The performers in this internationally known company are so far from casual in their technique it’s ridiculous. But once a year they fly by the seat of their pants, in “Inside/Out,” a program choreographed and performed by HSDC members. Walking into one rehearsal studio, I discovered lanky Larry Trice folded up in a cardboard box and Tobin Del Cuore shooting him with a video camera under the direction of Cheryl Mann and Sarah Cullen Fuller, who’ll perform while the finished video is projected....

Yuri Lane, human beatbox, traveled to the Middle East twice in the late 90s, but it didn’t occur to him to use the experiences as material until last year. After performing an excerpt from his 2002 show, Soundtrack City, at a Jewish theater conference, the artistic director of D.C.’s Theater J urged him to develop the final scene, where a character gets a phone call from a cousin in Israel telling him there’s been a suicide attack, into a show of its own....

A few years ago, many people who’d heard of novelist and performance artist Jonathan Ames couldn’t get past the “Mangina.” The public fixated so overweeningly on the inclusion of a prosthetic puss in his 1999 stage show, Oedipussy, that in a subsequent radio appearance Ames was moved to scream, “I’m a serious novelist, not just a pitchman for the Mangina!” In his new novel, Wake Up, Sir!, Ames reminds us he’s in good company....

In August 1980 the broken body of 33-year-old Doug Kenney was found at the bottom of a Hawaiian cliff. In A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever (Chicago Review Press), Evanston-based writer Josh Karp tracks the up-and-down path that led Kenney, a smart, good-looking blond from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who went to Harvard and then cofounded the satiric magazine National Lampoon, to the edge of that cliff....

When an all-female cast throws bras into the seats (exchangeable later for free drinks) and punches a character representing “self-centered men,” the show’s theme might seem obvious. But in Moist, directed by Greg Mills and performed by the four talented Ragdolls, womanhood is far more complex. One self-described liberated woman admits she’s a “BJ junkie,” and speakers at a rally for mothers who also work outside the home lead the audience in a “We Are the World”-like chorus of “Fuck the Children....

It was one of those mysteriously warm January nights, and I was in a great mood and had pulled in here for gas when I saw this good-looking guy get out of his car. My first thought was, “I think he’s married, but that’s OK”–which is kind of debauched, I know, but I figured a little shit talking wasn’t going to kill me. So I smiled at him and said, “Don’t you want to fill ‘er up?...

Why this play got the nod from Steppenwolf escapes me. Andrew Case’s nonstory concerns a bereaved couple of considerable means, one of whom copes while the other doesn’t. In the course of a sibling’s visit to their palace by the sea, tensions are laid bare, hidden dynamics exposed, and the horrible secret is etc, etc. I’d go on, but the specifics of the secret, once revealed, remain cloudy–and since its unveiling just about comprises the “action” rippling the surface of these very still waters, it’d hardly be sporting....

If “Stay With Me” by Rod Stewart were a person, it’d be crooner Pearly Sweets. With his big, wet alpha-male eyes and constant pouting, Sweets (real name: Abraham Levitan) gives the impression he’ll make love to you till the sun comes up, but once that first ray seeps through his miniblinds you’d best get your ass outta there, honey. Half golden boy, half churl, cocky past the point of ridiculousness, decked out in (for instance) white tux and black WHO THE FUCK IS MICK JAGGER?...

There’s so much about this Denver hipster-metal band that ought to be off-putting: artsy name, too-clever song titles, wrist-slitter lyrics, repetitive staccato punches. Oh–did I mention beards? It’s like Planes Mistaken for Stars is trying to find some new level of profundity for testosterone. But these elements, rather than making for the most aggravating and flavorless Victory Records reject of all time, actually jell into something compelling–Mercy (Abacus), the band’s newest, is far more sublime than it is absurd....

TORTOISE & BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY | The Brave and the Bold (Overcoat) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oldham is more a songwriter than a stylist, and would’ve been up a creek back when all most popular singers did was interpret other people’s material. His undoing of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” makes you wish he’d left well enough alone–he sounds like he’s reading the lyrics off a paper plate, singing about a savior rising from the streets the way you might sing about sandwiches or cabinetry....

It was the strangest bequest anyone in town had ever seen. On March 9, 2004, 89-year-old Raymond Brown, a native and part-time resident of Lodi, Wisconsin, died and left his entire estate, worth half a million dollars, to the Lodi Valley Historical Society. There was one major stipulation: everyone serving on the society’s board of directors had to resign within a year and could never again hold office in the organization....

A Google search for Malachi Ritscher came up with more than 120,000 hits this week, but the only mention of him in the Tribune remained the brief paid death notice published November 12. It described Ritscher, 52, as someone “active in Chicago’s avant-garde/experimental jazz scene as a recording engineer, fan and sometime-musician” and as someone who “loved his country; hated this war; and was not afraid to act on his convictions....

Proving Mr. Jennings Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’d think that a British play about the extreme measures that government and military officials take when it comes to Al Qaeda operatives might offer some insights into this new, urgent reality. But James Walker’s quasi-Orwellian Proving Mr. Jennings does nothing of the sort. Though it won the 2004 King’s Cross New Writing Award, like Guantanamo–the other 2004 smash hit from Britain about terrorism–it offers unassailable, well-worn gripes instead of meaningful satire....

When the leader of a band departs to go solo the group usually crumbles, but in Tristeza’s case the remaining members formed a better band. By the end of 2003 front man James LaValle had decided to go full-time with his band the Album Leaf; drummer James Lehner and keyboardist Stephen Swesey were gone as well. Guitarist Christopher Sprague and bassist Luis Hermosillo were left to rebuild, and on the evidence of the new A Colores (Better Looking), they’ve saved Tristeza from continuing on as a phenomenally boring Tortoise rip-off....

Horizontal Action Blackout A new mini festival dubbed the Whiteout–booked not by the Blackout folks but by Darius Hurley of Criminal IQ Records–has sprung up to capitalize on the ridiculous influx of out-of-town fans and bands with a string of early-evening shows Thursday through Saturday. It says a lot about how big the Blackout’s gotten that bands as good as the Feelers and the Catholic Boys–and others from as far away as Paris–end up playing piggyback gigs up the street at the Mutiny....

Vashti Bunyan’s recent comeback has been pretty low-key, but there are worse fates: at least her story has been happier than those of Nick Drake and Sandy Denny, whose music her exquisite, slightly fey Brit folk occasionally resembles. Her 1970 debut, Just Another Diamond Day, was produced by the well-connected Joe Boyd, featured members of Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, and was arranged by Robert Kirby, who worked on Drake’s first two albums....

Anyone who wants to weigh in on An Albatross’s latest record, Blessphemy (of the Peace Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite) (Ace Fu), probably ought to sit with it for a while before proclaiming it absolutely fucking insane. Because it sounds that way, but really, it isn’t. If you define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, what does that make a band that plays like there’s a rule against using the same note twice?...

I would’ve expected Antony & the Johnsons to grate on my nerves. Antony is a New York cabaret artist and scenester who’s toured as one of Lou Reed’s backup singers, and on his new second album, I Am a Bird Now (Secretly Canadian), Reed contributes backing vocals alongside the likes of Rufus Wainwright, Boy George, and Devendra Banhart–so the persistent theme of loneliness in the lyrics smells like a self-indulgent put-on, at least on paper....

WBEZ general manager Torey Malatia had to face the music last week at a meeting of Chicago Public Radio’s Community Advisory Council at Columbia College. He was scheduled to air his latest programming plans in the flesh for the first time, and an audience of about 70 was waiting to take him on. Last summer he’d announced that CPR would launch a second Chicago-area broadcast stream on 89.5 that would be all music, while ‘BEZ would go all talk....

It was one o’clock Sunday morning, and the six tipsy Trixies giggling in a Lincoln Park pizza joint really, really wanted to get into Jason’s pants. Sort of. They were on a bachelorette party scavenger hunt, and this stolid guy who’d come over to hit on them seemed like their best bet. “Give us your goddamn underwear!” one screeched. “When, if ever, have you had six hot girls ask for your underwear?...