Sam Greenlee is relaxed. He sits lotus style on a rainbow-striped blanket, rolling cigarettes and talking in reflective, short streams about the rage that fueled his 1969 underground classic The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Growing up in the 30s and 40s in west Woodlawn, Greenlee lived an “idyllic” childhood filled with Sunday school, Boy Scouts, and the rural, southern values of his parents....

Lead Story Mark Spotz, at his trial in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, in September, denying that he killed his brother: “He didn’t die until he got to the hospital. In my mind killing someone is taking a life willfully. I didn’t do that. I shot my brother and he died. I didn’t kill him.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September Baltimore police concluded that Saladin Ishmael Taylor, 34, had murdered a woman whose body was found in a row house with a one-inch piece of tongue nearby....

ONTOLOGICAL PROOF OF MY EXISTENCE at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ontological Proof of My Existence has all the potential for melodrama–a runaway teenager, Shelley, falls into prostitution at the encouragement of the charismatic Peter V., whereupon her doting father comes to fetch her home–but playwright Joyce Carol Oates is not interested in TV-movie fables. Peter V., who claims to have been reborn at the age of 25, takes the name of Pyotr Verkhovenski in Dostoyevski’s The Possessed....

A new year, a new tapas restaurant, this one right next to a new Boston Chicken and only a few steps away from a new Italian “ristorante.” Does the word “ubiquitous” come to mind? Piatti, the newest kid on an already overcrowded tapas block, needs to offer more than good food to get post-Christmas, pre-tax-season depressives out on a cold night. Fortunately, owner and executive chef Sami Signorino has come up with a visually exciting venue, a sophisticated and varied tapas selection that ought to compete with the best of them, and refreshingly reasonable prices....

For years San Francisco’s Barbara Manning has been a maddeningly inconsistent folk-rock outsider. Solo records like Lately I Keep Scissors and One Perfect Green Blanket were loaded with amazing material, but her lack of prolificacy and the occasional dud seemed to perpetually get in the way of her success. When she finally got a fairly steady band, she managed to release her worst record, last year’s weak Nowhere. I’m not sure what’s happened since, but Truth Walks in Sleepy Shadows (Matador), her new album with the shuffling cast of characters known as S....

Splitting Images Three of Ken Warneke’s four paintings at Tough reminded me of Vertov’s ambition, though Warneke lacks Vertov’s optimistic view of human perfectibility. Each combines four fragments of a face–two eyes, a nose, and a mouth–isolated in circles or ovals or triangles and set against a prepainted abstract ground. None of the features is in quite the right position, and each is obviously a part of a different person. The odd tension between the features and the backgrounds, the photographic precision with which each face fragment is painted, and the mind’s natural tendency to try to unify the diverse facial types into a single visage are what make these paintings exciting....

Cheap Trick Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in the days of Foghat and Journey, Jeff was cool enough to realize that Cheap Trick’s pure power pop had it all over those other bands. Their first three records–Cheap Trick, In Color, and Heaven Tonight–were what you played every morning before school and every weekend at parties. Nearly every song was right on the money, from the dark “Auf Wiedersehen” to the upbeat “Southern Girls” to the rocking “Elo Kiddies....

Two weeks ago, the Bulls were playing a rare home game in the month of February when they were suddenly subjected to a new and foreign sound. It was quiet. It was midway through the third quarter, and we could hear not only the squeak of shoes on the court but the echo of those squeaks reverberating off the ceiling of the United Center. It wasn’t really silent in the stadium but it was quiet–silence of a very peculiar sort....

They’re everywhere–Fedco, Costco, Price Club, and all sorts of other “club” stores that charge a membership fee and claim low prices. The other day I tried to join one of them, but there were a host of restrictive qualifications for membership: you had to work for the state, or be a federal employee, or be self-employed (and bring in tax returns to prove it–a business card wasn’t sufficient). I remain a nonmember....

The 50th anniversary of D day leads me to ask a timely question. Many American men began smoking while serving in the armed forces in World War II. The Red Cross even distributed free cigarettes to the troops. Most of these men became addicted to cigarettes, smoked throughout their lives, and now many have died of smoking-related illnesses. I wonder if more men have died from smoking connected with their World War II service than died as battle casualties in that war?...

By Ben Joravsky To the untrained, who can’t tell one plant from another, it’s a dubious cause. But to scientists and environmentalists it’s a noble effort, nothing less than an opportunity to guarantee that the “ecosystem stability can be maintained, evolutionary processes can continue, new species can eventually emerge, and biodiversity can continue to be maintained into the future,” as New York Times science reporter William Stevens once put it. Certainly, their diligence is beyond dispute....

If you and your loved one feel uncomfortable in traditional romantic settings, try treating each other to 11 Minutes Max: Soul Sisters With a License to Thrill–The Valentine Version. This late-night performance series provided an offbeat alternative to the usual holiday hype in its Christmas edition and now promises an unusual slant on love and life for Valentine’s Day. The “Cherubic Mistress of Ceremonies,” Paula Killen (who never fails to make you wonder where in the world she found that costume), provides fun ways for audience members to win special prizes that she’ll throw to the winners over everyone else’s head....

True to its namesake, the prolific, Vienna-based Alban Berg Quartet has turned in compelling performances of works by members of both Viennese schools in its 23 years. What’s more, its dedication to contemporary music comes through loud and clear in fresh interpretations of the latest opuses of Alfred Schnitke, Wolfgang Rihm, and the like. On its world tour this season the group is premiering a new quartet by the eminence grise of the Italian avant-garde, Luciano Berio....

One character in Loverboys, Ana Castillo’s new collection of short stories, is a successful writer, despite something she calls the “thing,” which comes into existence when “all the voices of those who call writing a craft, who speak grammatically correct, who studied with this name or that one, well up in my head and tell me once again, each time I sit to do it, that I have no business doing what I’m doing....

BOILING POINT BODIES, REST & MOTION At least 30 or 40 years separate the sensibilities that underlie Boiling Point and Bodies, Rest & Motion, two current releases I suspect won’t be with us very long. The first, a quirky and at times oddly charming museum piece, is masquerading as a Wesley Snipes action thriller, but advertising–even wall-to-wall–isn’t everything. The writer-director, James B. Harris, who was born in 1928, produced the first three important Stanley Kubrick features–The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), and Lolita (1962)–and what’s most distinctive about this movie is its bittersweet aroma of 50s nostalgia and over-the-hill desperation, most of it wafting around a pathetically cheerful con artist called Red Diamond (Dennis Hopper) who’s simply trying to stay alive....

By Jerry Sullivan At the time almost no outsiders came anywhere near the Kalahari, so nobody interfered with the deal the Bushmen and the lions had worked out. The Bushmen had no weapons of much use against a lion. They relied on arrows dipped in a slow-acting poison for hunting, and anybody facing a charging lion needs a poison that acts really fast. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there was more to it than that....

GREAT AFRICAN QUEENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the lights go down for Black Ensemble’s production, which Taylor also directed, drumbeats echo through the house, and as a fluorescent map of Africa is illuminated, the drums come to seem heartbeats and the rivers on the map veins through which pump the spirits of the women who ruled this continent. But regrettably, though Great African Queens has quite a bit of heart, there isn’t nearly enough creative juice to keep the show alive....

Between 1951 and 1955, James Dean acted in more than 30 TV dramas. Four of these shows–plucked from the networks’ vaults–have now been packaged as an omnibus meant to trace the rapid emergence of a cultural icon. Dean’s persona as a brooding romantic in blue jeans was, of course, largely forged by his big-screen roles in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, but the trademark mixture of vulnerability and bewilderment, of artlessness and grace, was evident in his TV work well before he became a movie star....

I was brought up, as I would bet most of us were, with a couple of specific verities–tolerance for the opinions of others and the understanding that if you really don’t like something that’s presented to you, and you have the opportunity to, you can always turn the page (change the channel, leave the room, etc). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I take the position that any revisionist view of culture (your culture or mine) is straight fascism....

Various Artists The Sea and the Bells Rather than shunning these developments as echoes of one of rock’s more dubious tangents, critics and fans alike have embraced them, declaring guitar rock null and void and heralding “post rock” as a whole new pop vocabulary. All of which raises the question: So who’s pretentious now? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Into this morass the Rhino label has hurled a real depth charge....