This Baltimore duo really has a way with bad ideas. On the new Socialize (Suicide Squeeze), Anar Badalov and Flora Wolpert-Checknoff seem to be playing a game of aesthetic chicken, daring each other to come up with the least appropriate thing to do in an intimate, downcast indie-rock tune. That would explain the coupling of a smooth, faux-Steely Dan sax solo and a sudden blurt of grotty distorted guitar on “Sunray” at least, or the counterintuitive drum programming, which often pairs patient, autumnal instrumental tracks with a kind of outsider-art take on Timbaland’s techy polyrhythms....

This fall, after a couple years of trying to mind my own business, I took a few halting steps toward the community of movie critics. I spent a few days at the Toronto film festival, joined the Chicago Film Critics Association, and accepted an invitation to vote in the annual Village Voice poll. And I liked Alexander Payne’s Sideways, whose endorsement by a multitude of critics’ polls has caused my colleague Jonathan Rosenbaum such consternation....

Once again the insipid if not megalomaniacal Margasak has made glaring, ridiculous omissions in his “Local Record Roundup” [Post No Bills, December 12]. How is it that the Chicago Reader continually ignores a robust and innovative local rock scene? Does Peter find the musical tastes of real Chicagoans too pedestrian for his highbrow column? Does it have to be aristo-avante jazz/noise to get the attention of Chicago’s premier “news and criticism” source?...

Robert Tenges’s new play addresses a touchy issue: what happens when a father and his daughter start experiencing their love as erotic attraction? Tenges, director Adam Webster, and an incredible cast explore the subject with grace and empathy. The scenes between the father (Michael Nowak), mother (Kirsten D’Aurelio), and teenage daughter (Bethany O’Grady) are startlingly true, and the ensemble grounds even the most unlikely, lyrical dialogue in the tense realities of family life....

Joe Meno’s adaptation of his forthcoming novel proves vibrant, funny, and at times strange and disturbing in the hands of House Theatre of Chicago. In Meno’s tale, a former boy detective has grown up and just been released from a mental institution. Before he takes his own life, he’s determined to investigate his sister’s tragic suicide. The company’s typically sprawling ingenuity has been reined in here, perhaps by the strong narrative, which provides a great showcase for the ensemble’s fine acting, Kevin O’Donnell’s harpsichord-and-string score (played live), and director Nathan Allen’s whimsical invention....

friday14 GREAT LAKES MYTH SOCIETY This Michigan quintet–essentially the underrated Ann Arbor band Original Brothers and Sisters of Love minus the lone sister—made an icy splash with their self-titled 2005 debut, a wintry, dusk-dark collection of boreal folk rock. The new Compass Rose Bouquet (Quack! Media) turns up the volume a little and conjures some warmer weather besides: now the band’s postauthentic traditional sound includes some refreshing summertime swigs of beery Britlike bar rock (sometimes I want to call these guys the Spring Green Preservation Society) to go with the bleak balladry imported from Ireland via Chicago or from Norway via Minneapolis....

Blowing Off Steam Burian, who plays bass in Milemarker, switched to guitar, and the pair began writing and demoing a clutch of tunes inspired by SST’s mid-80s catalog–music that combined breakneck tempos, noisy guitars, and thoughtful melodies. “The basic thing with Challenger was not really very high-concept,” says Burian. “It was just to have a band with the standard two guitars, bass, and drum lineup.” (Milemarker’s roster includes a keyboardist.) Drummer Timothy Remis, who played on the Challenger record, later dropped out, and Burian and Laney recruited Milemarker bandmate Noah Leger to take over....

Three different couples in their underwear tickle each other on the three large screens of Alison Ruttan’s video installation at Monique Meloche, Love Me Not. The scenes produce an overwhelming avalanche of flesh and gestures at once playful and aggressive as the ticklers lunge for a torso, try to fend off the other person, or grab the sole of a partner’s foot. The camera tracks around them in circles, adding to the delirium....

Spirituality is many things to many people, but whether it’s held close and private or preached to the masses it’s intensely personal, as evidenced in Cathleen Falsani’s new book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Falsani, the religion writer for the Sun-Times, has collected 32 interviews on the subject with a wide range of famous folk including Bono, Hugh Hefner, and Mancow (he loves Jesus)....

Everybody hates a happy ending, so Soft Spot, the album of quiet love songs that Clem Snide singer-songwriter Eef Barzelay wrote for his wife and newborn son in 2003, aroused some distrust among indie rockers committed to romantic dysfunction. The band’s new, darker End of Love (SpinArt) should win some of them back; Barzelay recently moved from Brooklyn to Nashville, but his guitars have never sounded heavier and pricklier, and neither have his lyrics....

Ever since its disappointing run on Atlantic Records in the late 80s and early 90s, Eleventh Dream Day has been a strictly part-time project for its members. But they haven’t treated the band like an opportunity to indulge in the occasional nostalgic getaway: albums like 1997’s Eighth and 2000’s Stalled Parade combined forward-looking, deeply introspective excursions into texture and mood with the volatile guitar dialogues that put EDD on the map....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This observation was clearly made by someone who has never read the Bible, or, at least, never read it carefully enough to remember what it says, as is clear from Leviticus 21:9 that the punishment for priests’ daughters who become prostitutes is death by fire, not death by stoning. As for mediums, no punishment whatsoever is mentioned in Deuteronomy 18:11, only a prohibition; and even if Exodus 22:17 were to be applied to mediums, which is a reading not warranted by the text, there is no mention there of death by stoning, the only source for which appears to be L....

Broad strokes and lapses in realism have to be allowed for in children’s theater, but this show might try an eight-year-old’s patience. The story–about a kid who finds a magical Honus Wagner baseball card worth millions in a neighbor’s attic–turns on an ethical conflict whose obvious solution (communicate, negotiate, share already!) is willfully ignored. Its memorabilia-trade villains, while hilarious, are too unbelievable. And its separated-parents subplot is entirely perfunctory. That said, author Dan Gutman, whose novel was adapted by Steven Dietz, has a marvelous feel for old-timey period details and early baseball lore–young Joey is first joined by Wagner in the present, then transported back to the 1909 World Series–and the acting, costumes, and set design are stellar....

Reverend Billy is leaning against the counter of a Starbucks in Northridge, California. Dressed in a white suit and clerical collar, his gelled, dyed-blond hair swept skyward in a John Travolta pompadour, he could easily pass for a real man of the cloth–until he opens his mouth. A congregation of a dozen supporters yells “Hallelujah!” as an ex-marine, deciding to act as store security, clutches at the reverend’s jacket. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

A documentary to savor for its eloquence and life-affirming humanism, this 2003 portrait of Swedish photographer George Oddner uses metaphor to illuminate the creative process: an eddying stream keys memories of childhood summers spent in Estonia, then the rivulet dissolves to a swirling black-and-white print as an instant in time is affixed to paper in a darkroom bath. Jazz riffs accompany Oddner, once a drummer, as he revisits New York and recalls his apprenticeship to Richard Avedon in the 50s....

On their latest album, Juxtaposition (Thrill Jockey), the Viennese trio Radian continue to transform raw static, hums, and hisses into clinical funk that’s strikingly dynamic and accessible. Before recording in Chicago with John McEntire, the group laid down bits of guitar, vibes, bass, and drums, then fed the sounds through various computer patches to render them all but unrecognizable. Synthesizer maestro Stefan Nemeth then layered the sounds over the liquid, volume-pedal-controlled bass swells from John Norman and Martin Brandlmayr’s distinctive, elliptical drumming....

I was creeping down the streets of Zion, Illinois, transporting a newly purchased antique table in the back of my Jeep, when I was overcome by a sneezing fit. When the eruptions subsided and I opened my watery eyes, I was in front of a low-slung brick building with a stenciled sign reading healing rooms of zion in the window. I was in the market for healing: yet another infection had attacked my chronically screwed-up sinuses, and I had a cough like a death rattle....

Shakespearean conceits are writ large in Michael Govier’s amusing play for Chemically Imbalanced Comedy. Borrowing from Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and incorporating musical theater, puppetry, and burlesque elements, this frothy farcical work isn’t always original, but it remains good fun. A committed cast energetically sells the silliness in Govier’s elaborate plot, as thwarted young lovers both straight and gay, a greedy king, a lusty queen, witches, and amateur thespians fall into a morass of mistaken identities, murder attempts, and accidental stabbings....

“After graduating from Harvard Law School, and serving as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for about a decade, and I know him from his time as a colleague here. He first came to our attention when then-professor, now-judge Michael McConnell suggested him for appointment to the faculty because of Obama’s first-rate work on one of McConnell’s articles for the Harvard Law Review....

“Teenage Kicks” was John Peel’s favorite song for more than 25 years, and when the legendary BBC DJ died last fall it was played at his funeral–he’d even said he wanted the line “Teenage dreams, so hard to beat” carved on his tombstone. The Undertones’ first single, it never topped number 31 on the UK charts in 1978, even with Peel’s help, but its sweet, concise punk pop is still a perfect justification for his faith in rock ‘n’ roll....