The mashup trend that exploded a few years ago has persuaded a lot of people to reboot their ideas about musical structure and intellectual property, but it hasn’t helped too many folks get paid. One exception is the pair of Belgian brothers who work alternately under the names 2 Many DJs and Soulwax. Their 2002 mix tape As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 pretty much defined the mashup genre with its dizzying combination of impropriety (Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” over the Stooges’ “No Fun”) and brilliance (Skee-Lo’s half-forgotten “I Wish” wedded to “Eye of the Tiger,” with a little dash of the Breeders), and since then they’ve done official remixes for just about everyone and even landed a record deal as Soulwax....

TALE/SPIN, Curious Theatre Branch. “I’ll be writing this forever,” sighs Michael Martin during the opening moments of this intensely personal monologue, which serves as the second half and centerpiece of this group show. Much has happened since the Great Beast Theater cofounder’s initial staging of his 2002 work The Bearer–including a move to New Orleans, two late-night muggings, and his purchase of a pawnshop pistol–and all these events dovetail neatly in the latest installment of his sprawling work in progress, now subtitled “The New Piece....

Brick, a low-budget debut feature by writer-director Rian Johnson, won a special jury prize at last year’s Sundance film festival for “originality of vision,” though that may say less about his movie than about what passes for originality in the movie business these days. Planned for seven years, shot in 20 days, and edited by the filmmaker on his home computer, the movie meticulously re-creates Dashiell Hammett’s brand of noir at a modern SoCal high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenage gumshoe trying to unravel the mysterious disappearance of his ex-girlfriend....

For almost two years Thomas Lee served on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq. In May he got out of the army and came home to New Orleans. Two weeks ago his house was washed away. He came to Chicago and moved in with a relative, and then he became a pawn in a long-standing dispute between the CHA and housing activists over what’s left of public housing. “Having a roof over your head is one of the most basic human needs,” said Jackson in a press release....

Generally speaking, it’s not ghosts that make Halloween scary for Chicago schoolkids–it’s bombers, kids who lie in wait with eggs and shaving cream for younger, weaker prey. When I was growing up, it was whispered that some bombers had filled Super Soakers with a potion of Nair: if you got shot in the head, that was it–you were bald. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the Homey we feared was a man dressed as a clown who’d supposedly been roaming the neighborhood and luring children into his white van–or maybe just snatching them and throwing them inside....

Long one of the most open-minded and adventurous trumpeters in improvised music, Wadada Leo Smith has been on an especially eclectic streak in recent years. He reconvened his Yo Miles! project with guitarist Henry Kaiser for last year’s Upriver (Cuneiform), the latest in a series of investigations of Miles Davis’s electric period. On 2003’s Luminous Axis (Tzadik), he joined up with a slew of computer musicians that included Mark Trayle, Chris Brown, and Ikue More, placing his brittle trumpet improvisations over constantly shifting matrices of texture and color....

One afternoon last fall at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse five jury trials were in progress. In courtroom 205 Frederick Calvin, who’s black, was on trial for possession of cocaine with intent to deliver. There were no black men in the jury box. In courtroom 402 Demetrious Allen, also black, was being tried for possession of a stolen motor vehicle by another jury with no black men. In courtroom 604 Javier Perez, a Hispanic man, was on trial for armed robbery....

Till now this New York band’s art-damaged heartache has felt to me like a fashion move, but on the new Misery Is a Butterfly (4AD) their agony finally takes on some weight; unapologetic in its fragile despair, the album borders on emotional pornography. Once-ferocious singer Kazu Makino has been reduced to a broken ballerina in a jewelry box–she still shrieks, whimpers, and whispers like a manipulative nine-year-old, but now she seems to know she’s not going to get that pony....

Screening at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibit “Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964,” these four programs focus on early films in which Warhol used a stationary camera, his performers alternatively showing off and withering under his passive-aggressive gaze. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Couch (1964, 58 min.) consists of 14 unedited camera rolls, each showing the couch in Warhol’s “Factory” from a different angle....

Forgiving Dr. Mengele Cheri Pugh, a graduate of Northwestern University, was working as an archivist at Chicago’s WPA Film Library when she came across footage of the Auschwitz liberation, including one particularly resonant image of survivors being led from the camp by two little twins. A Web search took her to the site of the CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, and to its founder, Eva Kor, the surviving sister from the historic shot....

Television Personalities Those early platters (since collected on Yes Darling, but Is It Art?) showed enormous promise, and throughout their career the TVPs attracted earnest and powerful patrons. John Peel talked up a test pressing of “14th Floor” on the air, which helped Treacy persuade his parents to loan him the money for the single’s first proper run, and in 1991, during the post-Nevermind frenzy, Kurt Cobain invited the band to open for Nirvana in London....

Perhaps the gentle reader should beware the spoilers ahead, but then again none are fatal: Julian Barnes’s latest novel, Arthur & George (Knopf), packs a lot of suspense, but the text is rich enough to stand without it. Barnes has been accused of postmodernism, but while he may toy with structure his prose is ever transparent. In this outing, once he reveals that his “Arthur” is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Barnes lets the book rest on a hefty body of research about the life of the writer, whom he depicts as a noble-hearted bull in a china shop....

George & Martha Interestingly enough, there isn’t any anal sex in George & Martha–although an asshole does come up for close inspection, as does his actual orifice. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One way or another, it appears that people have come to expect a reaming from Finley. And with good reason. In her most notorious public incarnation, during the early 1980s, she was a banshee straight out of the collective unconscious: famous for covering her naked body with gooey substances like chocolate, but also scary as hell for the way she seemed to channel the deep and abiding and mostly female anger that contaminates our culture like so much tritium from a nuclear plant....

This musical version of Roger Corman’s 1960 black comedy recounts the saga of Seymour, a Skid Row florist’s assistant who nurtures a man-eating plant by feeding his foes to the bloodthirsty fern. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s witty score echoes classic rock tunes by Phil Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; the era is further evoked by a black girl group that narrates the Faustian fable....

Back in 2003 Jason Molina 86ed the name of his long-running band, Songs: Ohia, telling me at the time that he planned to start using an ever-changing array of descriptors preceding “Electric Co.” It’d then be clear, he argued, that though there was a certain consistency to the band–i.e., him–the lineup was in constant flux. But after issuing a solo album last year under the name Pyramid Electric Co., he’s stuck with the Magnolia tag....

In 2001 workers were cleaning up the fourth-floor attic of the Hegeler Carus Mansion in downtown La Salle, Illinois, when caretaker Dan Irvin noticed two wooden shipping crates buried under trunks and boxes. “We thought they were full of clothes, like the other trunks,” he says. But when they opened them up, they found paintings, “somewhat dirty, but not too bad–there was a little bit of soot on them.” In total the crates held 27 framed watercolors on silk, standing upright in felt-lined slots....

In his debut novel, Red Weather (Shaye Areheart), Pauls Toutonghi zeros in on a time (1989), a place (working-class Milwaukee), and an age (15) with startling acuity. His narrator, Yuri, the shy son of Latvian immigrants, is torn between bravado and bewilderment as he wrestles with the embarrassments of adolescence–his alcoholic, romantic father, Rudolfs, chief among them. When Yuri falls hard for the daughter of a socialist blowhard, the resulting microcultural clashes mirror the geopolitical upheavals of the time; in one winsome scene Yuri’s parents watch the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV and sloppily, giddily kiss as Yuri squirms....

The morning after Election Day 2004, when Democrats and liberals started asking what had hit them, Thomas Frank had an answer ready and waiting. What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, his biting analysis of the culture wars and the bamboozlement of the American working class, was quickly on every wagging tongue in Washington. Since then the book has hit multiple best seller lists and Frank has turned up as a guest on everything from Hardball With Chris Matthews to The Daily Show....

Building on the 1955 stage treatment by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaptation restores censored material from the diary, including descriptions of Anne’s lesbian urges, her awareness of her changing body (“my sweet secret”), and her resentment of her mother. Because Anne is so complex, there’s even more of her to miss. As in earlier productions, we are there as two families try to imagine a future beyond their cramped, silent rooms....

I have heard for years that it is illegal to attempt suicide, but do such suicide laws really exist? If so, where and why? Obviously those who are successful in their attempts are beyond the reach of the law, and it seems awfully mean to add to the woes of those who have failed by bringing them up on charges. More seriously, wouldn’t such a law discourage someone who had attempted suicide from seeking professional help?...