Until about seven months ago I hadn’t been all that domestic. I’ve moved a zillion times in this city and never really got in the habit of unpacking all those cardboard boxes. Each of the few times I tried to paint it turned out hideously garish, and all the furniture I owned came from my parents or Ikea. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adler started his career as a campy gay potter and later branched out into squishier things like linens and rugs....

The first thing I saw when I walked into the lounge of the W Hotel two Saturdays ago was a turtlenecked man sitting in a booth clutching a cocktail with one hand and petting a very large, very fluffy white dog with the other. I was there for Refine the Paradigm, a benefit for tsunami victims hosted by the management company Icon Liquors and Xes Hollywood, a California nightclub. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Nicole Gordon is a self-described good suburban Jewish girl whose sweetly colored paintings and installations at Peter Miller disturbingly reflect on cultural displacement. Her goal is to cut through viewers’ complacency using her work’s studied prettiness. “In the very protected suburbs I grew up in,” Gordon says, “you hold yourself in your own little world and pretend that things around you aren’t really happening. I want to draw people in with my atmospheric colors and decorative surfaces....

Janine Wilburn’s 2002 diptych, Broken Lady, can be read as a set of before-and-after shots: On the left, the orderly structure of life before an act of sexual violence. On the right, the fragmented aftermath, a semblance of that previous life still visible through the cracks. This painting and eight other pieces make up “Survivor/Victim,” running through February 16 at Carrie Secrist Gallery. Organized to benefit the social service agency Rape Victims Advocates, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, the juried exhibit of work by established and emerging artists is intended to reflect the silence that persists around sex crimes....

Now that there’s no point waiting for Michael Jackson’s “Live From Corcoran” collaboration with Charles Manson, the Dirty Projectors’ The Getty Address (Western Vinyl) pretty much has the Weirdest Release of 2005 title sewn up. The loosely defined group, led by Yale dropout Dave Longstreth, caught my attention with its 2003 album The Glad Fact–first with the repellent cover drawing of a nude, spread-legged fat man against a bile-colored backdrop, then with intriguingly cracked but melodic songs like “My Offwhite Flag,” which sounds like Hall and Oates fronting the Dead C....

Singer Enrique Morente and guitarist Tomatito (aka Jose Fernandez Torres) are two of the most influential iconoclasts in flamenco music. Like most significant innovators they were well versed in the rules before they broke them. Morente was born in 1942 in Granada, Spain, moved to Madrid at 18, and quickly established himself as a formidable traditionalist. But after a handful of searing albums that demonstrated his grasp of the form, he began taking chances....

For a provocateur, Laura Kipnis can be surprisingly sincere. The 49-year-old Northwestern University communications professor has made her reputation subverting conventional wisdom, wishes, faiths, and lies—especially about American sexuality. In her 1996 book Bound and Gagged she argued for the liberatory potential of smut; in Against Love: A Polemic (2003) she lit into widely cherished assumptions about monogamy. Her lively new book—The Female Thing, set for publication in October—launches a leftist critique of the present moment in American feminism, from the movement’s deals with various devils to sentimental notions of femininity still tucked away in some progressive women’s minds like a secret stash of chocolates....

In the ephemeral world of dance, this 44-year-old company is exceptionally long-lived. Even older is the school associated with it, now called the Giordano Dance Center; it was founded by Gus Giordano 53 years ago. Perhaps because of its link to dance education, the troupe is known for technical excellence, a tradition maintained by Gus’s daughter, current artistic director Nan Giordano: attention to detail and a feel for style mark the dancers’ strong, precise work....

You had to be there. Mike Gray and the Film Group were. They were working out of a studio on Grant Place just off Clark in the summer of 1968. They had the latest handheld cameras from France and they were making good money shooting documentary-style commercials for the top advertising agencies in town. On Wednesday, August 28, says Gray, “we had Colonel Sanders in our studios when we heard there was a riot in Grant Park”–where antiwar demonstrators in town for the Democratic National Convention were squaring off with Chicago police....

Mat Smart and Ethan Deppe’s muddled new musical is part spoof and part serious update of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, but the two don’t make a satisfying whole. It does include a fishing trip, undertaken by four young Naperville residents: Ishmael (or “Izzy”), his ex-girlfriend Q, their gay pal Starbuck (a Starbucks manager), and A-Train, who’s obsessed with killing . . . Shamu, the Sea World orca. It’s never clear why the crew members don’t simply overpower their crazed captain; banal romantic subplots further impede credibility, and the comedy isn’t consistent or clever....

4 Murders Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The usual setting of Neveu’s plays is an American small town, like the one drying up in last spring’s American Dead or the one inhabited by crystal-meth addicts in The Go or the one scarred by a school shooting in Eric LaRue (his strongest play, also originally produced by A Red Orchid Theatre). 4 Murders has the poignancy and beguiling dark charm of these earlier works, but it lacks the indelible sense of despair that accumulates in Eric LaRue and American Dead....

Last month Dan Kuypers, aka DJ Chester Copperpot, was at EV Productions in Evanston working on a track with one of his childhood heroes, KRS-One. They’d shared the bill at a release party for another EV artist, Single Minded Pros, back in October, where Kuypers handed the rapper a beat CD. KRS-One called back with an offer to record a couple vocal tracks for the next Copperpot solo album, and in mid-March the pair went into the studio....

Panto, that uniquely British descendant of commedia, embraces so many low-art traditions that describing it simply is simply impossible. And those who haven’t been brought up on the stuff can’t provide quite the raucous audience participation the form requires or fully appreciate all the convention-dependent gags. But given these difficulties, the plucky Piccolo Theatre ensemble does handy work in this remount of its 2002 panto-inspired musical. Playwright Ken Raabe makes a brief tutorial of the opening scenes, and on opening night what seemed like a couple plants in the house helped patrons too shy (adults) or unfocused (children) to vocalize on their own....

I guess I should be happy the Reader decided to finally cover (at least tangentially) my art career, even if it took four years to do it [The Business, November 10]. Better late than never, they say. At least Ms. Isaacs got my name and most of the facts right. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But though I now understand the lure of the obvious play on words, I must still register my frustration....

No one in hip-hop has ever been penalized for talking too much about himself. Proto-MCs in 70s dance clubs were bragging about their rap skills before anyone was even sure what made for good rapping, and from those roots sprang the most explicitly autobiographical pop music in history. You don’t need to read the book or watch the movie to learn about Biggie’s teenage crack-slinging career, Jay-Z’s childhood in the Marcy projects, or the forensic details of 50 Cent’s shooting....

A friend forwarded your article on male genitalia in Greek art, and it reminded me of a discussion–OK, a near argument–I had with a friend on the sexual habits and rituals of the ancient Greeks. I read somewhere that homosexual acts among ancient Greeks were commonplace, and that one involved a ritual when a boy became a man. Supposedly the boy was anally penetrated by his father (or maybe his grandfather) to symbolize the passing on of the family seed....

Friday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS FESTIVAL The brainchild of Jeremiah Wallis, singer and guitarist in the local combo Paper Airplane Pilots, Tomorrow Never Knows was initially conceived as the release party for the band’s second CD, the self-released Western Automatic Music. But Wallis and Schubas booker Matt Rucins expanded it into a three-night festival gathering some of the region’s best up-and-coming pop acts....

Marigold Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We were 15 minutes late for our reservation–blame the Red Line. Nevertheless, we were cheerily greeted by our hostess, who bouncily ushered us to a table for one of the most pleasant dining experiences I’ve had in months. MARIGOLD, the new upscale Indian restaurant just up the block from the Green Mill, is a family affair: co-owner Sandeep Malhotra and his wife, Laurel, did much of the work designing and rehabbing the low-lit, jewel-toned space; Sandeep’s mother, Balbir, a Delhi native, consulted on the menu with chef Monica Riley, late of another Indian-hybrid venture, Treat....

Ian Svenonius, late of Nation of Ulysses and the Make-Up, is a man of many interests: one of the highlights of Weird War’s labyrinthine Web site is an excerpt from his book in progress, “The Psychic Soviet,” that connects Soviet cinema, Hitler’s beloved Wagner, and Rocky to make an argument about the “invisible hand of art in determining the destiny of the nation.” There’s a lot of strange intelligence that Svenonius wants to get out into the world, and on the new Weird War album, Illuminated by the Light (Drag City), his band sounds like it’s really straining to evacuate it....

At around noon last Sunday in Rolling Meadows, as preachers finished their sermons and Super Bowl parties were getting started, 20 of the best college wrestlers in the country were warming up inside a small gymnasium. “And for Northwestern,” the announcer started, his voice getting louder, “an all-American, undefeated at 24 and 0, number two in the nation, sophomore Jake Herbert!” Herbert stepped forward, looked Reynolds in the eye and shook his hand, then turned and low-fived two teammates....