Never Mind the Card–Say It With a Stamp Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artist provocateur Michael Hernandez de Luna has been creating his own faux stamps for years. In the fall of 2003, he writes in a wall label, he invited 47 artists from 11 countries to “reveal to us what they see as Evil.” The 127 stamp sheets in the exhibit target Hitler, suicide bombers, pedophile priests, and Pol Pot, among other subjects....

“You want to see some hams?” asked Douglas Freeman of Cadiz, Kentucky, as he ambled out of the barn. “We had it so hot and dry, a lot of ’em just shrunk up to nothing.” The 80-year-old Freeman, four-time winner of the Trigg County Country Ham Festival, is a legend in this part of southwest Kentucky, which is known for producing aged hams on a par with fine European varieties such as prosciutto di Parma and jamon serrano....

Brookins, meanwhile, is promising to crack down on bad cops and corrupt politicians–not exactly the platform advanced by recent state’s attorneys who are forces in the Democratic Party. “The problem with prosecuting or not prosecuting corrupt cops is that when they’re out there, they corrupt the whole system,” he said. “I have people come to me in the office after they go to CAPS meetings that they didn’t want to give the police this information because they believe they’re telling the dope dealers they got this information from Miss Smith and Mrs....

This hilarious yet unsettling short comedy by Stage Left Theatre ensemble member Mia McCullough focuses on a young suburbanite troubled by the pitter–patter of little paws in her attic. Turns out a squirrel is chewing up the insulation of the beautiful new home she lives in with her husband–who hates squirrels and refuses to share his wife’s bed as long as the critter is crawling around above them. As the woman wrestles with how–and whether–to get rid of the rodent, it becomes clear that McCullough is really writing about a couple’s response to an unplanned pregnancy....

Wilco’s sold-out show Tuesday at the Auditorium Theatre was originally set to coincide with the release of the band’s first live album, the two-disc Kicking Television (Nonesuch), but a manufacturing snag has pushed the release date back to November 15. Front man Jeff Tweedy says the live record, which is culled from a four-night stand at the Vic in May, is long overdue. “It’d been about ten years since Wilco started, and it seemed like this might be a nice way to have some sort of retrospective–kinda take a moment to look back, ’cause we really haven’t done a whole lot of that,” he says....

In her energetic, poignant, often funny one-woman show, Tracy Egan portrays 15 characters in the kindergarten ecosystem: kids, teacher, principal, social worker, nanny, and moms ranging from jaded to frantic. Though the structure and some of the jokes feel self-conscious (“A teacher saying her first name is like the Kinko’s cashier handing you her breast instead of your change”), Egan’s depictions of motherdom’s stock characters are crisp, distinct, and accurate, and the story flows beautifully under Teri McEvoy’s direction....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Monday the Government Accountability Office reported on 864 phone calls (PDF) to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which runs the new Medicare prescription drug program. GAO researchers received accurate and complete answers about one-third of the time. That’s not even halfway to a passing grade. More specifically, conservatives get elected by promising to shrink government, but they can’t get re-elected without responding to constituents who want government to improve their lives....

This musical has an offbeat premise: gay actor-director Nick sets out to create a spoof of Alexander the Great–and gets the real Alexander as his leading man, onstage and off, when the Macedonian conqueror returns from the underworld. Librettist Stephan deGhelder has done his research–the script and lyrics are packed with historical references and theater trivia. But the show is undone by coarse double entendres, lame camp humor, swishy stereotypes, sentimental cliches, and a callow, unconvincing portrayal of Alexander, by newcomer Graham Kurtz....

Chicago Chocolate Cafe But Fannie May’s loss was Moore’s gain. When the local chocolate giant was unable to fulfill some corporate holiday orders at the end of the year, Moore’s Chicago Chocolate Company, which at the time sold candy only through its Web site (chicagochocolate.com)–mostly corporate gifts like bars molded in the designs of company logos–stepped up. “We had a number of clients calling us, frantic,” Moore says. “We had one that had been with them 35 years, and we were able to turn around and get it done in ten days....

Back in the early 80s, everyone from Thurston Moore to Afrika Bambaataa wanted to be in Liquid Liquid, and Grandmaster Flash wanted it bad enough to jack the band’s song “Cavern” for “White Lines.” If anything, the desire to be in Liquid Liquid has only gotten more powerful with time–a new generation of dance punks has discovered that ripping them off makes for a satisfying side hustle to ripping off Gang of Four....

The first time I tried playing the self-titled debut from this Montreal quartet, I was in the car with a pregnant friend who was battling morning sickness, and we had to turn it off. The album starts with a clap of thunder and several minutes of wobbly synth squawk, and what my friend said was, “I feel like we just whooshed into outer space”–the thought alone was enough to make her queasy....

Leads Steve Tomlitz as Claude and Zach Laliberte as Berger don’t have powerful enough voices to knock their solos out of the park in this quintessential antiestablishment piece, but that’s almost beside the point. Hair redefined the American musical, focusing more on complex themes than characterization, and Tomlitz and Laliberte are skilled enough to elicit the requisite sympathy for their characters. Director Danny Bernardo’s choreography works well within the constraints of the space: the terrific ensemble (including Natalie Levine as debutante Sheila) plays to all sides of the stage and moves into the seating area tactfully, advancing the theme of all-inclusiveness....

Several years ago a bunch of us were sitting here in the window just people watching. A cab pulled up, an inebriated gentleman got out, and the guy proceeded to barf all over the sidewalk. Still to come, though, was a dog owner walking his pet–it was just a regular old mutt. The mutt proceeded to lap up the barf, but the dog owner wasn’t watching–he was cruising all the guys walking by....

Dark and challenging, this 2003 suspense film from Chinese director Lou Ye (Suzhou River) unfolds against the Sino-Japanese conflict of the 1920s and ’30s. The story of romance and espionage recalls Hitchcock’s wartime thrillers; the violent, chaotic set pieces, with their kinetic handheld camera and rapid cutting, evoke contemporary news coverage of terrorist crises. Zhang Ziyi (House of Flying Daggers) stars as a young woman in Manchuria whose romance with a visiting Japanese student (Toru Nakamura) is interrupted when he returns home and her brother, a political journalist, is killed by a Japanese assassin....

All the plate glass on the front of Nails R Us was covered with black plastic, but when I opened the door it was like I’d been gang tackled by color and light. The salon had been repurposed for the day as the set for the first video by local rapper Kid Sister, and it was a lot to take in: the walls were stunningly orange and covered with racks of nail polish in every possible shade, and the place was stuffed with lighting rigs and cameras and technicians and stylists and dancers dressed like In Living Color Fly Girls in multicolored DayGlo flight jackets....

Wendy Macleod’s serious, smart comedy updates the medieval morality play to contemporary San Francisco. Our Everywoman is Avery Bly, a traffic reporter who spends her days in a helicopter, watching other people’s car wrecks and bottlenecks from on high. When Doom comes to town in the form of the 1989 earthquake, Avery encounters the Seven Deadly Sins disguised as friends, relatives, would-be lovers, and coworkers. And so confronts herself. The play’s episodic structure demands strong–even, at times, savage–performances to keep it moving....

The Riddle of the Traveling Skull Although he enjoyed moderate commercial success early in his career–one of his books was the basis for a Bela Lugosi film, The Mysterious Mr. Wong–Keeler was long out of print when he died in 1967. But after his death, a small cult began scouring used-book stores for titles like The Skull of the Waltzing Clown and The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman. Articles celebrating his demented aesthetic began to appear in publications ranging from the Journal of Popular Culture to the New Republic, and his fame started to grow....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seeds for Ra’s one-man revolution were sown in Chicago, where he moved from Alabama in the early 50s. A fascinating document of his Chicago years has just surfaced in a slim volume called The Wisdom of Sun-Ra, published by the local art press WhiteWalls. The book collects typewritten broadsheet screeds that Ra wrote and distributed on city street corners in the mid-50s....

At three on a Monday afternoon a couple guys are openly dealing drugs on the corner of Marshfield and Jonquil. One block south, on Howard Street, at least a dozen storefronts sit vacant, and the remaining businesses struggle to stay open. Under the current B1-3 zoning, developers have to make the ground floor of any new building retail space unless they get a special-use permit from the city. If the zoning is changed to B2-3 they’ll be able to make the entire building residential without a permit....

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be fair, as the book opens, three years before her sabbatical, things aren’t going well. Married and miserable, she realizes she doesn’t want her husband, doesn’t want her comfortable suburban New York home, doesn’t want her high-flying career, and adamantly doesn’t want a baby....