These locals have only gotten around to releasing their self-titled debut now, after gigging for almost three years, but it’s certainly worth the wait. Like all right-thinking punks, they keep it under half an hour, and the catchy, gloriously raucous songs are moderately complex but never too fancy to work as fun-time rock. Over urgent, no-frills backbeats, drony vintage-keyboard blare jostles against big, clean clang-a-lang guitar lines–a sound sometimes reminiscent of Black Randy & the Metrosquad or the Damned....

Artistic director James Morrow returns to his hip-hop roots in two new works on a program of five premieres. His Can You Dig It is a generation-spanning celebration of funk and social criticism using music by James Brown’s JB’s, and texts by KRS-One, Public Enemy, and Mos Def. There’s an edge to this piece, which includes literal soapbox speeches and alludes to ongoing wars on poverty, drugs, and crime. But Morrow’s fundamental optimism and the get-down dancing keep gloom and doom at a distance: after Kyle Terry’s heavy-duty acrobatic display, he goes to a mike and gasps, “The revolution is tiring!...

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music runs through 10/31 at Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston. Rhino Fest is coordinated by the Curious Theatre Branch, and features emerging and established artists from Chicago’s fringe. Performances take place in Prop’s north and south theaters. Admission for most shows is $15 or “pay what you can”; exceptions are noted below. For information and reservations, call 773-267-6660 (except as noted below) or visit www....

My boyfriend and I are currently doing the long-distance thing, as I’m finishing up some schooling. About two months ago during some dirty phone talk he said he’d been masturbating while thinking about me fucking another man while he watches. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yeah, UATCT, I’m familiar with drastic, disgusted, after-the-fact denial. When I first came out–back before I knew better–I fucked a handful of “straight” guys....

“Sites seen” is more like it. In this third annual showcase, curated by Julie Laffin, performers’ audio and visual additions to the Chicago Cultural Center’s grand and humble spaces alike give them new resonance. Sara Schnadt’s Re-Trace is set in the third-floor kitchen, formerly the entry to the stacks when the building was the main library. Reflecting on librarians’ painstaking feats of memory before card catalogs existed, Schnadt projects a sampling of information from early collections, then traces the projections in red wool, alluding to domestic labor....

When I first met Thomas Lee, an army veteran who’d been washed out of his New Orleans home by Katrina, he was standing outside a Cabrini-Green row house, listening to an official from the Chicago Housing Authority assure him that the city would find him housing and a job. At the time Lee, the focus of my September 16 column, was sharing the two-bedroom apartment of his uncle, a friend of mine, with his sister and her seven-year-old son, who’d also been made homeless by Katrina....

It looked as if a tornado had passed through the house, picked up the remnants of Arrow Brown’s strange, sordid life, and dumped them in the alley. Brown’s outsize lifestyle matched his outsize character. He was rarely without his signature cigar, .38 special, and black homburg–a rogue image that even served as Bandit’s logo for a time. Among his other accessories was a wood-handled ice pick, which he would idly pull out and hurl at some target–a tree stump, a can....

In the movies or on television, when a doctor or a nurse needs to subdue a raving, hysterical patient, they inject a strong sedative, to which the patient succumbs mere seconds later. How accurate is this depiction? Does the drug travel from the arm to the brain that quickly? –Stephen A., Manhattan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Response time to a sedative injection varies widely depending on drug, dose, patient size, drug tolerance, route of administration, and so on....

Richard Greenberg ponders fascinating issues in this intellectually bracing drama, asking, among other things, what is the source of inspiration? And what’s the difference between creative brilliance and mental illness? He never actually answers the questions but allows the audience to draw its own conclusions on the basis of the evidence presented over two acts, the first about three troubled adult children of famous architects, the second about the architects themselves....

There are plenty of reasons why the no-budget online comedy series Yacht Rock was so successful. Nostalgia, wit, novelty–and most of all the way it indulged our sneaking suspicion that the people who make the smoothest, mellowest music are the slimiest, most treacherous ones. Hard rockers already like to style themselves as action heroes, so it’s barely funny to imagine them on an espionage mission–you need to go with, say, Loggins & Messina....

The Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s annual showcase of emerging talent runs Friday-Sunday, August 20-22, marking the 35th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival and honoring the memory of Abbie Hoffman, anarchist author of Woodstock Nation. This performance marathon offers a steady flow of entertainment by local fringe ensembles and solo artists while seeking to foster a communal spirit among performers and audience (which may be enhanced by sleep deprivation). Gathering of the Tribes...

Joe DiPietro’s savvy, funny songbook show reprises the King’s hits in a connect-the-tunes musical that blends Footloose with As You Like It. It’s the mid-50s, and an Elvis-like roustabout (the smoldering, very tall Cheyenne Jackson) shakes a small-hearted, dance-hating town from conservatism into liberal thinking–his love interest’s gender-bending disguise alone threatens at least one character’s sexual orientation. (Jenn Gambatese plays the character with androgynous dexterity.) Coming thick and fast, the two dozen ballads are inventively delivered and powerfully danced, and the set moves as much as the performers do, conveying a motorcycle roaring through the country, an abandoned amusement park, and biker angels hanging from the heavens....

ChicagoImprovAnarchy all too accurately re-creates the forced levity, awkward flirtations, and sing-along brainwashing of the summer camp experience in this whirlwind improvised montage. On the night I attended, the players’ disaffection with “Camp Anahkig” rang so true that I could have sworn they were doing community service. But otherwise nothing much happened beyond dutiful send-up and unidealized recollection–the laughs were few and far between. It was opening night, though, so jitters and tightness might have been a factor, especially since the headliners were less poised than the two-man opening act, Liquid Ecstasy, whose long, meandering riff on absolutely nothing was gorgeously executed....

Too many plotlines surge through this 110-minute two-act for New Town Writers by Chicago poet and teacher Robert Klein Engler. The backstory is that the protagonist, a gay college teacher, was fired for a fling with a student, while the principal plot, inflected by a ghost’s testimony, concerns the teacher’s current affair with the gay son of a racketeer. The best thing about the play is its sense of place: New Orleans inspires lovely descriptions of the French Quarter and of the Garden District’s “languid expectations....

After R.E.M. got big in the late 80s and jumped from I.R.S. to Warner Brothers, fans of their old labelmates the dB’s wrung their hands and asked the bitch-goddess Fame why she’d abandoned their heroes to die a cult band. (Chris Stamey, one of the group’s two chief songwriters, had left in 1982, and the other, Peter Holsapple, pulled the plug on the dB’s six years later.) The murky guitars and take-the-sock-out-of-your-mouth vocals on R....

Basque abstract artist Jose Antonio Sistiaga painted directly onto film with homemade inks to create this silent 1970 feature. But Sistiaga’s strangely titled work, which has recently been restored, is different from the films of Stan Brakhage, who didn’t come to film from painting and had his own rhythm. Among the predominant patterns in this abstract extravaganza are dancing drops and specks that alternately suggest satellites, flying saucers, or rushing bodies of water, and its combination of color and 35-millimeter ‘Scope (with about half an hour in black and white) yields the kind of spectacle one associates with musicals and SF epics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As someone who doesn’t get out of town that often, the two September-October weeks of the Chicago International Film Festival (running October 4-17 this year) are usually the high point of my moviegoing year. Partly it’s the gambler’s game, the sometimes giddy (or is it only fraught?) calculation of deciding what to take a chance on and what not to and how to juggle two or three must-sees at different theaters on the same off-night Tuesday....

Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City How it’s changing, and what’s driving that change, preoccupied Lloyd on and off for a decade–from 1993, when he was a University of Chicago grad student hanging out in the neighborhood, to 2003, when he left town for Nashville and a job teaching sociology at Vanderbilt University. His 295-page book, derived from his dissertation, asks how the bohemias of today are different from their forebears....

George Christensen, a 55-year-old bike messenger, likes to set challenges for himself. In 1975 he sat through every inning of every game in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. In 1991 he made 73 deliveries in one day, a record for Chicago bike messengers at the time. Last spring he attended 70 movies in 12 days. As a kid he was always saving his allowance for something, but didn’t know what. He wanted a better bike than the one-speed his parents gave all their kids but wouldn’t spend his money on the Schwinn Varsity ten-speed he coveted....

Musicians and Their Money Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re a charity,” Acri says, explaining that the theater doesn’t have to make money. “Our basic mission is to provide seminars and programs for working musicians or people interested in careers in music.” The seminars, conducted by Acri and Allan Curtis, Cavalcade’s director of operations, address legal, financial, and promotional aspects of the music business....