Near the end of the first round, Stephan Bonnar landed a furious blow that made a clean, surgical cut across the bridge of Forrest Griffin’s nose. Griffin, a rising star in the world of mixed martial arts, had a 9-2 record and a fearsome reputation: in a 2003 bout he knocked out an opponent with his one good arm after having broken the other moments earlier. Now the blood poured out, rendering his face a late Jackson Pollock....

While flipping around cable recently, I came across a show discussing human fertility. Among its claims was that male fertility rates (sperm counts) have declined by 50 percent in the past 30 years and continue to decline. They suggested one possible reason for this is that as much as 80 percent of hormones in female contraceptives get flushed into toilets and end up in our drinking water. Is this true? Will fertile males one day be an endangered species?...

Konono No. 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Take, for example, the superb music released under the Buena Vista Social Club banner. By and large, it’s not what most Cubans listen to–homegrown hip-hop and timba, a slick dance music, are the preferred forms of pop on the island. Two great African acts that have performed here, the Senegalese group Orchestra Baobab and the Congolese rumba group Kekele, are considered old-fashioned back home; kids in Africa are more interested in the locally produced hip-hop that’s exploded there and the more polished Congolese rumba produced by singer Koffi Olomide....

Say what you will about Vermeer, no one at Palette & Chisel, the city’s venerable north-side artists’ club, would be caught dead practicing the coloring-book version of fine art. Within the club’s handsome Victorian confines, artists who project images on canvas before painting them are regarded with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The crux of Palette & Chisel is painting what you see, not tracing photography–that’s cheating,” says the group’s president, Val Yachik....

Part movie binge, part slumber party, this 24-hour marathon of cinematic castoffs has become an annual event at Northwestern University. This year’s festival is already sold out, but there’s a ticket exchange on the Web site, www.b-fest.com. Movies begin screening at 6 PM Friday, January 28, at McCormick Auditorium in the Norris University Center, 1999 Campus Dr., Evanston, and continue through Saturday afternoon; the center’s doors are locked between 2 and 8 AM, and there’s a 30-minute breakfast break at 9....

BOBBY CONN’s career doesn’t make much sense–except, perhaps, to Bobby Conn. Since the late 90s he’s routinely changed stage personas, transforming himself from an ex-con to a financial guru to a glammed-out conspiracy-obsessed Antichrist. When the world didn’t implode at the turn of the century like he predicted, he simply regrouped: now he’s an anti-Bush soul crusader in silver lame, and he’s dead serious. Conn and his band, the Glass Gypsies, decided to cut their new album, Live Classics Vol....

The most shameless moment on Ginuwine’s “In Those Jeans,” the hit from last year’s The Senior (Epic), isn’t the chorus, in which the song’s title finishes the phrase “Is there any more room for me…?” It isn’t the bridge, a roll call of popular denim brands (“Levi’s, Prada, Baby Phat, I love them / Love the way you wearing them”) that sounds like a play for ad work (“Ginuwine wants to see you in our jeans!...

This venerable company, founded more than 40 years ago by Gus Giordano and now headed by his daughter Nan, goes punk for its Harris Theater debut. Chicago choreographer Michael Rioux says that in his quintet Punk You Very Much he was aiming for “something fun to watch” that would also communicate the feeling of being alone, of being one person against the world. At the same time he was laughing at himself a bit, an aspect clearly visible in the costumes (bright punkwear that would look right at home on Saturday-morning cartoons) and in the choreography: one tough guy shoves his hands in his pockets, then can’t seem to get them out....

In Heritage, now receiving its world premiere, Chicago playwright Brett Neveu depicts two not-so-likable African-American men caught up in slavery’s legacy. One is a prisoner on work detail, restoring a Louisiana plantation home (Randy, a twentysomething car thief); the other is a middle-aged prison guard, Westfield, who likewise has no family, ambition, or passion. As work on the home continues, the brutal legacy of the plantation seems to possess both men and pit them against each other, especially since Westfield is Randy’s overseer while being overseen himself by an unconsciously racist white guard....

Working as a bandleader, duetting with the likes of William Parker and Roscoe Mitchell, and playing in the volcanic David S. Ware Quartet, pianist Matthew Shipp made some of the most intense, unalloyed free jazz of the 90s. But so far this decade he’s spent much of his time exploring other possibilities: he’s refined hybrids of jazz and popular idioms with DJ Spooky and members of the hip-hop group Antipop Consortium, played electric piano with electroacoustic improvisers (and former drum-and-bass technicians) Spring Heel Jack, and released three solo albums whose mix of acoustic jazz grooves and programmed beats suggests an arranged marriage between Horace Silver and Boards of Canada....

With a style at once massive and ornate, McCoy Tyner easily commands a place among the ten most influential pianists of postbop jazz. Both Tyner and Impulse Records came of age through their association with John Coltrane: Tyner played in Coltrane’s classic quartet, and the label released Coltrane’s pioneering records of the early 60s (an era chronicled in one of this year’s best jazz books, Ashley Kahn’s The House That Trane Built)....

I deejayed here last year at this electroclash event called Liquid Sky. We brought in everything from punk bands to drag queens. One night we had Houston Bernard, this act from New York. He referred to himself as a bi porno-electro-punk rapper. Very X-rated, very, very raunchy. After his first act he stepped outside to cool off. Apparently he met some guy who was walking down the street and they slipped into the alley for a quickie blow job....

In his review of my play The Uneasy Chair [“The Wrong Engagement,” October 14] Tony Adler writes, “Smith’s comedy was almost certainly never meant to be anything more than a frothy exercise in creative anachronism,” and later, “I can’t say for sure whether Smith consciously built hell into The Uneasy Chair.” Well, as the author, I can say definitively that I did consciously build hell into The Uneasy Chair, that I did hope that it would be a bit more than a frothy exercise in anachronism, and that Mr....

David Mamet’s 2005 courtroom burlesque is filled with profanity, racial and religious invective, and homophobic shtick. But the only shocking thing about it is the inept way the usually masterful playwright juggles these elements. The action involves a Jewish defendant, his Jew-hating Christian attorney, a stoned judge, and a closeted gay prosecutor whose sissy boyfriend is throwing a snit fit. Offstage, an Israeli-Palestinian summit provides a chaotic counterpart to the onstage insanity....

For his most recent album, Purple Violets (Stunt), saxophonist SAM RIVERS is backed by players four and five decades his junior–and bassist Ben Street and Danish drummer Kresten Osgood work hard to keep up with the 81-year-old leader. Rivers doesn’t have anything left to prove; he preceded Wayne Shorter in the Miles Davis Quintet, recorded a host of classic inside-out recordings for Blue Note, was a driving force behind the 70s loft-jazz scene, and even played straight man in Dizzy Gillespie’s mid-80s group....

Recently my boyfriend and I broke up, one reason being his lack of initiative in calling me. After we broke up, I spoke with several of my girlfriends and found out that they, too, have similar troubles with their boyfriends or guys they are seeing. Some of these women are in serious, long-term, loving relationships. It seems to me that this is a blight on modern relationships. Women want to get phone calls from our significant others because it lets us know we are cared for, but men seem to be indifferent, even after it’s been brought up and discussed....

This action, among other cost-saving moves, gives us a future. I am hoping you will join me in focusing our energies on that future, on minimizing the distress that this development will cause everyone, and in maintaining the cherished tradition of excellence at this newspaper we all love. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I know this is a time of great anxiety. I want to answer all your questions and my door is open....

Ignoring Spain’s century-long literary golden age, Circle Theatre bills Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1936 play, about a bitter Andalusian woman who wants to keep her adult daughters spinsters, as “the greatest Spanish tragedy of all time.” Likewise, director Kristin Gehring ignores the script’s poetic imagery and folkloric hyperbole to interpret the play as psychological realism. A less hesitant, self-conscious cast might have strengthened her case, but as it stands Lorca’s tale is unconvincing....

Friday19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DAR WILLIAMS Dar Williams is possibly the best songwriter among the big names currently on the below-the-radar modern folk circuit, and she ought to know it–her fan base won’t stop telling her so. But she made a gutsy move on last fall’s My Better Self (Razor & Tie), stopping the album dead in its tracks to do loving versions of Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” and Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” (featuring Ani DiFranco)....

About a dozen of us met at the Aldi on Milwaukee near Leavitt last Saturday night. We quietly walked under the Blue Line tracks across the street, pushed aside some weedy overgrowth, and shimmied through a homeless sanctuary of shopping carts and dirty blankets that smelled like a zoo. I didn’t get the memo that said to wear long pants and sneakers–I was in coochie-cutter shorts and platform sandals. Tramping up a dirt trail in the dark, losing traction, I wondered what, exactly, I’d gotten myself into....