Ty Tim was a high school teacher in Cambodia in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over. The country, which had suffered years of strife during the Vietnam war and massive U.S. bombing in its wake, now fell victim to Pol Pot’s efforts to transform it into a land of peasant farmers. The plan called for the eradication of religion, culture, and history, and it was brutally enforced. The calendar was reset to year zero, temples were destroyed, educated city dwellers were declared the enemy....

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW COURT THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play is packed with sex and violence—elements that director Sean Graney brings to the fore at Court Theatre. Like Orton, Graney, a leading figure on Chicago’s fringe-theater scene, enjoys pushing the envelope; he shocked critics and audiences last year with the dark comedy he wrote and directed, Porno. Graney’s rendition of Orton’s last work is loud, brash, raunchy, sometimes messy, often very funny, and always creative....

Black Dialogue, the Perceptionists’ debut full-length, is the most fluid and humane disc to emerge from the mass of futurist paranoia that is the Definitive Jux label. Faint praise, you say? What if I said that they can turn a chant like “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” into a jam that’s harder and more fun than whatever your fave G-Unit soldier is currently muttering on B96? Each of the Boston hip-hop standouts in the trio–Mr....

Tre Kronor It begins with fish–lots of it. Tre Kronor offers nine variations on herring, and a boatload of other sea creatures as well, many accompanied by distinctive sauces. Inlagd sill is standard pickled herring, but there’s also herring in mustard, with herbs, in tomato sauce, curried, and with creamy orange mayo. Glassblower’s herring comes in a sweet and sour marinade of white onion and bright orange carrot. The matjes herring is fabulously dense and meaty; it’s caught young during spawning season and packed in oil (rather than vinegar), flavored with sandalwood, and topped with creme fraiche and green onion....

The big news about this year’s World Music Festival is that there really isn’t any news. Michael Orlove of the Department of Cultural Affairs, who’s organized all seven festivals, says that this year’s process was the smoothest yet–visas came through, and for the most part artists kept their commitments. (There was just one last-minute cancellation, by Venezuela’s Simon Diaz.) The only serious trouble came early in the year, when Orlove was trying to settle on a lineup: the low value of the dollar against many foreign currencies meant that a number of overseas artists couldn’t offset the financial liabilities of making the trip without booking several more stateside gigs....

Friday 25 LOS LOBOS The cover art for Los Lobos’s new album, Live at the Fillmore (Mammoth/Hollywood), is a Mexican-flavored send-up of Grateful Dead art, which reflects the group’s recent decision to emphasize feel-good jamming over the innovations that marked albums like Kiko (1992) and Colossal Head (1996); their last few studio efforts have sounded like little more than excuses to stay on the road. For what it is, though, the stuff is good, effortlessly mixing blues, cumbia, ranchera, soul, and folk rock....

Italian novelist, critic, and semiotician Umberto Eco swept into the American consciousness in 1983, when a translation of his medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose became a surprise best seller. I wonder if half the people who bought that challenging book ever finished it. Most probably jumped off the Eco bandwagon rather than attempt later novels like Foucault’s Pendulum–and only real geeks got into his nonfiction stuff like Travels in Hyperreality....

Anthony Muñoz, 37, is a photographer and an art director at the marketing agency Upshot. He’s planning to launch a visual culture magazine, Cheetahfight, and is the new father of a baby boy. Tell me about your outfit. I’m wearing a wool hat I picked up in a bazaar outside the 14th-century mosque Mecca Masjid […] Bradley Crandall, 21, is double majoring in economics and political science at DePaul and works part-time at Brooks Brothers....

Dinosaur Jr Maybe it was particular to the time and place–Minneapolis in the early 90s–but from what my girlfriends told me, lots of boys thought going to the woods with a girl and regaling her with an hour and a half of Dinosaur Jr trivia was a perfectly acceptable courtship ritual. If you liked him (or Dinosaur) enough, you could pretend it was a date. I withstood many hours of Dinologue during those awful teen years, and my memories of the band’s early albums–with their noisy, shimmery solos and arcs of warm feedback–are inextricably tied to memories of some dude who never liked me back....

Various Artists The first time I stole a record it was because I wanted to be in a girl group. It was easy. I went to the library, picked up a copy of 25 Years of Motown, cut out the magnetic alarm strip with a razor, slipped the five-album set into my large schoolbag with the spray-painted peace sign on it, and headed home to listen to “Reflections” by the Supremes a few dozen times in a row....

Former Squirrel Nut Zippers front man James “Jimbo” Mathus does to roots music what first-wave punks did to 60s rock ‘n’ roll. Mathus’s latest album, Knockdown South, released earlier this year on his label of the same name based in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is an audacious mess that combines fractured, macho honky-tonk, trance-blues psychedelia, neo-funk, primitive garage, and snotty juke-punk. The deliciously skewed, barely in-tune “Let Me Be Your Rocker” mercilessly savages several decades of southern R & B and rock; the next tune, “Boogie Music,” is a Dixie-fried ode to partying–and to the very same music Mathus was just sneering at....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Saturday the Sun-Times ran a small item about a man who had set himself on fire during rush hour Friday morning near the Ohio Street exit on the Kennedy. His identity has still not been officially determined, but members of the local jazz and improvised music community say they are certain it was Malachi Ritscher, a longtime supporter of the scene....

The City Council may be about to take a baby step toward independence, may be about to actually defy Mayor Daley. At issue is an ordinance that would require developers in gentrifying neighborhoods to set aside apartments for low- and middle-income residents. Three years ago 15 community groups formed a coalition to push for such an ordinance, and they persuaded Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle to introduce one in 2002. But only a few council independents supported it, notably aldermen Joe Moore (of the 49th Ward), Helen Shiller (46th), and Ricardo Munoz (22nd)....

The phone rang late one night. A young lady said she would like to order two egg rolls. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. “This is a French restaurant.” She then ordered two croissants and one French roll. I told her our kitchen had already closed, and she asked to speak to Elton. I informed her that there was no Elton at this location. “Oh no, you must be joking with me....

Nora O’Connor has long been a tireless utility player on Chicago’s sprawling alt-country scene. As a member of the raunchy Blacks, she put a gilt edge of harmony on the rough singing of Danny and Gina Black, and she did the same for Andrew Bird’s suave vocals in her stint with Bowl of Fire. When she wasn’t climbing onstage at the Hideout to help out one No Depression act or another, she might be in the studio, singing on even relatively citified tracks by the likes of the Aluminum Group, Archer Prewitt, and the Baldwin Brothers....

For years the city hounded Walter Ogloza to hurry up and sell his properties on West Lawrence and North Laramie, insisting they were needed for a condominium complex that would rejuvenate the area. In October Ogloza crumbled and sold his two lots. The city finally got the land it coveted. But not only has no development begun, Ogloza hasn’t gotten paid. “The city bugged me–‘Sell, Walter, sell,’” he says. “So I sold....

MOB Productions makes its debut with Peter Morris’s 2002 play, structured as alternating monologues for a tacky showbiz mom and a young man serving time for a notorious murder he committed as a child. Though Morris tends to moralize on his themes–fame gained and innocence lost–the play proves a sensible choice for a brand-new cash-strapped company: it provides meaty roles and some pretty good speeches yet requires only two actors and not much of a set....

David Tsao HH: So many pollutants are new to nature or occur in unnaturally large concentrations. Are you surprised that plants can help clean them up? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DT: Not necessarily. Phytoremediation is sometimes like a black box: we can measure what’s there before and we can measure what’s there afterwards, but we don’t always know what happens in between. In a way, I don’t care how it works as long as it does work....

A day-by-day guide to our Critic’s Choices and other previews a 9 PM, the Note, 1565 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-0011 or 866-468-3401, $8 in advance, $10 on the day of the show. –J. Niimi Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » cTHURSTON MOORE, JIM BAKER, ROLLO RADFORD, AND AVREEAYL RA On Saturday and Sunday the Hyde Park Art Center will host a symposium connected to its exhibit of ephemera from Sun Ra’s sojourn in Chicago, where panelists will consider the cultural import of his work, but the odd hybrid lineup of the quartet put together to kick off the weekend says as much as any lecturer could about his influence on the world of music....

Tango Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coming of age in communist Poland, Mrozek took two directions in his early work. Some-times he addressed abuses of centralized power and the curtailment of human freedom: in his first script, The Police (1958), an extraordinarily effective police force eliminates all disloyalty and must therefore create faux dissenters to justify its existence. Other times Mrozek concentrated on more pitiable human foibles....