It’s relatively easy to hang a mythology on your sound when you come from, say, Norway, a place plenty of Americans consider exotic. But like many bands in the current wave of American black metal, Saint Charles’s Nachtmystium has to work a little harder. Grotty fifth-gen cassette demos are out; running your own label (in this case, emerging powerhouse Battle Kommand) and making it viable is in. Fractious sub-subgenre snobbery is out; touring with everyone from Deicide to Pelican is in....

Nicholas A. Patricca’s comedy, reworked from a version staged by Bailiwick in 1993, centers around a gay, HIV-positive Catholic priest trying to hold onto his financially strapped parish and his sexually frustrated boyfriend, a Jewish professor. Patricca resists playing his protagonist’s unusual situation for laughs, trying instead to keep the story grounded in the real world. But if that’s his intention, he should confront more fully the harrowing fear and anguish that must surely accompany life as a gay priest–now more than ever given the recent push to ban even celibate gay men from the clergy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s attributed to first assistant state’s attorney Robert Milan, Cook County’s second-ranking prosecutor. I assume this is just careless venting over the fact that Cook County Board president Todd Stroger has apparently backed out of an agreement to boost prosecutors’ pay. Because if it’s how Milan and the attorneys he supervises really think, then it means the state’s attorney’s office doesn’t have much respect for some of the basic fundamentals of American justice....

My wife and I were married straight out of college. At the time I knew she suffered from a potentially debilitating mental disorder, so I came into the relationship with my eyes fully open. Since then, nine years and two children have followed. About two years ago her disorder began to get worse. Suicidal ideation, hallucinations, delusions, and the like. Her psychiatrist put her on a new medication that for the most part has eliminated her symptoms....

The $75,000 Parking Spot And what does Stone say? “He’s a schmuck,” says Stone. “I love running against schmucks.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brewer, an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, says he had one of those aha moments that could occur to anyone who takes the time to study one of hun-dreds of deals that are routinely approved every year. The parking garage is the product of the Devon-Western tax increment financing district, which, like all other TIFs, siphons property taxes away from schools and parks in order to subsi-dize development that, in theory anyway, will eventually generate even more tax revenue....

If Neil LaBute weren’t already Neil LaBute, I’d say this 2002 play shows potential. There’s some nicely structured dialogue, effective black humor, a novel variation on the baby-stoning bit from Edward Bond’s Saved–and most of all, a noble refusal to demonize even the most grotesque behavior. But the author/auteur of In the Company of Men should be beyond the sluggish predictability of this look at suburban teenaged lumpen rage. With a stock assortment of degenerate parents and disaffected kids and tropes out of Jerry Springer and Maury Povich (plus an earnest overlay of Michael Moore), this is 105 minutes of deja vu....

Jeff Dorchen has spent his career goring sacred cows. And when he runs out of victims, he gores himself, as he did in his brilliant 1995 one-man show, The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain. Cain delivers his rambling confessional monologue–which Dorchen insists has “12 percent new material” in its Rhino fest incarnation–to a callow young man who’s about to evict him. The sad irony is that at first Cain believes his persecutor is famed music historian Alan Lomax, come to document Cain’s work and revive his flagging career....

What with the new war on terror and the ongoing war on drugs, I’ve heard a lot of people make the claim that the United States has incarcerated a higher proportion of its citizens than any other country in history. To me, this claim seems tenuous at best. What about countries such as China, the USSR, and Germany during the mid-20th century? Perhaps the jail population would be low, but with all of the secret detainments and labor camps, the actual total would be more befitting of the all-time title....

After watching countless spy movies, westerns, and TV cop shows, I wonder: how easy is it to knock someone out by smacking them on the back of the head with a pistol, club, etc? Since I’m not willing to act as a test subject, although I’m pretty sure I’d have plenty of volunteers willing to do the smacking, I’m asking you as the next-best source. –Dave Arnold, Ashland, Kansas Best of Chicago voting is live now....

This Broadway hit explores the humanity behind the fearsome image of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Based on Gregory Maguire’s marvelous 1995 novel, the show focuses on ungainly, green-skinned Elphaba (whose name comes from the initials of Chicago author L. Frank Baum, inventor of Oz). As she’s transformed from oddball schoolgirl into a sorceress who must learn the uses of enchantment, Elphaba develops a close relationship with her perky blond schoolmate Galinda, destined to become Oz’s “good witch....

Mark Wagner got the idea for his money collages, now showing at Western Exhibitions, after having lunch with a friend. “I got out my wallet, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out this tangled mass of bills. He had to spend some time smoothing it out. Something about that transgression of money stuck in my mind. I was uneasy at the messiness of it, but it had an appeal–like watching a horror movie....

MY SISTER’S CONTINENT | Gina Frangello (Chiasmus) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The novel takes the form of Kirby’s winding, angry reply to her former shrink, who’s using her as a case study in a book (“Hysteria in the New Millennium”). Speaking sometimes in the first person to the doctor, sometimes using the third person from Kendra’s point of view, Kirby drags the reader through the months that culminate with Kendra bingeing herself into the hospital, then disappearing for good....

Bathsheba Nemerovski, a 35-year-old hairstylist at Sine Qua Non in Lakeview, buys very expensive or very cheap clothes and nothing in between. “Midpriced clothing is a waste of money,” she declares. “Everyone has it, there’s nothing interesting about it, and you’re not getting a bargain.” Asked to clarify her idea of “interesting,” she explained, “I like things that are almost bad but just to the point that they’re really good.” Not surprisingly, here she gravitated toward a challenging piece, a quilted, high-waisted skirt by Agga B, which Nemerovski appreciated for its unusual length and flirty front slit....

Back in the spring the west-side rap group Qualo received a proposition they were sure was a prank: the intern who handles their digital marketing got a message through his MySpace page offering them a record deal with major-label monolith Universal. “We thought it was a joke,” says Chicago Shawn, whose real name is Shawndell Lewis. “But it turned out to be real.” The message was from Universal A and R exec Jolene Cherry....

Big Chill But the officials he’d trashed filed a defamation suit–against not only the council member but the reporter and the owner of the paper he worked for. Instructed by the judge on Pennsylvania’s “neutral reporting privilege,” a jury ruled against the council member but in favor of the newspaper that had quoted him. Then things got strange. The state supreme court pointed out that a neutral reporting privilege doesn’t exist in Pennsylvania and reinstated the suit against the journalists....

Two African-American duos perform together and separately in this bill combining clever sketch comedy and tight improv. Kevin Douglas and Inda Craig-Galvan of the politically minded Kevinda use rap to slyly dis George W. Bush and in one fantastical sketch imagine a young Condoleezza Rice telling her Black Panther father she’s a Republican. Pip Lilly and Rebecca Jackson of Straight & Nappy portray corrupt evangelical preachers as well as rappers who inadvertently reveal embarrassing details about their personal lives....

You might wonder why the latest release from Brother Ali is called Champion EP–at 39 minutes, it’s not much shorter than the new full-length by PJ Harvey. The designation makes some sense, though: rather than a fully realized follow-up to the Minneapolis MC’s superb Shadows on the Sun (Rhymesayers, 2003), this nine-track set reads more as a preview of where Ali might be headed next. “Bad Ma Fucka,” with its “Lose Yourself”-style rock guitar, would have been too aggressive for the good-natured flow of Shadows: “I don’t have a Plan B / I don’t have a mom and dad to help me land on my feet,” he sneers, “I gotta react / Not for nothing just to cuss you / Ain’t nothing subtle about an old-fashioned ‘fuck you....

Since 1991 this singular sextet from Pori, Finland, has relentlessly shaped a sound to embody its name, working complex, endlessly repetitive motifs through countless permutations. Over the last five or six years the group has put a fascinating spin on Krautrock, magnifying the craggy rhythms of Neu! and the spaciness of Amon Duul I and exploring them in extended passages ethereal, pastoral, and operatic by turns. Much of the band’s music is instrumental, and generally guitar is used for color and texture rather than power, but that’s certainly not the case on the new Tulikoira (Ektro)....

Tracy Baim Publisher of Windy City Media Group, the local gay media conglomeration that includes Windy City Times, Nightspots, Identity, and Windy City Queercast, Baim is also co-vice chair of the Chicago Gay Games. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rick Garcia Ever since his days as one of the “Gang of Four” activists, who worked tirelessly to pass the Chicago Human Rights Ordinance in 1988, Garcia has had one of the most visible GLBTQ faces in town, whether in his role as director of public policy for Equality Illinois or as the lone man weaving through the crowd with a giant rainbow flag at last spring’s immense immigration rights march....

Director Frank Merle’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy for the Keyhole Theatre Company is shorter but strangely labored. Unthinkably, he omits the play within the play–a pivotal scene in which psychosexual tensions and revenge fantasies collide and are transformed into palpable menace. A few judicious cuts elsewhere cure the characters of their nasty habit of overexplaining themselves, but many of the nuances get lost too. If we’ve learned anything from Law & Order, it’s that every crime has a motive, and in the absence of complex characterization here, the second-act violence seems particularly senseless as the body count rises....