I met a guy through a BDSM chat room. It seemed like the perfect no-risk adventure sex–he’s dom, I’m sub; he’s sexy as all get-out, I’m fat in all the places he likes girls to be fat. So we hook up. But instead of the onetime adventure I was expecting, we hook up again and again. We talk for hours on the phone and hang out naked watching TV and eating Chinese food....

Q More than a few times, you have implied that if one’s partner is unwilling to satisfy, the deprived person has a right to seek it elsewhere. My sex life with my wife, despite my best efforts, is infrequent and uninspired. I recently met a married woman who has had a nonexistent sex life for many years. We like each other immensely and are compatible in many ways, including in our sexual desires....

Bird Names, Chandeliers, Golden Birthday INFO 773-276-3600 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though the Bird Names have released a stack of recordings, Wooden Lake is only their second album on a proper label. It’s not the kind of record with a ready-made audience: cheaply recorded and packed with unidentifiable sounds and junky rhythms, it’s too noisy and unhinged to register as pop, but at the same time it’s too reliant on familiar genres (psych, folk, vintage country) to impress anyone as truly avant-garde....

“Young people come up to me at events like this and say, ‘You’re history!’” says Jack Mulqueen. He waits a perfect vaudeville beat, then adds, “That’s also what my wife tells me when I do something wrong.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Led by Pandora, a harlequin in mod couture played by Elaine, the kids flailed and wiggled with the sublime balance of abandon and awkwardness that’s only possible between the ages of five and twelve....

Sam Shepard’s latest, a ham-fisted satire of post-9/11 America, has none of the subtlety, grace, or dramatic power of his best work, like True West and Buried Child. The dialogue is obvious, the characters are flat, and the story is both preposterous and uncompelling: a Wisconsin dairy farm is invaded by a sadistic, Dick Cheney-like villain out to turn everyone into an unthinking, ultrapatriotic drone. In the right hands, this flawed script full of righteous indignation might have been at least amusing, but Karen Kessler’s Chicago-premiere production lacks passion and conviction....

Dangerous Highway Hinton died in 1995 at age 51, but he’s still unchallenged as the greatest blue-eyed soul singer ever to live. “He remains unique,” wrote Wexler, “a white boy who truly sang and played in the spirit of the great black soul artists he venerated. With Eddie it wasn’t imitation; it was totally created, with a fire and fury that was as real as Otis Redding’s and Wilson Pickett’s.” That’s no hollow hyperbole, coming from a man who guided the careers of legends like Big Joe Turner and Aretha Franklin....

I’ve been doing some research on the great American songwriter Irving Berlin and something struck me as odd. Several sources claim he never learned to read or write music. While this is certainly believable for later songwriters with easy access to recording equipment, how was Irving Berlin able to pass his songs along to live Broadway orchestras without a transcription? Is this folklore, or did he come up with some way to write music without writing down the notes?...

I got off the Dan Ryan at an exit where 20 pairs of tube socks sell for five bucks and you don’t even have to leave your car, passed two jumping Polish stands, and parked in a dark, near-empty lot surrounded by rusty barbed wire, facing a decrepit old church with faint bluish light flickering through its glass block windows. There was a hand-scrawled sign asking me to PLEASE KNOCK on the warped wooden door....

Berger World Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Berger and his team started courting Graham last summer, after a nonprofit group headed by former Auditorium Theatre Council director Jan Kallish expressed interest in the building. He says he has no immediate plans to raise rents, which range from $300 to $800 for studios. He thinks he can reopen the building’s two theaters, the Playhouse and the Studebaker, closed since their last incarnation as the Fine Arts movie house, and says he’s working on a plan that could include educational use....

Like many other R & B vocalists of her era, Detroit’s Bettye LaVette never achieved the kind of stardom her enormous talent deserved. She hit the R & B charts a few times in the 60s and again in the early 80s, but until this decade her career was more often defined by missed opportunities, like the debut album she cut in Muscle Shoals in 1972 that was inexplicably shelved. The tide started turning in 2000, when that album was released as Souvenirs (Art & Soul); the blues-stoked A Woman Like Me (Blues Express) followed in 2003, earning her a W....

Jean Renoir, The Boss With Jean Renoir and Michel Simon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1966 Jacques Rivette made a three-part TV documentary titled Jean Renoir, the Boss, and its 90-minute centerpiece has rarely been seen since. “A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue,” screening on DVD this week at Alliance Francaise, is a missing link that’s key to understanding Rivette’s work....

The 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival continues through Sunday, August 19, with screenings at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, and Elegant Mr. Gallery, 1355 N. Milwaukee. Tickets for single screenings are $7; a $50 pass admits you to ten. For advance tickets visit brownpapertickets.com; for more information call 773-341-6727 or visit cuff.org. Thax Poet Thax Douglas is a loner who shares his intimate thoughts with hundreds or thousands of strangers; a fixture on Chicago’s rock scene, he takes the stage before musical sets to read his verse, often penned on the spot....

Taped to the door of a small room next to the factory floor at Stern Pinball is a memo telling employees they have to sign up to play the company’s latest game and test it for bugs. “If you don’t sign up,” it says, “you obviously don’t want to work at a pinball factory.” Pinball has its roots in games such as the 19th-century French bagatelle, in which players used sticks to push balls into numbered holes on a table....

I understand accessories. Necklaces, bracelets, hoop and chandelier earrings, anklets, toe rings, pinkie rings, neckties, bow ties, cummerbunds, suspenders, cravats, ascots, concha belts, headbands, scarves–they all bring me happiness. Hell, I won’t even rule out a well-placed dickey. But I’ll admit it: I fear the hat. Hats just freak me out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The room was filled with hundreds of concoctions made by six milliners, including cloches, berets, fedoras, modified derbies, grand church hats, and saucy little cocktail hats....

In 1998 His Name Is Alive released an album called Ft. Lake, and bandleader and founder Warn Defever had a doozy of a backstory to go with the title–he explained that there’s a Civil War fort in his home state of Michigan that’s been slowly settling into a huge sinkhole for a hundred years and is now entirely underwater. I don’t know Michigan well enough to call his bluff, but real or not that fort makes a lovely metaphor for HNIA’s sound: sturdy, down-to-earth Americana like blues, soul, and gospel submerged in a surreal and otherworldly realm....

The Gnawa are a Sufi people brought from sub-Saharan Africa to what is now Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia to work as slaves. But the term also refers to healers–often but not always members of this ethnic group–who use ceremonies of music and dance to induce a trance state and facilitate communication with the spirit world. In its continuing quest for international resonance under the direction of Jim Vincent, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has commissioned Gnawa, an ensemble work from Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, that uses these songs (here by Hassan Hakmoun and Adam Rudolph)....

Many Chicago comedy troupes feature one gender and one color. Local 386 earns its union moniker by including rising improvisers from across the city–men, women, whites, blacks, a Hispanic DJ. In their second production, a 75-minute sketch show, they approach terrorism literally and figuratively in bits about poorly scheduled suicide bombers, blitz marketing, Big Brother, an unflappable cuckold, and aggressive club dancers (showcasing Eddie Jordan’s magnificent plasticity). Though some scenes sputter and some jokes falter, their moxie is admirable, their writing consistently smart....

Look Back in Anger Bracing John H. Johnson’s conviction that a national market existed for a middle-class black press was a white press where condescension reigned. When Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 a Sun-Times editorial that began, “A revolting crime against humanity has been committed in Mississippi,” ended with a pitying reflection: “A man cannot help it if his skin is black, but a man whose black heart leads him to lynching has only himself to blame for his crime....

In most chamber orchestras that claim to do without a leader the first violinists are in effect conductors. Not the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which doesn’t even have permanent section leaders, democratically selecting the concertmasters and principal players for each work. Founded in 1972, this superb ensemble has remained a modern chamber orchestra, bucking the trend toward period instruments and performance style as it plays everything from Bach and Handel to Charles Wuorinen and Elliott Carter....

I’m not entirely sure why the Oxford Collapse’s sound strikes me as so right and good, which I’ll take as proof that there are still bands out there whose ethos can’t be described with the usual rock-crit algebra of style, reference, and image. The New York trio does avail itself of the ever popular Don Knotts vocal style (see the Ponys, Arcade Fire, et al) and sometimes strikes me as an Americanized update of high-strung 80s UK shamble-rock bands like the Fire Engines or Swell Maps, but I think such similarities are more a case of convergent thinking....