Like lots of indie-rock bands these days, HEAD OF FEMUR seeks safety in numbers. Officially they’re an octet, with a core of three Nebraska-bred Chicagoans: Mike Elsener, Ben Armstrong, and Matt Focht. But on their second disc, Hysterical Stars (SpinArt), nearly 30 musicians honk, saw, pound, tinkle, wail, clang, and generally make a jubilant noise. Most overstuffed collectives get compared to the Elephant 6 tribe, but Head of Femur’s orch-pop arrangements are less zany and more immaculate–nary a horn, string, or glockenspiel is out of place....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In July, days before teams of homeless people from around the world began to arrive in Edinburgh to compete in the third annual antipoverty soccer tournament called the Homeless World Cup, UK immigration denied visas to the teams from Kenya, Zambia, Burundi, Cameroon, and Nigeria, ruling that the players likely lacked the funds to support themselves during their stay....

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip The show actually is almost impossible to understand. But I don’t think that has anything to do with how insular it is. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider what happens in the pilot episode. The producer of the show-within-the-show (Judd Hirsch) has a meltdown when the network censors force him to cut a controversial sketch. He goes on the air live and denounces the network for showing garbage and then denounces America for watching garbage....

I’ve recently been exploring my bi side and experimenting with other men. I’ve come to the point of being perfectly comfortable with my sexuality: I’m attracted to both women and men, but I’m predominantly attracted to women. I hate the idea of having to hide this. I’ve read Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt’s book The Ethical Slut, and have come to the firm conclusion that I don’t want to lie about my sexuality....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the most exciting artists on the excellent Los Angeles hip-hop label Stones Throw perform tomorrow night, August 10, at Morseland on a bill organized by Evanston imprint EV Productions. Oh No (aka Michael Jackson–no, not that one) is the sibling of Otis (dba Madlib), and while he’s still working in his brother’s shadow, his superb new album Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms proves he’s coming into his own....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ways in which the city goes about implementing these projects are certainly not always scrupulous or fair (witness Mayor Daley’s midnight assault on Meigs Field). Citizens should, and must, challenge any project that impacts on their lives. However, many of the same residents and business owners who feel threatened or inconvenienced by the Brown Line project have, for example, thought little about preserving the character of the city....

One struggles in vain against the temptation to describe this black comedy as an odd duck. Keith Huff’s cheerfully twisted new piece limns the unlikely relationship between a buttoned-up CPA with some dark secrets and an Irish office temp/cellist who’s been impregnated by her caddish boss. What seems at first an homage to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment soon ventures into Norman Bates territory. Larry Neumann Jr. is delightfully creepy as the bean counter, but in Alex Harvey’s staging, Katlyn Carlson is overly reactive and shrill as the woman, whose character isn’t as well developed....

The Life and Times of Lake Shore Drive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Woolf has had no formal training except for a few life drawing classes–taken before he met his wife, he says, mostly so he could look at naked women. Born in 1927 to one of the founding families of Greeley, Colorado, he had a grandmother who painted so obsessively that she reportedly tied his dad and aunt into their high chairs so she could work....

Actors Austin Pendleton and Freeman Coffey lend intellectual and emotional depth to this engaging, nuanced world premiere of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s two-man play. They’re so good they almost compensate for the script’s inertia and racial stereotyping, as an uneducated, plain-talking “old country nigger” rescues a white New York intellectual from suicide, then spends 135 minutes trying to lead him to Jesus. McCarthy’s characters speak mostly prose rather than dialogue, and since only the white character has any potential for change, his story is the whole story....

Veritas–Latin for truth–is carved into the limestone face of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California. Inside the building, truth is so abundant that juries are usually provided two contrary versions of it. Foster told the jury he was on routine patrol on the south side on a hot June afternoon in 2002 when he saw a woman and two men arguing near the corner of 76th and Peoria....

A Museum of Our Own Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We want to be positive,” he goes on. “We don’t fault the other institutions for not focusing on Chicago. We accept that the mandate of the Art Institute and the MCA is to bring art in [from outside]. But we want to invert the museum model.” In Klein’s vision, the Chicago Art Foundation would be an inclusive, intergenerational “incubator” where artists would have an advisory voice, an opportunity to sell their work, and a vested interest....

Tim Jag has a thing about honesty. His current work–represented by eight brightly colored pieces at Melanee Cooper that juxtapose panels of mass-produced fabric or paper with his own abstract painted patterns–is the result of the reading he did when he started grad school at Montana State in 1990. As an undergrad, influenced by artists like Eric Fischl, he’d been doing what he calls “psychological paintings of people in rooms.” But after reading Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt he abandoned the attempt to create illusions....

Four adult actors in Rubicon Theatre Project’s production are convincing and funny as “gifted” nine-year-olds enrolled in a program intended to stimulate budding geniuses. They also persuasively represent the quartet’s maturation over the three-year period covered by Liza Lentini’s script: there are plenty of laughs in this flashback to the early 80s encapsulating pivotal moments of preadolescent angst. But Michael Gillett’s dull delivery of the school board’s perspective in the show’s narration undermines the satire, and Kassi Dallmann’s 90-minute staging can feel slow and cramped....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was disappointing that public housing activists cynically tried to exploit the human misery caused by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina by calling for the Chicago Housing Authority to suspend its rebuilding plans and house flood victims in units slated for demolition or dedicated to relocated CHA families [The Works, September 16]. However, the federal government has already deemed CHA high-rise units unsafe and unfit for people to live in, and the row houses are already spoken for by Chicago public housing residents....

Italian-born musician Domenico Sciajno started out as a bassist playing contemporary classical works, but even at the beginning of his career he was eager to break down musical boundaries. In the early 90s he studied composition in the Netherlands, where he was also drawn to free improvisation; later that decade he began recording a series of albums with Italian guitarist Giuseppe Ielasi that were distinguished by their wonderfully brittle tonality and wide-ranging dynamic sensibility....

Five years after his superb debut feature, In the Bedroom, writer-director Todd Field returns with another story set in a close-knit community whose quietness makes the characters’ unhappiness seem like thunder. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson, both disenchanted with their spouses, meet in a public park with their preschool children, and a series of carefully arranged playdates allows them to nurse their unspoken infatuation until it finally engulfs them. Meanwhile a bitter ex-cop (Noah Emmerich) lets off steam by harassing a paroled pedophile (Jackie Earle Haley) who’s come home to live with his doting mother....

Annie Hall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified. (It’s been suggested that communism is the political involvement that Bogart’s grizzled casino owner, Rick, may be in retreat from at the beginning....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The steps taken Monday by the Daley administration and City Council to address police abuse rightly dominated the news out of City Hall. After years of delays and inaction, the city agreed last week to settle four police torture cases, and as the council’s finance committee signed off on the $19.8 million in payments Monday, aldermen urged Mara Georges, the city’s top lawyer, to find a way to end the city’s obligations to defend and pay a pension to the lead torturer, former commander Jon Burge....

Starting in the mid-1940s, drummer Roy Haynes made his name accompanying Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, and Stan Getz, among many, many others. While his contemporary Art Blakey was a born bandleader with a recognizable sound he left untouched for four decades, Haynes–one of the most brilliant percussionists jazz has ever produced–adapted his precise, snappy attack and unmistakable elastic sense of time to the needs of each new collaborator....

I’ve been in a relationship with a wonderful man for four months. He treats me better than anyone I’ve ever been with. (I’m 29.) The problem? I’m very adventurous sexually. I’m a freaky girl. I like to be spanked, choked, fisted, and I’m into anal sex. He’s a straitlaced officer in the armed forces, and while the sex we have is great, he refuses to indulge me in even one of the previously mentioned activities....