Taking Story Week authors out of the classroom and into the Metro, the annual “Literary Rock ‘n’ Roll” night is a festival tradition and always a big draw. This year’s guests are Dorothy Allison, Tom Perrotta, and Alexis Pride; Jon Langford provides the rock ‘n’ roll part. Allison, currently a visiting artist in Columbia College’s fiction department, is best known for her wrenching semiautobiographical debut, Bastard Out of Carolina, a 1992 National Book Award finalist; her latest novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Riverhead....

Irish playwright Frank McGuinness has tackled the horrors of war before, in plays like Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and the hostage drama Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me. But he’s outdone himself with this translation of Euripides’ grimmest tragedy: McGuinness’s Hecuba is transcendent in its stark nihilism yet studded with well-placed contemporary locutions, as when one of the women in the chorus contemptuously refers to “kiss-ass Odysseus....

The title of Joan of Arc’s recent odds-and-sods collection, The Intelligent Design of Joan of Arc (Polyvinyl), is more than just a creationism joke–it’s a fitting statement on a stylistically erratic career that’s covered everything from post-emo rock to abstract electronics to elliptical singer-songwriter territory. But the group’s newest, Eventually, All at Once (Record Label), is its most relaxed and accessible effort to date. Tim Kinsella’s yelp of a voice keeps getting prettier (even if his melodies are still convoluted) and the contrapuntal lines of guitars and vibes form a thick-yet-airy lattice that reveals new subtleties with each listen....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music runs through 10/31 at Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston. Rhino Fest is coordinated by the Curious Theatre Branch and features emerging and established artists from Chicago’s fringe. Performances take place in Prop’s north or south theaters. Admission for most shows is $15 or “pay what you can”; exceptions are noted below. For information and reservations, call 773-267-6660 (except as noted below) or visit www....

By now Robyn Hitchcock’s fans probably know better than to expect much in the way of surprises. The 2004 disc Spooked, a spare, countrified, and diamond-sharp excursion with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, was a nice changeup, but on his “twenty-somethingth” album, Ole! Tarantula (Yep Roc), Hitchcock is back to his usual brand of oddity: his shimmering and infectious psychedelic pop tunes, full of lines and imagery that would stop traffic coming from most people, occasionally seem overly familiar from him now....

If you were among the hypotensive minority who thought Low’s first album could’ve been a little slower and sadder, a little more sedate and diffuse, this is just the band for your attention span. Little Hours (Jagjaguwar), Spokane’s fifth album, seems to unfold according to Zeno’s Paradox, which postulates a distance divided in half infinitely–it’s always approaching zero but never quite reaches it. Rick Alverson (formerly of Drunk, a fellow Virginia slowcore act) writes tunes that divide time into ever more fleeting moments and feelings into tinier and tinier sensations, pursuing a telescoping search inward....

Tim Hecker Axolotl In most cases, though, musicians don’t attempt any sort of representation, and the only specific image that comes to mind when you listen to a recording is that of the performers and instruments used to create it. With representation off the table, abstraction can only be a meaningful category with respect to those performers and instruments–that is, with respect to the source of the sound, not its meaning....

It’s not the Bad Plus’s fault that their ferocious yet accessible 2003 debut, These Are the Vistas, provoked a torrent of hyperbolic praise. Now the trio faces a backlash of dopey slurs like the ones Andy Langer made in Esquire last year: that they play jazz for people who can’t be bothered to understand jazz, music “you wouldn’t have to renounce your love of Physical Graffiti for.” Setting aside the fact that there’s no law against digging jazz and Led Zeppelin, the Bad Plus never slummed to attract rock fans; they simply are rock fans, given to using sacred texts like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Heart of Glass” as the basis for highly physical improvisations and deft, shape-shifting arrangements....

Recently I gave a jump to someone who’d left his car headlights on and drained his battery. Because I have a healthy respect for anything containing moving parts, flammable liquids, and battery acid, I followed the directions for giving a jump in my owner’s manual to the letter. These instructions run to seven pages. To summarize, they say to turn on the heater blower in both vehicles to prevent damage from voltage surges, turn off all other switches and lights in both vehicles, connect and disconnect the jumper cables in the order specified (positive terminal of dead battery, positive of booster battery, negative of booster battery, body BUT NOT negative terminal of dead car), and let the booster car run for several minutes before trying to start the dead car....

When a band follows a promising start with a long stretch of total silence, it’s not always clear whether it’s fallen straight into an abyss–maybe it’s just trying to let the buzz grow. Two Ton Boa, a two-bassist quartet founded by singer-songwriter Sherry Fraser, released a much lauded debut EP in 2000–Fraser’s darkly intimate cabaret vocals and playfully grim narratives attracted plenty of comparisons to Polly Jean Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux, and I heard a bit of Rasputina and Jarboe in there as well....

A rousing “hear hear” for letter writer Mike Koskiewicz’s comments [July 7] on Michael Miner’s Hot Type column on Ozzie versus Mariotti [June 30]. “Two-bit hack” is a bit kind. Miner writes that he’s “been writing about Mariotti since he arrived in Chicago 15 years ago.” Well, perhaps he has, but it sure seems as though Mariotti has gotten a free ride from media critics ever since he joined the Sun-Times as their answer to Bernie Lincicome, then the Tribune’s resident basher....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just got clued in to a free Rhymefest thing happening tomorrow (Thursday, November 30) in Chicago. He’s playing some sort of Courvoisier-sponsored party down at Dragonfly, 832 W. Randolph, and it looks like if you show up by 9:30 you can hit up the open bar. This will be something like the kajillionth free Rhymefest show in Chicago in the past two years, but given his dedication to not sleepwalking through any show, big or small—a rare quality in MCs these days—it should be worth getting down to....

ATONEMENT ssss Directed by Joe Wright adapted by Christopher Hampton from a novel by Ian McEwen With James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Saoirse Ronan, and Vanessa Redgrave Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s an old saw in the movie business that great novels yield mediocre movies (like The Great Gatsby) while mediocre novels can be turned into great ones (like The Godfather). Atonement is the rare exception, a fine novel that, with modest alterations, has been translated into a fine movie....

At the end of his first year as an MFA student, Robert Horvath received a disastrous critique. He’d been painting the same sort of imagery for years, encouraged by his instructors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to continue making landscapes with anatomically correct hearts floating over them. Then, in the spring of 2000, a visiting curator “ripped me apart,” Horvath says, “and asked questions I couldn’t answer–like why do you paint like this?...

Given her omnipresent headband and penchant for song titles like “The Wizard” and “Seal Jubilee,” it’d be easy to mistake British singer-songwriter Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, for a vat-grown female counterpart to Devendra Banhart. But last year’s Fur and Gold, which gets its stateside release on Caroline this month, is actually good. The album blends expansive, expressive soundscapes a la Kate Bush with the naked intimacy of old Cat Power or even vintage Tori Amos, from before she nicked Liz Phair’s sex-mom style....

The last time I saw Japan’s Boredoms play was in 2003, at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Los Angeles; they’d gone to a three-drummer lineup, and their trance-inducing performance convinced me once and for all that while they may occasionally make great albums (1998’s Super Ae comes to mind) they’re best experienced live, where you can watch front man Eye lead a real-time pursuit of his free-roaming muse. That said, their newest release, Seadrum/House of Sun (Vice), is at least half great....

In the seven or so years since singer-guitarist Matt Pike decided to apply the monumental chthonic heaviness of his previous trio, Sleep, to music with a more human metabolic rate, High on Fire has matured into possibly the greatest unhyphenated metal band in America. It’s been more than two years since Blessed Black Wings, and they’re touring now to soften us up for Death Is This Communion, due in September on Relapse....

Given the circumstances under which Holger Czukay left Can in 1977–the band’s percussionist, Reebop Kwaku Baah, pulled the plug on him in the middle of a concert for the third time–you could hardly blame the guy if he never played music again, much less with Can. Of course, he has: Czukay returned to the fold to make Can’s 1989 reunion album, Rite Time, playing French horn and Dictaphone instead of bass guitar, and he’s used vintage Can tracks and contributions from his erstwhile bandmates on his marvelously eccentric solo records, which spotlight his whimsical singing and masterful cut-and-splice technique....

In Defense of Bullshit I made a list of some aspects of bullshit that the author was overlooking. There’s the relativity of bullshit: a smitten poet explaining that her smile puts the sun to shame and her eyes outshine the starriest night speaks with utter sincerity to a maiden who, if she’s been once around the block, is thinking, “The same old bullshit.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And there’s the law....

The Israeli Film Festival runs Monday through Thursday, April 3 through 6, at Columbia College Ludington Bldg., 1104 S. Wabash. Admission is free, all works will be shown by video projection, and each screening includes a 6:30 reception and a lecture. For more information call 312-673-2350. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Written and directed by Arik Kaplun, a Russian emigre to Israel, this overly contrived and broadly comic 1999 feature focuses on a group of immigrants in a Tel Aviv neighborhood during the gulf war....