Nana Shineflug, who founded the Chicago Moving Company more than 30 years ago, has always set a steadfastly personal course: she recently performed with her young grandson, for example. That tradition continues with Cindy Brandle, now coartistic director with Shineflug. Brandle says her trio on this program–Thrown, premiered last fall–had its origin in her own enforced inactivity during a pregnancy that required bed rest. She wanted to make something kinetic and at the same time convey a new mother’s sense of being thrown here and there by the vagaries of her child’s needs....

Writer-musician Paul McComas and his former student Emile Ferris, a writer and visual artist, are both fascinated by monsters–he began making his own monster movies at 11, and in 2003 she published a story called “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Karen Reyes.” Now, for this program of collaborations organized by Jamie Horban, they’ve created Backyard Monsters, which combines McComas’s edited childhood movies and live musical accompaniment with a monologue by Ferris: drawing on her short story, it focuses on the impact of the Vietnam war....

We interrupt this entertainment product for an important public announcement: Spotted making music in Lakeview last Saturday, the Bzots–three assembly-line robots recently escaped from Globocrud LLC’s local plant–remain at large. Says Globocrud’s CEO, the Exalted Sir Cleve Crud, PhD, Esq.: “While these robots are in no way dangerous, they cost me a lot to build. If you see a suspiciously colorful, noisy, work-shirking robot, call the emergency Crudline at…” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Intolerance in the Air Wanta decided to follow his hunch and look for correlations between our polarized atmosphere and the ways people get their information. With the help of Stephanie Craft, an assistant professor, and Mugur Geana, a graduate student, he reexamined data from a 2003 Pew Research Center survey that had touched on Americans’ convictions and media choices in order to tease out his own conclusions. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Even if your first album is solid from beginning to end, burying the sweetest spot 14 tracks deep takes balls of steel. But that’s where the ubercoy “Ladybird” shows up on Ladytron’s 2001 debut, 604, a disc that for my money remains the gold standard on the neo-new wave market to this day. Its perfect, crystalline synth pop, spun-sugar sweet and lighter than air, has withstood my best efforts to overplay it into oblivion, and the pairing of continental ice queen Mira Aroyo with Albionic ingenue Helen Marnie still sounds like the most brilliant no-brainer ever....

The kernel of a very good idea lies at the heart of Karen Zacarias’s play, now receiving its world premiere under Henry Godinez’s direction. Exploring the frustrations and machinations of the title character, wife of a dying painter who was once friends with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Zacarias hints that often the most interesting stories can be found in the margins of the canvas. But that through line is diluted during the 90-minute play by too many competing narratives....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Michael Miner’s column this week [August 27] he states, “Let’s cut Bush some slack. A comfy spot’s what Bill Clinton had at Oxford. To guys who signed up for the national guard, those six years of meetings and summer camps looming ahead were a huge millstone.” I assumed Miner was being satirical (or at least ironic), but his last sentence, “Bush learned to fly a fighter jet in the guard–no small thing–and if he skipped meetings for a year, he attended them for five,” convinced me that Miner is clueless (like most of the media these days) about the difference between being shot at in Vietnam and attending meetings–or, oh what a hardship, getting to fly a fighter jet....

Seven great films by the former Chicagoan, long unavailable, that show his love of puzzles, games, and incisive self-questioning. Many of the films mix humor and religious experience: a man prays in a supermarket in No Sir, Orison! (1975), whose title is a palindrome. Around 1969 Land began using sharp, bright compositions to construct obscure narratives that critique materialism and undermine the sensuousness of his images. In Wide Angle Saxon (1975) the white Anglo-Saxon protagonist, bored by the “structural” film he’s watching, begins to question his attraction to his possessions....

I’m a 24-year-old male with a 28-year-old girlfriend. We’ve been together for a year, and I love her with all my heart. We get along, she makes me laugh, and she even plays video games with me. But our sex life is less than great. I know there are guys out there who will hate me for saying this, but the problem is my cock. It’s too big. I’m 6′ 3″, and she’s a foot shorter....

This two-person play reveals the gentler side of a company renowned for its gritty, testosterone-driven productions. The woman in Gardner McKay’s bittersweet fable is a secretary working in Liverpool and the man, a fisherman from the western coast of Ireland. Their love is nurtured by letters to each other, but when they finally meet they discover that distance is necessary to relationships based on romantic fancy. Under Richard Cotovsky’s capable direction, Robin Hughes and Eamonn McDonagh deliver sensitive, intelligent, detailed performances, and Becky Kusar’s sound design evokes the seductive but ever-shifting power of the sea....

Mannequin Men PRICE $15, $13 in advance Except for guitarist Ethan D’Ercole, who plays in Watchers and put in time with a handful of ska outfits in the 90s–Isaac Green & the Skalars, Skavoovie & the Epitones–nobody in Mannequin Men has been in another band that anybody’s paid attention to. As a result they’re totally psyched to be playing in this one. When they’re really clicking they can write five new originals in a single rehearsal, then play them all at a show the next night–and they’ll drop whatever they’re doing for a gig booked just hours in advance....

“Golf is a good walk spoiled.” –Mark Twain Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But if a great athlete suggests an essential character by his or her style of play–Ryne Sandberg’s perfectionism, Mike Singletary’s intensity–doesn’t any athletic performer do the same, no matter the level of play? Doesn’t clumsy or nervous play suggest a clumsy or nervous personality? For me the temptation has always been to read something about my current state of mind–something perhaps previously undetected–into my performance at golf, that most intensely individual sport....

Bubbles of methane gas rise to the oily surface of a small pond next to a heap of trash that includes a gas mask once used by an employee of the Alburn Incinerator, which used to stand here. Rusted barrels nestle in the reeds, and twisted pieces of metal poke up through the water and vegetation. “This was no-man’s-land in the 80s,” says Victor Crivello, a resident of nearby Pullman and a former environmental technician for the Illinois EPA....

Chuck’s Southern Comforts Cafe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s still busy, but the eight-year-old restaurant has settled into its groove since then. Many of the place’s attributes remain unchanged: the casual booths, the pig tchotchkes, the couple hundred hot sauces for sale. Most of the old favorites–beef brisket, gumbo, churrasco, and Pine’s famous Cajun green beans–are still around. So is the slow-smoked hickory barbecue and house barbecue sauce, available in mild, hot, and a new honey-chipotle version....

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe confounds expectations with its big sound–it comes across as a full-size orchestra whose performances are impeccably detailed. Formed in 1981, the group is known for intense interpretations of the German repertoire, as is pianist-conductor Andras Schiff. For all his obvious preparation, he never plays as if he’s merely re-creating what he’s practiced, and unlike many musicians today he makes no concessions to the early-music movement. He’s a staunch defender of performing Bach on the modern grand piano, writing of his distaste for the sound of a harpsichord in the liner notes to his latest Goldberg Variations recording: “Hands on heart, can you listen to the harpsichord that long?...

He Walks the Line As the two sides waited for the assigned judge, Joan Lefkow, to return to the bench after a long absence, Bond’s attorney, Craig Futterman of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School, filed an amended version of the 20-month-old suit. He added three new defendants: a former administrator at the Office of Professional Standards, police superintendent Philip Cline, and the city of Chicago....

The headliner may be Frederick Ashton’s 1964 The Dream, danced to the music of Mendelssohn. But the real story is Jiri Kylian’s gorgeously abstract four-movement Return to a Strange Land, set to Janacek sonatas. Its moves are complex yet feel inevitable: two men embrace across a woman suspended between them, then keep their legs entwined but part to let her slip through. In each section these human geometric patterns resolve into a beautiful final image, always sculptural but sometimes suggesting Henry Moore and sometimes Winged Victory....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wow. I really thought that Jessica Suarez’s Pitchfork review of Tegan and Sara’s The Con—with its opening line, “Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock, a comparison only fair because of the company they kept”—would be able to hold onto its status as the most infuriating piece of music writing I’ve read this month, especially being so close to the end of July....

The members of this local comedy-rock trio get a lot of practice being funny outside their gigs: Tony Mendoza (vocals, drums, Farfisa), Joanna Buese (bass, “kazoogle”), and Thea Lux (vocals, guitar) also perform with troupes like ComedySportz, Annoyance, and Sirens Improv. There are plenty of yuks on their self-titled EP (Roydale): a faux radio ad for a sandwich shop declares, “The only thing faster would be putting a sandwich gun into your mouth and pulling the trigger....

I’ve always been a little less enthusiastic about Magnolia Electric Co. than Songs: Ohia, even though the main thing Jason Molina changed was the name he recorded under. The problem is that the trenchant troubadour has started to get above his raisin’. His latest release, Sojourner (Secretly Canadian), asks an awful lot from his fans: it’s a box set of three full-lengths and an EP, all consisting of material recorded during previous album sessions....