If old age, as de Gaulle said, is a shipwreck, the shoal it often founders on is youth. Vernon Jarrett is 71, Mark Hornung 33, and Hornung decided this year it was time to do things differently on the editorial board of the Sun-Times. So Jarrett said yes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hornung brought black reporter Michelle Stevens onto the board and recently named her his deputy....

Friday 14 In 1968 Chicago wise guy Tony “the Tuna” Accardo built a house in River Forest with most of the features considered essential for mob living: restaurant-size kitchen, walk-in vault, and hidden gun racks. A few years ago, he died of natural causes. Today and tomorrow from 10 to 5 furnishings from the house, including a circular banquet table that seats 70, will be sold to the public. FBI agent turned crime author Bill Roemer plans to attend the sale, which happens at the house, 1407 N....

In one sense, Cath Carroll makes some of the most confrontational alternative-rock music around. At a time when even major labels are willing to shell out cash money for the privilege of releasing some very outre sounds, you may ask, how can a musician break new ground? Carroll’s method: softness, not harshness. The transplanted Briton, now a Chicagoan, purveys a soothing, percolating groove that shares some theoretical foundations with the work of the lush pop proselytizers in Scritti Politti and the Pet Shop Boys....

It took more than ten years, but planting trees has finally made Wangari Maathai a fugitive in her own country, Kenya. At the Jane Addams Conference at the Hilton and Towers on May 18, the founder of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement received two standing ovations as well as the Jane Addams International Women’s Leadership Award. But at home she hasn’t slept two nights in the same place since February. Those who shelter her don’t know where she’s going next....

GOD’S COUNTRY Shattered Globe Theatre But that’s something of a quibble: what Dietz has given us is less a play than a sledgehammer. It sets out to affect its audience, and never mind finesse. The outrage is genuine, the message fervent, the situations chilling. A Klansman soberly posits that abortion is a conspiracy to wipe out the white man and that 96 percent of all abortions are of white Aryans....

An LA trio with a stupid name is nothing unusual, but Grant Lee Buffalo–their leader/guitarist is named Grant Lee Phillips–more often than not cough up the goods to transcend their quirky, sweeping aspirations. The band’s penchant for melodrama is clearly derived from David Bowie–the quick opening of “Jupiter and Teardrop” sounds exactly like “Ziggy Stardust”–but I’ve slowly been convinced that their lush sense of atmosphere is all their own. They’re touring in support of an album, Fuzzy, that was originally released more than a year ago on Slash, and the title track is their finest example of feel-sculpting: a lazy, melancholy acoustic strum builds and builds, thickened with electric guitars, fattening rhythms, and an irresistible falsetto vocal wrapped up in an amazing, sinewy guitar line....

By this time last week the calls had already piled up from Vermont and New Mexico, from Alabama and Quebec, and even from Switzerland: calls from fans of free-music improvisation who had heard, or read, or downloaded details about this weekend’s activities in Chicago. So when a sizable contingent of musicians arrive from Free Music Productions, Europe’s most respected collective of avant-garde improvisers; and when the subsequent storm of cross-cultural sound settles in over Chicago (their only stateside port of call); and when they finally join forces with a slew of Chicago compatriots–well, it would be unseemly to claim that nobody warned you....

Kaspar, Transient Theatre. The legend of Kaspar Hauser is an intriguing one: kept in a small room for his entire childhood, the youth finally emerged on the streets of Nuremberg at age 16 able to speak only one sentence. And Transient Theatre’s adaptation of Peter Handke’s play Kaspar is a provocative piece of theater. Director Tammy Berlin–who with Sheila Pacione integrated Handke’s script with original text–sets this Kaspar alone in a room full of objects, among them five television sets....

SLICES: BIANNUAL REPORT ON STATUS OF RELATIONSHIP WITH SIGNIFICANT OTHER The faint reek of Pine Sol was in evidence as we entered the N.A.M.E. space. Later in the performance, in a video, Scott cleans a kitchen table with Pine Sol and a sponge while he and his mate, artist David Eckard, engage in a sort of shorthand intimate yet quotidian discussion. As I watched the video, I didn’t look at the two of them talking; instead, my eyes were fixed on the bottle of cleaning fluid in one hand and the sponge in the other, which somehow had become a metaphor for Scott’s approach to living and loving....

BORIS GODUNOV The opera was rejected for performance by the operatic authorities in the imperial capital of Saint Petersburg, and the composer made some additions to render it more acceptable. The revised work enjoyed some modest success in Russia–it doesn’t seem to have migrated out of the country–during the lifetime of the composer, but then productions gradually died out. The ever-helpful Rimsky-Korsakov rescued the opera from neglect by toning down some of its novelty, and in this form the work became known and accepted in European theaters....

Betty Montmartre–nicknamed for a long-ago nightclub she worked–offered perspective in front of the Vic at midnight. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gibson was back in town from Oregon because the Old Town School of Folk Music and WFMT radio, home of The Midnight Special, had organized a benefit for the 12-string guitar and banjo strummer. Half a lifetime ago, he and actor Hamilton Camp were the hippest act at the Gate of Horn, the hippest night spot in town....

OLIVER LAKE 8/5, BELMONT HOTEL The supple-toned alto saxophonist from New York meets the Chicago rhythm section of bassist Harrison Bankhead, drummer Dushon Mosley, and pianist Ari Brown (the last better known as the saxophonist in the Ritual Trio). Lake, perhaps best known for his charter membership in the World Saxophone Quartet, is a spellbinding improviser and composer, his rich wellspring of ideas emanating from an R & B-drenched base. This is his first Chicago gig in years....

Founded as a component of the Bucktown Arts Fest, this annual summer showcase of fringe theater, performance, and music has relocated farther north over the past few years. This year’s edition, which runs August 15 through September 23, is housed at the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, 2827 N. Lincoln, and the Famous Door Theatre Company, Jane Addams Center Hull House, 3212 N. Broadway. Directed this year by Beau O’Reilly, the event takes its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big); more than 20 companies and individual artists are featured, among them Famous Door, the Curious Theatre Branch, Retro Theatre, Theater Oobleck, Betty’s Mouth, Ler Noot Fiesta, Studio 108, David Hauptschein, Terri Kapsalis, Frank Melcori, Julie Laffin, David Kodeski, Warren Leming’s Cold Chicago Dance Theater, and Cleveland’s New World Performance Laboratory....

Theaters and Hotels: Strange Bedfellows? With the funding spigot running at a bare trickle at many corporations and philanthropic foundations, arts organizations are thirstier than ever. Recently some local businesses and arts groups have forged promising partnerships that could be a boon for all parties involved. In the theatrical arena alone two hotels with astute general managers have successfully teamed up with theater companies anxious to expose their work to new audiences....

Until now, Alderman Robert Shaw’s supernatural powers were confined to suits loud enough to wake the dead. But at last week’s City Council meeting, Shaw apparently channeled the spirit of Johnnie Cochran, who hasn’t even died yet. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shaw morphed into Cochran during the council debate over Alderman Ginger Rugai’s controversial plan to erect 11 cul-de-sacs in North Beverly along 95th Street and Western Avenue....

Hitsville spent last weekend in Columbia, Missouri, at a University of Missouri conference called “On the Beat: Rock ‘n’ Rap, Mass Media, and Society.” The affair was designed as an academic-journalistic summit on rock, bringing together various professor types (the University of Illinois’ Larry Grossberg; DePaul’s Deena Weinstein, author of Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology) and critics (the New York Times’s Jon Pareles, Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis) for four days of meetings on campus and nightly music at Columbia’s beloved Blue Note, where participants saw Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, and Chuck Berry on successive nights....

DAVID SANCHEZ QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The saxophonist David Sanchez makes the most persuasive case for multiculturalism you’ll hear this year. (When you consider that jazz itself–by seeking and adapting new and disparate influences–is the most multicultural of musics, Sanchez’s case becomes all the stronger.) Even among the horde of practiced and powerful young saxophonists on the scene, Sanchez stands out for reasons that have much to do with his Puerto Rican roots and his command of a broad range of Afro-Caribbean music; listening to the evidence, you can hardly deny the fluidity or impact of this influence....

A few years ago, world cinema received a shot in the arm from so-called glasnost movies from the former Soviet Union–pictures that had been shelved due to various forms of censorship, mostly political, and were finally seeing the light of day thanks to the relaxation or near dissolution of state pressures. For the first time since I started making these annual lists for the Reader five years ago, not one of the pictures was made in Hollywood; significantly, the three Hollywood pictures that came closest are valuable precisely because they attack the lies, distortions, and perversions of the mainstream media....

Two Latino guys in their early 20s, one heavyset, the other thin, are sitting on a stoop, staring at the two-story house across the street. “Who told you that, man?” “Nobody’s gone in there that I know. Just the people that live there.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The house across the street is wooden and rickety. It sits 50 feet back from the street on a deep lot near the corner of Chestnut and Ashland, and it has a backyard and a run-down coach house....

The Santa Fe rail yards, abandoned warehouses, and dusty streets near Ashland and the South Branch of the Chicago River seem empty, but just past dawn on this early Sunday morning Santa-Fe Grapes, 2733 S. Ashland, is bustling with customers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alleruzzo, a short, thin man with cheeks glazed purple and pink by the sun, smiles. At 78, the man they call “the Dean of Randolph Street” is still part of the autumn ritual of the Ashland wine-grape market, just as he has been for 66 years....