It’s amazing how a healthy dose of irony can alter our perspective. The film that was greeted as a quasi-pornographic turd upon its release is now held up as quintessential gay camp, a worthy successor to the Roger Vadim-Russ Meyer school of cult filmmaking. Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 “expose” of the Las Vegas skin trade, is itself exposed in this potty-mouthed puppet version. After touring Chicago’s off-Loop spaces in 2002 and 2003, the show has been remounted in a run at Theatre Building Chicago to celebrate its upcoming appearance at the New York International Fringe Festival....

With more boutiques opening every year and the city’s increasing awareness and support of the local design scene, Chicago’s style IQ is higher than ever. While that can translate into higher prices, savvy shoppers can always find a bargain. Here are some tips for working the retail system. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the other department stores hold big regular sales throughout the year and usually have a few discounted racks going at any one time....

Funk’s Grove, IL “It’s not a bear,” Tom says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s why he and Chris are convinced they saw a bigfoot. Chris, who works as a security guard at a Bloomington mall, claims to have seen the creature several times since last summer. He even tried to photograph it in the woods in July. “After Chris took the picture,” his father says, “the camera ceased to function....

Whawp. That was the sound of Delusions, a festival of experimental music at the Zhou B. Art Center, getting shut down two weeks ago. The closure, ordered by police, was as predictable as a waltz tempo, but somehow no one at Bridgeport’s palace of the avant-garde saw it coming. Majel Connery—artistic director of Opera Cabal, the organization of composers, writers, musicians, singers, and actors producing the four-day festival—says her group didn’t have a contract with the center....

Tantalus Theatre Group aims to bring the competitive, vain, lusty, conniving gods and goddesses of Norse mythology to life in this ensemble-written show. But despite 100 minutes of storytelling, song, dance, and improvised games, the effort fails. Directors Glen Cullen and Devin Brain and their cast are occasionally inventive at telling tales most American audiences won’t know well, but the narratives are often so unfocused we can’t follow them. The trickster Loki (annoyingly played by crude class clown Kevin Antonio Viol) vies with a dull Odin (Cory Conrad) for support in a series of interactive scenes with the audience that might be better suited to children’s theater; we never really care who wins....

A girl sits on a toilet, naked, with blood running from her nose down her chest. There’s a speculum in her vagina. She has a black eye. Her name’s Meg McCarville, and she recently got her BFA from UIC. She staged this photo and a couple hundred similar ones–including some where she’s got a swastika painted on her chest in blood–and had a friend shoot them with a digital camera as part of her final project....

I’d love to hear you weigh in on the case of Jason Fortuny, the person who posted an ad on Craigslist posing as a woman looking for a dom male, then posted all of the responses, including the pictures some men sent him. I thought that, as a person who receives voluminous amounts of damaging and embarrassing e-mail from people who count on your discretion, you might have an interesting perspective....

SOUND ON SURVIVAL 4/22, 23, VELVET LOUNGE In the early 80s alto sax player Marco Eneidi left the Bay Area for New York, where he found his fortune on the free-jazz scene; opportunities to learn from Jimmy Lyons, Bill Dixon, and Cecil Taylor are nothing if not golden, and Eneidi developed a trusting, confident touch with a Coltrane-ish heft and solidity. He’s been back out west for about ten years and appears in Chicago extremely rarely; this group is his trio with bassist Lisle Ellis (also a Taylor veteran) and drummer Peter Valsamis, who has a background in Mills College electronic music of the Pauline Oliveros/William Winant sort–meaning he’s ready to push the role of the drums farther forward and farther out....

The premise of Bassprov sounds unpromising: a couple of guys sit around drinking beer, pretending to fish for bass and shooting the shit. But improv tricksters Joe Bill and Mark Sutton, well seasoned by their years at the Annoyance, are after more than yet another show full of shallow Hicksville stereotypes. True, the characters they play are probably only a year or two of unemployment away from full white-trashdom, and they’re fond of pastimes that upper-middle-class types consider dumb, like fishing and riding go-karts....

Recently I read a news item (in a real newspaper, not the Weekly World News) about a man arrested for cannibalism. Allegedly, this guy had placed an ad in some publication expressing his desire to meet somebody whose fantasy was to be devoured–for the purpose of fulfilling the fantasy. Somebody actually answered the ad. Apparently, the two worked out their terms to mutual satisfaction, for in due course the respondent was indelicately dispatched to the hereafter, and his earthly remains were then converted into the ultimate low-carb entree....

As tires wear out, rubber is presumably deposited on the road surface. Where is all that rubber? –R.D. Morgan, Camden, South Carolina Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tires are a mix of materials, mostly synthetic and natural rubbers but also including carbon black, oil, sulfur, steel, and chemicals added as antioxidants, strengtheners, and fillers. They also contain varying amounts of potentially hazardous metals such as zinc, nickel, chromium, cadmium, and copper....

Artist and preservation warrior Barton Faist, famous locally for his battle to save Tree Studios, stood up last week at a Chicago Artists Coalition board meeting to champion a new cause. “I was asked to come tonight to discuss the possibility of reviewing Olga,” he announced to the ten board members and two staffers (including executive director Olga Stefan) seated around the conference table at CAC’s new offices. But as soon as Faist launched into a description of his encounters with Stefan during her first 15 months on the job, outgoing chair Lynn Merel cut him off....

“I have never been ashamed to be Muslim, not even after 9-11, and not now,” states Asma Gull Hasan in the introduction to her new book, Why I Am a Muslim: An American Odyssey (Element). The 29-year-old Hasan, a Colorado-bred graduate of Wellesley and New York University Law School, has become something of a Muslim feminist pundit since the timely 2000 publication of her American Muslims: A New Generation, which landed her op-eds in the New York Times and guest appearances on The O’Reilly Factor and Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher....

Playwright Steven Simoncic’s depiction of an African-American couple and an upper-middle-class white couple living next door to each other in Humboldt Park is admirably evenhanded despite the script’s running gag about racial stereotyping in advertising and swipes at overpriced Starbucks coffees. The clever, breezy first act takes a politically correct attitude toward gentrification yet remains sympathetic to both couples. Problems arise, however, with the need for narrative closure: will the black people get to stay in the neighborhood or not?...

I used to think of Deerhoof’s music as a sublime juxtaposition–sweet pop melodies brutally colliding with angular riffs and rhythms–but on their forthcoming and best album, The Runners Four (Kill Rock Stars/5RC), those elements seem inseparably intertwined. Recorded in their Oakland practice space without the elaborate multitracking that’s given previous efforts such a supernatural feel, the disc conveys all the immediacy and power of the band’s live shows. Satomi Matsuzaki’s wiry bass lines lock in with Greg Saunier’s relentless drumming while guitarists Chris Cohen and John Dieterich trade invigorating counterrhythms and shards of melody; Matsuzaki’s vocals, more complex and sophisticated than ever before, are still oddly soothing thanks to her tiny wisp of a voice....

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece manages to be many things at once: a Taiwanese Last Picture Show, a failed heterosexual love story, a gay cruising saga, a melancholy tone poem, a mordant comedy, a creepy ghost tale. A cavernous Taipei movie palace on its last legs is (improbably) showing King Hu’s groundbreaking 1966 hit Dragon Inn to a sparse audience (which includes a couple of that film’s stars) while a rainstorm rages outside....

It’s tempting to tag this tale of star-crossed love in a Catholic seminary “The Sermon on Brokeback Mount.” But the characters have more than private/public conflict to deal with–theirs is a love triangle rounded out by God. This could’ve made for ultranarrow material, but the thoughtful script–developed by the two performers and director Lessa Bouchard–delves into the existential dilemmas underlying all faith. And the well-drawn Michael (Grant Stokes) and Jeff (Garrett Prejean) represent two common ways that devout but moderate Catholics of every sexual persuasion negotiate the dogma that draconian literalists take at face value....

Terry McCabe delivers crisp, engrossing adaptations and stagings of two Sherlock Holmes mysteries. “A Scandal in Bohemia” is peculiarly passionate, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius detective (Don Bender, both smooth and driven) meets his emotional match in a beautiful American actress (Meghan Principe). And in “The Final Problem,” a riveting depiction of good and evil locked in mortal combat, he meets his ultimate opponent: Professor Moriarty, the “Napoleon of crime” (played by Bender as if he were Holmes’s alter ego)....

Jesus, guys. Can we all take a break from writing OutKast articles? I appreciate that they have a movie out, and what might be their last record, but is it really worth everyone struggling on their own to come up with new adjectives to describe Andre 3000 in what’s probably going to end up the exact same article that everyone else is writing at the same time? I’m not even going back into my browser history to copy the links because I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep again just looking at the titles....

Kathy Albain Deaths from lung cancer among women have risen 150 percent in the last 20 years, and the disease now kills about 70,000 women annually in the U.S., more than breast and ovarian cancer combined. To counter this trend Kathy Albain, an oncologist and cancer researcher affiliated with the Loyola University Health System in Maywood, helped found the professional organization Women Against Lung Cancer. Lung cancer, she says, may be different for women than men....