PHEDRE, Keyhole Theatre Company, and ANDROMACHE, Keyhole Theatre Company. You can’t help but cheer the ambition of mounting two tumultuous five-act Jean Racine tragedies in rotating repertory on a tiny budget with the same eight-person cast. And pairing the plays, newly translated by Barbara Carlisle, is an astute choice. Andromache, written in 1667, was Racine’s first great success after breaking with the strict Jansenist sect, which frowned upon ungodly endeavors like theater....

Please help me! My husband gets off on the voyeur thing. It started out with him watching me and masturbating while I was unaware of his presence. Soon I was wearing Daisy Dukes at the door (about to come myself!) and writing out a check for the pizza delivery guy while my husband hid. I’ve also accepted room service at a hotel wearing just a thong–after being fucked half senseless by my husband–while he hid....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was really, really excited by an e-mail I got about a DVD documentary on thrash metal called Born in the Basement. Municipal Waste and local genre revivalists like Rager have put me on a thrash kick recently, so I was primed for some thrash history. Unfortunately the movie–or at least the 35 minutes I made it through–consists almost entirely of former Overkill drummer Rat Skates sitting in front of a TV (tuned to color bars) and telling you about how thrash happened without any interruptions by anyone else from the scene who might want to contribute a few words....

To the folk revivalists of the early 60s, Hobart Smith was like a coelacanth Alan Lomax had dredged up from the murk of the deep south: a living, breathing fossil of American folk music. Smith was a banjo-playing, clog-dancing, gnarly old hillbilly who’d spent his life learning tunes from people who in some cases were just one generation removed from the Civil War era. In a sense he did with his brain what Lomax did with his tape recorder, collecting and preserving songs before their performers died off....

John Fante’s slim 1939 novel Ask the Dust, one of four autobiographical novels about his surrogate, Arturo Bandini, has a childlike lyricism that recalls William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac. “I climbed out the window and scaled the incline to the top of Bunker Hill. A night for my nose, a feast for my nose, smelling the stars, smelling the flowers, smelling the desert, and the dust asleep, across the top of Bunker Hill....

Conservatives often say that Americans who work for a living have gone Republican, and some people on the left agree, though they give the phenomenon a different spin. Tom Frank, cofounder of the Baffler, labeled it the Great Backlash in his scathing, impressionistic What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Few books on American politics can approach Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 for readability....

Yes, Virginia, Some People Still Care About Ethics So she quit. “I understand that these are tough times for newspapers,” she said in her letter of resignation. “But economic concerns are not sufficient to make me sacrifice the integrity of a section I have worked for, cared about and worried over for two decades.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week Gerst went west to lecture to journalism classes at the University of Oregon and receive the university’s Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism....

This weekend the first Hawk Winter Music Festival presents 70-something acts at 11 venues. At first glance it’s hard to tell what separates the fest from any other three days of music in Chicago–the bulk of the shows were booked months ago and only corralled under the festival’s banner in the past few weeks. But the Hawk does have a theme: it’s a coming-out party for the League of Chicago Music Venues, an association of local club owners and operators that so far represents Buddy Guy’s Legends, the Double Door, the Empty Bottle, the Hideout, the HotHouse, House of Blues, Martyrs’, Metro, Park West, Schubas, and Uncommon Ground....

Swim Cafe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Karen Gerod was a photo stylist when she started baking cakes and cookies for her friends. Small surprise, then, that Swim Cafe, her new breakfast-and-lunch joint, is magazine pretty. Awash in mild, bright shades of aqua and sea foam green, the uncluttered room is filled out by three curved wood benches that resemble waves. They were designed and built by Gerod’s husband, who also fashioned the white-topped tables....

For years the plywood boarding up the unoccupied storefront at the northwest corner of Honore and Milwaukee was prime band-poster space. Then a couple weeks ago the wall was covered with a large-scale graffiti piece. The painting showed a cityscape with one word on each building: it can happen anywhere, the message read. A big-bosomed cartoon woman stood demurely off to the side; next to her the word axe was written in a familiar angular style....

Do you believe art drives social change? Venita Griffin does, and as director of marking and communications for the Community Renewal Society, she found herself in a position to act on this belief. CRS publishes the Chicago Reporter, which this year sponsored the first ever John A. McDermott Documentary Film Competition. It was her idea. On October 14 Beyondmedia Education, a production house that focuses on marginalized women, got an e-mail from Griffin that began, “Congratulations....

YouTube has realized the indie-film ethic of ordinary people generating their own cinema, but the result seems to be a library of solipsism, self-regard, and second-rate showbiz. That makes a genuine indie talent like Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha) even more notable; his low-budget tales of confused college grads have all the immediacy of a bedroom webcast, but they’re also drily funny and shrewdly observant of personal and social behavior. Shot in black-and-white 16-millimeter, this second feature centers on a shaggy musician (Justin Rice) who arrives in New York, meets up with an old friend (Bujalski), and begins drifting into a love triangle with the friend’s sweetheart (Rachel Clift)....

An adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse must convey not only the dialogue but the narration’s mock-serious tone, a perfectly balanced mix of ironic detachment, exaggeration, and understatement. And Page Hearn’s faithful, playful version of Pigs Have Wings manages to find room for the authorial voice–characters deliver the narration–and thus most of the book’s best lines. But the actors in director Martha Adrienne’s production undo his good work with their rather unhinged, verging on shrill, performances....

After a lot of digging, I think I’ve finally sorted through the confusion surrounding the city’s policy on photos taken in Millennium Park. Even the people running the park had a hard time separating the issues, so it’s no surprise the security guards I wrote about on January 28 were getting them mixed up. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The second source of confusion is the requirement that professional photographers get a permit....

One August day six years ago, John Corbett got a mass e-mail containing some disturbing news: a collection of artifacts related to the charismatic, radical jazz musician Sun Ra was in danger of landing on the trash heap. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The house being cleared out, it turned out, had belonged to Alton Abraham, Sun Ra’s business manager. Abraham had died a year earlier and the house was being sold by his ex-wife, Catherine Baymon....

The Stills’ 2003 debut, Logic Will Break Your Heart, had disco drums, hungover-sounding vocals, and crystalline hooks that were vaguely new wave in a sort of Joe Jackson way–it was a great guilty pleasure for hipsters who liked the Strokes but didn’t want to seem so far behind the game as to admit they actually liked the Strokes. I know it did the job for me. “Still in Love Song” and “Lola Stars and Stripes” were good enough that they would’ve made an impression even without Julian and the boys around to set a precedent....

Friday21 BOWED PIANO ENSEMBLE Colorado-based composer Stephen Scott takes a strikingly original approach to piano music, elaborating on extended techniques developed by John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Conlon Nancarrow. In 1977 he founded his Bowed Piano Ensemble, a ten-member group that huddles over the innards of a single grand piano and uses a host of tools–including nylon fishing line, horsehair-covered tongue depressors, guitar picks, fingernails, percussion mallets, and custom-made mutes–to sculpt dazzling orchestral sounds that are rich with rippling counterpoint, subtle rhythms, and harmonic splendor....

Age tends not to be a problem when you’ve always looked elderly and addled. Professor Irwin Corey, who turned 91 this year, was particularly popular in the 60s and early 70s, when trickster iconoclasts were especially prized, but honed his craft in the 30s and 40s, a chaotic time when vaudeville was dying and no one quite knew what was coming next. That’s when he developed his trademarks: adopting a brilliant but scatterbrained persona (“the world’s foremost authority”), he’d begin with some physical shtick, then deliver a long, insanely digressive lecture that always began with the word “however....

Trumpeter Nate Wooley and percussionist Aaron Siegel are accomplished group improvisers with strong jazz backgrounds, but in a solo improv setting both tend to throw all idiomatic reference out the window and head for the frontiers of sound research. Wooley–who’s previously played in Chicago with his excellent trio Blue Collar, featuring Steve Swell and Tatsuya Nakatani–is at his most radical on last year’s Wrong Shape to Be a Story Teller (Creative Sources)....

Belushi: A Biography Woodward had never met Belushi, and was a showbiz outsider when he started researching his book. His introductory note is pensive. “What happened?” he asks. “Who was responsible, if anyone? Could it have been different or better? . . . He made us laugh, and now he can make us think.” For Woodward the meat of Belushi’s story lay in his drug addiction, and he chronicled Belushi’s prodigious cocaine use and the monstrous behavior it spawned with a fetishistic eye for detail....