I’ve been seeing this great guy for about two years now. A few months back I stumbled upon some she-male photos on our computer. When I confronted him he said that it was in response to a “nightmare” he had from watching HBO late at night or something. I asked him to be honest with himself and me. I told him I could be GGG or that we could just be friends if he didn’t want to be with a natural woman anymore....

This isn’t the sort of question you usually answer, but I hope you will consider it anyway. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A month ago we were making love. I was restrained to the bed; we did this all the time. The next thing I knew he was fingering my anus. I told him to stop but he wouldn’t. He took his time, stretching and lubing....

I’m an 18-year-old guy with an awesome kinky girlfriend. She likes getting tied up, blindfolded, spanked, and just about anything else we can think of. It’s awesome. My question is this: we were watching some BDSM porn and they used these awesome contact lenses that worked as blindfolds because they were completely opaque. I’ve searched high and low and cannot find them. Help us out! –Ropes Should Come Included Best of Chicago voting is live now....

[snip] “Most people who report science, a small minority of whom are science writers, don’t have enough knowledge to make heads or tails of it,” says Jon Franklin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer now teaching at the University of Maryland, in an interview published in Women’s Enews. “Science writers leave out what they don’t understand, editors take out what they don’t understand and readers get what’s left.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Chicago’s never been known for independent politics. Even in the late 60s and early 70s, at the height of the local independent political movement, there were only five or six aldermen willing to take a stand against Mayor Richard J. Daley. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As readers of this column are well aware, TIFs are districts created by the City Council in which all property taxes that go to the schools, parks, and other taxing bodies–including the county–are capped for 23 years....

Friday 15 Saturday 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BLOWFLY I don’t know if Blowfly, also known as R & B songwriter Clarence Reid, truly is the “original dirty rapper” (surely that’s an honor lost to the mists of time), but his long-running act certainly is blue enough–hell, it’s practically ultraviolet. Fahrenheit 69, just out, is his first set of new, original material since 1988’s Blowfly for President, and apparently he’s made some indie friends in the meantime: the CD was released by Alternative Tentacles (or “Testicles,” as his liner notes have it), the artwork is a hilarious send-up of a Bad Brains album cover, and foulmouthed young ‘uns Gravy Train!...

Consider me an Olympics skeptic. Chicago can’t adequately fund public transportation or education, much less the world’s premier two-week sports spectacle. Besides, as much as I love this town, I have to think more deserving cities are fighting for the 2016 summer games. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WBC boxers are more polished and precise than Golden Gloves competitors, if less impassioned. These, after all, are the best amateur boxers in the world....

What is it about the Hammond B-3 that inspires wunderkinder? Joey DeFrancesco was famous in Philadelphia before he hit high school; a comparative late bloomer, Chicago native Wil Blades started playing drums at eight and switched to organ in his late teens, carving a niche for himself almost from the moment he arrived in San Francisco to attend college. Now in his mid-20s, Blades plays plenty of funk and jam-band gigs out west; here in Chicago he’ll likely show off his mainstream jazz chops, with less of the usual B-3 bluster and more of the measured melodicism of Dr....

By now I should be completely exasperated by the emotional histrionics of XIU XIU front man Jamie Stewart; every time I read about the dysfunction Stewart displays in every song, I feel like telling him that conventional therapy might be a better option. In the bio for Xiu Xiu’s latest, La Foret (5 Rue Christine), he claims that the song “Muppet Face” is about “a cat dying and the negative understanding of how fucked-up my sexual self is and how disgusted I have become with myself in regards to this....

Whenever someone makes a promise with an extremely loud disclaimer, it should raise a red flag. So when Joe Morrone invited me to one of his adamantly no-pressure Flaunt parties, “a monthly party of sensually sophisticated couples and uninhibited single women who want to share their interest in erotic exploration”–according to the press release–I imagined glory holes and sex swings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Looking around the dimly lit room we saw a handful of well-dressed couples–I’m guessing most in their late 30s–sipping cocktails and sneaking peeks at one another....

John Corbett has admired the Chicago harbor scenes of James Bolivar Needham since seeing them in a retrospective a decade ago. “I thought they were lovely, kind of gritty,” Corbett recalls. Rich, small-scale representations of the city’s industrial waterways as they were a century ago, the paintings have the complexity of Persian miniatures, he says, with the three-dimensional feel of sculpture. “They are very tactile, and that tactility is a little rough and expressionistic....

Ask a Stupid Question . . . So it’s pretty well established that just one American in three (and change) likes the job the president is doing. That could be why Fox decided to push beyond these tediously consistent results and ask a question that cut to the bone, a question that asked, in other words, are you for the president or against him? Do you hope he’ll turn things around, or do you want him to fall flat on his face?...

Near the end of this musical retrospective the audience joins in when a character proclaims once again, “I just love me some Etta James.” Writer-director Jackie Taylor may offer too many self-help affirmations in this production–she’d rather analyze the singer’s emotional state than give actual details about her life–but she knows how to entertain her audience. Five equally impressive and expressive singers, each representing a different time in James’s life, rip through the show’s two dozen tunes....

With their first two albums the Books–Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto–devised a breathtaking new kind of chamber pop. They relied heavily on digitally chopped-up guitar, cello, banjo, and violin, and once in a while they’d add some vocals (theirs or other people’s), but most arresting was the way they uncovered music in sampled chunks of found dialogue. Set amid ingenious, roomy arrangements, the inflections and rhythms of ordinary speech became melodic....

THE AMPHORA PROJECT | William Kotzwinkle | Grove Press | In a 1988 essay literary agent Russell Galen had some advice for writers gunning for the big time: “Don’t worry about ‘breaking out of genre.’” Just “make it big, big, very big.” Maybe someone should send a copy to William Kotzwinkle: the man knows how to write, but he’s remained a subcult fixture since Doctor Rat and Fata Morgana were published in the 70s....

CHASING THE RADIO, Fillet of Solo Festival, Live Bait Theater. This evening of monologues by three cops from Police-Teen Link–Live Bait’s collaborative group bringing law-enforcement officers and teenagers together–attempts a blend of social experiment and grassroots art making. And at their best, these rough, heart-on-the-sleeve reminiscences represent a kind of humanizing outreach to civilian audiences, turning the uncivil lugs most of us dislike for writing us tickets into sympathetic people trying to do impossible jobs....

The sixth annual Chicago Anarchist Film Festival runs Saturday and Sunday, May 6 and 7, at Acme Art Works, 1741 N. Western. Screenings are by video projection, and each program totals four hours; for more information visit www.arsenalmagazine.net/filmfest. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saturday’s program begins at 7 PM and includes short works from the Argentinean media collective Grupo Alavio; Rob Van Alkemade’s short Preacher With an Unknown God (2005), about the performance artist Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping; and Jose Padilha’s Brazilian feature Bus 174 (2002, 119 min....

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is widely regarded as his bleakest. Yet until the end, when the human spirit is shattered by hammer blows of fate, it’s a work of conflict and ambiguity. Mahler’s restless writing shifts between hope and despair–even the reassuring andante questions itself. The uncertainty at its core extends to the composer’s revisions: there are historical and musical arguments for performing the middle movements in either order. (Here conductor James Conlon has chosen the original sequence of scherzo followed by andante....

In Parallels and Paradoxes, a 2002 book of conversations between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, Barenboim presents his vision of music history as a continuum, with each major composer linked to the others in a constant flow of experimentation and expansion. This view doesn’t have a lot of traction among American composers, who don’t feel history’s tug so strongly, but it’s still powerful in Europe. Barenboim brings this idea of perpetual development to any work he performs, and especially to Beethoven’s....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Amanda Marcotte writes, “As Lorraine noted in her post on this the other day, one of the primary features of turning someone into an Other that you can feel superior towards is to symbolically cast them as embodied and then implicitly or even explicitly cast yourself as superior and transcendent of bodily concerns. How does this work? Well, ....