David Graham: Declaring Independence The automobile’s profound influence on the American landscape is revealed in David Graham’s 18 color photos at Catherine Edelman, most from his latest book, Declaring Independence. Never condescending, these often humorous images document roadside attractions and other outdoor scenes with a care that presents them as more beautiful than kitschy. Still, Graham articulates the disconnectedness that travel by car creates: viewing the land at high speeds from a ribbon of concrete, we’re struck not by continuities or relationships but by momentary attention getters....

Adapted from a novel by Ukrainian writer M. Kotsyubinsky, Sergei Paradjanov’s extraordinary merging of myth, history, poetry, ethnography, dance, and ritual (1964) remains one of the supreme works of the Soviet sound cinema, and even subsequent Paradjanov features have failed to dim its intoxicating splendors. Set in the harsh and beautiful Carpathian Mountains, the movie tells the story of a doomed love between a couple belonging to feuding families, Ivan and Marichka, and of Ivan’s life and marriage after Marichka’s death....

Like the movie the title spoofs, Stir-Friday Night!’s 18th revue includes some racing (a Japanimation-esque contest between skaters) and some Asian-underground drama (a noirish bit involving outlawed Chinese food). Both expertly executed sketches are hilarious. As in previous SFN! productions, the cast lampoons Asian cliches: Bollywood, martial arts, conservative parents. But they also look at raceless subjects like marriage counseling and the electric slide. Musical director Shane Shariffskul has crafted some catchy numbers, and director Lillian Frances nicely mixes light and heavy subjects, including the making of a PB&J and a partial recitation of FDR’s 1942 executive order resulting in the relocation of Japanese-Americans....

Contrary to popular stereotype, the blues never had a pristine original state–even the earliest recordings document a wide variety of styles. So-called Delta blues paired hoarse imprecations with aggressive acoustic strumming and picking, Piedmont blues combined gentler vocals with the complex textures of ragtime-influenced fingerpicking, and the vaudeville-tinged “classic” blues of singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey often used a piano or full jazz orchestra for accompaniment. From the beginning, these styles influenced one another–and younger artists updated them with their own ideas, often borrowing from the pop and jazz of the day....

Friday 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MERLE HAGGARD Hag’s much ballyhooed return to Capitol Records, where he recorded most of his classic work, isn’t a return to his classic country sound. On Unforgettable, released last year, he applies his gentle, wonderfully weathered crooning to pop standards like the title track, “As Time Goes By,” “Pennies From Heaven,” and “I Can’t Get Started.” In the past Haggard has recorded album-length tributes to country legends Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers, and he sounds just as comfortable dipping into the Great American Songbook, much as Willie Nelson did on his seminal 1978 album Stardust....

These two electronic improvisers, both based in Cologne, have been working together off and on since the late 90s, finding fascinating ways to communicate despite their different idioms. Thomas Lehn came to electroacoustic improv as a pianist with a background in classical music and avant-jazz and now applies his lightning-quick reflexes to an unwieldy, unpredictable old analog synth swarming with patch cords, relying on intuition and chance as much as on his knowledge of the instrument....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I also like–or used to–that it’s short and focused. Despite America’s recent embrace of brined turkeys (salty!), which dictates an even earlier start time for poultry prep, you really can’t stretch the festivities that far in either direction. There’s basically one main activity, not counting football or doing the dishes. You might call big-haul grocery shopping or last-minute convenience store shopping for cut flowers and more marshmallows part of it....

Coughs | Secret Passage (Load) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coughs use every instrument as a percussion instrument, not just the trashed, monolithic two-man megakit at the back of the stage–a multicolored heap of snares, cymbals, soup pots, floor toms, metal barrels, and bass drums mounted flat like tabletops. The guitar and bass pile on with more banging and chomping, and even the vocals and saxophone steer clear of melody–the songs could be sketched out with only two or three symbols, one for the thuds and another couple for the breaks and scree between the thuds....

Somewhere in Lydia R. Diamond’s overlong, overwritten theatrical exercise is a powerful play. She interweaves the stories of Saartjie Baartman, the 19th-century “Hottentot” displayed like a circus animal for five years to European “polite” society, and Sara Washington, a present-day feminist academic offered a lucrative book deal to write Baartman’s biography. But in our era of revisionist history, the play’s animating crisis–Washington can’t imagine telling the story without becoming as exploitative as Baartman’s colonialist captors–makes no sense....

If you were looking for evidence of DJ Z-Trip’s extensive roots in underground hip-hop on Uneasy Listening Volume 1, his 2001 mix-tape collaboration with DJ P, you had to pay close attention. But it was there: though the Phoenix turntablist was as eager as his fellow mashup pioneers to deconstruct world-famous schlock like Phil Collins, in the process he’d mix in an indie-rap luminary such as Del tha Funkee Homosapien. Shifting Gears (Hollywood) is where Z-Trip comes clean–in more ways than one....

Jay Kelly at Walsh Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kelly also uses traditional symbols to a different effect than one might expect. The perfectly symmetrical black cross against a light tan background in Untitled #1127 isn’t a Christian cross and doesn’t have quite the right proportions for the Red Cross’s logo or for the white cross at the center of the Swiss flag. Denying viewers specific referents pushes them to think about the impact of symbols, particularly since the composition is made asymmetrical by an almost white band at the bottom....

On April 13 the New York Post’s gossip page ran a story titled “Clash of the Britons.” What followed wasn’t a rundown of another sad scuffle amongst the royals, but rather a thumbnail summary of a bitter public feud between–ready for this?–Robert Smith and Morrissey. The principals in this 20-year-old grudge have each released a new record in the past few months. Morrissey’s You Are the Quarry came out in May, The Cure at the end of June....

Though Calvin Cooke has been a master of both traditional lap steel and ten-string pedal steel guitars for decades, for many he’s a recent discovery; the Detroit-based musician has become revered by the new generation of “sacred steel” artists who emerged on the blues and jam-band circuits in the late 90s. The acclaim he’s received is due in part to his willingness to embrace a variety of sounds, from understated folk to roadhouse raunch; on his sole CD, Heaven (Dare), released in 2003, his chord runs can evoke Wes Montgomery or the acid-tinged noodlings of “Eight Miles High”-era Byrds....

Writer-director Idris Goodwin’s new one-act for Hermit Arts is a slam-bang homage to the caper-gone-wrong genre, with a light sprinkling of the metaphysical musings of early Sam Shepard. Like Robert E. Sherwood’s 1935 classic The Petrified Forest, the play takes place in a cafe occupied by outlaws–two brothers, one wounded in their foiled kidnapping attempt. The cafe is also owned by two brothers, and Goodwin weaves together the theme of dual (and dueling) personalities who together make one whole consciousness, as he has in his plays Braising and Verses....

Live Bait Theater presents its ninth annual showcase of one-person performances. The event features work by an array of well-known fringe artists–among them David Kodeski, Stephanie Shaw, Susan Karp, and Edward Thomas-Herrera–as well as a crop of emerging talents, including real-life police officers involved in Live Bait’s Police-Teen Link program. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The festival previews on Thursday, July 29, and opens Friday, July 30, for a run through August 14....

With an 18-inch neck and dainty size-six feet, Hack Wilson should have been too top-heavy to walk, much less play baseball. But he spent 12 seasons in the majors, 6 of them with the Cubs, and in 1930 he hit 56 homers and a record 191 RBIs. Playwright Jon Kaplan thinks Wilson deserves to be better known, and would be if he hadn’t been such a lush. Kaplan’s got it wrong....

I apparently hear something in Hot Chip that a lot of other people don’t. I’ve been loaning their 2004 debut, Coming On Strong (released in the U.S. last year on Astralwerks), to some of my more strictly indie-rock friends, but the filter-swept keys and dance beats seem to be a little too “techno” for them. Reviewers compare Hot Chip to Ween, which is fair enough: the British group shares Ween’s fascination with tacky flange effects and cheap-sounding drum machines....

Lead Story Things People Believe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September, Scott Stevens resigned after nine years as chief weather forecaster for KPVI TV in Pocatello, Idaho, so he could devote more time to researching and exposing what he says is the manipulation of U.S. weather by hostile foreign organizations. On his Web site Stevens asserts that Hurricane Katrina was caused by a Russian-made electromagnetic generator wielded by the yakuza in retaliation for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; suspicious cloud patterns in recent years are, he says, only part of the “unmistakable” evidence that “our weather has been stolen from us....

You’d think Marty Hackl would be happy. The River Forest Women’s Club–a green-stained, board-and-batten 1913 building designed by Prairie School architect William Drummond–is under contract to be sold to a private buyer with the money needed for its restoration. The structure, on the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois’ ten-most-endangered list for the last two years, is now safe from the wrecking ball. It won’t be sold to developers eager to build on its double lot....

I just finished reading the letter from Forced Air Ruined the Sheets, and frankly I’m shocked! Not at FARTS’s disgusting problem–a fart “went between the lips of [her] vagina” after sex–but shocked at you, Dan. Haven’t you ever heard of a pussy fart, Mr. Savage? Queefs? After all the pumping and squeezing of sex (especially doggy-style, in my experience) pockets of air are sometimes trapped up in the vaginal canal. As the muscles relax postorgasm, the air is released....