“I have as many opinions as Steve Albini,” says Brad Wood. “I just don’t get asked.” Wood, proprietor of the Wicker Park production company Idful Music, is slowly getting some attention after his wowser work with Liz Phair and Red Red Meat, but comparisons between acerbic, hardline underground producer Albini and the genial and pop-steeped Wood seem a bit strained. Wood likes and respects Albini, and he does have some strong opinions, but they tend to be delivered graciously, and it’s almost impossible to get him to say anything remotely controversial....

Buried Child Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as the hero of Buried Child learns, you can’t go home again. Well, you can, but things won’t be the same. Buried Child isn’t a bad show; it’s certainly not a decayed relic, like the farmhouse to which Vince returns, searching for his roots. That dilapidated farmhouse, designed by Robert Brill and lit by Kevin Rigdon, is one of the production’s greatest assets: sprawling, surreally tall, with buckling floorboards, an improbably steep stairway, and a mounted stag’s head peering over the trashed-out TV room in which the action occurs....

Top Ten Albums for ’95 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sally Timms, To the Land of Milk and Honey. Mekons singer Timms freely notes that she lacks the sexual angst of a PJ Harvey; her second solo record, made in Chicago with Dave Trumfio and Jon Langford, captures the improbably distinguished voice of a self-described riot granny who’s watched punk evolve for 20 years and uses this perspective to imbue her songs and a wild selection of covers with depth and substance....

No one’s ever called journalism an exact science. But it gets to miss the broad side of the barn only so often before the finicky turn angry. “Channel Seven news has learned that detectives discovered boot prints near the murder scene,” Goudie revealed. “We’ve been told that authorities have now determined the sole pattern was made by boots like this–cheap imitation military-style high-tops.” As Goudie continued, the camera lingered for about nine seconds–a newscast eternity–on a pair of black boots of the type an ersatz storm trooper might wear, especially the worst kind of ersatz storm trooper, the swaggering brutal blond Nazi homosexual ersatz storm trooper and cold-blooded assassin....

WHEN HECK WAS A PUPPY: THE LIVING TESTIMONIES OF FOLK ARTIST EDNA MAE BRICE When Heck Was a Puppy–written by Lomnicki, Michael Blackwell, and Nancy Neven Shelton, based on a compilation of life stories by Lomnicki, Mercier, and other southern folk artists–is a curious, at moments magical play that feels more like an extended performance monologue. In it Lomnicki also plays a game called Jumbled Up Geography and spontaneously asks audience members questions (“If you could be an animal, what would you like to be?...

AFTER MAGRITTE and THE AMERICAN DREAM Chroma-Zone Productions at Mary-Arrchie Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One would hardly call Tom Stoppard’s After Magritte or Edward Albee’s The American Dream an unfamiliar work. There seems to be at least one production of each of these suckers here every year. I’m sure there are plenty of logical reasons to continue reviving both–they’re short and written by reputable playwrights, and they feature small casts and uncomplicated sets....

The staircase leading up to our neighbor’s front porch is crumbling. The paint is flaking off and splinters of wood, sometimes whole boards, are falling onto a patch of garden alongside our house. This has been happening since Mrs. Lederer’s death three months ago, almost as if her life force, even away in a nursing home, were the only thing holding her house together. The front of the yard was kept free of leaves and litter through the efforts of Anna, a grossly underpaid and overworked servant who remained mysteriously loyal to Mrs....

I’ve Lived to Tell It All George Jones is lily-livered. Not only that, he gives crappy interviews. Jones has been working the publicity circuit lately, peddling his recently released autobiography I’ve Lived to Tell It All. TV chitchats may help George spread the word, but they leave you wondering if he has anything to say. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve Lived to Tell It All, cowritten by Tom Carter, tries its best to live up to the title....

A showcase for generally unknown, mostly young pro, semipro, and student directors, this monthlong event features productions ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material, all in the service of what Bailiwick press materials proclaim “a new world vision.” Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 883-1090. Opens Sunday, October 1, 7:30 PM. Through October 26: Mondays-Thursdays, 7:30 PM; no show Thursday, October 5; each program features two or three one-acts packaged under a single title....

One of the prizes of this year’s Fringe festival is west-coast singer Cameron Silver, who re-creates the feeling of a 30s German cabaret in his fine performance Berlin to Babylon: The Songs of Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender. Like Michael Feinstein, whose recordings have introduced the music of such composers as George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin to post-baby boom audiences, Silver connects to the music of a past era and brings Weill’s and Hollaender’s songs to life with a passionate intensity....

I’ve always believed that Daniel Barenboim feels more leeway as a chamber musician than as a conductor: when collaborating with a few like-minded souls rather than an entire orchestra, he can at least indulge his sense of adventure, his penchant not to stick with the same interpretation. He’ll have a chance to prove it once more at this Sunday’s sampler of Schubert’s music for four hands, which he’ll perform with longtime pal Radu Lupu....

Fickle Trib Irks Ryan “The threadbare nature of the state’s case was obvious long ago to anyone who read the powerful, passionate work of Tribune columnist Eric Zorn,” declared the Tribune’s November 6 editorial. It was written by Wycliff two days after a Du Page County judge described the original police investigation as “sloppy, very sloppy” and acquitted Cruz of the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico. Yet if “DuPage authorities had had their way,” said the Tribune, “Cruz and [codefendant Alejandro] Hernandez would be dead now, executed…on the basis of ‘evidence’ that was never more than a tissue of lies....

Spencer Dormitzer Spencer Dormitzer’s startlingly goofy paintings–15 are on view at Space Gallery–are something of a surprise even today, when anything can be art. True, bright, pop colors, cartoonish imagery, and bizarre fantasy figures all made it into galleries years ago. What’s striking is the way his aggressive, sensually colored figures, which look like pop icons but are mostly his inventions, are often left almost surrealistically unexplained. His work is a bit like a brilliantly drawn comic book, more subtly colored than it seems at first, with a story by Andre Breton....

By Jordan Marsh The peculiarly Chicago story of the Reliance Building begins in the aftermath of the great fire of 1871. Bounded by water on three sides and railyards on the fourth, downtown Chicago rebuilt upward instead of outward. “Tall” buildings of four and five stories were constructed, to the amazement of locals and visitors alike. Twenty years later, most of those awe-inspiring buildings were demolished. Chicago’s unrelenting growth and development (the city’s population more than doubled in the 1880s) had rendered them obsolete....

Mississippi Heat could easily have been a dreary revivalist outfit, the blues equivalent of those ersatz “Dixieland” bands that tootle for the yahoos in overpriced bistros along Bourbon Street during convention season. But guitarist Billy Flynn is a fiery, emotional player for whom the old blues sounds are as urgent now as they were for the Delta migrants who created them in the late 40s and early 50s. Pierre Lacocque is that rare younger-generation harpist who’s absorbed the lessons of subtlety, silence, and solo construction from the masters–Big and Little Walter, the two Sonny Boy Williamsons–as well as their raucous, hawklike tonal power....

Lead Story In August a television station in Jacksonville, Florida, that had been carrying Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour suspended the show and threatened to cancel it altogether because of Falwell’s sexually explicit descriptions of the alleged foibles of President Clinton. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The French newspaper Le Parisien reported in November that a black man who was the object of racist remarks made by an elderly woman in a Vienna train station snatched the woman’s train ticket and ate it....

Zully Alvarado, her head held high, is walking with the help of a cane through her Ravenswood shoe and clothing shop. She’s told me she wears a size-one and a size-six shoe, but I can’t tell which is which. “I like to say I’m making a living,” says Alvarado. Then she adds, “I look at my shoes not as a business but meeting the needs of society.” That’s the way she’s come to look at most things....

To the Chicago Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A nuttier theory is possible. I learn from the article on Harvey in the great 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Harvey numbered among his patients Francis Bacon; so an upholder of the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays might be led to the view that Bacon discovered the circulation of the blood and taught it to Harvey–or even that, tired of the writing of plays, he induced his stalking-horse Shakespeare to retire to the country (where indeed the latter died in 1616) and began now to write medical lectures and books, with Harvey as his new front man....

Highly controversial and troubling but undeniably powerful and impossible to dismiss, this French feature cowritten (with critic Jacques Fieschi) by, directed by, and starring the late Cyril Collard follows the last reckless days and nights of a 30-year-old cinematographer and musician who discovers he is HIV positive but continues to have sex with strangers as well as with his two more regular lovers. Based on Collard’s autobiographical novel Les nuits fauves, Savage Nights won Cesars (the French equivalent of Oscars) for best picture, best first picture, most promising actress (Romane Bohringer), and best editing a few days after the 35-year-old filmmaker died of AIDS in March 1993....

When the folks at Sheila, who’d been improvising every Wednesday at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap in Hyde Park, opened their north-side show a little over a year ago, they had a great gimmick–the “giant wall of plot twists”–and a lot of charm and spunk but not much else. They depended for laughs on cuteness, sheer spontaneity, and the easy absurdity of working a randomly chosen plot twist (“a sudden death” or “a love scene,” for example) into an improvised sketch that had hitherto been about, say, two guys arguing over a chainsaw....