Assault on Precinct 13 With Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Brian Dennehy, Drea de Matteo, and Ja Rule Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After most of the employees of a police station in a Los Angeles ghetto have moved to a new building, the station is attacked by a vengeful gang that uncannily expands into a mob, to the accompaniment of Carpenter’s relentlessly minimalist, percussive synthesizer score....

If hip-hop steers clear of the gangsta minstrel-show quagmire and continues to annex more and more of mainstream pop culture, sooner or later so many people will have grown up with it as the dominant music of their youth that nobody will still feel compelled to point out when a hip-hop artist isn’t black. Until that utopia arrives, though, it’s going to be hard to talk about A-TRAK without mentioning his white French-Canadian heritage–I mean, it’s no small feat for a hip-hop DJ to excel when he comes from what’s hands-down the least funky stock in North America....

You’d have to be dead not to be charmed by Beth Broderick, the star of playwright Theresa Rebeck’s solo show. As Haley Walker, a single mother from Texas looking for love in New York, Broderick is open-faced, rangy, funny, and eccentric in an endearing, very familiar way. Since Haley always talks to us while preparing for or decompressing after a date, Broderick’s main onstage activity is changing outfits–something she does in a way that’s sure to resonate with clotheshorses and the men who love them....

I guess the Cougars took one look at all the garage-rock duos out there and decided to go in the opposite direction: really, it doesn’t take eight guys to play this stuff, but these locals pile on with sadistic gusto. Their 2003 debut, Nice, Nice (Go Kart), was a sort of matter-antimatter collision of the minimal and maximal: shrill, chord-rich keyboards and out-of-control soul horns lent some color and shading to a fierce post-post-hardcore version of the clean-and-mean school of rock ‘n’ roll....

Tom Zeigler’s gentle, humorous play about an elderly Appalachian woman and a type A, urban-transplant hospice worker illustrates the range of American feminine experience. Esther McCormick gives the mischievous Grace an easy laugh, abundant common sense, and simple faith, exuding both lightness of spirit and the weightiness of Grace’s impending death. Her subtlety in the role amplifies the artifice in Millicent Hurley Spencer’s jagged, uneven turn as Harvard-educated Glorie. Despite the performer’s likability, strong voice, and commanding presence, when the stakes are the highest Hurley Spencer stumbles over the emotional truth, flipping Glorie’s pain on and off like a light switch....

Perhaps the biggest jazz story in recent years is the unexpected reemergence of the great bassist Henry Grimes. A flexible and powerful musician, Grimes was a crucial fixture during the 60s, working with avant-gardists like Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor as well as more daring mainstream players like Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, and Bill Barron. But he felt emotionally troubled and needed a change. He moved from New York to California in 1968, but work was scarce and he sold his bass because he couldn’t afford to have it repaired....

A striking piece of lo-fi folk in a southern Gothic vein, Iron & Wine’s 2002 debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, became an indie success on its own merits, though its charming backstory didn’t hurt. Originally the “band” was little more than the four-track hobby of Sam Beam, a Miami film professor, but an Iron & Wine track on a fanzine compilation caught the ear of Sub Pop cofounder Jonathan Poneman, who, after hearing more of Beam’s homemade music, offered him a contract....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » —They’re here! They’re queer! They’ll play for shitty beer! Latest wow-where-have-they-been good news is the October 20 Reggie’s appearance of Pansy Division. The snarky and sometimes smutty power-pop ‘n’ postpunk powerhouse formed in 1991, after guitarist Jon Ginoli and bassist Chris Freeman got tired of “being ostracized by other musicians for being openly gay and by other gays for being openly rock....

This remarkable British silent (1929) is special in many ways. Directed by German master E.A. Dupont, with lavish sets and luscious cinematography by two of his compatriots, Alfred Junge and Werner Brandes, it charts the erotic hold of a Chinese beauty (Anna May Wong) over the owner of a palatial London nightclub (Jameson Thomas). He fires her as a dishwasher for distracting coworkers with her tabletop dancing, then hires her back as a featured performer, to the consternation of his mistress (Gilda Gray)....

Clint Sheffer’s new play for Bruised Orange Theater Company resembles work by Edward Albee and David Mamet. But Sheffer creates something original in this witty piece about two men connecting through their mutual obsession with an unseen woman. Their fantasies about her are the baggage they have to carry around–the biblical name Amos means “burden bearer.” Sheffer plays the nerdier of the two characters and Andy Schoen the other man, an artist....

How can I tell if I’m asexual? Is it a legitimate orientation or am I just a seething ball of neuroses? After the results of a study on asexuality were published in the Journal of Sex Research in August 2004, a new sexual minority group began taking its turn on the wicked stage. Everyone from the BBC to Salon to the New Scientist weighed in on the 1 percent of the population that, according to UK researchers, “had never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all....

Emily Mann’s earnest 1980 script about a Vietnam vet, his wife, and his lover is interesting mostly as proof of how much better she became at writing docudrama. It’s unlikely anyone needs reminding today how tough it was to return from Vietnam, and the play’s “war is hell” mantra feels like sloganeering. In Alex Levy’s overly polite staging, the three actors are trapped for most of the play’s 90 minutes in unvarying vocal patterns as they deliver monologues about wartime atrocities, spousal abuse, and alcoholism....

The Go! Team’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike (Memphis Industries, 2004) seems to unfailingly inspire the kind of overwrought X-meets-Y descriptions that press releases trade in–if I had to take a turn, I’d say Kurtis Blow meets the Dynasty theme song meets the Ventures. But however you wanna parse it, it’s one of the funnest records I’ve heard in years. The organic, hooky, danceable songs sound like they could digest just about anything and convert it into more energy....

While all the gossip’s albums are blistering, vital, and fun, none has done the band justice like their fresh release, Standing in the Way of Control (Kill Rock Stars). (Full disclosure: I was the Gossip’s publicist until 2004.) A sparse trio of drums, guitar and voice, they take the edge off their thuggish garage blooze with the nouveau-disco beats of new drummer Hannah Blilie (of Shoplifting and the Chromatics). Singer Beth Ditto uses the space created by Blilie’s pounding bass-drum breakdowns to make her voice–part punk firebrand, part gospel diva–as wide as a boulevard, finally bringing the passion of her live performances to the disc’s anthems of girl-girl love, heartbreak, and gender-queer struggle....

Ahoy, matey. Pirates are often depicted with a parrot on their shoulder. What’s the basis for this? Was there a specific pirate from history or literature that had a feathered friend? –Craig, Phoenix Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Piracy dates back at least to ancient Greece and continues today; its golden age began in the 1650s and peaked circa 1720, when around 2,000 pirates terrorized the Atlantic....

Friday 13 MOONLIGHT TOWERS One might complain that the music this Austin quartet plays lacks regional flavor, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing: lots of Austin bands claiming to have regional flavor sound as phony as a plastic shaker of “Cajun seasoning” that’s actually 40 percent MSG. I’m racking my brain for some way to resist the glistening, hard-surfaced, perfectly molded power pop on the Moonlight Towers’ second album, Like You Were Never There (Spinster), but the only complaint I can make is that listening to a bunch of their songs at one sitting feels like too much–the same way one hard butterscotch candy is the best thing in the world but a whole bag makes your mouth hate you....

Reader editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enjoyed Michael Miner’s 2/3/2006 account of the elegies for This American Life’s putative Chicago “feel,” though I might be able to muster a few more tears for Ira Glass’s departure to NYC if I thought it surprising that fellow mourners spend their Friday afternoons shopping at Marshall Field’s, nibbling sandwiches at the Berghoff, and sipping mai tais at Trader Vic’s....

If Rent is Jonathan Larson’s legacy, this 1990 precursor is the promissory note his postmortem hit redeemed. The same themes surface: a love/hate relationship with New York and Broadway, the difficulty of preserving one’s integrity, the scourge of AIDS, the power of friends, even the intrusiveness of voice mail. This musical–a 2001 reworking of Larson’s original solo show–includes a hopeful, struggling composer similar to Roger in Rent (a terrific Michael Ingersoll); a character who recalls both Benny and Angel, Quinton Guyton’s materialistic Michael, who, like Larson, is cut down young; and Jess Godwin’s Susan, who anticipates Mimi’s directness and devotion....

The studio at Q-101 where Mancow’s Morning Madhouse originates once had a single “dump button”–a switch that enables a producer to bleep dirty words during the seven-second tape delay that separates what gets said in the studio and what goes out on the air. Now it has two–Mancow himself works the second–and there are plans to install a third, which will be operated by a new employee whose sole responsibility will be to watch Mancow’s mouth for him....

WOLF PARADE, JASON FORREST It’s been a banner year for the Canadian rock scene. After the Arcade Fire’s Grammy nomination and a slew of hot albums from quirky, dramatic pop ensembles like the Dears and the Constantines, many more American indie kids can now correctly identify what side of the country Montreal is on. But no list of the year’s highlights would be complete without Wolf Parade’s debut for Sub Pop, Apologies to the Queen Mary, a prelim “best of” consisting of rerecordings of songs from the group’s self-released EPs....