The canonical punk scenes—in New York, London, and Los Angeles—were doubtless pretty dangerous places to be. But three decades later they’re the subject of a tall stack of books, and the stories that came out of them—Iggy trading his Raw Power jacket for drugs, Patti Smith doing a face-plant from a stage in Tampa, Black Flag fans brawling en masse with police on the Sunset Strip—have been softened by time and repetition into the objects of an often perverse nostalgia....

JULY 24 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Feminists and cheapskates take note: Women & Children First’s annual storewide sale starts today. Every book in stock is 20 percent off and some are reduced as much as 50 percent. The store’s at 5233 N. Clark in Chicago and is open from 10 AM to 7 PM; the sale runs through August 1. Call 773-769-9299....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jessica Hopper wrote about Lake of Dracula a few weeks ago in the print version of the Reader, but I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that the band’s less-than-two-year existence ended nearly a decade ago. The recently released Skeletal Remains (Savage Land) suggests that the band’s music hasn’t aged at all. Sort of a supergroup of the city’s so-called “now wave scene,” the band was fronted by soon-to-be-techno star Marlon Magas, with Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers on guitar and Heather Melowic of the Scissor Girls on drums....

The 14th Congressional District of Illinois stretches west from the fast-spreading sprawl of Kane and Kendall counties past Northern Illinois University in De Kalb and the Ronald Reagan home in Dixon to the eastern suburbs of the Quad Cities on the Mississippi. Like congressional districts everywhere, its boundaries were drawn for one purpose only: to help the incumbent win. Laesch favors national health insurance over expensive and complicated partial fixes like the Republicans’ Medicare prescription-drug plan (which Hastert got through the House in November 2003 by holding the 15-minute roll call vote open for an unprecedented three hours until enough arms were twisted)....

On November 3, millions of Americans staggered through the motions of giving a shit about the job, the kids, the dog, and the gas bill. “How did this happen?” they asked each other numbly. “How are we going to survive another four years?” Dennis Loy Johnson, cofounder of small, Hoboken-based Melville House Publishing and proprietor of the literary Web site mobylives.com, was one such blue citizen. But rather than sit around and mope, he got busy and sent out a call to the progressive punditry, from Lewis Lapham to Billionaires for Bush, asking for answers to the question “What next?...

Il Mulino And yes, portions are huge. Steak cartoccio, from an epic list of specials, was a formidable brick of cow smothered in sauteed mushrooms and guarded by a circular battlement of fried potatoes. But apart from its size, “you can get the same thing at Denny’s,” said my underwhelmed companion. I ate it, but the question remained: what possible justification is there for this $60 steak? I can only guess that the majority of food ordered at Il Mulino is taken home and eaten over a week of lunches, or perhaps presented to the servants in lieu of wages....

This story begins with me waking up with a black eye and dried blood on my face and not remembering what had happened the night before. My roommate, aka Dr. Fun, had a bunch of people over partying at our apartment and we decided to go out. The last thing I remember was being knee-deep in booze at about eight o’clock. Here’s what Dr. Fun told me happened next. We came here, and even though I don’t typically do karaoke, I immediately signed up for 20 songs....

Canadian Emily Pohl-Weary–whose work finishing the autobiography of her grandmother, sci-fi legend Judith Merril, won her a special Hugo last year–is in town this week with the contributors’ tour for Girls Who Bite Back (Sumach Press). The just-released anthology, which Pohl-Weary edited, is full of fiction and essays about “the new breed of superheroines” in pop culture, from flying freaks to everyday powerhouses. I can take or leave most of the feminist essays herein–their points have been made so many times that the dirty details of the action-packed fiction hit harder....

A Reader Writes: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sunday afternoon on the Red Line I witnessed two pickpocket attempts, about 40 minutes apart. As my uncle was getting on the el at Jackson, a man in front of him pretended that his foot was caught between the platform and the train. He fell backward into my uncle, grabbed him, and another man took the wallet from my uncle’s pocket....

The Pain and the Itch Which isn’t to say that this is sitcom writing. Norris began acting and directing in Chicago in the 80s, and he’s been writing plays since 1991. He’s far too cerebral to be content with the usual setups and punch lines. Still, a few familiar tropes appear. There’s the classic setting–a holiday dinner gone badly awry. Then there are the familiar characters, family members who drive one another a little nuts....

Ravi Shankar’s associations with Yehudi Menuhin, the Beatles, and Philip Glass made him the best-known Hindustani classical musician in the world, but it’s worth remembering that it was his skill and standing within that tradition that made him so sought after in the first place. The records he made in the 50s and 60s showcased his fleet, immaculate articulation on the sitar, as well as a command of the tension-and-release dynamics that can make a raga utterly exhilarating....

A startlingly original filmmaker, Owen Land lived in Chicago in the 70s but dropped out of sight years ago. His films, also long unavailable, are at once hilarious and hermetic, playing complex word and image games that can’t be fully unraveled. In the longest and best on this the first of two programs, On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Roberta-Flack-via-Dirty-South synth line that opens T.I.‘s “What You Know” was as big a gimme as any DJ could ask for this year — dropping it at any time of night got a reaction from the crowd equivalent to throwing a handful of twenties on the dancefloor. Nothing else on King (Atlantic) was anywhere near that bonkers, but Tip’s at the forefront — alongside Nas, Lupe, and the Clipse — of the best hip-hop trend in forever: making records you can actually sit all the way through in one listen....

I’m a 22-year-old female with a wonderful, caring 21-year-old boyfriend. While I’ve slept with more people than he has, none of my long-term relationships has lasted as long as his single previous relationship (we’ve been dating for nine months). I felt very grounded and secure in our relationship, and was ready to try new things with him–until yesterday. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ask yourself this, BI: If your boyfriend had said, “Oh, yeah, I did anal with the ex–I fucked her ass tons of times!...

I have long enjoyed your advice, humor, and politics. But I never thought I would need your advice, being a well-adjusted hetero chick. All that changed a few months ago when I got married. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The answer to your question, MMM, is right there in your letter. Why would your husband hide his sexual fantasies from you? Perhaps because he knew that if he shared his fantasies with you–his boring, predictable, and perfectly natural heterosexual male fantasies–he would be tried, convicted, and condemned along with the rest of the “fucking culture....

I am a straight monogamous man with normal sexual predilections. I don’t need to find someone to pee on me, paddle my butt, tell me about fucking other men, or anything else too weird. So why am I writing to you? First, I wanted to thank you for printing all the letters from the perverts. I feel lucky that my sexuality is wired the way it is, and I’m thankful every time I read your column and am reminded of the sexuality I might have gotten....

This new fest, organized by the League of Chicago Music Venues (see the Meter), features three days of music at multiple venues. A special $20 “Hawk Pass,” which can be purchased at participating venues, will get you into all the shows you can handle on Sunday (it’s not available for Friday or Saturday). For more information go to www.thehawkchicago.org. :00 Andy Zipf, Mike Reeb, Josh Harty. Free. All ages. Double Door | 1572 N....

I find a lot of the songwriting on the much praised Neon Golden (Domino, 2002), the most recent album by the German post-rock band the Notwist, to be unremarkable, and Markus Acher often seems like the ultimate faceless, all-purpose indie front man: sweet, timid, sensitive, an abiding love of beauty, zzzzz. Yet thanks to electronicist Martin Gretschmann (aka Console), who joined the group in the late 90s, they consistently manage to transcend their limitations....

Samuel Fuller’s 1982 masterpiece about American racism–his last work shot in this country–focuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks. Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an animal; in this respect it’s like Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, and Fuller’s brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable intensity....

“The thing about Chicago MCs,” says Donald Mason, “the reason why we’re being embraced right now, is that we ain’t selling crack rock and aiming nines at your head for 16 songs straight. We giving people real hip-hop: straight conversation, introspection, battle shit, political shit. You getting it all.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mason’s 2003 debut, The Darkest Cloud (also on Molemen Records), was dizzyingly dense–the product of an MC eager to work out years of musical and lyrical ideas all at once....