It was about an hour after dusk in the early summer of 1991, and I was sitting on a log in the half woods near my parents’ house with a guy I’d met in the front row at a Dinosaur Jr show. I had the names of my favorite bands scrawled in pen on the toe caps of my Converse high-tops (“Fugazi” on the left, “Dinosaur” on the right), and I studied them intently, trying to keep my teenage awkwardness under control....

Though he moved to Chicago in 2001, Andrew Morgan spent most of the subsequent years elsewhere, bouncing from his native Kansas City, Missouri, to Oxford, England, to Lawrence, Kansas, to Los Angeles to Harvard University before finally settling back in Lincoln Park in June. He began recording Misadventures in Radiology, his ambitious solo debut, at Elliott Smith’s studio in LA in 2002, but Morgan eventually required a year, five more studios, nearly two dozen musicians, and hundreds of takes to complete his symphonic pop opus, which was inspired in equal measure by Kind of Blue and Pet Sounds....

Now in its third incarnation, this rollicking production by Congo Square Theatre Company has moved. And where performing it on the Goodman’s small stage was like trying to dance on the head of a pin, the Duncan YMCA Chernin Center gives the show’s five hoofers room to move. Once again ten fervent singer-actors give their all to the shtick and the music, backed by live keyboard and drums. Once again they tell the story of the Nativity but give it a refreshing fun-loving spin; in the second half, devoted to gospel music, Cherisse A....

THOUGH CHICAGO MAY lack the industrial infrastructure of a publishing powerhouse like New York, there’s a lot going on here if you know where to look. Home to two respected university presses (at the University of Chicago andNorthwestern) and established operations like Chicago Review Press and the Afrocentric Third World Press—which had a breakout hit this year with the Tavis Smiley project The Covenant With Black America—Chicago’s seen a surge of publishing activity in the last few years from upstarts like Evanston-based Agate Publishing, Punk Planet Books (an offshoot of Punk Planet magazine), and OV Books (from the literary journal Other Voices)....

Are writers entitled to use others’ real-life stories? When does artistic license become soul stealing? This dilemma drives a wedge between an aspiring author and her aging mentor when the young protegee overshadows her professor using material that the older woman shared in confidence. The production is part of Circle Theatre’s Black Box Series, in which developing artists stage low-tech productions, focusing instead on acting and directing basics. Worthy concept, but the results are uneven....

Jesse Jackson Jr., who just won reelection to his congressional seat, keeps insisting he hasn’t decided whether he’ll run for mayor in February. But when he talks about the new political army he’s organizing he sounds like he’s been running for quite a while. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jackson, who set up the Jackson Exploratory and Listening Committee to look into a mayoral bid, says that even if he isn’t a candidate this time around, his new political army will provide a base for a campaign in four or eight years....

As pop concepts go, a slicked-up My Bloody Valentine with audible lyrics and pushy drums wasn’t a sure bet for success–not even in 1995, not even with trip-hop fillips, not even with Shirley Manson in a miniskirt. Still, Garbage’s shiny, nasty stomps must’ve seemed at least plausible as a mainstream gambit for Geffen, considering that back then the label was crazy enough to think Butch Vig might make Sonic Youth radio friendly....

There are two parts to this quirky hour-long performance, the first by Numbskull, the Human Blockhead, aka Fraser Coffeen and Jennifer Huffman. With her assistance he hammers nails into his nose and pins balloons to his forearms. It sounds gross, but with his showman’s flair for spectacle, Coffeen’s no-gimmicks carnival stunts are outrageous and funny. In the second part–“10% Less Fat,” created by Children of the Absurd–Kelsie Huff and Amy Sumpter parody weight-loss culture....

A battle over a proposed condo tower on South Wabash raises a basic question: How do you strike a balance in architectural preservation? Compromise too much and you wind up with an entry arch standing in a park beside the Art Institute, a forlorn remnant of Louis Sullivan’s demolished 1894 Stock Exchange Building. Compromise too little and you wind up protecting irrelevant buildings. At the permit-review meeting the battle lines were drawn in the usual way....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe the media circus surrounding Brian De Palma’s Redacted (see Pat Graham’s recent post) will spark the kind of water cooler chat that gets people into theaters, but the saber rattling has overshadowed any discussion of the director’s artistic intentions. When I first saw the movie in September, at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by how stylistically different it is from his previous works; De Palma met the challenge of shooting a high-definition video feature on a $5 million budget by radically reinventing his approach to storytelling....

When Verbow lost its deal with Epic five years ago, front man and guitarist Jason Narducy wasn’t sure what he’d end up doing–music had been the center of his life since he was ten and fronting the grade school punk band Verboten. But the 34-year-old has landed on his feet, and he’s not only running a painting company but enjoying some unexpected success playing bass as a hired gun–he’s toured with Liz Phair and Bob Mould and just landed a gig with former Guided by Voices leader Robert Pollard....

Mr. Lif’s congested, sandpapery voice and El-P’s cataclysmic production both commit aggravated assault on the eardrums, and on Lif’s new Mo’ Mega (Def Jux) they make an intimidating pair. This time El-P backs off from his customary otherworldly density, trying sparser, more industrial textures–steely electric guitars, jittery percussion, corroded keyboard sounds–that if anything make his earth-shaking drums feel even bigger. Lif stands astride this next-level grit-hop making his trademark agitprop accusations, his grainy flow a perfect match for his prickly sentiments....

This multidisciplinary event, presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs through Sunday, April 10. The avant-garde showcase, now in its third year, features established and emerging artists (including a number of SAIC students and alumni) working in theater, performance, circus arts, puppetry, storytelling, dance, music, video, and sound and installation art. The shows range from family-oriented to adults-only. Participants include Goat Island, the Curious Theatre Branch, Free Street, Theater Oobleck, the Hypocrites, the Neo-Futurists, Plasticene, Teatro Luna, Mathew Wilson, Mad Shak Dance Company, and many more....

Peter Dombrowe’s humorous, sometimes bizarre photographs of Hamburg and environs, part of the five-photographer show “Utopia’s Backyard” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, speak to the artificiality of the modern urban landscape. Two workmen in Klinkerarbeiten attach faux-brick tiles to the side of a building that’s mostly covered with them, revealing that what appears to be masonry is an illusion. Wohnwagen auf Dach shows a flimsy-looking prefab house with a trailer home perched on its roof, as if the larger structure has just given birth....

The 22nd annual Printers Row Book Fair runs Saturday and Sunday, June 3 and 4, 10 AM-6 PM, and gathers more than 130 exhibitors, including booksellers, publishers, and literary organizations, on the blocks around Dearborn (50 West) and Polk (800 South) streets. In addition to the new, used, and collectible books for sale, the fair features dozens of readings, discussions, and signings by local and national authors as well as children’s activities, musical performances, cooking demonstrations, and food vendors....

On a recent weeknight at G Boutique, a Bucktown lingerie shop and sex-toy emporium, Rachel Shteir, associate professor and head of the dramaturgy and dramatic criticism program at DePaul, was dressed in patent leather heels and lacy black stockings, a red bra winking out from underneath her camisole and bright teal blazer. She was there to sign copies of her first book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, before Michelle “Toots” L’amour’s monthly burlesque workshop, which that night would draw about 15 women looking to pick up a few moves....

Twentywhatevers are forever struggling to reconcile their good intentions with their passive disengagement from the world, but “The Good That Won’t Come Out,” the lead cut from Rilo Kiley’s 2002 album, The Execution of All Things, is the most self-lacerating and clear-eyed expression of that dilemma I’ve heard this decade. As if to solve the problem for themselves, the LA pop quartet broadened their emotional scope and musical ambitions for last year’s follow-up, More Adventurous (Brute/Beaute)....

You kind of expect an icon to fall on his face at some point. But here’s Savion Glover, 21 years after he first appeared on Broadway at age ten in The Tap Dance Kid, continuing to take on new challenges–and meeting them in ways that are inevitably hailed as astounding. The show he’s touring here, Improvography, has received raves since it opened in late 2003 in New York. It features a live band and a troupe of seven other dancers, called Ti Dii, in choreographed ensemble pieces with and without Glover to recorded music....

King John It’s too bad, because Shakespeare’s title character is a rich subject for exploration. King John was the nefarious, inept youngest son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane (known most vividly to us as Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn in the film version of The Lion in Winter). His brothers included Richard the Lion-Hearted, against whom he intrigued for years with all the acumen and success that Wile E....

[snip] “Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in faculty clubs,” writes William Stuntz, a Harvard law professor and evangelical Protestant, in a November 29 posting at Tech Central Station on the Web. “And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning. In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about understanding the world we live in....