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ALFRED EISENSTAEDT Making the grandiose pithy and the ordinary grand is no mean task–it takes work. “I have found that the most important element in my equipment is not an expensive camera or a unique lens but patience, patience, patience,” he has said. “If you don’t know how to stand knee-deep in water for hours, or sit broiling in the sunshine while mosquitoes buzz around your head, remaining absolutely motionless yet relaxed and alert, you are finished before you start....

“Business communications” firm whose name we wouldn’t care to have: “Creative Executions Ltd.” of Glen Ellyn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Brothers and sisters who are the victims of neglect and abuse are frequently separated by DCFS [the state Department of Children and Family Services] and placed in different foster homes,” says Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy. “While at times this is unavoidable because of the lack of adequate resources, what is avoidable is the fact that DCFS prevents brothers and sisters from visiting one another....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I read your reader’s lament, and the responses from the auto industry, regarding the auto headlights that don’t shut off automatically when you turn the ignition off [Straight Dope, March 2], I was surprised that no one mentioned what I feel is an even better alternative that is currently available at nominal cost. This is a tiny device, which can be purchased for under five dollars and installed by virtually anyone with the barest minimum of mechanical aptitude, which emits a beep or some other type of audible warning whenever you turn off the ignition without first switching the headlights off....

Earlier this football season, I survived something of a crisis. For about the 25th time in my life–but for the first time in several years–I decided I just didn’t enjoy the sport. I spent the first three weeks of the season in Europe, which effectively removed me from the season-long, spread-based office football pool, and when I returned I threw myself briskly back into baseball. By the time I got to football, studying it as yet another cultural artifact, it seemed once again a mean and brutish sport, violent and territorial....

When I was in an artillery unit in Vietnam, we were told that each shell we fired cost the taxpayers several thousand dollars to manufacture, disregarding the cost to develop the weapon itself or the cost of training the manpower to shoot it. We speculated that, considering the great number of rounds we fired, the United States could easily have instead built each Vietnamese a beautiful suburban house complete with swimming pool instead of spending the money trying to kill them....

BLOOD IN THE FACE It was a sparsely attended meeting. Before that we made small talk with the handful of other people present–including the couple who owned the trailer and a young man who identified himself as the son of communists and who cheerfully explained that the society had deliberately adopted the structure of the Communist Party, complete with cell meetings like this one and vows of secrecy. He and everyone else in the room seemed friendly, normal everyday folks, until the film projector blew a fuse just as they began to screen a movie....

A Man and His Xerox “I don’t know how I can entirely say no to that,” Leahy allowed. “I’m certainly publishing my own stuff, that’s for sure.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “None of this makes much sense to writers who live comfortably in the liberal tradition of writing. Liberals are quite comfortable with the assumption that leftists and conservatives have no right to see print....

The first warning was a knock on Vevelyn Diamond’s back door at about two in the morning. It was a man–Diamond doesn’t know who–crying “fire.” She and her husband, John, had been talking about the fire in the basement that had been extinguished only a few hours before. John flung open the front door, and the flames, which were leaping up the front stairwell, spread into the living room. Police suspect arson, though they have made no arrests....

Souleymane Cisse’s extraordinarily beautiful and mesmerizing fantasy is set in the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) long before it was invaded by Morocco in the 16th century. A young man (Issiaka Kane) sets out to discover the mysteries of nature (or komo, the science of the gods), but his jealous and spiteful father prevents him from deciphering the elements of the Bambara sacred rites and tries to kill him....

Friday 20 Matthew Owens–sculptor, puppeteer, and connoisseur of death, gore, and corpses–is in the midst of another performance piece. RM 1348 limns the gory thought-dreams of a hospital patient (he’s in room 1348) between operations. “Jumping from narrative to shadow puppetry,” say the folks at Club Lower Links, “from musical interludes to intrusive medical treatment, from philosophizing to inarticulate babbling, the piece is intended to convey the relationship (real or perceived) of modern medicine and state-sanctioned torture as well as that of the renegade hypochondriac and the very real consequences of disease and malady....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Country-folkie Darden Smith, most recently of Austin, Texas, isn’t doing anything really modern–he’s most comfortable espousing a relatively enlightened country style, and even at his poppiest (on a bouncy number like “Frankie & Sue”) he achieves a 70s sound reminiscent of the Sanford-Townsend Band’s “Smoke From a Distant Fire.” But he has an intimate, cozy way with a melody–the one on the shimmering “2,000 Years,” for example, efficiently overwhelms the song’s kinda dumb apocalyptic visions–and his newest album, Trouble No More, is questioning, calm, and likeable....

I’m over at the new library watching Shorebirds Atlantic, a free lunch-hour dance concert by Margaret Jenkins and Rinde Eckert. They’re known as intense postmodern performers from San Francisco, very cool, so I’m all serious. The lights come up on a man and a woman dressed in identical white bathing caps, black swim goggles, white shirts, long white coats, longer white cotton skirts, and black gym shoes. “Death,” the man says, “has become regrettably commonplace....

DEATH AND PANCAKES Guy (Russell Alan Rowe) is a 32-year-old gay songwriter who discovers one night that his telephone is a time machine. Drowsy and relaxed after a phone-sex session, he idly dials his family’s old number–and makes contact with himself 20 years ago (young Guy is played with deep feeling and a beautiful tenor by Keith Anderson). The experiment leads to grim flashbacks from Guy’s childhood: the sudden death of his father (played by Barnes, who’s also the offstage keyboardist, under the stage name Eddie Briscoe); a series of classroom embarrassments (Guy’s talent for writing stories brings him more trouble than acclaim); a war-zone relationship with his widowed mother (Kim Docter), who in a string of careless insults takes out her loneliness and frustration on her kid; and an even worse situation with his 15-year-old brother Brad, who likes to call his kid brother a cocksucker–and likes to prove it by coaxing/forcing Guy into oral sex in the basement....

The most interesting bird I’ve seen this spring at Somme Woods was a transient, a male prairie warbler who sang all morning on May 26, and couldn’t be found on May 27. The dominant type resulting from the cross is the Brewster’s warbler, which looks very much like the blue-winged except that, instead of solid yellow underparts, it has a white throat and belly separated by a patch of yellow on the breast....

The Pomo Afro Homos are three living organisms whose distinguishing social characteristics are nicely encapsulated in the group’s name. These days, of course, those characteristics are also pathologies, a fact that lays the groundwork for the 12 stories that make up the Fierce Love performance cycle. The stories deal with everything you’d expect them to: love and hate, denial and loneliness, pain and (you bet) pleasure. Some are dopey, one is steamy, but most are devastatingly funny, whether it’s a cluster-bomb attack on In Living Color’s stereotypical queers or a rap song on the complications of modern gay fashion accoutrements (“A red bandana / means fuck me”)....

The bartender sets a glass of thick, tawny red liquid in front of me. At the bottom is a heap of dark pellets; were the bar lighter and my brain less addled, I would immediately identify them as raisins. After inhaling the fumes, I throw back a mouthful, and the hot drink burns the back of my throat, warms my stomach, and starts my head spinning. The sweetness that comes after the liquor’s bite lures me into another swallow....

HALF MY FACE IS A CLOWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a quick succession of 14 scenes, Odenkirk explores the theme of performance, assuming a variety of characters and developing their situations with satisfyingly coherent comic logic. In one bit he’s a bad stand-up comedian stealing his jokes from “Bazooka Joe” comics as he chews gum onstage; in another he’s an uncomfortable priest delivering a woefully unprepared funeral eulogy; in another he’s a stereotyped hillbilly boozer who suddenly breaks character to criticize the audience’s willingness to laugh at such stereotypes....

Guitarist Jack Johnson teamed up with Frank Frost (harp, piano, guitar) and drummer Sam Carr back in 1963, and as the Jelly Roll Kings they established themselves as one of the Clarksdale, Mississippi, area’s most popular blues bands. Rowdy and exuberant, playing everything from Delta blues standards to country-western novelty numbers and pop tunes, they carry on in the great juke-joint tradition: they’re technically proficient but raw around the edges, dedicated to filling the house with joy, and they play with a refreshing informality and willingness take chances....

For almost a year now peace has reigned at Wrigley Field. The Cubs have their lights, the fans a pennant run, and the residents of nearby Lakeview, well, they’ve more or less accepted the fact of night baseball. Not that it matters how Hansen or local residents feel. The law was passed with almost no opposition. Mayor Daley did not publicly endorse it. But his brother–state senator John Daley–did. Worse, the proposal was introduced by a Chicago state senator–Thaddeus Lechowicz, a Daley ally from the northwest side....

There isn’t much evidence these days that this city was once the scene of a lively country music industry. But in the 1930s and ’40s many famous country singers and musicians lived in Chicago and recorded their classics here. Many of them were drawn by what at the tune was the most popular country music radio show in the United States: the WLS Barn Dance. Although the Barn Dance died in 1960 and many members of its cast have retired, country-western singer and songwriter Patsy Montana–one of the show’s biggest stars–has yet to quit....