If you ever saw Patricia Li Klayman fronting Grand Theft Auto, a 70s-punk-inspired four-piece that gained some local notoriety several years ago in part for her hell-raising style, you probably would have never guessed she’d end up making teddy bears and sock monkeys for a living. “Now I’ve become this,” she jokes, gesturing around her studio in her Humboldt Park condo. About a half-dozen sock monkeys still in need of eyes are perched on a windowsill....

Three days a week Thomas Marlow sets up his portable studio at the Silk Road Oasis in the Chicago Tourism Center and takes pictures of people. Hired by the city to capture visitors and Chicago residents alike, he sends his subjects home with a print of their choice, gratis. Each portrait takes about 15 minutes, as Marlow methodically gets a model release signed, takes anywhere from 5 to 30 shots, then displays them on his laptop and has the subject pick one....

Houghton Mifflin has been publishing its “Best American” series (of short stories, essays, travel writing, etc) since 1915, but this month it introduces a brand-new edition: The Best American Comics 2006. To compile the anthology series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore, who’s also coeditor of Punk Planet, scoured graphic novels, alternative papers, the Web, and even self-published works, then delivered her top picks to guest editor Harvey Pekar (of American Splendor fame), who whittled the selections down to the 30 included here....

One problem with being the Guinness-certified world’s fastest rapper is that you’re in constant danger of getting written off as a novelty act. So it’s brave (or foolhardy) of Twista to accept the role producer Kanye West casts him in on the hit single “Slow Jamz.” Early in the song West is sweet-talking a new lady friend, but things go better than he can handle, and she starts calling out “Faster!...

The Departed sss Martin Scorsese’s underworld thriller The Departed opens with a voice-over from its larger-than-life villain, a Boston crime lord played by Jack Nicholson who declares, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me.” It’s the most personal statement in this highly commercial movie: Scorsese’s most popular and critically acclaimed films have defined the violent urban drama (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas), but through a series of ambitious and eclectic projects he’s resisted being defined by it himself (The Last Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence, Kundun)....

When indie rockers start blogging mash notes to superficial Europop, I get a smidgen suspicious: Why go spelunking in the vast recesses of the Internet for catchy trifles when you can just switch on the radio? Maybe some folks are so snobby they can only enjoy the thrill of pop when it doesn’t have the perceived baggage of actual popularity. Or maybe there are genuinely smashing tracks out there like Annie’s “Chewing Gum,” a Tom Tom Club-style electropop groove by writer-producers Hanna Robinson and Richard X, who’ve developed into a kind of meta-pop Stock/Aitken/Waterman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month a jury decided that former columnist Bill Page and the Kane County Chronicle had libeled Thomas in three 2003 columns. It would have been a nice thing for anyone who takes seriously the dignity of the courts if Thomas at that point had declared that his reputation had been restored, the money wasn’t important, and it was time for the Illinois judiciary to put the litigation behind it....

San Francisco-based producer and DJ Cheb i Sabbah devoted his first few albums to Indian musical traditions, making his own field recordings and then meticulously constructing his tracks in the studio. Unlike ethno-techno dabblers who slap house beats on top of samples of sitars or Bollywood divas, Sabbah understands the history and structural underpinnings of the music he works with. On his new album, La Kahena (Six Degrees), he turns his focus to the Maghreb–which makes sense, since he was born and raised in Algeria....

The ninth European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, March 24 through 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. This lively 2005 documentary by German-Turkish director Fatih Akin (Head On) follows bassist Alexander Hacke of Einsturzende Neubauten through the crumbling streets of Istanbul to present a dynamic and wide-ranging portrait of the ancient city’s musical riches....

For the first time since his brilliant debut feature, Real Life (1979), Albert Brooks plays a semifictional character named Albert Brooks, this time a guy who heads an ill-conceived State Department mission to discover what makes people in India and Pakistan laugh. Questioning and mocking himself, he combines personal worries about his dwindling career as a comic performer with more general ones about this country’s lack of smarts when it comes to the third world....

In his one-man show, Canadian impressionist Rick Miller plays all the characters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth using voices from The Simpsons. It’s a cute premise, but after the first half hour the joke of having Marge as Lady Macbeth and Homer as the blood-soaked rebel grows thin. Miller mixes high- and lowbrow culture the way The Simpsons sometimes does, as in its fourth-season musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire, but less expertly....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Life got a little more dangerous yesterday when the Violet Hour started opening two hours earlier, at 6 PM. Also, the bar rolled out a new fall cocktail menu from head bartender Toby Maloney. From New York, Maloney phoned in a few of the highlights, among them the Chi-Town Flip: an applejack cocktail with port, the vanilla-scented Spanish Licor 43, cream, nutmeg, Fee Brothers Old Fashion bitters, and a whole egg....

Continued from last week . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the second part of the story I’ve been telling friends here at dinner. I’m in Belize, covered in stinky monkey doo-doo, standing by a bus stop, and a guy has a machete held up to my neck. He wants money. I told him I didn’t have any, so he started patting me down and I had like $3....

I’ve been a big fan of the Octopus Project from the get-go, so it’s nice to see their wild, upbeat instrumentals finally getting some recognition (some high-energy SXSW shows helped, landing them a recent David Fricke shout-out in Rolling Stone). Their third full-length, Hello, Avalanche (Peek-a-Boo), out next month, is the first produced by an outside engineer: the band traveled to Seattle’s Bear Creek Studios, where Ryan Hadlock helped them collage newly recorded studio sounds with existing elements from demos and rehearsal tapes....

Jay Steigmann and Emily Boardman are more talented than their name implies, but they’re not quite versatile enough to do full justice to the dark comic sketches in their 35-minute show on religion, adoption, cancer, sexual harassment, and pornography. Some scene transitions, seamlessly staged by director Butch Jerinic, have greater energy than the sketches, and both women need to differentiate their characters more to give this ambitious writing greater bite. Opening the show, Michael Moore’s 35-minute comic monologue introduces us to a self-absorbed drama queen (Moore may be portraying himself, but let’s hope it’s an exaggeration)....

Jersey Girl Next month the second Chicago International Documentary Festival will screen Mark Brian Smith’s fascinating Overnight, which chronicles the precipitous rise and fall of indie filmmaker Troy Duffy. A blue-collar kid from Boston and a giant in his own mind, Duffy hit the jackpot in March 1997 when Harvey Weinstein, the fabled cochairman of Miramax Films, bought Duffy’s script for a post-Tarantino shoot-’em-up called The Boondock Saints and proclaimed him “a unique, exciting new voice in American movies....

The 21st annual Printers Row Book Fair runs Saturday and Sunday, June 11 and 12, 10 AM-6 PM, and gathers about 150 exhibitors, including booksellers, publishers, and literary organizations, on the blocks around Dearborn (50 West) and Polk (800 South) streets. In addition to the new, used, and collectible books for sale, the fair features dozens of readings, discussions, and signings by local and national authors as well as children’s activities, musical performances, cooking demonstrations, and food vendors....

Canadian violinist James Ehnes has been to Ravinia twice already–giving a recital as part of the “Rising Star” series in 1994 and playing Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in ’97. Now 27, he’s performed in more than 20 countries and collaborated with artists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. His CDs reveal an expressive, technically gifted musician with a sweet, lyrical tone. He can toss off etudes by Paganini and Kreisler and seems to have a flair for the virtuoso repertoire–but he never sounds flashy....

The New York jazz scene isn’t lacking for wunderkind pianists, but even so Robert Glasper has grabbed headlines: though he was only 26 when Canvas (his second record and first for Blue Note) came out last fall, his playing is marvelously mature. Most of the album couldn’t quite match the opening track, “Rise and Shine,” but that’s what he gets for leading off with a solo statement so inventive and commanding that musicians twice his age would have happily called it their own....

SONIC YOUTH | Rather Ripped (Geffen) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t get into most of the records avec O’Rourke–just the last one, 2004’s Sonic Nurse, a pastoral, poppy flashback to their early-90s albums that’s rich with creamy guitar tones. I was hoping that Rather Ripped would be deeper damage, a flashback that flashed further back–who doesn’t want SY to make Sister again?...