Monday resulted in a decision to continue operating, at least for now. “We are moving forward,” says general manager Colleen Lober....