Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Protect Freedom Brittain and Slovo intercut interviews with more than a dozen people, devoting most of the first act to the detainees and their families. Most of the first 20 minutes goes to Mr. Begg, a Pakistani banker whose son Moazzam was held at Guantanamo (he was released in January 2005 without ever being charged). As a young boy, Mr. Begg says, Moazzam announced that he wanted to “make a society…to help older people, feeble people, and people with disabilities and all that....

Of all the parties I’ve been to in recent memory, I’ve anticipated none so much as last Friday night’s Dearraindrop opening at Kavi Gupta Gallery. The neopsychedelic art collective, featuring twentysomething siblings and native Virginians Billy and Laura Grant and Laura’s long-term boyfriend, Joe Grillo, is hot shit in the art scene–its trippy, cartoony, infinitely detailed collages have been shown at superhip galleries like Deitch Projects and John Connelly Presents in New York and HaNNa in Tokyo and praised in the New York Times–but never mind about that....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas sued on grounds that Page defamed him in three 2003 columns that accused Thomas of playing politics with a disciplinary case before the supreme court — “political shimmy-shammy” is how Page put it. Thomas won the jury trial a year ago (scroll down) and was awarded $7 million, a sum trial judge Donald O’Brien later sliced to $4 million....

Seattle music critic Charles Cross seems intent on tackling the lives of his city’s musical titans one by one. Given its subject’s brief and messy existence, Cross’s 2001 Heavier Than Heaven was as close to a definitive biography of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain as we’re likely to see. His latest effort, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (Hyperion), follows the fortunes of a similarly influential and ill-fated icon, and while Cross’s style will never be confused with that of a virtuoso music historian like Nick Tosches, his prodigious research skills and protean prose do much to reveal the less-explored aspects of Hendrix’s life–most notably his hardscrabble childhood and conflicted relationship with his father....

Now in its sixth year, the Chicago Irish Film Festival runs Friday, March 4, through Sunday, March 13, with screenings this week at the Beverly Arts Center, 1407 W. 111th St. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $10, $8 for BAC members. For more information call 773-445-3838; a full festival schedule is available online at www.beverlyartcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The opening-night feature, Adam & Paul (2004, 86 min....

Tony Sam, cofounder-producer of Chicago Underground Comedy, attracts the city’s funniest amateurs and rising professionals even though his show’s less than two years old. He bills CUC as “alternative comedy,” in part because of its bar setting, and challenges comics to present brand-new material and avoid “tired premises.” This week’s particularly strong lineup includes Sam, Jared Logan, Nate Craig, and host Nick Vatterot, whose specialty is quirky, cerebral, free-associative meanderings. Craig has self-produced two solid, ambitious CDs and regularly tours the midwest....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It may be run by Levy Restaurants, but Fulton’s on the River still tries to have an adventurous side. It used to be home to Mark “the Oyster Whisperer” Mavrontonis, who’s now based out at Mike Ditka’s Oakbrook Terrace and just last month took up Michael Ruhlman on his pork-belly Caesar challenge (I’m told the salad’s no longer on the menu, though you could always make a request)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How to bet on a snail race, from Mental Floss blogs and New Scientist: “When inspecting the snails at the start line, make sure to put your dough on the least slimy creature.” Unlike most fluids, their mucus gets slipperier as it gets thinner. Games College Republicans play, according to Andrew Grossman in the Michigan Daily, as proposed by an intern with the College Republican National Committee: “One such idea is ‘Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,’ in which a volunteer would play the part of an illegal immigrant and hide somewhere on campus while others try to find him....

Though filmmaker-dramatist-artist Jean Cocteau was one of the towering figures of 20th-century European culture, his quasi-autobiographical 1928 novella Le livre blanc was for years dismissed as pornographic trivia. Turns out this account of a homosexual’s coming-of-age in early-20th-century France is one of his most enduring works: its refreshing sexual candor makes it relevant, as does its exploration of how gays must endure or defy bigotry. The Journeymen Theater Company’s sensitive, intimate story-theater adaptation captures the book’s fascination with the tensions between sex and love in Cocteau’s relationships with, among others, a precocious schoolmate who died young and a handsome but unlucky sailor....

Peter Margasak’s already waxed hypnotic on tonight’s Soft Circles/Lichens show at the Empty Bottle, and I second everything he’s got to say about it. But he overlooked local openers Locks, and I suggest you don’t. Tonight’s the release party for their CD, Bad Words, which is one of those records where the amount of time it takes to explain it can exceed its actual running time. At times they recall the intimate electronics of late-90s Joan of Arc, sometimes they freak out into gawky punk with rhythmic talk-rap vocals that reminds me of the Dead Milkmen in a way I can’t fully explain....

Nearly three decades in, Los Lobos have yet to make a bad record–quite a feat for a group that’s put out more than a dozen. The worst you can say about this LA combo is that it occasionally lacks inspiration (see for instance the band’s previous studio disc, 2003’s The Ride). But they’ve consistently snapped back, and on the forthcoming The Town and the City (Hollywood), due out September 12, they sound as passionate and hungry as a band that’s just starting out....

Outside of Ellen DeGeneres, probably no female stand-ups have done more in the past ten years to promote the cause of gay rights than Margaret Cho and Sandra Bernhard, performing in town this week in conjunction with Gay Games VII. Both are self-professed bisexuals specializing in a bawdy bitchiness and impassioned by their distaste for Republicans and antigay laws. But their appeal transcends gay issues: fueled by former insecurities–Bernhard’s about her lips and height, Cho’s about weight and ethnicity–they’ve long explored the condition of otherness....

News They Shouldn’t Use Knutsson reedited the VNR, dropping the narration of “Jim Lawrence” and writing his own and briefly discussing the problem of phishing live on camera. But when his report got rolling, there wasn’t much that didn’t come from Trend Micro. Where Lawrence had intoned that “software like PC-Cilin is your first line of defense,” Knutsson advised that “while software may help protect you, ultimately it all comes down to common sense....

Most of the African-American figures in Cedric Smith’s paintings at Gallery Guichard are depicted as if in product packaging or ads: Smith remembers his uncles talking about caddying for whites and using their earnings to buy Cokes, so Coca Cola shows a black boy standing by a golf bag. The weathered-looking red background is inspired by the decrepit signs in his grandmother’s ruined general store, where he played as a child....

On Twelve Rooms (Peek-a-Boo), local trio Palaxy Tracks accesses an even darker muse than the one that inspired its first two full-lengths, The Long Wind Down (2000) and Cedarland (2003); a cover of Leonard Cohen’s despairing 1969 gem “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” only underscores the gloomy mood. Singer Brandon Durham has a mature and elegantly expressive croon that’s perfectly suited for these wounded rhapsodies and drizzly doomsday proclamations, whose lyrics were influenced by Raymond Carver’s finely etched short stories....

On The Harvest (Galapagos4) local rapper Qwel and producer Maker do just about everything right: their 2004 collaboration has positivity without that cheesy uplifting vibe and gangsta-rap energy without the rabies. Qwel talks big about change–teaching people verbs instead of selling them nouns, to paraphrase the PR–but he rarely sounds disgusted with the here and now. He’s more concerned with “The ‘IT’ in ‘Keeping IT Real,’” to borrow the title of the album’s second track....

Saving Journalism From the Journalists A report commissioned from McKinsey & Company by the Carnegie Corporation got to the point. Citing a recent Pew Research Center poll, it said that both TV news and newspapers “have suffered damaging blows to the credibility of their reports” and that “this unimpressive view of journalism is reflected in the academic world, where schools of journalism have never achieved the stature long enjoyed by schools that prepare students for medicine, law, architecture, business and other careers....

High school English teachers take note: Given the Cotton Mather administration running Washington and the spirit of Salem abroad in the land, taking your students to see this collection of three Shakespeare parodies might get you fired. The language is vulgar, the situations involve drugs, sex, and martial arts–sort of like cable. But it may be worth the risk. No kid’s going to come out of this hilarious show with anything less than a vastly enhanced appreciation for the Bard’s badass potential....

GNARLS BARKLEY | St. Elsewhere (Downtown) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this context, Cee-Lo’s gregarious delivery sounds creepy, even lecherous. He’s definitely coming on too strong with the ersatz nerd-gothic of “The Boogie Monster” (“Dracula’s the name . . . “) and “Necromancer” (“I think I like her better dead”), but his deadpan cover of “Gone Daddy Gone” has an appeal that outlasts the initial novelty of a rapper doing the Violent Femmes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s kept us going every Wednesday for the last however many years is the time-honored Reader tradition of “donut duty”–a once rigorously administrated system in which two people are deputized each week to bring in fuel for the final sprint. That means a lot of doughnuts, coffee cake, and bagels, sure. (And a lot of spiking blood sugar around noon....