You know, I have been reading Savage [Savage Love] for years because it’s funny shit. But lately it just seems the writer is too hung up on the “gays and marriage” thing. Who is to stop you from having a ceremony? Just because you don’t get the “paper” doesn’t mean it’s going to stop you from enjoying all of the relationship things that any other couple does. This writer should focus on the letters he chooses to publish and give them the benefit of the same old shitty (funny) advice as in past years....

The tall one is Coco Chanel, the great fashion innovator. The grasping but stupid blonde is Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. The guy who does almost nothing but talk about golf is Arthur Capel, the British sugar daddy who bankrolled Chanel’s career. And the oversexed one in the black jackboots? Guess. OK, I’ll tell you. He’s Hitler! But without the mustache since, I suppose, that would have tipped us. Playwright Susan Hahn is a prominent poet and she makes a poet’s mistake here, substituting metaphor for narrative....

They bought a Ford Tempo for a dollar, saving it from the junkyard. It was more than a decade old, the tires needed to be replaced, and the windows didn’t all roll down, but they figured the engine ran well enough to get them across the country. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Manseau was raised in a Boston suburb by a former nun and a priest....

For the final project of their programming and distribution class at the School of the Art Institute last fall, video makers Sara Cough and Colin Palombi helped organize a screening of student work at Jinx Cafe in Wicker Park. They were counting on their 20 classmates showing up plus a handful of interested individuals; instead they drew a crowd of 60. “It was way too crowded,” says Palombi, who’s 22 and has just completed his final semester at SAIC....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suppose we’re seeing nothing more than respectful disagreement among thoughtful jurists, but there does seem to be an exquisite process of calibration shaping the appellate court’s response to George Ryan’s appeal. To review, the former governor was convicted 18 months ago of corruption in office and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Codefendant Lawrence Warner was sentenced to three and a half years....

I got invited to go to a really fancy party here and wanted to bring a friend of mine. We knew it was going to be bumpin’, and we knew that with free liquor we were going to get drunk and stupid, but we thought we’d at least look nice. So I was wearing a $2,000 Prada suit and my bud was wearing electro chic. We decided to stop by a warehouse party first to test our looks....

Pat Martino’s new album, Remember: A Tribute to Wes Montgomery (Blue Note), is a throwback: the Philadelphia guitarist honors one of his earliest influences on the CD, replicating both the sound and style of the classic records Montgomery cut for Riverside in the early 60s. (Martino’s unusually well equipped for such deep study of an artist–after an aneurysm robbed him of his memory in 1980 he relearned jazz guitar by listening to his own records....

Red Scare, Second City’s new main-stage production, is packed with crisply timed physical comedy as well as smart, sharp dialogue. But it also contains dramatic passages as strong as any in a “straight” play and songs as intelligent and well sung as any in a contemporary musical. Directed by Mick Napier, this is a bold piece of conceptual theater whose innovative long-form structure–a seemingly random stream of events develops into a dreamscape of a divided America–either demands close attention or invites you to submit to its hallucinatory flow, depending on your frame of mind....

Right now in Chicago there are about 1,200 aspiring improvisers enrolled at the Second City Training Center, 600 at ImprovOlympic, and 100 at Annoyance Productions. Add them to the legions that’ve already graduated from these programs and you’ve got some 5,000 improvisers in the city, many of whom have come here specifically to study and perform. All of them want what Dan Bakkedahl had. “There were all sorts of fantastic reasons to stay,” he says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) The Chicago Architectural Club asks contenders for its 2007 Chicago Prize to answer the question, “How Does the Lakefront-Loving Chicagoan Cross the Road?” All right, they didn’t put it that way. They said, “There have been major violations of our open lakefront — most notably the construction of an eight-lane highway known as Lake Shore Drive. As a result there are few points in which to safely cross Lake Shore Drive....

The secret to the Sweat Girls’ long-running success is that, despite their moniker, they never seem to break a shvitz. That doesn’t mean they’re not hardworking. Since 1993 this ensemble of monologuists has delivered engaging, thoughtful, funny disquisitions on topics ranging from dating and motherhood to the encroachments of middle age without any pandering or preaching. The current five self-effacing, witty, articulate writer-performers–Cindy Hanson, Dorothy Milne, Clare Nolan, Martie Sanders, and Pamela Webster–don’t get up onstage together as often as they used to; Milne for one has been busy running Lifeline Theatre....

In October the Wire published a primer on what it pronounced “the moment when Black music grew its Afro and took a lesson from hippy-rock, exploding into the Technicolor dream funk and proto-disco of psychedelic soul.” On the British magazine’s list of essential recordings from the era, alongside the expected goods from Parliament, the Temptations, and Rare Earth, was an obscure compilation called Chains & Black Exhaust: 18 tracks of some of the heaviest, spazziest guitar funk ever laid to wax, including some amazing paeans to mind-altering substances like Gran Am’s woozy “Get High” and Iron Knowledge’s lacerating “Showstopper,” which extols the virtues of coke....

The Pain in Spain: What They’re Saying Across the Pond In the States a partisan debate raged in the press over whether Rumsfeld should quit, be fired, or hang in there. A friend e-mailed me her letter to the Sun-Times canceling her subscription because that paper took Rumsfeld’s side. The Tribune stood by him too–failing to mention that until he became secretary of defense Rumsfeld sat on the Tribune Company’s board of directors....

In our world of endless noise and pointless jabber, the movies of Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring) are transcendently quiet: the illicit lovers in this eerie South Korean drama communicate whole worlds without ever speaking, and the woman’s single line of dialogue, directed at her cuckolded husband, is almost certainly a lie. A young man (Jae Hee) drives around on his motorcycle, breaking into homes while the owners are on vacation and inhabiting their lives for a while; during one such invasion he’s caught red-handed by an abused wife (Lee Seung-yeon), and their wordless romance is like a cathedral held in cupped hands....

Dirty Projectors Longstreth’s claim that the record represents an attempt “to reimagine American music by recreating the marriage of African music and European music in their purer, unbastardized forms” holds a little water, but only because he has an unusual talent for stitching radically different genres together–his hybrid form isn’t a blend so much as a contrived, almost perverse combination of familiar elements, like a cream cheese and parrot sandwich. Taken together, the “European” chamber-music elements, the “African” percussion and rhythms, and Longstreth’s own wandering croon–a peculiar, wobbly tenor that tips easily into falsetto–create a dreamlike state where alienation and familiarity coexist without tension....

Why is it that I is the only pronoun we capitalize? “It’s because we believe that we are irreplaceable,” says Joseph Suglia. “We fetishize ourselves. We turn ourselves into gods.” Hence the premise of his latest novel, Watch Out, in which the main character, Jonathan Barrows–a vicious tyrant who’s self-obsessed to the point where the only thing he lusts after is himself–methodically and psychotically turns up his nose at the entire world....

Franz Kafka began his first novel, Amerika, in 1912, a year after he’d become infatuated with Yiddish theater–considered a backward, embarrassing cultural artifact by “respectable” (that is, assimilationist) German-speaking Jews in Prague. A champion of this extravagant, schmaltzy, shabby form, Kafka befriended impresario Itzhak Lowy and even lectured on “the Yiddish tongue.” In Ken Prestininzi’s dizzying, vibrant Amerikafka, Yiddish theater literally comes back to haunt the dying writer, as Lowy brings his troupe to Kafka’s sickroom to enact an absurd, fractured adaptation of Amerika....

Friday 9/3 – Thursday 9/9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “People think, oh scooters, cute,” says Kristen Frazer, who cofounded the Second to Last Club for lovers of Vespas, Lambrettas, and other motorini with her husband, Moe Balazs, a decade ago. “But we tend to be a wild bunch of people.” To mark the group’s tenth anniversary they’re getting scooter fans together this weekend for the Slaughterhouse 10 Scooter Rally....

Free is good, but it’s really good when the goods are top-shelf. Seven dance troupes with great reps take the stage on this program, which includes Alvin Ailey’s classic Cry. Created in 1971 for Judith Jamison, who succeeded Ailey as company director after his death, it’s performed by Dwana Adiaha Smallwood. And the Ailey-like Complexions Contemporary Ballet–directed by former Ailey dancers Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson–performs Rhoden’s Red/The Force. But overall the evening is weighted toward ballet: Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews of American Ballet Theatre perform the Don Quixote pas de deux; the Joffrey Ballet offers Gerald Arpino’s best-known work, Light Rain; and the San Francisco Ballet presents Helgi Tomasson’s Concerto Grosso....

This daylong program of documentaries about the rights of children, selected from the United Nations Association’s annual touring film festival, takes place Saturday, November 19, from 9 AM to 5 PM at Columbia College Ludington Bldg., 1104 S. Wabash. Suggested donation is $10 per half-day session; admission is free for Columbia College students. For more information call 312-344-6732. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrea Gronvall has called Len Morris and Robin Romano’s Stolen Childhoods (2004, 85 min....