Lead Story You Mean These Are Crimes? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Police in West Hartford, Connecticut, arrested Matthew Flynn, 46, in August; apparently enraged by the repetitive music coming from an ice cream truck on his block, Flynn allegedly threatened to castrate the teenage truck driver with a pair of hedge clippers. Also in August, David Rye, 48, was arrested in Simi Valley, California, after he allegedly tried to silence the car alarm of a Toyota parked near his apartment by firing at least three bullets into the car....

David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play about the relationship between a young, troubled Hyde Park woman and her even more disturbed John Nash-like mathematician father is funny, moving, and tightly written, with enough twists to keep it interesting even on a third viewing. But this Keyhole Theatre Company production is hobbled by indifferent direction and an ineffective ensemble. Usually savvy director Frank Merle never manages to find the humor or drama in the material....

Though far from being an all-out pothead, I occasionally smoke a little smoke and, to the best of my knowledge, have never experienced any ill effects (aside from that way natty brownie I ate on my 18th birthday). I have however heard a ton of nonsense on the subject concerning brain cancer, sterility, mental disorders, and, thanks to one fanatically religious friend, death and damnation. Being a reasonably health-conscious guy, I was wondering, what serious physical or mental effects could smoking marijuana have on me?...

I was watching an episode of Nature on PBS about sea turtles, and at one point the narrator mentioned vast deposits of methane at the bottom of the ocean in solid form. Then he gave some vague warning that the warming oceans may unleash all this methane into the atmosphere. What’s the straight dope on methane lurking beneath the sea? Will it give us an energy-independent utopia or burn us all to a crisp?...

The cold war is long over, but the politics of divisiveness, in which critics of the government are smeared as traitors, is all too present today. In this climate it’s both stimulating and scary to be reminded of the case of blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, imprisoned in the late 40s for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (In a later TV interview he said he was guilty as charged–he did have contempt for Congress....

In 1810 an amply endowed South African woman named Saartjie Baartman was displayed as a sideshow freak–but the Hottentot Venus’s story doesn’t seem to interest playwright Suzan-Lori Parks much. Instead she aims to capture the character of the time and examine showmanship. Director Jaclyn Biskup and the Mill (formerly Experimental Theatre Chicago) bring a charming carnival quality to the show; Darci Nalepa in particular is big and bold in her barkerlike role....

Though psych quartet the GRIS GRIS are from the Bay Area, a region known for producing bands with hypnotizing licks and epic space jams, their sound is rooted elsewhere. Their second long player, For the Season (Birdman), tokes heavily upon the sounds of the late-60s south, especially the 13th Floor Elevators and the gurgling swamp haze of early Dr. John (from whose classic 1968 album the group takes its name). The album was written and recorded over three months in a cabin on some wooded acreage in Kosse, Texas, about 45 miles southeast of Waco....

Alan Taylor may be the best American historian working today. (We’re limiting the conversation to real historians, not cheerleaders like David McCullough.) Taylor’s latest, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, tells in meticulous detail how the several Iroquois tribes got snookered out of the land that is now western New York and parts of Pennsylvania and Ontario. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Alto saxist Charles McPherson is a safe choice to kick off the Jazz Showcase’s annual monthlong celebration of Charlie Parker, but nonetheless an exciting one. At 65 McPherson is still a perfect stand-in for Parker–a role he played on the sound track to Clint Eastwood’s film Bird. With his fat, almost fulsome tone and spectacular facility with the tropes and phraseology of bebop, he can command Bird’s style and sound as only a handful of others–Sonny Stitt, Phil Woods–ever have....

In January 1966, on his 39th birthday, Alexander Polikoff had lunch with friends. They told him about a group of African-American organizations that had asked the ACLU to help them stop the CHA from building public housing exclusively in poor, black neighborhoods. Polikoff, a lawyer, had already helped the ACLU argue some major cases: they’d won the fight to put Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer back on bookshelves, though they’d lost the battle to get a law license for George Anastaplo, who’d been denied one after he refused to say whether he’d ever been a Communist....

Jah Wobble started his career at the top of the postpunk heap, playing colossal reggae-influenced bass lines for Public Image Ltd. when he was just barely out of his teens. Things fizzled out fairly quickly, though: after leaving PiL in 1980 he embarked on some promising but uneven projects both on his own and with members of Can, and by the mid-80s he’d left music entirely, working various jobs for the London Underground....

My favorite moment on Low’s new record, The Great Destroyer (Sub Pop), is about halfway through “When I Go Deaf.” Gently strumming an acoustic guitar, Alan Sparhawk sings about how losing his hearing will improve his life–“We will make love / We won’t have to fight / We won’t have to speak / And we won’t have to lie”–then lets fly with a stadium-size blast of Crazy Horse electric guitar that carries through the rest of the song, as though he can’t wait to finish off his eardrums....

Of all the one-MC-one-producer collaborations I’ve heard in recent years–MF Doom and Danger Mouse, Aceyalone and Rjd2, Common and Kanye–Murs and 9th Wonder have the most natural chemistry. On the new Murray’s Revenge (Record Collection), their second full-length, 9th’s lilting, soul-driven beats set a mellow mood that lets Murs’s confrontational, self-revelatory rhymes pull you in gently but doesn’t dilute his cocky magnetism. And while Murs doesn’t spin strictly autobiographical tales this time out–there aren’t any songs dedicated to women who’ve given him blow jobs–he’s still just as frank and perceptive....

We hang out here after our catering gigs are over with and talk about our nights. One evening we’d been at a beautifully landscaped North Shore estate with a very dressed-up crowd of about 40 people. They had cocktails around the pool, then headed toward the garden when the dinner bell rang. The meal was going beautifully–the first course had been cleared, and we were serving the entree when we noticed that the sprinkler system had started up on the outer garden about 50 yards from the guests....

Most of these 15 films by nine filmmakers (screening over two nights) are well worth seeing, especially those by Andy Warhol and Warren Sonbert. In Warhol’s Kitchen (1965, 66 min.), a static camera observes characters in a kitchen sitting, talking, and playing at seduction. Warhol’s passive-aggressive view of his emotionally vacant characters is heightened by the blocklike black-and-white composition, which imbues the refrigerator with as much presence as the cast (in fact, the furniture is included in the credits)....

NSide by Side by Sondheim | Stephen Sondheim is so far above good and beyond conventional that it’s easy to see his musicals as pure art and forget their Broadway showmanship. This Theo Ubique Theatre Company version of a much-performed biographical revue supplies an entertaining reminder. Director Fred Anzevino goes in heavily for old-fashioned, hand-shimmying, boa-whipping ingratiation. Not that he ignores Sondheim’s trademark ability to voice the subtle self-reflexiveness of the 20th-century urban sophisticate....

[snip] A time to worry. “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,” Princeton engineering professor Robert Socolow tells the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert. “And, in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation....

My desert island disc? Sonny Rollins’s 1956 album Saxophone Colossus, hands down–unless I’m allowed to bring a box set, at which point it turns into a toss-up between The Complete Prestige Recordings and The Freelance Years (Riverside). Rollins has provided at least three of my most memorable concert experiences–a show at Symphony Center in the 80s and two others over the years at the Chicago Jazz Festival–as well as one of the most disappointing, a night at Ravinia in 2002 when he had nothing much to say but kept hunting for a statement anyway....

TRIBES OF NEUROT, STEVEN VON TILL, BLOOD AND TIME 1/2, BOTTOM LOUNGE The Bay Area experimental metal collective Neurosis has given rise to several subsidiary musical entities and branched out into the visual arts, film, and performance as well. The most recent release from the band proper was last year’s collaboration with former Swans front woman Jarboe, who lent a visceral human cry to its occasionally arid sound. Spin-off acts Tribes of Neurot and Blood and Time will perform at this show, and founding guitarist Steven Von Till will play a solo set; fans will also get to hear Neurosis’s next album, still warm from Steve Albini’s mixing board and not due out till next fall....

Beyonce | “Ring the Alarm” The Rapture | “Don Gon Do It” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Rapture’s forthcoming fourth release, Pieces of the People We Love (on Motown–no, really), is such a mess it’s unlikely to rescue what remains of their career, but “Don Gon Do It” is their best hope. Granted, the verses are lowest-common-denominator MySpace disco, and front man Luke Jenner sounds like Opera Duck UK, delivering lyrics so cheesy (“Pain of broken-hearted life / You are so fucked-up / I wish you’d die”) they make Pete Wentz look like Slavoj Zizek....