I am a 26-year-old gay guy with a strange fetish. Mine feels like it’s the strangest one out there, because I’ve never read anything about it anywhere. Consequently, I’ve always felt embarrassed and ashamed about it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are several issues at work here that you could address. I’m not really quite sure what it is I’m asking for. –The End Eater...

I’ve been with my guy for almost eight years. He wants sex way more often than I do, but that’s because I’m not attracted to his 80-pounds-overweight body. The one time I gently broke it to him why my libido was low he acted really hurt and didn’t sleep with me for a few weeks. He didn’t go on a diet either. I can tell he occasionally feels guilty by the way he orders diet soda to go with his greasy fast food....

With one assistant and a hand pump, New York artist Jason Hackenwerth spent a week in early June turning some 7,000 balloons into 13 giant sculptures commissioned for a Chicago event. Seven of them are now hanging from the ceilings at Navta Schulz. His balloon works have been attracting attention at galleries and museums in the last 18 months, but he’s been entertaining kids in restaurants and malls with smaller, more conventional balloon sculptures for years....

Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote view journalism as an intricate mix of principles, bravado, and negotiation. Working in a minefield, their star journalists are victims of their vocations. Good Night, and Good Luck, set in the early 50s, celebrates Edward R. Murrow’s bravery, eloquence, and sense of justice in challenging Joseph McCarthy at the height of his power—a kind of heroism that evokes John Wayne’s in a western like Rio Bravo (a movie I cherish, though its view of good and evil is similarly unshaded)....

As direct and universal as Our Town, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s musical just needs the right voices behind the right faces to work. Fred Anzevino and Beverle Bloch’s tenderly crafted revival for Theo Ubique Theatre Company tempers the first act’s exploration of love’s insanity with the second act’s antiromantic reality checks. Derrick Trumbly is all nerdy neediness as the boy next door, Sarah Ann Giocomo as his much-tested soul mate reveals a stunning soprano in her splendid songs, and Jeremy Trager brings assurance and worldly wisdom to their great tempter, El Gallo....

Sometimes movies earmarked for kids are a lot more nuanced, sophisticated, and mature than the ones that are allegedly for grown-ups. As a nonparent, I often avoid PG fare, but Howl’s Moving Castle and The Adventures of Sharkboy & Lavagirl in 3-D suggest that maybe I shouldn’t. Conversely, during the two long hours of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a deeply stupid and offensive action comedy-romance, I kept feeling I was being addressed as an obnoxious, heartless, and nihilistic grade-school brat....

There are plenty of reasons to assume WILDERNESS is just another bunch of guys romancing the corpse of Ian Curtis: like Joy Division, they use loping bass lines, chiming guitar riffs, and mournful, plodding rhythms to create dreamy, minimal music. But they actually have more in common with the seminal postpunk band (and fellow Baltimoreans) Lungfish: long, unbroken songs that gently arc and stretch, guitar cadences that repeat like mantras, and peculiar, uninhibited singing....

A lovely September Sunday produced a perfect storm of sports in Chicago. The PGA tour made its belated stop at Lemont’s Cog Hill for the event once known as the Western Open, while the Indy Racing League pulled into the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet. The U.S. soccer team welcomed defending World Cup champs Brazil for a hastily arranged friendly at Soldier Field. Less exotically, the White Sox continued their series against the Minnesota Twins at Sox Park....

BLANKSLATE, Plasticene, PAC/edge Performance Festival, at the Athenaeum Theatre, and THE USUAL HAUNTS, PAC/edge Performance Festival, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Every play begins with a metaphorical blank slate. But unfortunately most directors spoon-feed their audiences, providing instantly recognizable characters and situations and plenty of anxiety-relieving exposition. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not Dexter Bullard and Plasticene. They tease us for an hour or more in BlankSlate with inconclusive contextualizing–props that may be literal or figurative, costumes that may or may not be significant, theatrical beats that may or may not be building blocks in an elusive plot....

I recently heard someone at an art lecture argue that the Manson murders didn’t end the 60s, as Joan Didion contends, but actually kicked off “The 60s,” an era of nu-hippie romanticism that’s now in its fourth decade. Listening to the full-length debut from Brightblack Morning Light, due later this month on Matador, I’m not sure how much longer we can keep up this fascination with leather headbands and tripped-out jams without losing every bit of self-respect....

Three months ago I wrote a story for one of the daily newspapers about Bark!, a musical that opened October 21 and is still playing at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. Composed by David Troy Francis with a book by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard (who also wrote the Great Dane’s share of the lyrics), Bark! focuses on the small pleasures and major anxieties of six dogs stuck in an animal shelter....

Sustainable Architecture in Chicago: Works in Progress | Museum of Contemporary Art If Mau were a cobbler, no doubt he’d see the world progressing through the evolution of shoes, but instead design is the atomic force he sees shaping our existence. “If you can imagine,” Mau says, “the number of times you can close your eyes and open them in a space where you’re not looking at design things, you realize that it’s almost zero....

My War: Killing Time in Iraq John Crawford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Buzzell named his blog “My War” after the Black Flag song–because he liked the band and, as he writes in his new memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, it “sounded kinda tough.” It doesn’t take long to tell that he isn’t going to win points for literary art. A hard-drinking, hard-drugging California skater with a “Fuck the World” tattoo, Buzzell joins the army in 2003 lacking anything better to do....

G’s . . . A Boutique Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bridgeport’s notorious for a few things, but shopping’s not one of them. Mary Ortiz, who grew up in the neighborhood and raised her own kids there, hopes to help change that. When her mother died last year, Ortiz was left with hundreds of pieces of vintage sterling-silver and gold Mexican jewelry left over from a jewelry store her parents owned for a short time in the late 70s....

These iconoclastic Chicagoans have played together in different combinations over the years, but rarely all at once. A few years ago they made a record for Atavistic’s Out Trios series, and while the results were uneven–always a risk with improvised music–the range of sounds they produced was astonishing. I was going to list the instruments used on the recording, but that’s beside the point: Parker, Drumm, and Zerang are all capable of rendering their gear unrecognizable....

“Most advertising is schlock because most people have bad taste, not because of who pays for it. For that matter, most attempted art is schlock too.” —Harold Henderson, November 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe what it takes to diminish this kind of destruction is for groups of people to try to band together to find alternatives to the capitalist greed that is negatively impacting all of our lives....

A slew of organ-jazz discs has come out lately, but two with similar approaches are worth comparing. Break Out, the much-anticipated album by Soulive, attempts to add elements of R & B and funk to the genre, but the songs are so overproduced they remove any of the trio’s jazz (or even jam-band) credibility. On the other hand, the songs on Super Heavy Organ (Magnatude), a relatively unheralded disc from keyboardist Robert Walter, do much of what Soulive wanted to do, and a lot better, grabbing the ears of jazz listeners and moving the feet of hipsters....

Ingebrigt Haaker FlatenWhen Wed 10/11, 10 PMWhere Hideout, 1354 W. WabansiaPrice FreeInfo 773-227-4433 Haaker Flaten made the big leap across the Atlantic to be with his girlfriend, Trea Fotidzis. The couple met in summer 2005, when Fotidzis traveled to the Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway with her friend Mitch Cocanig–one of the organizers for the local improv collective Umbrella Music–and within months they were certain it was time to live in the same city....

I couldn’t wait for last Thursday to end so I could go home, lie down, and think about what I’d just done. I felt like I’d entered a place from which I would never be able to return. My life had changed irreversibly, and not necessarily for the better. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s when I saw it: a black suede tasseled handbag that made me shiver with desire....

Love the Cup (Domino), the debut EP by Glasgow quartet SONS & DAUGHTERS, was filled with twanging guitars, bleak lyrical themes, and boom-chicka-boom beats–a fitting approach for a band that named a song after Johnny Cash. But though they still kick up some sawdust on their first full-length album, The Repulsion Box (Domino), they’re hardly hemmed in stylistically. The stuttering guitar that drives “Medicine,” the junkie’s lament that opens the album, sounds like it was lifted from an Ex tune; the tale of a runaway bride in “Red Receiver” is set to an acoustic skiffle shuffle; and the anthemic “Taste the Last Girl” echoes early Blondie....