Duty requires me to mention that Ani DiFranco has a new album, Knuckle Down (Righteous Babe), though if you don’t already own it you never will. DiFranco herself is obviously aware that only cultists feel compelled to check in on each collection of first-day-of-the-rest-of-Ani’s-life musings, so she’s billing Knuckle Down as a group effort: the half dozen or so guest musicians include Todd Sickafoose on bass, Patrick Warren on keyboards, and opening act Andrew Bird on violin and glockenspiel....

Bash at the Conservatory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I saw “Bash” last fall, I left disdaining the play as a symptom rather than a critique of moral decay. In that production, “Bash” seemed an intellectual exercise, a clever little nihilistic machine spiced with violence. The one-act Iphigenia in Orem was just a contemporary version of Euripides’ classic, in which Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to appease the gods, and Medea Redux just a recasting of another Euripides play, about a woman who takes vengeance on her husband by killing their children....

Maybe Seattle punk is cool again, maybe it’s not–I gave up years ago trying to track the invisible progress of coolness from one scene to the next. The Briefs obviously don’t care either: their infectious, intensely dorky 2000 full-length debut, Hit After Hit, sold 10,000 copies, mostly through word of mouth, and put Seattle’s Dirtnap Records on the map. The success of the Briefs’ version of skinny-tie punk–vocals perched between tough and geeky, lyrics jumping from rebellious fantasies to self-destructive fantasies to sci-fi fantasies, aggressive guitars playing sweet sock-hop chord progressions–earned Dirtnap the cash to support records by other worthy wavey outfits like the Epoxies and the Spits....

I’m sure lots of people thought hell would freeze over before this sick ‘n’ twisted New York MC went straight. It must be snowing in the underworld right now, because the erstwhile Chris Palko has ditched the drugs, and on the new Hell’s Winter (Definitive Jux) he’s dropped the viciously misogynistic lyrics too. His cartoonishly morbid horrorcore first turned heads on the 1997 single “Agent Orange,” where he claims that he survived his own abortion when the suction canister was stolen from the garbage; his dementia topped out on 2004’s Water World, a collaboration with Tame One that’s all about smoking stuff dipped in embalming fluid....

WITH ALL THE recent Gay Games hoopla, Chicago is finally getting some overdue credit for being gay friendly. In 1961 Illinois was the first state to decriminalize any private sexual behavior between consenting adults. In 1988, the City Council passed the Human Rights Ordinance, outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation and including GLBTQ folks in hate crime protections. Ten years later the rainbow pylons lining North Halsted Street were erected, giving the nation one of its first officially recognized gay ghettos....

Contract Killers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Belfast native, Cassidy started his music career as a teenager in the mid-80s, playing bass in the Manchester group B.F.G. before launching his own orch-pop outfit, Butterfly Child. He came to Chicago on a promotional stop in 1996 and recorded the band’s 1998 opus, Soft Explosives, here with locals like Tortoise’s John Herndon and Euphone’s Nick Macri....

APRIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The future of Metropolis Performing Arts Center still hangs in the balance as Arlington Heights considers whether to purchase the facility; in the meantime executive director Tim Rater is forging ahead with programming intended to keep everybody laughing. A Metropolis production of the classic British backstage farce Noises Off previews this weekend. Under the direction of Schadenfreude comedy troupe member and Metropolis producer Sandy Marshall, the play within a play will incorporate Metropolis as its setting, throwing the audience members into the action as soon as they walk through the door....

DJ Shadow’s brand-new disc, The Outsider (Universal Motown), might be the most incoherent album of the year, but it’s also a huge paradigm shift for the pioneering turntablist. Instead of drawing from his massive record collection and constructing tracks exclusively from samples, he’s brought in other musicians to flesh out his ideas. He sticks to his hip-hop roots for nearly half the album: “3 Freaks” (with MCs Keak Da Sneak and Turf Talk) and “Turf Dancin’” (with the Federation and Animaniaks) invoke the “hyphy” style of his Bay Area stomping grounds, matching hyperactive programmed beats with bleeping, rubbery synths, and on “Seein’ Thangs” fierce Mississippi MC David Banner delivers a bitter riposte to the Bush administration’s response to Katrina....

ELECTRICIDAD, Goodman Theatre. Luis Alfaro’s Spanglish take on Sophocles’ Electra has more to offer than most reimaginings of Greek tragedies. Unlike Charles Mee in his pat deconstructions of gender relationships, Alfaro places the tale in the specific context of contemporary Chicano gang life. In the process he offers startling insights into internecine hatreds among immigrant communities and some challenging commentary on the social problem of the vanishing father. Here Clytemnestra (called Clemencia) has killed her drug-dealing gang-lord husband as retribution for being sold to him as a sex slave at age 13–he stands for “the generations of undisciplined men who have wasted our lives....

After Fritchey filed, the case moved to what they call a record review. That’s the mind-numbing process where representatives from both sides sit around a computer screen while a clerk from the board of elections compares signatures on the nominating petitions to the signatures on voter registration cards. If the clerk thinks the signatures don’t match, or if the address isn’t in the ward, she recommends that they be stricken....

Greg Osby’s fierce commitment to evolution is particularly notable now, deep in the second decade of his career–a time when many jazz players settle into routine. The saxophonist’s bands are always changing (although that’s partly because some of his former sidemen, like pianist Jason Moran, have developed strong solo careers of their own) and so are the concepts he brings to recording: St. Louis Shoes was a systematic reassessment of the music he grew up with; on Symbols of Light (A Solution) he used a string quartet to create habitats for improvisation....

What’s this fresh catastrophe at the Sun-Times? So now what? When the ABC audits a newspaper, it’s looking for evidence that the paper exaggerated its circulation. But Hollinger’s already admitted to doing that. In this case, the ABC’s duty is to consider the possibility that it’s the admission that’s exaggerated. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think anyone inside the ABC believes for a second that’s the case....

Dead Kennedys Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3 Disc Set Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jon Landau, the former Rolling Stone writer who went on to serve as Bruce’s producer, manager, and Svengali, famously called Springsteen rock ‘n’ roll’s future back in 1974–but neither of these records was ever the future of rock. They were its present–and in listener land, where there aren’t any critics digging for the next big thing or record labels marketing fresh trends, they still are....

Welcome to our new look. For many months now, we’ve been planning to reformat the paper as a single section, and when the Reader was bought in July the project was put on the fast track. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are many advantages to the changes we’ve made, but the one you may notice first is that we’re coming out a day earlier, with our listings starting on Thursday....

A table came in the other night–four gay boys–and as they were finishing up they asked me if I could deliver a note to another table, saying it was a message for a friend of theirs on a blind date. They told me three times it was the guy with glasses at the table next to the fireplace. I walked over to check it out, and there was only one guy with glasses on that side of the restaurant....

I’m here tonight working on a benefit for Live Wire Theater Company, where I’m a member. The things we do are very different from what I used to do as part of the street cast at the Renaissance Faire. I remember walking past a group of guys tussling around on the grass. One fella explained that he was giving his friend a piggyback ride and asked if I wanted one. I said sure, hiked up my hoopskirts, and stepped back about five paces to get a running start....

Anthropologist Mumm’s reply to my letter [“Just Another Example of Whitewashed History,” Letters, September 7] contains some erroneous assertions as well as some valid points regarding the Latino population that saturated Logan Square in the late 60s and 70s. Unfortunately, using terms like “white flight” and “en masse” indicate a totality of action, which is an affront to Logan Square’s diversity that was then and continues to this day. Mumm continues by insinuating a false dichotomy stating that a reversal of history is somehow responsible for Latinos struggling to remain with whites who were struggling to escape....

Hey, everybody: I’m on vacation–my first in years–so I’ll be running some much loved, frequently requested classic Savage Loves for the next few weeks. Don’t get me wrong, ladies. I’m all for cunnilingus. Women deserve it, and straight men, in my opinion, are obligated to provide it. I’m as pro-cunnilingus as gay men ever get. Even so, spending a week reading hundreds of detailed letters about cunnilingus, picking out the best ones, and editing them into a column is something I can put off....

With the underground success of Diverse’s excellent One A.M., Twista’s Kamikaze entering the Billboard album chart at number one, and the wildly anticipated debut from Kanye West, Chicago hip-hop may be finally gaining some real momentum. But stuff’s been happening here for years, and any number of local acts might have made it with better luck. One of these was Rubberoom: their only full-length, 1999’s Architechnology, is a fierce underground classic shot through with millennial dread....

The Unexamined Line Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pelz’s target was the entire capitalist economy, including most of what was going on in the bustling aisles beneath us. “Capitalist globalization, unwittingly, is a movement toward a less human society,” he said. Not only will it have us all working around the clock for a pittance, it’s spreading the commodification of culture, transforming “countless activities that had been outside the sphere of the market into mere sources of profit....