Jerry Weller, the 11th District representative who’s up for reelection in November, has some explaining to do. As I wrote in an August 25 cover story, “The Congressman and the Dictator’s Daughter,” he’s already raised questions about whether he has a conflict of interest because he’s refused to step down from the House of Representative’s influential Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere even though he’s married to Zury Rios Sosa, a third-term legislator in Guatemala....

You’d think by now all exegesis would have been squeezed out of Kewpie dolls, Jesus lamps, and geisha figurines. But Liliana Porter’s show, “Girl With Rubber Dog, and Other Situations,” suggests that tchotchkes still have a story to tell. Porter’s meticulous screen prints, wall-mounted sculptures, and photographs present resuscitated figures in vignettes that read like cells excerpted from a storyboard. In the slick C-print Dialogue With Teapot, the gaze of a Dutch girl on a ceramic basket-weave teapot meets the glance of a geisha statuette posed with the teapot against a perspectiveless cream background....

Patty Chang: Shangri-La Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Predictably, the exhibition catalog refers to what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror phase” of development, when a child’s self-recognition enables the ego to progress through imagined projections of a unified self. Like Lacan, Chang recognizes the role fantasy plays in forming identity–and in the identity art she creates. Such work, which focuses not on the artist’s individual humanity but on some group identification (race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability), often falters when it relies on a humorless, self-martyring combination of condescension and accusation to supposedly subvert stereotypes....

In 1974 a White House under duress released a transcript of President Nixon’s secret tapes. The next day the Tribune published all 246,000 words, and a week later it asked Nixon to resign. The Tribune newsroom tends to regard the Times newsroom as a collection of prima donnas to whom Chicago is, in one Tribune writer’s words, a collection of “hayseed interlopers.” But that’s the generality. Baquet is a specific. He came up through the Tribune and went on to the New York Times before going to Los Angeles....

Michael, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I believe that, instead, he let the locker-room machismo of his former career overshadow the circumspection that would more properly befit a state supreme court justice. His suit, even if it were to benefit him personally, could do great harm to the legal system he heads. Any appellate panel that touches this will be second-guessed, and the upholding of the verdict will–rightly or wrongly–cast the whole concept of impartiality into question....

Until it finally showed up on record store shelves last month, it seemed PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES’ much-talked-about third album, Elan Vital (Matador), might never see the light of day. For much of the last two years the band appeared to be in a state of entropy: second guitarist Nathan Thelen left the group and was replaced by keyboardist Leona Marrs; the record was recorded and mixed only to be scrapped and tried again; and once it was completed, the release date was bumped three times....

In the lineage of the goth-rock superhero–which runs from gothfather David Bowie through black prince Peter Murphy all the way to whatever Perry Farrell is–Andrew Eldritch is certainly the most overlooked. Never mind that the Sisters of Mercy pretty much spearheaded the so-called second wave of goth in the mid-to-late-80s, or that the current darkwave scene would barely be worth paying attention to (on the boys’ side, at least) without the influence of Eldritch’s opaque cool and sonorous vocal style....

The venue for this interactive show a la Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding is a dance club, and the concept is that various character types from teen angst movies are attending Wanaget High’s 1989 prom. But the show’s jock, cheerleader, geek, exchange student, and outsiders (named Fender and Dickie and costumed just like John Hughes’s Bender and Duckie) are never fleshed out. And though familiar stories of high school conflict are flimsily reenacted on occasion, most of the show loses the battle with the club’s blaring music and bar chatter....

Austin, Texas honky-tonkers the Derailers are having a hard time recovering from the departure of singer and songwriter Tony Villanueva. The band still had the same basic hardscrabble sound on last year’s Soldiers of Love, with Brian Hofeldt stepping in as the singer, but the depth and presence of Villanueva’s vocals was sorely missed. The new Under the Influence of Buck (Palo Dura) is better; unfortunately, the Derailers didn’t write a single tune on it....

Don’t bury me on the lone prairie And you’ll stand out in buttons and bows. –Gene Autry Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the problem with Langford’s art is not that it’s shallow or repetitive. It’s that the only aspect of these performers that really seems to interest him is that they’ve been forgotten. Practically the only thing you’ll learn from looking at his images of Georgie Goebel or Homer & Jethro or Rex Allen is that nobody knows who they are anymore....

Indian classical music has proved to be a wonderfully malleable tradition over the last five decades or so, with remarkable musicians like guitarist Brij Kabra and saxophonist Kadiri Gopalnath finding ways to play the ancient repertoire on Western instruments. In the late 70s U. Srinivas began adapting the mandolin for Carnatic music, and since then the self-taught musician has become one of India’s most exciting voices. He’s perhaps best known in the West as a member of John McLaughlin’s Indian-jazz fusion ensemble, Remember Shakti, but it’s in performing the unfiltered music of his homeland that he truly shines....

Laura Mackin’s show at Contemporary Art Workshop is based on “imagery from strangers,” she says. “When you find someone’s videos or pictures, they seem mysterious at first, and then you wind up imagining the intentions of the people who made them.” The origin of this exhibit is a home video she bought at a thrift store while she was an undergrad at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Rabbits, squirrels, cartoons, etc....

The first animal that Irene Hardwicke Olivieri incorporated in her work was a walking stick, found when she was an undergrad in Texas. “They’re pretty amazing,” she says. “They have a record copulating time among insects of 72 hours, and they’re capable of parthenogenesis.” She kept it in a terrarium for a while, reading everything she could about the species, and when it died she put it in an artwork, under glass with a text about walking sticks painted on it....

Few women chafe against the Nashville hit-factory system because it doesn’t allow them to be girly enough, but Deana Carter may be such a rarity. When Carter broke out on Capitol a decade back with Did I Shave My Legs for This? (on the strength of the genuinely funny title track and the wistfully folkish “Strawberry Wine”), she was hardly a virago, and given her small, supple voice she couldn’t even have been cast as one; the title track of her 2003 album I’m Just a Girl was even more defiantly unliberated....

Mick Collins has been trying for ten years to get people to stop calling the Dirtbombs a garage band. Their recent singles compilation, If You Don’t Already Have a Look (In the Red), includes covers of the Bee Gees’ “I Started a Joke,” Soft Cell’s “Insecure Me,” and Yoko Ono’s “Kiss Kiss Kiss.” (“Fuck you and your white belt,” Collins adds in the liner notes.) But methinks he doth protest too much....

Symmetry Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Symmetry has a conventional structure: boy gets opportunity, boy loses opportunity, boy gets different opportunity. Oscar Newman is a brilliant physicist teaching at Albuquerque State out of a mysterious all-consuming loyalty to his mentor, department head Neal Julian. The setting is also conveniently near the home of Oscar’s late mother, a famous watercolorist conveniently influenced by the Eastern philosophy taught by Oscar’s office mate, equally brilliant scholar Ecco Sagada, who’s consigned to Albuquerque for equally mysterious reasons....

I place the French Kicks in the category of New York bands that never get their due because they’re unreasonably expected to blow the pants right off your ass. I think this bias goes back to the dawn of the decade, when rock crits drew a line in the sand between rad postpunk acts (Interpol, Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and bands that merely write good alt-rock songs (the Natural History, Walkmen, French Kicks)....

Jordan Harrison’s fanciful tale of an inspired teenage girl, Moll, who invents a machine that can “hear the unhearable” is loaded with clever whimsy–not to mention hilarious sound cues courtesy of Foley artist Scotty Iseri. The crux of this 90-minute fable, directed with a light but sure hand by Damon Kiely, is how Moll (played with winning gusto by Gwendolyn Whiteside) deals with having her machine stolen–and heart broken–by a shape-shifting mercenary....

Brett Favre appeared at Soldier Field this month like a figure out of the Iliad. In addition to taking the Pack to two Super Bowls and one championship since the Bears’ last title 20 years ago, Favre had beaten the Bears in front of their home fans 11 straight times. Yet this season found the Bears resurgent and the Packers on the wane, with Favre sometimes looking like the only real player left on his team....

A few weeks ago, on the back patio of the Handlebar, two dozen friends and well-wishers clustered around Paul Smith and Ben Helphand as they raffled off “vaguely democracy-themed” items from a battered UPS next-day-air envelope: a vintage paperback copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals; a goody bag of swag donated by the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail; a jar of honey from the North Lawndale-based Chicago Honey Co-op (“A model of democracy to emulate,” cracked Helphand, “minus the queen part....