In some ways Detroit trio SSM sound like they’re trying to be a nouveau disco band; they have the beat and hi-hat heat, but otherwise they miss the target entirely. Not that you can say exactly what it is these guys are up to: Their full name, Szymanski Shettler Morris, is a straight 70s-prog nod, and the artwork for their self-titled debut on Alive rips off the nude-girls-on-rocks thing from Houses of the Holy–only these ladies are buxom, have cockatiel heads, and are posed next to a spaceship against a nuclear sky....

The four Lebanese experimental musicians who were set to perform in Chicago this week as part of Tabadol Project—Mazen Kerbaj, Christine Sehnaoui, Raed Yassin, and Ziad El Ahmadie–decided to postpone their U.S. tour due to the rapid escalation of violence in Beirut and other cities in their homeland. Kerbaj has frequently joked (with characteristically black humor) that his biggest early influence as a trumpeter was the sound of bombs falling in Beirut, and he recently launched a blog as a way of dealing with the current mess....

I can’t think of a better portrait of contemporary Paris or the zeitgeist of 2001-’04 than Chris Marker’s wise and whimsical 58-minute 2004 video. Marker, now in his 80s, shot the images on the streets of Paris and in its metro stations: graffiti, posters, demonstrations, musical performances, cats (real and cartoon). The original conveys Marker’s commentary only through pithy intertitles, but the English version screening here has an unfortunate voice-over delivered in a heavy French accent by actor Gerard Rinaldi that tries to explain as well as translate these titles....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve given it a couple of days and it’s still hard to work up the anger I’m supposed to feel over the arrogance of FCC chairman Kevin Martin. His critics are saying Martin, a Republican, delivered the store to Big Media Tuesday when the FCC, by a 3-to-2 party-line vote, gave single owners permission to go on running both newspapers and TV stations in the same markets, and made it easier for such arrangements to be made in the future....

Common Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last summer, when Common released Be (GOOD/Geffen), I wrote in my blog that the album was causing a communal feminist boner across the land–his dynamic, self-actualized version of masculinity was something unseen in popular hip-hop, where Young Jeezy saying “I’m so emotional / I love my Glock” passes for soul-searching. In the Twin Cities City Pages I even wrote that one of the disc’s better singles, “Faithful”–basically an extended metaphor comparing monogamy to religious faith–“conflates liberation theology and adult male reckoning....

I wouldn’t want to be Loudon Wainwright III, not after his daughter Martha released a song about him titled “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole,” a stinging response to what she describes as his neglect and disapproval. Recently discussing Loudon’s song “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” she told the London Guardian that “I always felt terribly sorry for the poor woman I thought it was about, because of the line ‘Every time I see you cry you’re just a clone of every woman I’ve known....

Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Cycles of Artistic Creativity University of Chicago economics professor David Galenson thinks he can shed light on these questions and more. In his new book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, he presents hard evidence for the long-held notion that creative people come in two basic types. No, not crude versus subtle or traditional versus innovative. Rather “young geniuses,” who draw mainly on ideas, and “old masters,” who draw mainly on experience....

On paper last year’s Blue Mongol (Sunnyside) seems like an awful mismatch: jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd performs with the Mongolian Buryat Band, whose sound is similar to that of Tuvan groups like Huun-Huur-Tu. But if any jazz musician can adapt to such a radically nonjazz context, it’s Rudd. A former assistant to Alan Lomax, a onetime ethnomusicology student at Yale, and a master of both Dixieland and free jazz, he’s consistently open to new ideas: for 2003’s Malicool he collaborated with Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, finding common ground between Mali’s Mande grooves and his own blustery, metallic tone and astonishing improvisations....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We never thought it would come to pass. We’ve received so many overtures over the years and they’ve never come to pass,” Bob Roth, a founder of the Reader in 1971 and president of Chicago Reader, Inc., told me. But when Creative Loafing made its overture in March, “we got a better offer than I expected. And I guess it was time....

Charles L. Mee’s thinking farce explores love’s twin tensions of freedom and faithfulness, the psychology of suicide, and our foolish search for security. The story involves yet another fractured family enduring a dysfunctional holiday, as a young couple spends Christmas with the guy’s parents, each of whom has a partner along. Chris Pomeroy’s staging–a Chicago premiere by the Reverie Theatre Company–is more real than the script, which includes Mee’s often irritating trademarks: analytical dialogue in the form of debate, quote collages, repetition for effect, and random temper tantrums, door slamming, and group dances....

On “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette),” a track off the Detroit soul singer’s new Scene of the Crime (Anti-), LaVette looks back with a triumphant sneer on a career that took four decades to get off the ground. She bitterly recalls cutting a shoulda-been classic album in 1972 at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, which was inexplicably shelved by Atlantic and didn’t see the light of day till a French label released it in 2000–but she got the last laugh, achieving broad success with 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, an unlikely collection of songs by everyone from Aimee Mann to Sinead O’Connor that she made all her own....

Law & Order WHEN Friday, 9 PM Law & Order: Special Victims Unit They used to seem invincible. This was particularly true of the original L & O. When it caught its groove, it was as rigorously stylized as Kabuki. You just knew that approximately 12 minutes into any episode Lenny Briscoe would make a bitter joke about his marriage (usually some version of “He’s been stabbed 25 times in the back–just like my ex-wife did to me at our settlement hearing”)....

In Lynn Nottage’s latest play Undine, a black woman who hauled herself from Brooklyn poverty to the Manhattan bourgeoise, suffers Dickensian reversals of fortune. Next Theatre’s production, directed by Jason Loewith, exposes the plot holes in Nottage’s satire and forces the farce with overly broad acting–as Undine, Jacqueline Williams tones down the histrionics only when she has someone subtly funny to play against, like Dale Rivera as her charming louse of a husband....

Screwball comedy has always contained a thick streak of romance: screwy people have more trouble finding love, and when they do meet their opposite number, what usually reels them in is the other person’s screwiness. Jennifer Westfeldt, who scripted and starred in the memorable Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), understands this principle, and her new project, Ira & Abby, is not only delightfully funny but unaffectedly romantic. Neurotic Ira (Chris Messina) and nurturing Abby (Westfeldt) meet by chance, fall head over heels for each other, and get married in a matter of days; only then does he discover she’s been through two whirlwind marriages already....

I am a massage girl–wink, wink–who provides men with happy endings. I enjoy porn–especially guy-on-guy porn–and I like to think of myself as very open. I am also happily married. Until recently. My husband is 36, handsome, 6’2″, well-endowed, works out daily, and has an awesome body. For 14 years our sex life was great. He always liked that I talked dirty during sex, watched porn, etc. In the past two years, however, all he has wanted to talk about are she-males....

BEAR CLAWSlow Speed Deep Owls(Sickroom) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As adventurous indie rockers venture in greater numbers into the world of programmed electronics, I’m sure we’ll see more bands like Future Rock. These three dudes make dance music that leans heavily on hip-hop breakbeats and a version of house that sounds like they picked it up from somebody who was influenced by somebody who was influenced by house—its icy brittleness has been worn away by all the hands it’s passed through, and the fuzzy production and warm analog synths make it sound almost intimate....

Confronted with archetypally picturesque Parisians, including a winsome mime and a charmingly wry waiter, you may feel just the slightest twinge of an urge to knock somebody’s teeth in. That doesn’t last, though. Yes, this revival of Jean Giraudoux’s satirical fantasy is too cute by half–and yes, it fails to address the script’s darker aspects, including a barely encoded anti-Semitism. (“The Jews,” Giraudoux once wrote, “sully, corrupt, rot, corrode, debase, devalue everything they touch....

DeLaCosta Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you can get past the aggressive hipness of the new hot spot DeLaCosta, with its icky-sweet signature “poptails” (fruity cocktails garnished with boozy popsicles), loungey see-and-be-seen “solarium,” and curtained cabanas for private dining, you’ll find a very good restaurant. For his first Chicago venture, celebrated chef and James Beard award winner Douglas Rodriguez combines Spanish, South American, Caribbean, and occasionally Asian flavors that inject new life into the nuevo Latino trend....

On a Saturday afternoon in early April, 47 boys and one girl, most of whom attend the elite Francis Parker High School, filed into the basement of a classmate’s Old Town home. The host’s mother collected $5 from each for pizza and soda. Bowls of popcorn were already scattered around the room, and a paper sign pointed the way to the bathroom. Each student also paid $20 for a bag of chips–the white were worth 25 cents, the green 50 cents, and the red $1....

Arctic Monkeys Turner’s eye is undoubtedly sharp. The album’s lead cut, “The View From the Afternoon,” deposits us on his home turf, a Northern England where the anticipation of Saturday-night thrills inevitably dissolves into a dumb, drunken blur of cash-gobbling fruit machines, maudlin late-night text messages, and lascivious taunts from wicked women leaning out limousine windows “in bunny ears and devil horns.” And the band’s tight, knotty postpunk, with its volatile, irregular rhythms and its tuneful guitars taking sour turns, is an ideal vehicle for his uncomfortably detailed observations....