Faust The Faust story has been inspiring artists–Marlowe, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Boito, Mann–for about 450 years. The original story seems to have been based on the life of Johannes Faust, a reputed magician who died shortly after Luther started the Protestant movement, making him roughly contemporary with the legendary mastersingers of Nuremberg. Faust’s life and leaguing with the devil appeared in Das Faustbuch, first published in 1587 and sometimes attributed to Faust himself....

In the liner notes to The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (Mosaic)–the excellent seven-disc set that arrived earlier this year–the Chicago-born pianist explains the frequently published myth that he was born in Haiti. “It seemed like a good career move at the time….Growing up in the black belt, I could only go so far because there was such a color caste system in Chicago. So being from Haiti was a good neutralizer....

Mary Brogger was cruising the spines at Myopic Books last winter–a conceptual artist on the prowl for concepts–when she picked up William James. Eureka! It was love at first read. “No absolutes, truth depends on practical outcomes, process is all;” she says, rattling off the charms of James’s old line on pragmatism. “I was predisposed to it. It’s what I had been practicing all along.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Better Than Ezra is touring on the heels of a minor MTV hit, a passable single called “Good,” driven by a pretty admirable hook and leader Kevin Griffin’s drawled vocals. It’s not the band’s fault that the song has lifted them out of the obscurity they’re about to return to, nor that their record company is aggressively marketing this unexceptional southern boogieless band as “alternative.” Of course, it’s not Griffin’s fault either that he’s a lunkhead, but let’s hold him to it anyway....

Blues/soul veteran Bobby Rush has toned down his excesses in recent years: gone are the days when he’d streak from the dressing room to the stage clad in little more than a Speedo. But he’s still good for a bawdy time. His hits–“Chicken Heads” and “Sue,” among others–fuse a danceable funkiness with graphic sexual imagery in the same oral tradition that spawned the dozens, rhymed drinking toasts, and the eloquent folk poetry of signifying....

The Century Orchestra Osaka is young–it was put together in 1989 by the Osaka prefecture, which generously subsidizes it–and so are most of its 56 members: their average age is 30. Their maestro, though, Jerusalem-born Uriel Segal, has a couple decades of experience under his belt. While the Century ranks a notch or two below East Asia’s finest–perhaps more on par with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago–its fresh and exuberant style has already won accolades....

As a professor at the University of Chicago and composer in residence for both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera, Shulamit Ran wields unprecedented influence on the local music scene. Though she’s championed contemporary music, her taste is fairly conventional, veering toward the latest fads propagated by the east-coast academic establishment, and her own body of work remains rather slender. Her most impassioned and aesthetically successful composition to date, the song cycle O the Chimney, was written more than 20 years ago, at the outset of her career....

Two years ago, on my first and only date with Marco, we walked briskly along Cornelia from Broadway to Halsted, a block where several gay men had been attacked the previous week. Except for a porchload of frat boys hurling insults as we passed, the walk was without incident. A year later I walked down the same block to a friend’s house, following a trail of blood from Halsted right to his doorstep, where a gay man had been stabbed the night before....

Blush With Wang Ji, Wang Zhiwen, He Saifei, Zgang Liwei, Wang Rouli, Song Xiuling, Xing Yangchun, Zhou Jianying, and Cao Lei. Of course the relation of writing to visual representation isn’t the same in China as in Western cultures. Anyone who attended the Art Institute’s recent superb “Splendors of Imperial China” show, drawn from Taipei’s National Palace Museum, noticed that most Chinese landscape painting contains writing–and therefore belongs to the realm of literature and philosophy, as Hao Dazheng suggests, rather than constituting a “portrayal of reality” in the Western sense....

THE STATE I’M IN: A TRAVELOGUE, CONTINUED at the Goose Island Brewing Company, through April 30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The outline of her picaresque story remains the same: a Killen-like character named Rose travels from Seattle to Chicago and back to her home in California, experiencing life, liberty, love, and death. But in this version I was more aware of the heart behind Killen’s talk....

Anne Wilson Each carefully shaped mass of hair has a certain stark beauty, an almost minimalist perfection of form. And the placement of the works side by side recalls the serial imagery of minimal and conceptual art. But each mass of hair is organic, unruly, filled with tiny random variations in direction. There’s a tension between the rectilinear formality of the framing, the simple shape of each piece, and the occasionally skewed directions of each strand....

“Hey, man, what’s up?.” The men look up and greet Jack Graham as he walks along Lower Wacker Drive. Dressed in a dark suit with pinstripes, a pale shirt, and a tie with tiny embroidered eagles, Graham doesn’t quite fit in. Even in his wrinkle-free duds and tortoiseshell glasses, Graham seems at home with these men. That’s because Graham knows what it’s like to live on the streets. As a nascent nonprofit organization, HOME has only just recently been able to pay Graham a salary....

Dear Mr. Hayford, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for attending and reviewing Gigantic Productions’ premiere of Charlie’s Good Time Gospel Hour [June 14]. However, I feel it is important to point out that it was Michael Dowd, not myself, who performed the part of Charlie (as stated in your review). While I did appear onstage to give the preshow welcome to the audience, I cannot take credit for being “nothing short of riveting....

Lead Story When Long Island, New York, school superintendent Edward J. Murphy retired September 30, he received handsome severance pay at a time of severe financial troubles for New York schools. Under the contract he had negotiated with the local school board in 1985, Murphy was entitled to 90 days paid vacation a year (the normal is 15 to 20), plus paid sick leave–with the option of accumulating it and cashing it in at the rate of $1,000 a day....

SEASON TO RISK 12/22, METRO Default leaders of the current Kansas City, Missouri, punk rock explosion, Season to Risk teeter predictably between grinding-metal and ugly posthardcore machinations. Their most recent offering, In a Perfect World (Red Decibel/Columbia), delivers the requisite noise, chaos, and rage but lacks songs, originality, and verve. Just because you meet the qualifications doesn’t necessarily mean you can do the job. Babes in Toyland headline and Mount Shasta open....

Ends is the story of Kingsley, a 26-year-old African American man who lives alone in a cabin in the wilderness. Kingsley is discovered during a thunderstorm by a white camper named Frank Glober, who has recently returned from an early tour of duty in Vietnam and is stuck in a workaday office job. Kingsley, who hasn’t seen anyone for 14 years, has gained all his knowledge about life from reading authors such as W....

From the outside, the green-and-white house on Warren Boulevard near Ashland doesn’t look much different from any of the other buildings in the neighborhood. The paint has started to peel and the windows are gray and sooty. The only thing a little unusual about it is the dusty checkerboard propped in one of the downstairs windows. The greatest American-born checker player that ever drew a breath, some say, and without a doubt the greatest Chicago ever had....

My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In point of fact, My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud represents only one half of a dialectic about history; the other half has been cut off by U.S. marketing strategies. Just before making this feature, the writer-director and cowriter, Mordillat and Jerome Prieur, made a feature-length talking-head documentary about the same period of Artaud’s life, Le retour d’Artaud (“Artaud’s Return”)–a documentary that one critic has compared in its methodology to both Shoah and Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits....

THE METHOD, Emerging Artists Project, at Cafe Voltaire. Karin Shook’s mildly amusing, gentle satire takes aim at a very easy target–the excesses of a dim-witted, touchy-feely director and his cast of two codependent actresses–but fails to hit the bull’s-eye. This hour’s worth of shallow sitcom jokes about relaxation exercises, encounter groups, rebirthing classes, bad poetry readings, and new-age psychology only skirts the issues. Shook never, for example, goes very deep into the sadomasochist relationship the controlling director Omar has with the two unassertive women....

When T.S. Eliot was in his early 30s and working as a bank clerk in London, he collapsed one day from exhaustion. In the few weeks of convalescence he was given he wrote The Waste Land, perhaps the greatest work of modern poetry. Now Jenny Magnus inadvertently inherits his legacy. Last summer she was so overworked–acting in her brother Bryn’s play, performing with two bands, and working full-time–that she “had a little bit of a nervous breakdown....