Wild Dogs!, East Window Theatre Company, at the Greenview Arts Center. What makes Daniel J. Rubin’s dark comedy so unpleasant is not its unmitigated cynicism but the shrillness of its familiar nihilistic pronouncements and the smugness of its hip pomo attitude. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the rapid-fire style of a children’s adventure, Rubin gives us 15-year-old twins Albert and Trudy, who are plunged into the abyss of late-20th-century America when their mother chops off her ring finger and abandons them....

Friday 4/25 – Thursday 5/1 Ombudsman Andrei Codrescu is not just an essayist, NPR commentator, novelist, editor, and movie star; our nation’s most witty, ironic, and overexposed Romanian emigre is also a poet. He’ll read from his work tonight at the sixth National Poetry Video Festival. His performance will be followed by clips of his film Road Scholar and a screening of some of the year’s best poetry videos. It starts at 8 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E....

CHICAGO MOVING COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If there’s any Western dance equivalent to the oriental forms of No and the martial arts, intended to produce beauty and cosmic connection throughout a lifetime, it’s choreography like that by Nana Shineflug, especially her new 25th-anniversary Chicago Moving Company creation, Coming Forth by Day. At the heart of this work, inspired by a new translation by Normondi Ellies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is a solo by Shineflug herself, “On Becoming Ptah....

DAVID BERKMAN QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist David Berkman has called New York home for 15 years, so a healthy collection of that city’s top-name musicians has heard his intelligently conceived, cleanly crafted, and beautifully balanced jazz. Some of them, including Joe Lovano, Matt Wilson, Tom Harrell, Ray Drummond, and Cecil McBee (with whom he appeared on the 1997 CD Unspoken), have seen fit to hire him, too....

Friday 12/5 – Thursday 12/11 6 SATURDAY Until recently no other newspaper got more mileage out of covering itself than StreetWise. But an editorial overhaul by Brendan Shiller has since turned a good idea, poorly executed, into an actual newspaper. But if you’re still partial to those fascinating vendor profiles, filmmaker Bill Glader’s video documentary Inside StreetWise features four inspiring stories from people who have used the paper to turn their lives around–a man working his way through paramedic school, a woman supporting her young daughter, a former CPA with a brain tumor, and a former addict turned reporter....

The Ballad of Little Jo Then there was “Little Jo” Monaghan, an east-coast debutant who took literally Horace Greeley’s advice to “go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” According to a 1904 newspaper article, Monaghan gave birth to an illegitimate child as a teenager and left home in disgrace. Adopting a male facade to keep from being molested as she ventured into the rugged frontier, she moved to Ruby City (later Silver City), Idaho, in 1867; there she forged a new life as a miner, rancher, and broncobuster....

Basement Jaxx Kids these days can’t sit still–and neither can their music. Look what’s happened to the stodgiest of electronic-dance styles, house. Used to be that once house producers had a groove established, it stayed in place, for four, five, six, seven minutes at a time. Sure, they’d monkey with it–one strain, acid house, was built on sounds made by constantly playing with the pitch shifters of an outmoded analog synthesizer, the Roland TB-303....

The woman known simply as Marilyn may have soaked up her liberal views about sex in Brazil, her mother’s homeland and the country where she was born. Or maybe they’re a reaction to her strict upbringing. These days the onetime Catholic schoolgirl and army brat is the co-owner and director of a gallery devoted to erotic art that opened last year in Wicker Park. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MOGWAI/GANGER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of what’s being tagged “post-rock” over in Britain at this point sounds suspiciously like the sort of slow, hypnotic guitar rock that American bands like Codeine, Slint, and Seam played in the early and mid-90s. Glasgow’s Mogwai have been critical darlings since releasing the rather workmanlike Slint imitation Young Team (Jetset) a couple years ago, but their new Come On Die Young (Matador), produced by Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev knob twirler Dave Fridmann, lives up to the hype....

MONTE WARDEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After fronting the proto-alt-country combo the Wagoneers as a teenager in the late 80s, Austinite Monte Warden maintained only a tenuous connection to country music: though his songwriting credits have turned up on records by Kelly Willis and Patti Loveless, the two fine (if commercially invisible) solo albums he made for Watermelon earlier this decade featured Buddy Holly-flavored retro pop and crisp blue-eyed soul....

PEDRO THE LION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a chart somewhere on the Internet that gives Christian “equivalents” for popular rock bands: if you like the Foo Fighters, try Seven Day Jesus; if it’s Pearl Jam you crave, try Plankeye. The Seattle group Pedro the Lion isn’t on the list, but it should be: its debut album, It’s Hard to Find a Friend (Made in Mexico), is a better Sebadoh album than the new Sebadoh album....

PALADINS 8/6, Double Door This San Diego trio–the only band in the history of the world to record for both Alligator and 4AD–plays roots music with a capital R. On their sixth and latest album, Slippin’ In (Ruf), the Paladins stray further from their blues-rock beginnings to dig deeper into echo-chamber rockabilly and hillbilly thumpers, such as the Everly Brothers-esque “The Hard Way” or the shuffling, steel-guitar-streaked “Strong Boy.” Greaser bands come and go (and hardly anyone notices), but these guys have just gotten better and better over the last decade....

I am happy to see the Reader give coverage to Brazilian music. Unfortunately, it must be difficult to fact check when there are few people who speak Portuguese in Chicago. As a Portuguese speaker who lived in Brazil for four years and has interviewed Caetano Veloso, I would like to point out a few problems with both of your Brazilian music pieces on June 11 [Rock, Etc.]: Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Life at the Theatre Building And then there’s The Life, composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Ira Gasman’s 1997 musical about the drugs and prostitution in pre-Disneyfied Times Square, circa 1980. Taking a page from Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, Coleman, Gasman, and David Newman’s book gets the milieu down pretty well–the hookers and pimps and junkies and assorted hangers-on. Then they focus on the story’s main characters–a prostitute named Queen and her pimp-lover Fleetwood–and their attempts to leave the Life behind....

There’s a wreck of a vacant lot on the south side of North Avenue just west of the Kennedy Expressway. The pavement is broken, but this summer drivers were parking their cars there anyway. Sitting on the lot’s eastern edge was a small booth with a sliding door and the word “PARK” in big black letters. If drivers had opened the door and pulled out a booklet from a dispenser, they would have realized they were in a work of art....

Friday 1/15 – Thursday 1/21 16 SATURDAY Many Soviet artists exhibited their work in alternative spaces not because they were cool but because they had no other choice. Between 1976 and 1983 Rafael Levchin and other underground poets and artists in Moscow would get together in each other’s kitchens and present their work. The so-called kitchen generation named themselves “metarealists” because their work dealt with an alternative reality. One of their multidisciplinary get-togethers will be re-created today at the Chicago Cultural Center; Levchin has dubbed it Glossolalia-2....

Case #98CH2950: Norman v. Pollard Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jay Norman, a Chicago-area Buick district manager, took Jeanne Pollard of Chicago to the 1998 Chicago Auto Show’s “First Look for Charity” event. He had two tickets in a drawing to win a 1998 Chevy Corvette convertible and offered to share part of the prize with his date if he won. When he did win, Norman says, Pollard ran up to claim the prize and later demanded that the organizers give her the car....

CHUCHO VALDES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few things are more exhilarating than the furious rhythmic conversation at the heart of the Chucho Valdes Quartet. A key progenitor of modern Latin jazz, Valdes founded the great Irakere back in the late 1960s, and in recent years this spellbinding Cuban pianist has reached dazzling new heights. His quartet–with bassist Francisco Rubio Pampin, trap drummer Raul Piñeda Roque, and percussionist Roberto Vizcaino Guillot–shifts rhythms seamlessly, infusing jazz improvisations with infectious Afro-Cuban grooves....

Vasily Shulzhenko Joseph Piccillo Moscow painter Vasily Shulzhenko makes ambivalent references to a heroic past in his exhibit at Maya Polsky. The Atlantes shows two men holding up not the world or the heavens but protruding portions of the apartment building behind them. A man sweeping the pavement doesn’t even come up to their knees, making them seem giants–but ordinary, somewhat absurd ones. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the ironic Venus in Moscow, a nude Venus seems to float on a white sheet outside an apartment window....

Improvisation has always been an important facet at Second City, but it was usually treated as a means to an end: scripted sketch comedy shows. The troupe Lois Kaz, formed in 1994, changed all that–named after a longtime Second City employee (and the ex-wife of Second City music director Fred Kaz), it was begun for one reason only, to improvise one-act shows. Its members succeeded admirably. It would have been hard for them to miss: the group included some of the best young improvisers in town, many of whom had already spread their wings in legendary groups like Ed and Jazz Freddy....