Gunning for Jung Zealous Jungians despise Noll–for his books The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ, not to mention his 1994 op-ed essay in the New York Times in which he conceded Jung “the genius and medical credentials to make his own cult mainstream and meaningful” but nevertheless linked Jung’s name to those of David Koresh and Jim Jones. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet even within this tradition of critical condescension, Smith’s review of Deirdre Bair’s Jung: A Biography in the January 21 New York Times was extreme....

On January 29 a dozen members of the Illinois Minuteman Project marched in the drizzling rain down Keller Road in Waukegan toward a grassy area the police had cordoned off for them across the street from Holy Family Parish. Two weeks earlier members of the church had met with village officials to protest a crackdown on drivers who didn’t have licenses, many of whom were Hispanic. Now the Minutemen were holding a counterprotest....

Patty Duke, the ex-child star who brilliantly portrayed Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, today lives in rural Idaho and earns a solid living from television movies and the occasional Broadway show. What would motivate her to come to the Chicago suburbs to perform at a small nonprofit venue? “When you have the opportunity to interpret really wonderful writing, many of us journeymen actors will go anywhere,” says Duke of her upcoming engagement in A....

I loved Moaners singer-guitarist Melissa Swingle in her old band, Trailer Bride; steeped in rural southern beauty and despair, they sounded like they were slowly drinking themselves to death in a decaying frame house, staring at the stars through the holes in the roof. Swingle formed her North Carolina-based duo, the Moaners, with drummer Laura King, veteran of a host of Baltimore punk bands, and their debut album, Dark Snack (Yep Roc), is quite a departure from Trailer Bride....

I’m writing regarding Frigid Frustrated Fool. My problem is hairiness, too: I’m crazy about hairy women! I will stare in rapt lust at a woman’s hairy armpit in public. While FFF sounded too self-pitying to be hot, thoughts of her hairiness moved me to engage in hand-to-gland combat. My question: where can I find my hairy princess? –Bring ‘Em Super Hairy, Y’all I read FFF’s letter with interest, not because of her emotional issues but because the weight gain and unusual hair growth rang a bell....

Legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler (In the Heat of the Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Bound for Glory) is the irascible but engrossing subject of this digital video by his son, Mark Wexler. Born rich but radicalized in the 50s, Haskell divided his career between Hollywood dramas and left-wing documentaries, adroitly combining the two in his low-budget 1969 masterpiece Medium Cool (screening Saturday and Sunday morning at the Music Box)....

Playwright Jez Butterworth’s better-known thriller Mojo is less awful than this group portrait of losers losing–creepy characters obsessed with religion, poetry, assault, child molestation, and their own lousy lives. Two superstitious ex-gardeners (played stupid and sly respectively by Peter Moore and Damian Arnold) live in a decrepit cabin near a Cambridge bog, where each encounter with gratuitously nasty visitors is played as its own dumb dark comedy. Like the script, which promises much and delivers zilch, G....

The Arena Football League was designed for people who can’t get enough football. Its 20th season began, strategically, the weekend before the Super Bowl, when no other football was scheduled, and the local franchise, the Chicago Rush, opened at home two days before the big game, thus setting itself up as the only football in town for the next three months. The Rush caters less to football’s fans than its fanatics, such as the guy in front of me as I pulled into the parking lot of Rosemont’s Allstate Arena....

Friday 3 EXPLODE AND MAKE UP Local quartet Explode and Make Up is a hardcore supergroup of sorts, featuring members of 88 Fingers Louie, the Bomb, the Methadones, and others. They make much of being “old” (i.e., thirtysomethings) and seem to embrace the notion of hardcore becoming another genre of old-man music with a tradition, like the blues. Fine by me, if the songs are as raw, tight, and passionate as the ones these guys play....

They’d already repurposed the mullet and the foam-mesh trucker hat, so it was clearly just a matter of time before hipsters sank their talons into heavy metal. The music’s camp value is well established: This Is Spinal Tap first mined hard rock’s excesses for laughs 20 years ago, and bands like Manowar, Gwar, and arguably Kiss have been lampooning them at least that long. As Jack Black has shown in his prog-metal goof Tenacious D and, more recently, while imparting rock wisdom to Generation Z in School of Rock, it’s certainly possible to send up the trappings of metal and get a genuine kick out of the music at the same time....

Sallie Gratch was on a mission. She walked into Flowers Flowers, a floral shop in Evanston, gave a quick wave to the cashier, and made her way over to the tulips sitting in the storefront window. As she leaned in for a closer look she dipped into her purse and pulled out a two-inch green toy soldier, gun raised and at the ready, and planted it beside a flowerpot. She wandered around the store for a few more minutes, nonchalantly poking at the other plants, then sauntered back over to the window and quickly placed another soldier on the ledge....

Adrian Tomine and Seth (aka Gregory Gallant) are two of the most celebrated comic artists of the moment, both welcomed into the New Yorker’s fold while still widely adored by the fans who’ve followed their work for more than a decade. In the latest installment of Tomine’s serial Optic Nerve, a young Asian-American movie theater manager beds his first white girl and his mouthy lesbian friend Alice gets kicked out of school for kicking another girl in the crotch....

It’s surprising enough that pianist Amina Figarova–a woman born in the mostly Muslim nation of Azerbaijan–would gravitate to American jazz, let alone develop such a centered, compact style of improvisation. On a series of discs going back more than a decade, she neatly twines the influences of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, but even so, I don’t think anyone expected her to emerge as one of the leading jazz composers of the new century, as she’s done on the two discs she released last year....

Mickalene Thomas Mickalene Thomas’s works at Rhona Hoffman are engaged with issues of race and gender. But unlike most identity artists, Thomas eroticizes her subjects. Her art is also gorgeous–especially the eight large paintings of African-American women, rendered in bright colors and covered with rhinestones, which are used like brushstrokes to add shine to clothing and furniture. Though Thomas used different models, all the figures are similarly bold, posed seductively and staring at the viewer; they’re both homogeneous and differentiated, subtly questioning the nature of black female identity but reaching no conclusions....

About a week ago Nicholas Tremulis expanded the family business. He was working on three new songs at Rax Trax Recording, a Lakeview studio owned by his longtime bandmate Rick Barnes, and he decided to have his nine-year-old daughter, Electra, sing backup on one of them, an R & B-meets-mariachi reworking of Edgar Eden’s gospel tune “Satan’s Jewel Crown.” “It’s her first microphone appearance,” says Tremulis. “There’s something cute and weird about hearing her little voice sing, ‘Satan’s jewel crown / I’ve worn it so long....

Miguel Depedro, aka KID606, has nothing left to prove–and anyway he’s never seemed to care what people think of him. Depedro, who runs Tigerbeat6, the most perverse and irreverent electronic label I can think of, made his mark in 2002 with The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams (Violent Turd), an obnoxiously agitated, in-your-face pileup of dirty gabber breakbeats and uncleared, uncredited samples from the likes of Jay-Z, Bikini Kill, and Missy Elliott....

Hell is hot but entertaining. Rich people dress like bums, top executives have no title on their cards, beautiful women dress down: it’s called “counter signaling.” More examples over at Marginal Revolution. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hell has a mild day. Local ultracon Tom Roeser endorses and seeks to expand the century-old progressive reform of primary elections, calling for a state law requiring that the runner-up in any primary election should automatically succeed to the candidacy if the winner cannot continue....

Lake Affect: Photographs by Othello Anderson Disciplined, carefully delimited approaches to nature photography yield a revelatory diversity in two exhibitions. Shooting in color, Othello Anderson has been recording a single view of Lake Michigan since 1980, leaning against the same tree at the Fullerton Avenue beach and photographing waves, clouds, storms, sunrises, and twilights in all seasons. Shooting in black and white, Barbara Crane has taken overhead shots of mice, birds, skeletons, sticks, and other items she’s found since 1987 near her cabin in southern Michigan, positioning them against a black velvet backdrop in her studio....

I was here one night with a huge group of friends celebrating a weekend event. I’d been noticing one particularly lovely young lady all that time but hadn’t found the right time to ask her out. I hoped to have an opportunity here, but just when I maneuvered into place next to her in the beer garden, the bar closed it, moved everyone inside, and she was surrounded. Then my best friend started feeling the beginnings of a mild case of food poisoning and implored me to go home....

We’re hanging out celebrating–what else?–the White Sox’ World Series championship, and my friends and I are looking around to see if Grandma and Grandpa Hippie Woodstock are in the house. Back when I was still in high school I was visiting my sister in the city. Our plan was to go to a Cubs night game and get some cheap standing tickets; I’d say there were about five of us who ended up going....