The first time Jill Prescott tried to saute shrimp, the recipe called for clarified butter. She followed the instructions exactly, or so she thought. “Of course, I had margarine,” she says with a laugh. “You ever try clarifying water and chemicals? I turned up the heat high, and it started spattering all over the place. I almost burned down the house. I could never figure out why I couldn’t do it....

Revelation: The Quilts of Marie “Big Mama” Roseman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No less weird is that, for over a century, “insider” artists from Picasso to the Chicago Imagists and Basquiat have co-opted the visual markers of the transcendently deranged to give their own scribbles some reflected charismatic authority. In the past few years, a few art collectives–Dearraindrop, Royal Art Lodge, Paper Rad–have appropriated outside artists’ hallucinatory takes on pop culture....

The Notorious Bettie Page—about the pinup and soft-core-bondage film and magazine star of the 50s—mixes archival black-and-white and color footage with re-creations. The mix of materials evoking the period is far from seamless, and we can’t always be sure what’s archival and what’s simulated because sometimes the filmmakers are trying to fool us. But their preoccupation with the manufacture of images keeps this exercise in exposure and concealment interesting. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

friday21 INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS In the midst of the bluegrass boom, it’s nice to find a band with killer chops that isn’t either pandering to the jam-band set or acting like a bunch of reconstituted hillbillies. This young Nashville sextet covers a lot of ground on its recent debut, Fork in the Road (Sugar Hill), from the pure, lyrical country of “Starry Night” to the Nickel Creek pop-grass of “Letter from Prison....

I’ve seen this play so many times I can practically repeat the lines with the actors. Sam Shepard’s 1980 drama about the reunion of two brothers, one a weak, respectable suburbanite and the other an untamed animal, is frequently revived, usually by recent college graduates. Seldom has it been done by anyone, however, as well as it is by the Hypocrites in this smartly directed, intensely acted production. Key to its success are two young but seasoned actors, Brad Harbaugh and Paul Noble....

Dear Ms. True: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It has come to our attention that many people consider the Southeast Environmental Task Force responsible for the article on the cluster sites in the June 18 issue of the Reader [“Your Mayor Could Clean Up This Mess”]. Since we are the leading environmental organization on Chicago’s southeast side, this is not surprising–but it is erroneous....

Justin D.M. Palmer’s “site-specific” comedy, set in a genuine Wrigleyville apartment, runs a young couple through a 14-date steeplechase, each scene unfolding as though they’d just met. This threatens to land somewhere between Groundhog Day and 50 First Dates, but fortunately it’s more reminiscent of an old Kids in the Hall routine. The fresh-faced Cliff Chamberlain and Chelsea Cutler rocket through the dizzying variations on a theme–internal monologue, six-string serenade, Spanish-language version–hitting every comedic button with sure-handed nonchalance, and Palmer has a nice turn near the end as the dreaded cock-blocking roommate....

Countless bands have ripped off the Fall, and countless singers have ripped off Mark E. Smith’s distinctive de-liv-e-ry-uh. But it’s the rare front man who goes further and latches onto Smith’s less obvious traits: humor, spontaneity, and the aura of danger that comes from being unafraid to make an utter ass of yourself. It’s just these qualities that make Art Brut great, and so separate the band from the parade of Peel Show and Rough Trade revivalists....

By pitching this 80-minute production to both adults and children, the family-oriented Tireswing Theatre ends up appealing to neither. Playwright Andrew Lines has created a Mexican-folklore version of the Faust legend, whose grand dimensions are sure to escape the little ones. But all the running around and screaming, presumably added for the kids’ benefit, will annoy anyone too old for cartoons. In brief, unmotivated allusions to the original folktale, Blancaflor resembles Cinderella....

Writing in the New York Times, Dave Kehr called Bruce Posner’s 19-hour box set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 “one of the major monuments of the DVD medium.” Yet one peculiarity of this medium is that its monuments are easily overlooked, and this 174-minute program, part of a touring series that also stops at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center later this month, offers a rare chance to sample Posner’s uncommon discoveries on the big screen, most in their original formats....

An overrated debut can cast a long shadow across an artist’s career. Operating on the “fool me twice, shame on me” principle, critics and fans get grudging with their praise once they realize they even slightly overvalued the first shot. Maybe that’s the situation facing Erykah Badu–I can’t think of another reason the adventurous Worldwide Underground (Motown), a 50-minute disc she called an EP, was greeted with yawns last year when it was greeted at all....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allied Advertising recently informed me that the Ben Stiller comedy Night at the Museum is being previewed only to the daily press, not to weekly reviewers–which naturally raises the question of whether the company in question (Twentieth Century Fox) is deciding in advance that we weekly reviewers won’t like this release. Whether that’s the meaning of their strategy or not, it does show a kind of uncertainty that is much more general among the so-called majors....

Two women who grew up with an alcoholic parent find the humor in dark times in this 75-minute double bill by the Box Theatre Group. Meg Graves opens with a short tragicomic monologue, Something in the Way, about martinis, music, and her mother. Graves’s biting observations are amusing and affecting if a bit repetitive. A high-energy Kelsie Huff then takes us to her grandfather’s funeral in small-town Illinois in Huffs, a monologue well served by her unique perspective, vivid imagination, and willingness to embarrass herself....

Clad in black leather and sporting a Mohawk, Kasper T. Toeplitz strikes a badass pose onstage, and his music backs it up. At his first Chicago concert in 2001, the Warsaw-born, Paris-based composer, bassist, and computer musician premiered Yam Almost May, a throbbing yet lyrical drone piece by Phill Niblock composed from samples of Toeplitz’s bass, and the low frequencies seemed to hit listeners’ guts as hard as their ears. For last year’s Capture (released on Toeplitz’s label, ROSA, an acronym for “Recordings of Sleaze Art”) he captured the movements of three dancers via webcam and electronically translated them into sound, generating a slowly accumulating onslaught of flickering high tones and ear-scouring hiss....

Ben Joravsky: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Without a tax incentive of its own Illinois can expect its production numbers to decline significantly. The state can also expect local production businesses, whose supply of jobs and revenue depend on the volume of production shooting in state, to fall on hard times. This not only means less tax revenue for the state, but more local employees out of work....

Finally! Someone steps forward to blow the lid off the hidden underworld of Jeopardy! fanatics. In this intimate, often hilarious solo performance, computer programmer and Alex Trebek worshipper Scott Hermes traces his growing addiction to nerdish tests of brain power, from a small-time quiz show in Schenectady through seven-tile, triple-word-score Scrabble gambits and on to his plan to escape a dauntingly real reality by becoming a contestant on the greatest game show of all time....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two former girlfriends of married New York City endocrinologist Khaled Zeitoun recently sued him, citing “severe emotional distress,” according to a September New York Post story. Tiffany Wang claims in her suit that on her first date with Zeitoun he told her they had been married in a previous life, that he regretted mistreating her, and that he had spent his life searching for her to make amends....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On an 88-degree day in July, Susan Guita Silverstein of Stamford, Connecticut, told emergency workers not to break the window of her Audi A4 to rescue her 23-month-old son, whom she’d accidentally locked inside along with the keys. Despite their warning her that it was dangerous for her child to remain in the hot car as long as he had, Silverstein insisted they wait while she got a spare key from home....

My boyfriend, Jason, is having problems with a boy named Roger who’s obsessed with him. But because Roger is friends with Jason and Jason’s friends, Jason won’t just tell him off. Roger had the audacity to call Jason today and ask about our sex life. Roger is not only making Jason’s life hell, he’s also making their shared friends’ lives hell. On top of it all, Roger called Jason’s ex, Cody, and told him about me being around the dorm, which may sound petty, but Cody is a very sweet boy who doesn’t need Roger making him feel like shit because of the fact that Jason’s dating someone new....

One of the criticisms leveled at the Strokes is that, unlike great thinkers such as Royal Trux, they have nothing to say. But their new album, First Impressions of Earth (RCA), does pose some heady questions. Like: How does a self-centered generation have an existential crisis but hang on to its self-centeredness once it’s over? At this point the band’s prevailed over a few crises and what’s generally called “growing pains....