Naked Raygun Jettison My first Naked Raygun show, at Tuts in Lakeview in 1983, was an oasis in a long summer of faceless hardcore. Metal influences and thrash were beginning to dominate punk rock, and most of the other bands I’d seen lately–the Exploited, Jodie Foster’s Army, local boys Rights of the Accused–were graceless, pimply shouters in flannel shirts, all about velocity and volume with “politics” that rarely went deeper than “Fuck Reagan....

NU MUSIC MARATHON FEATURING ANTON LUKOSZEVIEZE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first annual NU Music Marathon–that’s “NU” for Northwestern University, but it’s pronounced “new”–consists of six consecutive one-hour sets, each featuring solo or small-group pieces by conceptualists and provocateurs from the U.S. and abroad. Among the roughly two dozen composers represented are Germans Kunsu Shim and Helmut Oehring; young Americans Vanessa Lann, David Smooke, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra resident Augusta Read Thomas; and of course standbys like Cage, Berio, and Kurtag....

In the early 1930s, so the story goes, a young Polish woman was killed in a car crash on the way back from a dance at the O’Henry Ballroom on the south side. Since then many people have reported picking up a young woman in a fancy dress along Archer Avenue, only to see her disappear from her seat as the car passed Resurrection Cemetery. One story has a passerby noticing a woman locked behind the cemetery’s fence after dark and calling the police....

Scott Parkinson may be only 29, but he deserves a lifetime achievement award for his portrayal of Richard III in Shakespeare on the Green’s current production–most actors need a lifetime to achieve this level of sophistication and cunning. As Shakespeare’s misshapen misanthrope–willing to flatter, woo, or behead anybody who stands in his way–Parkinson struts about with sparkling malevolence, withering his opponents with his laser-sharp voice, conning even the most suspicious nobles, and stopping the show now and then to invite the audience to delight in the idiocy of those who fall for his chicanery....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’re in luck: The day your letter arrived, I was on my way to my dermatologist’s office to have a mole the size of Portland hacked off my leg. I gave my derma doc–Dr. Frank Behring–your letter, and while he was carving me up, here’s what he said: “Pimples, ‘big, crazy, sometimes painful pimples on the tush,’ can be a manifestation of acne....

Joel Ross Nicholas Sistler: The Confounded Eye Joel Ross’s installations dwarf the viewer. Measuring Texas, the principal installation in his show at Vedanta V-2, consists of 881 photos stretching across two walls in a grid. Size does matter here, since Ross set out to photograph every mile marker on the stretch of Interstate 10 that runs across Texas from New Mexico to Louisiana. And that’s exactly what he did. When a marker was missing, he photographed the spot where it should have been....

SUNNYLAND SLIM TRIBUTE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Barrelhouse Chuck studied under two of Chicago’s all-time masters–Little Brother Montgomery and Sunnyland Slim–and his style is a personalized blend of the former’s percussive rootsiness and the latter’s impeccable melodicism and rhythmic sense. Among the musicians joining him in this tribute to Sunnyland, who died two years ago this month, are two members of Sunnyland’s last working band, rock-steady bassist Bob Stroger and the inventive, jump-blues-influenced saxophonist Sam Burckhardt....

THE CLOWN, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at the Lunar Cabaret, and CUT IT OUT!, Caravan/Caravan, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at the Lunar Cabaret. It was just chance that two of the entries in this year’s Rhino Fest (which closes this weekend) are adaptations of works by Heinrich Bšll, but they play off each other nicely. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neither is particularly faithful. Though Douglas Grew and Frank Melcori call their hour-long version of Bšll’s thick novel The Clown “a distillation…not a substitute,” even that’s an overstatement: Bšll’s dry wit and clear-eyed descriptions of postwar life hardly appear in the piece except for a few lines of narration....

David Teplica Looking at these photos made me realize how neatly the phenomenon of twins suits the postmodern ethos, which calls into question, even denies, the authenticity of individual identity as well as of imagery. At least since Cindy Sherman began working, in the mid-70s, photographers have been filling galleries with wall-size installations of self-portraits in which no version of the self is privileged over any other. And the way Teplica often photographs his twins–intertwined, each facing some part of the other–they look a bit like cutout paper dolls....

Beyond the Mat Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Documentaries are almost always more interesting if the filmmakers fess up about their relationship to the subject, as unabashed pro-wrestling fan Barry Blaustein does in this naively made, compelling homage to the sport. A former writer-producer for Saturday Night Live and first-time director, Blaustein seems to have stumbled into a documentarian’s dream yet manages to appear more empathic than exploitive....

BLACK HEART PROCESSION, ORSO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two songs into Three (Touch and Go), the third album by the Black Heart Procession, I was already profoundly bummed out: the group’s emotional range extends approximately from the dark torpor of Leonard Cohen to the gothic garishness of Nick Cave. Multi-instrumentalists Tobias Nathaniel and Pall Jenkins–who, ironically, live in sunny San Diego–build their sad songs on gentle acoustic guitar arpeggios and simple, graceful piano melodies, adding layers of shifting instrumental detail....

BOB BERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When tenor saxist Michael Brecker left Horace Silver’s band in 1974, his replacement was Bob Berg, and you really can’t beat that for symbolism. Brecker’s huge metallic sound, piston-driven technique, ground-zero intensity, and enduring fascination with harmonic permutations inspired by the middle period of John Coltrane’s career now constitute the template for an entire school of modern tenor men....

In 1928 Stalin proposed the creation of a Soviet Jewish Autonomous Zone in Birobidzhan, a remote marshy area on the Chinese border. Beginning in 1934, thousands of Soviet Jews–along with Jewish leftists from the U.S. and other countries–were drawn to the region by the promise of freedom to express their cultural identity. Life there was difficult (the family shown here stands outside an underground mud hut, known as a zemlianka), and the dream of a “Soviet Zion” came to an end with the birth of Israel in 1948 and Stalin’s continued campaign against Jewish culture and institutions....

CIRCLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The sumptuous, magisterial gloom of Circle evokes the unrelenting climate and geographical remoteness of the sextet’s native Finland. In the early 90s their noisy, riff-driven rock was distinguished mostly by Spacemen 3-like drones and unusual time signatures, but over the years they’ve meticulously cultivated a sound of their own, reconciling the metronomic intensity of Krautrock, the ethereal drift of ambient music, and the baroque flourishes of prog-rock....

By Ben Joravsky But the dead man’s friends and family believe Richman was the victim of bullies with badges who shared the system’s contempt for a bold environmental crusader. In 1981 Jack’s father, a lawyer and former FBI agent, suffered a stroke; six years later he died. Jack’s only sibling, a sister, lived in Boston. For the last two decades his closest friend and companion was his mother, a Chicago public school principal who eagerly drove him about in her Cadillac Fleetwood....

By Michael Miner Despite this discouragement, exorcism is a topic with which the press occasionally becomes obsessed. Consider these headlines: “Exercises in Exorcism,” Christianity Today. “Exorcism Frenzy,” Newsweek. “Exorcism: Is It for Real?” Christianity Today. “Exorcist: the Roman Catholic Rite,” Newsweek. “Who Believes in Exorcism?” Christianity Today. “Devil and the Priest,” Saturday Evening Post. “Sexorcist,” New York Times Magazine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McClory was speaking of Cardinal George’s appointment of a priest to act as archdiocesan exorcist....

GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Godspeed You Black Emperor! follows in the footsteps of Roy Montgomery, Holger Czukay, and Scenic by composing vivid sound tracks to nonexistent movies. But while those other artists seem content to let their records do the talking, this nine-piece ensemble from Montreal devotes most of its energy to its live show: in its four years the band has embarked on several tours but made just one album, f#a#°, originally released in Quebec on vinyl and only recently reissued on CD by Chicago’s Kranky label....

GUIDED BY VOICES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Following an uncharacteristically lengthy two-year silence, Robert Pollard’s Guided by Voices has resurfaced on a new label with a bright, shiny new album, Do the Collapse (TVT). In the past Pollard has notoriously sabotaged records that were sounding too professional in the studio, preferring tape hiss, jarring fades, and inconsistent recording levels to anything resembling clarity, depth, or oomph....

Out to Sea Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unless I’ve lost count, this is the seventh comedy pairing Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and neither the standard-issue trailer nor the prospect of seeing these geezers as dance hosts on a Caribbean luxury cruise filled me with any sympathetic anticipation. For a long time this duo has been picking through ersatz or second-rate Billy Wilder and Neil Simon material without adding any sparks....

For a group of people long labeled sinners–and understandably sensitive to a charge that’s still made–it’s more than a little ironic that gays and lesbians should select a sin as our annual rallying cry. And not just any sin, but the sin Pope Gregory the Great called “the queen of them all.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gays and lesbians embraced the sin of pride 30 years ago to combat something that was, at the time, a much deadlier problem for queers than any of Evagrius’s wicked passions or Greg’s capital vices–shame....