Nine years after she got sober, psychiatrist Sarz Maxwell was doing well enough. More than a decade earlier Drug Enforcement Administration officials had caught on that she had been prescribing herself amphetamines for about a year through her practice in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Initially the state’s medical licensing board wanted to send her to prison. “It was very scary,” she says. “It’s a felony to write yourself a prescription for a controlled substance....

The huge vase in Vera Klement’s Chthonic Urn, one of her large works at Maya Polsky, is roughly painted, covered with smears and drips that give it an almost volcanic presence, as if it were still in the process of being formed. It floats isolated on a completely white field, invoking the whole history of pots rather than being just a particular vessel in a particular place. On a vertical panel to its right are five abstract landscapes; in her statement Klement writes that “the parts remain separate to…leave their meaning and their formal elements unresolved,” but the landscapes connect the pot to the outdoors and to the lives of the earliest peoples who made and used such things....

With each album that New York rapper Aesop Rock puts out, his beats get more cluttered and his lyrics sound more like riddles. But his vocal style stays the same: he articulates every word but snaps off his rhymes quickly, practically warping them into a different language. On his latest EP, Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives (Definitive Jux), Aesop’s verses and choruses just manage to miss getting run over by the backing tracks, in which snares and zapping sounds bonk and boing against each other to create heady syncopation....

At one point on his new album, Finding Forever (Geffen), Common tries to smooth-talk a potential paramour who doesn’t date rappers: “I’ve got my SAG card, baby,” he tells her. “I’m an actor.” It’s true he’s been turning up on the silver screen, but he also switches roles like a chameleon on disc, covering the range from straight-up bangers to sappy, fuzzily spiritual ballads. At his best he’s one of hip-hop’s most talented and dynamic figures, and here he mixes tough beats with 70s soul like he did on his comeback, Be....

After the guitar-heavy rock of 2003’s Beneath This Gruff Exterior, John Hiatt decamped to Memphis’s Ardent Studios with producer Jim Dickinson, where he made last year’s more song-oriented Master of Disaster (New West). Recorded with the help of Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood and Dickinson’s sons Cody and Luther–two-thirds of roots rockers the North Mississippi Allstars–the album artfully blends soulful southern grooves and Hiatt’s picturesque storytelling, which has lost none of its precision or bite over 30-plus years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gerald Bracey, a psychologist with a gift for polemic, has made a second career out of (in his words) “debunk[ing] the notion that schools were better in the past than they are today.” In Education Week (registration required) he rolls out the guns once more to claim that the Soviets’ launch of the first orbiting satellite 50 years ago “wounded” the reputation of US schools....

Now in its fourth year, Aurora’s Midwest Literary Festival typically features a slew of regional authors and nationally known scribes in all genres. Confirmed at press time were David Morrell (whose 1972 novel First Blood inspired the first Rambo film) and Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian). The festival includes workshops, panels, poetry slams, readings, and signings; upwards of an estimated 10,000 people have attended in years past. The MLF is offering for sale copies of books (many of them autographed) from past visiting authors, including big names like horror novelist Peter Straub and locals Elizabeth Berg (A Year of Pleasures), David Ellis (Line of Vision), and Andrew Winston (Looped); see the festival Web site for info on how to purchase....

Lead Story According to an April New York Times dispatch, at least a third of all brides in Kyrgyzstan are abducted by their husbands in accordance with a practice called ala kachuu (roughly, “grab and run”). The prospective groom, usually with the help of friends, kidnaps a woman and brings her home, where his family tries to convince her to accept him. If they can keep her there overnight (by force or otherwise), she must agree to the marriage or face being humiliated and ostracized, as her virginity will thereafter be suspect; in many cases the bride’s own parents advise her to submit....

You may have seen one of Jenny Lam’s blank, prestamped, self-addressed postcards affixed to a light pole or on a bookstore shelf somewhere in the city. The postcards always feature the same prompt: “Tell me one thing you dream of doing before you die. Use this card as your canvas.” Lam, a Chicago-based artist and independent curator, places a unique code on the bottom corner of each postcard, which she uses to record and track its location....

Aculturally specific evening-length work by a company based in Goiania, Brazil, is the opener for the LatinContempo Festival, which runs three weekends in February and March. And Henrique Rodovalho’s Choreography for Listening isn’t just good for you: it’s fun. It’s like a natural-history study–the performers’ quick, quirky, often humorous movements make them look like animals responding instinctually to their environment. Here it’s aural: a pastiche of talk, music, and ambient sounds culled from a 1997 documentary about street musicians in Brazil, Sons da Rua (“Street Sounds”)....

If you follow entertainment news with any regularity, you’re probably already familiar with The Brown Bunny. Last year it caused an uproar at Cannes with its graphic three-minute sequence of writer-producer-director-cinematographer-editor-star Vincent Gallo being hungrily fellated by Chloe Sevigny. The filmmaker subsequently got into a highly publicized feud with Roger Ebert, who had called The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of the festival. And last month community outcry in Los Angeles forced the removal of a 60-foot billboard over Sunset Boulevard that offered a more oblique image of Sevigny going down on Gallo....

I hope I can be forgiven for promoting a piece of my own promotion. It seems worth doing in this case because an hour-long interview with me by Mara Tapp about my latest book, Discovering Orson Welles, taped for CAN TV19 and showing on Sunday, October 21, at 5 PM and then again on Monday, October 22, at noon, entitled “Unseen Orson Welles,” includes a silent, five-minute sequence (scroll down article to four paragraphs before the end) from Orson Welles’ unfinished Don Quixote that is arguably the greatest sequence he shot for the film, even though it can’t be found in the execrable version cobbled together by Jesus Franco in 1992....

First in a series of occasional columns about the music industry. Understandably, this gives big music companies the screaming heebie-jeebies. Until now the only interaction labels had with cell phones was in the hugely profitable ringtone business. At two to three dollars apiece, ringtones will produce half a billion dollars in sales in the U.S. alone this year, according to BMI–double the 2004 figure. Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business for Sony BMG Music Entertainment, recently told Business 2....

This letter is in response to Tom McClurg’s letter in the November 25 issue. It is interesting that Tom McClurg cites “diversity” and especially “age diversity” as reasons to allow allegedly ill-behaved children to have the run of Andersonville. Ill-behaved or behaved children aside, I would like to point out that if Mr. McClurg has had such an interest in age diversity in our north and northeast city neighborhoods, he might like to know that, as far as Andersonville, Uptown, and Ravenswood are concerned, only 11 percent of families in the area can afford an average-priced condo, more than 40 percent of the area’s seniors make less than $25,000 a year, and the community has lost 3,500 senior families between 1990 and 2000....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The second is to focus strictly on the merits of Robin Thicke’s new The Evolution of Robin Thicke (Star Trak). It is a balanced record in that the dirty funk of songs like “Cocaine” is enough to negate the other parts, which sound exactly like how you remember bad Babyface songs sounding. This approach is as boring as his songs that sound like bad Babyface....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was actually one of the more interesting twists on use of the program. TIFs (or tax increment financing districts) are intended to subsidize development in blighted communities that would otherwise find it difficult to attract investment. In this case, however, 47th Ward alderman Gene Schulter was seeking public funds to keep private development out — at least a certain kind of private development....

Lawyers who defend police-torture victims in Chicago long ago reached a harsh conclusion about Cook County’s criminal judges: most have a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge police brutality. Now these lawyers can point to a case so extreme it’s almost funny: a judge who apparently ruled on his own performance as a prosecutor, deciding there was no taint to a confession that the judge himself had written. Judge Nicholas Ford passed judgment on assistant state’s attorney Nick Ford....

Carla Bozulich has yet to be granted her rightful place in the pantheon of brilliant rock ‘n’ roll women, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because she’s too happy straddling the line between accessibility and its antithesis to ever produce the unconflicted anthem that’s strongly suggested for those seeking admission. Nothing demonstrates this better than the droning, wailing, indulgent requiem that opens her new album, Evangelista (Constellation). I can hear a little pissed-off Meredith Monk in there, a little free-rangin’ Patty Waters, a little Patti Smith growling in tongues–but it mostly makes me think of what The Marble Index might’ve sounded like if Nico had been less of an icy fatalist and more of a brawling wildcat....

The late-90s big-beat fad pushed dance music into the U.S. mainstream–in the process providing car manufacturers with a decade’s worth of music for their, err, racier commercials–but few of its anthems, and fewer of the musicians behind them, sound particularly good today. The Chemical Brothers are a notable exception, proving themselves time and again to be two of dance music’s most appealing innovators. History will remember them for “Block Rockin’ Beats”–one of the most ecstatically noisy songs to ever reach heavy rotation on MTV–but if their new album, We Are the Night (Astralwerks), is anything to go by, their best work may be ahead of them....

This second annual showcase of collaborations between local musicians, filmmakers, and performing artists and their counterparts from around the world is organized by the Borderbend Arts Collective and runs through 10/27 at various locations. For more information call 312-543-7027 or visit chicagocalling.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Jones Gallery A movement performance, A Phone Play, by Timothy Rey; a screening of the short film This Is Our Club: The History of Montgomery County, Maryland Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, Inc....