There should be a warning label–“not recommended for inexperienced actors”–on Nicky Silver’s nasty little comedy about a group of New York neurotics making themselves and everyone around them miserable. Silver’s dialogue has a sitcom glibness that makes it seem easy to deliver, but his wit is so mean-spirited that only the most adept performers can both get laughs and communicate the playwright’s acid-tinged critique of American society. Most of the young actors in the newly formed Kick in the Face Productions don’t seem comfortable enough onstage to mine the play’s depths–almost all of them deliver one- or two-note performances....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Malachi Ritscher wanted attention paid when he planted a banner that said “Thou Shalt Not Kill….Your Taxes Buy Bombs and Bullets” at the side of the Kennedy Expressway November 3 and then burned himself to death. Online, he got it immediately. The mainstream media are finally catching up. An AP story last weekend sent Ritscher’s suicide around the world and was picked up by the New York Times among other American papers....

As usual the Chicago Jazz Festival is recognizing a few big-name anniversaries–40 years of the AACM, 70 of Down Beat magazine, and what would’ve been Charlie Parker’s 85th birthday–and celebrating a handful of jazz greats both living and dead. (This year it’s Roy Haynes and Eddie Johnson in the former category and Tony Williams, Charlie Weeks, King Oliver, Vandy Harris, and Cannonball Adderley in the latter.) The Jazz Institute of Chicago, which books the fest, apparently sees little point in tinkering with its formula to establish an overarching theme, so we get the customary breakdown once again–a healthy dose of topflight mainstream jazz, a bit of traditional stuff, and a few token avant-garde acts....

friday7 Harvey sid fisher YouTube and MySpace have given Harvey Sid Fisher a new lease on schmooze: he recorded his trademark “Astrology Songs” back in the mid-80s, but people like them so much they still invite him out and probably buy him drinks to boot. For his midwest Zodiac Tour, he’ll be backed by Iowa-based quasi-punk folkies the Miracles of God, whose droll school-of-hard-knocks approach should help ground his lyrics (“First I must see what you have for a brain / For me to be reached on a physical plane /....

Why? is the nom de microphone of Yoni Wolf of the Oakland-based Anticon collective, a loose-knit group of sonic experimentalists weaned on hip-hop but transformed by lo-fi pop. The various projects and groups under the Anticon umbrella vary widely in their methods of reconciling DJ/cut-and-paste culture with folky underground rock. Their voraciousness can be as exhilarating as it is overreaching: Clouddead (Wolf’s project with Doseone and Odd Nosdam), for instance, often suffers from overindulging both subcultures....

“I think my life will run out before my work does,” singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt predicts in the voice-over that opens this documentary portrait. “I’ve designed it that way.” He wasn’t kidding. When he died of a heart attack in 1997 he’d spent 30 years boozing and courting death (he once jumped off a fourth-floor balcony out of curiosity), yet his profoundly lyrical guitar ballads are revered by Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, and Emmylou Harris....

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her In the introduction to her recent book Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her Melanie Rehak writes, “Grab your magnifying glass, because this is a mystery story.” She too is right, but not in the way she means. The mystery is why this book was published. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She’s even inspired parodies–the surest sign of ubiquity....

More gross than scary, this Local Infinities show is still perfect for Halloween–or indeed for any time you feel like contemplating the hideous mysteries of the human body. Larry Underwood is the voice of reason as Doctor Tulp, based on a real-life dissector Rembrandt immortalized in a 1632 painting. Meghan Strell is the hysterical Sister Luyt, an amalgam of 17th-century female criminals who keeps interrupting Tulp’s lecture with shrill complaints and taunts....

Twenty years after the trio known as Culture Clash was formed, its members–Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza–are still skewering the vacas sagradas of Chicano life. In Culture Clash in AmeriCCa they offer a kaleidoscopic variety of subjects portrayed in a range of styles, from a Chaplinesque tango/pantomime on El Salvador’s tangled, tragic relationship with the United States to a Godfather-style reworking of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World that holds the explorer personally accountable for everything from “500 years of genocide” to Ricky Martin singing “La Vida Fucking Loca....

When choreographer Margi Cole received a grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, she used part of it to buy herself some men–three, to be exact. For Written on the Body, her piece about the Bronte sisters, Cole wanted to include their male alter egos–they wrote under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell–but she hasn’t often employed men in her ten-year-old troupe. She also used the money to travel to the Brontes’ home in Haworth, Yorkshire, where she came to understand the family’s social and physical isolation, located as they were on the desolate moors, their home surrounded by a cemetery....

Honey 1 In fact Adams’s most faithful customers did come from outside the neighborhood. His fussy, inflexible approach to slow-smoked, meaty ribs first inspired chatter on online food forums about a year and a half ago, and before long print and broadcast food journalists joined the chorus. You could always count on his having a supply of excellent, inexpensive, and filling rib tips, but you had to call two hours in advance for full racks: the neighbors weren’t buying them, and he refused to have big slabs of pork sitting around all day....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Royster with the Oyster festival at Shaw’s Crab House kicks off Friday with a party at the Schaumburg location from 5:30-7:30 featuring free oysters with the purchase of any Goose Island beer. Oyster Week begins Monday at both locations with nightly oyster-slurping contests, live blues performances, and fresh cold-water oysters on the half shell ($11.95 a dozen, $6....

As part of its William Finn festival, Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago performs Finn’s seldom revived 1978 pop opera about a sexually confused adolescent, Marvin, and the females in his life: the teacher he has a crush on, the girl he dates, and the woman he marries–and eventually leaves for a man, as we learn in Finn’s sequel, Falsettos. Like that piece (also reviewed in this section)–which is far superior thanks partly to playwright James Lapine’s influence–In Trousers is concerned with a transition to manhood in which physical and emotional maturity are badly out of sync....

I confess I didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect Game Boy-generated underground music seems inevitable. Introduced stateside in 1989, the handheld machines are essentially small, cheap computers, and given the rapid obsolescence endemic to the electronics biz, most of the early models have ended up on closet floors or at garage sales. According to a November 2003 Wired write-up by none other than Malcom McLaren, an international vanguard of shallow-pocketed geeks has learned to reprogram the little buggers’ crude sound chips to play something other than the Legend of Zelda theme–and among the musicians name-checked by McLaren’s contacts (“two guys named Thierry and Jacques”) was Chicagoan Mark DeNardo....

A man pulls a raw egg and a fine-toothed saw from a wooden box. He spends 20 minutes sawing the egg precisely in half. Then he makes breakfast. It’s one of the more sublime sequences in Mr. Fluxus, a Neo-Futurist performance installation opening in November, which I’ve seen in rehearsal. Creator and Neo-Futurist founder Greg Allen has long been enamored of Fluxus, the playful, do-it-yourself “intermedia” movement that coalesced in the early 1960s....

Fairmount’s annual Museum Days Festival, which drew 40,000 people last year, celebrates the town’s two famous Jameses: Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, and James Dean, who would’ve turned 75 this year. Both men were born in nearby Marion but were raised on farms and schooled here. The Garfield events, for kids, include an art contest, races, and the display of a new statue of the cat at the Fairmount Historical Museum, which runs the fest....

As far as I know, no one has ever pushed the tension between Serious Art and seriously taking the piss quite so far as the Sun City Girls. Part devoted ethnomusicologists and part bohemian pranksters, brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, coconspirator Charles Gocher, and an unstable cast of accomplices have perfected (over 20-odd years and more releases than even they can count) a kind of monkish total immersion in dilettantism. Because it’s constantly changing form, their music is notoriously difficult to describe, but in a nutshell it’s “world music”–that is, music from all over the world, thrown together in a busy, jammy collage that sounds a bit like a toolbox taking a tumble from the top shelf of a closet....

The Death of Indie Distro? IPA now concedes it should have admitted BigTop’s troubles last spring, but it naively hoped to fix them over the summer. According to Schroeder, mere days before she got Landry’s October 19 e-mail someone finally leveled with her: BigTop didn’t know when she’d be paid. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I have to play hardball now, but what can I do?...

Blues singer Lee “Little Howlin’ Wolf” Solomon always seemed a bit too mild for his nickname. The original Howlin’ Wolf, Chester Arthur Burnett, had stood nearly six and a half feet tall and weighed almost 300 pounds–in Peter Guralnick’s book Lost Highway, bluesman Johnny Shines admits that when he first met Burnett in 1932 he was afraid of him, “like you would be of some kind of beast.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Adelheid Mers first became known for multicolored light projections, but since 2000 she’s been creating some of the most original art I’ve seen–large digital diagrams that elucidate ideas in books that have engaged her. Three untitled diagrams from her series “Images After George Lakoff: Moral Politics–How Liberals and Conservatives Think” are now on view at the Page Brothers Open Studio. One compares Lakoff’s notions of the “ideal liberal” and “ideal conservative” using simple icons and text: citizenship requires either “fearless responsibility” or “fierce patriotism....