Reeling: The 25th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival continues through Sunday, November 12, at Chicago Filmmakers, Columbia College Ludington Bldg., and Landmark’s Century Centre. Tickets are $7-$10, $5-$8 for members of Chicago Filmmakers; for more information call 773-293-1447. Following are screenings through Thursday, November 9; for a full schedule visit chicagoreader.com. Filthy Gorgeous: The Trannyshack Story Sean Mullen’s 2005 documentary charts ten years of thrash, glam, and drag at Trannyshack, a weekly San Francisco club night that has hosted gay icons from David Bowie to Kiki & Herb star Justin Bond....

I’m a 19-year-old girl, attractive, outgoing, and ambitious. My boyfriend is 21 and shares the same qualities. We’ve been dating since January. At times he gets really moody and won’t tell me why, but I’ve noticed a pattern to what prompts it: (1) me hanging out with my guy friends (guy friends I’ve known since we were about 13, no attraction); (2) me hanging out with a guy I once had a one-night stand with, whom we both know; (3) me talking to a guy at a club....

My problem starts when I get an erection. Within seconds my cock starts to dribble this clear, sticky liquid. This happens every time I get stiff. I guess I thought it was normal. I’ve had no other cock problems, and sex has always been great and it all works like it should. None of my ex-girlfriends ever said anything about this. The problem is, now I have a new girlfriend who says it’s not normal and I should see a doctor....

Michael Miner [Hot Type, October 6] suggests that the terrorist-asteroid equivalency is, for many, “a lot less illuminating than loopy.” Perhaps. Perhaps it is my own actuarial training, but I find it more illuminating than loopy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years ago Harper’s had an article on “near earth objects”–not only did they change the course of evolution several times (when a kilometer-size asteroid hits the earth it creates enough damage to blot out the sun for several years, effectively altering evolution), but smaller impacts have had noticeable impacts on the course of human history: a smaller impact is said to have altered human behavior in the southwest, while an impact in Siberia in the early 1900s scorched thousands of acres and the glow of the fires could be seen as far away as England....

Last year the White Sox put together a highlights reel that played on the stadium scoreboard before games and during breaks in play. The reel expanded as the Sox advanced into the playoffs, but one of my favorite moments remained Aaron Rowand’s great catch at Yankee Stadium during a series in which he pretty much stymied the Yankees at every opportunity. It was a backhanded grab in deep left-center field, Rowand running full out, leaping, catching the ball, and landing flat, and when I watched it I’d shout, “Run it down, Aaron!...

Friday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CATFISH HAVEN This local trio, which has been playing genial, shaggy boogie rock and indie-folk jams since 2001, recently signed with Secretly Canadian, which will distribute its self-released 2002 EP, Good Friends. A new EP and full-length are scheduled for early 2006. Sybris and Wilke Surprise open the early show, which is all-ages; Stag Party and Clyde Federal open the late show....

In this Greasy Joan & Co. production, adapter-director Greg Allen reimagines Georg Buchner’s unfinished protomodernist masterpiece as a hallucinatory carnival sideshow. Designer Marcus Stephens’s dreamily dreary tent and sound designer Nick Keenan’s old-timey score are nice touches that help underline the story’s creepy menace: the much-abused titular soldier ultimately murders his mistress in a fit of jealousy, paranoia, and soul-crushing angst. Most of the supporting cast offer nuanced, idiosyncratic takes on Buchner’s grotesque characters, but Carlo Garcia’s blustery, overly aggressive Woyzeck is never vulnerable and therefore never pathetic....

With his signature blue yodel, Jimmie Rodgers became country music’s first superstar shortly before the Great Depression. But by the spring of 1933, the “Singing Brakeman” was close to death–though he was only 35, he’d been bedridden for years fighting tuberculosis. Knowing it would be his last session, he booked time at a studio in New York City, where he was attended to by a nurse and lay on a cot between takes....

I made a disturbing discovery the other night while watching the new extended DVD edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: I’ve lost my taste for meaningless carnage. In the biggest battle in The Return of the King, as the vast pixelated armies of orcs came swarming toward Minas Tirith, only to be stabbed, hacked, pierced, beheaded, trampled, squashed, scattered like bowling pins, and heaped up like compost, I realized that I just didn’t care....

God is in the details of this wordless 45-minute work by collaborative movement-theater troupe Sprung. The subject is a happy one: the piece’s starting point was the sentence “Two people choose to be together.” And the show is defined, for better and worse, by its lightheartedness–even the seven deft performers’ movements are light and quick. Scenes in which they wait for a bus or take their dogs to the park are remarkable for their musicality, acute observation, and humor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a wonder I’ve never been to the Columbian restaurant El Llano, since for the last ten years I’ve lived within an easy walk of it and passing by my wife and friends and I invariably say, “Oh, we should go there.” Last week, in the early afternoon, the bubble finally burst and I went. The bad news first: There isn’t really a lunch menu—no sandwiches, no noshy kind of meal that you can enjoy in 20 minutes....

I tried to get a pal to bet me that the guys in the Blackouts started playing together in the mid-to-late 90s–these Champaign-Urbana rockers borrow both from standout garage bands of that era and from punk acts that were by then mainstream (hint: the Sex Pistols). My friend wouldn’t bite, though, or I’d be 50 bucks richer: in their mid-20s now, the Blackouts formed in front man Steve Ucherek’s parents’ basement in downstate Odell in 1997, five long years before the release of Everyday Is a Sunday Evening, their first proper disc and the debut venture of Deerfield upstart Lucid Records....

Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb began their partnership with this nearly forgotten 1965 delight, also Liza Minnelli’s Broadway debut. In this survival saga with a cautionary ending reminiscent of Sweet Charity, hopeful Hungarian Flora, a fashion illustrator turned radical, gets entangled with the communist party–until she’s asked to sacrifice love for independence. This plucky staging for Theo Ubique Theatre Company, directed by Fred Anzevino and Beverle Bloch, showcases the inventive score and the nine cast members’ rich if raw talent....

White People (Atlantic) just may be the first hip-hop album where the skits are more riveting than the music–and in this case that’s saying a lot. Prince Paul and Dan “the Automator” Nakamura first revealed their lounge-lizard personas, Chest Rockwell and Nathaniel Merriweather, on the 1999 tour de force So . . . How’s Your Girl?; the trip-hop shuffles they come up with for White People are slighter, which befits the duo’s intention to bring the funk to the most unlikely melanin-deprived artists....

The new En Route (Verve)–featuring this lithe, heady trio, recorded onstage–has been hailed as the return of the “real” John Scofield, to which I can only add “Welcome back.” Four of Scofield’s five previous albums, starting with 1998’s hot-selling Medeski Martin & Wood collaboration A Go Go, had pushed into jam-band territory. It seemed a natural development: Scofield already had the keys to jam jazz in his pocket, having first built his style by welding elements of fusion, rock, and electric blues to a hard-bop chassis....

When Laurie Anderson played Chicago in the early 80s, her solo show Americans on the Move was a giant affair whose huge video projections and amplified electronic score almost overwhelmed her. Today, in The End of the Moon, her only companions onstage are a violin and a laptop. But there’s still something oracular about this performance poet and musician, now 58. Part of it is her trademark delivery, with its drawn-out vowels and sibilant consonants, part of it her big subjects–here what’s true, what’s beautiful, and what will become of outer space....

Jae Ko’s 22 bold abstract sculptures at Andrew Bae, made of long rolls of adding-machine tape soaked in water and ink, have their origins in a seven-year depression. After getting art degrees in Korea and Japan, Ko moved to Washington, D.C., in 1988; she married a Korean-American in 1990. She’d been raised in an unusual Korean family: her father designed their homes and encouraged her to learn carpentry. But her husband’s more traditional family, she says, was living in the style of Korea in the 60s....

I went to a friend’s wedding, a friend whom five years ago I would have called a best friend. (I don’t know how to describe our friendship now because we don’t talk or see each other much.) At the wedding I became reacquainted with her ex-boyfriend (she dated him for three months three years ago), and now I’m dating him. She’s pissed and claims that I’m breaking the “code”–that is, the unwritten code of not dating your friends’ exes....

I know you don’t want to hear this, Dan, but marriage is about babies. By supporting the baby industry–i.e., hetero baby producers–our government keeps the country populated. Gay people can’t reproduce, even if they can raise other hetero people’s kids (adoption) or use other people’s sperm (artificial insemination). But never–and I mean never–can two gay people produce a child on their own. Why is that so freakin’ hard to understand? The natural urge of a man and a woman to make babies is the basis of our existence....

[snip] “I did not hear Mr. Gonzales repudiate two and a half years of official U.S. policy, which has defined torture so narrowly that only [practices leading to] organ failure and death would qualify,” said Senator Barack Obama on the Senate floor February 3, explaining why he voted against confirming the nominee for attorney general. “If the entire world accepted the definition contained in the Department of Justice memos, we can only imagine what atrocities might befall our American POWs....