Nell Blaine (1922-’96), who first got attention as a painter after moving to New York in 1942 to study with Hans Hofmann, worked abstractly for about a decade before switching to the pretty, Matisse-inspired landscapes and still lifes she’s best known for today. The 19 paintings, drawings, and prints at Valerie Carberry are from her abstract period and include several startlingly original large paintings. Monument (1948) is broken by thick black lines into areas of mostly solid color that mix straight edges and curves; shapes seem clustered to suggest figures at the left and right, with eyes that are like blank, solid-color visors....

Rufus Wainwright’s last record, 2001’s Poses, was a paean to hedonism, chronicling his appetite for junk food, cigarettes, and sex. But this summer Wainwright announced that he was simplifying his life and making his way back from what he described to the New York Times as a trip to “gay hell.” His new album, Want One (Dreamworks), leaves no doubt that he’s a soul in recovery: although he’s wearing a suit of armor on the cover, the picture somehow manages to project naked vulnerability, and the songs are correspondingly tender and revealing....

When you said, “All masturbation horror stories that sounded like BS were discarded,” I said to myself, “I guess we won’t be reading any ‘I-got-a-hot-dog-stuck-up-there’ stories.” The hot dog story you ran was well crafted, but it’s an urban legend. Type “hot dog vagina urban legend” into Google.com and you get hundreds of results. Sometimes ten seconds of research goes a long way. Moving right along, my Grand Council of Masturbation Experts convened this week to select the winners of Savage Love’s MHS contest–a process that turned out to be more complicated than scheduling the Emmys....

Sweaty, disheveled, and shoeless, Stefan Grace and five friends from Chicago hustle across a gymnasium in the Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler University in Indianapolis. Grace is as lanky as a center, but they’re not shooting hoops. In a sort of semi-improvised choreography, two teams of two or three people each are unfolding and refolding gigantic painted backdrops. The scenery once belonged to the famed Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which toured North America until the early 1960s and was a successor to Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the company that launched a ballet revolution in the early part of the 20th century....

CONCRETE BLONDE 2/8, VIC This literate and soulful Los Angeles trio broke a lot of hearts when they broke up in 1994, and not many bands have straddled mainstream style and underground substance with as much class or skill since. Front woman Johnette Napolitano has stayed busy, if not famous, playing with Holly Vincent in Pretty & Twisted and collaborating, along with Concrete Blonde guitarist Jim Mankey, with the rock-en-espanol band Los Illegals....

CATHERINE IRWIN 11/8, HIDEOUT Conventional wisdom holds that goths are the world champs at celebrating depression, but the Sisters of Mercy never recorded anything nearly as bleak as what you’ll hear in country music. Rooted in old-world ballads, the dead-child-photographing 19th century, and the life-is-short, hell-is-long harshness of working-class Calvinism, it depicts a world in which one’s beloved is more present in death than in life. On her first solo album, Cut Yourself a Switch (Thrill Jockey), Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin combines grim originals with oldies like Roger Miller’s “Don’t We All Have the Right to Be Wrong” and the Carter Family’s “Will You Miss Me” to recapture that old-timey chill....

The Man Stripped Bare by His Boy Unfortunately, the intellectual satisfaction of creating a piece whose form expresses its meaning so well isn’t sufficient to compensate for that form’s weaknesses. Serial soliloquies inevitably raise the question, Why don’t these people talk to one another? Even when that’s the dramatic point, it’s a question that distances the audience from the work. Only rarely does a monologue provide the emotional punch, the engagement with character, that is dialogue’s stock-in-trade....

h2etropolis Lang’s utopian rallying cry, written in Germany during the editing of Metropolis, is well worth recalling today. It’s relevant as an acknowledgment of the lack of mutual understanding between nations that currently threatens our planet–and by extension, of the lack of mutual understanding between classes that threatens our country and planet. And it’s relevant as a double-edged expression of hope (“We will realize it!”) and despair (“such difficulty understanding each other in all too many languages”)–responses that form the warp and woof of Metropolis itself....

Lovesexy Well, at least there’s good sex–the solution of another English novelist, D.H. Lawrence, for the individual’s isolation and society’s incoherence in a mechanized world. Two people who fuck purely, merging the personal and political in seamless pleasure, can start a revolution. Unfortunately, if the dispiriting little show “Lovesexy” at the Museum of Contemporary Art is any indication, the majority of artists and curators today view the erotic less as a trope for transformation than for simpleminded transgression....

Playwright Beau O’Reilly claims to have listened to a lot of Depression-era folk music while writing this script–and it sounds like it. As in any great Carter Family ballad, lyrical pathos seeps from all the cracks in Whiskey in Blue, and O’Reilly’s usual slow-moving but surefooted approach is perfectly suited to his meditation on physical and spiritual impoverishment. Curious Theatre Branch’s Whiskey in Blue arrives at the Storefront Theater, after opening at the Lunar Cabaret a little more than a year ago, in much the same state as before....

Ballet Hispanico Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t be thrown by the name–ballet has little to do with this New York-based troupe. Nor is it ethnic in the same sense as the venerable Ballet Folklorico de Mexico. One of the works on this Ballet Hispanico program, Ann Reinking’s Ritmo y Ruido (“Rhythm and Ruckus”), is pure Broadway jazz in the Fosse vein, all swiveling hips, undulating torsos, come-hither looks, and beckoning fingers....

Friday 10/25 – Thursday 10/31 “Pullman and Haymarket have become pop-culture labor icons, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg,” says Bob Bruno, cochair of the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies. “This is still a town whose working class experiences a great deal of economic and political abuse and struggle.” He cites recent labor disputes at downtown hotels, V&V Supremo Foods, and Azteca Foods, where workers are still on strike, as examples....

The operators of the Lakeshore Theater, the latest venture to move into the old movie house at 3175 N. Broadway, have booked for a February opening Puppetry of the Penis, an off-Broadway hit featuring two naked Aussies performing various “dick tricks.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1992 Friedman went to work as managing director at the Northlight Theatre, then based in Evanston. In his early years there he again walked a tightrope, particularly after the theater’s deal to move to a space at National-Louis University in Evanston fell through....

Glass artist Steven Webber holds the end of a five-foot metal blowpipe over a fire blazing in one of the reheat stations along the “hot wall” at his Humboldt Park studio. Sunglasses protect his eyes from the intense flame, which can reach more than 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Sweat rolling down his neck, he pulls the pipe from the “glory hole” (as glassblowers refer to the fiery opening), balancing a red glass glob the size of a fist on the end....

Since the 1950s Albert “Tootie” Heath, of the Philadelphia Heaths, has been a paragon of jazz drumming. Just swinging as hard as he does would be more than enough to get by on, but he has myriad ways of giving voice to the time, from a very light cymbal ride to the full Fort McHenry fireworks show. He’ll start a tune with sticks, switch to brushes for the piano solo, then a stick and a brush to turn up the heat, and on and on....

HENRY JOHNSON ORGAN EXPRESS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weaned on hard bop and the mainstream sounds of the 1960s, Chicago guitarist Henry Johnson has the big tone and strong swing that marked the best jazz of that era. He’s got technique to burn, and best of all he doesn’t light it up just to prove he can; when he improvises, he most often keeps that extra power comfortably in reserve and focuses on lissome melodies....

JASON GRAAE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in Chicago and raised in its burbs, Jason Graae (pronounced “grah”) has built his reputation on the coasts–he was in Falsettos on Broadway and played Houdini in the LA production of Ragtime–and on disc, where his supple tenor has brought to life various classic Broadway scores, including the Gershwins’ Strike Up the Band. (For several years he was also the voice of the cartoon leprechaun in the Lucky Charms cereal commercials....

Jameil Al-Oboudi remembers Baghdad as a lively place in the 1950s and 60s: before the Baath Party consolidated its power, actors would often come to his parents’ house to rehearse for his father’s university and Free Theater Group productions, and “any night you could go to the symphony or see a ballet or go to the parks….Rarely would you see a woman in veils.” Now 51 and living in Hyde Park, Al-Oboudi has tapped into his memories of life in Iraq to produce his first feature, Yousif–a lyrical film that follows the daily life of a 60-something Iraqi torture survivor and painter in Chicago....

Joe Pernice spent the mid-90s fronting the much acclaimed Scud Mountain Boys, but I forgive him. He was young, all the other kids were doing the alt-country thing, and maybe he needed to purge the dourness from his system before pursuing something more worthwhile. Since he re-formed the Pernice Brothers in ’97 (he and brother Bob had played under that name in the 80s), the Byrdsian ideal he’s chasing has been more McGuinn-Clark than Gram Parsons, and on the third and latest Pernice Brothers full-length, Yours, Mine & Ours (Ashmont), he ups the tempos enough to shake off any lingering accusations of sad-sackism....

Tuesday, January 11, 11:20 PM 1944: Every plate, every plate–there’s something wrong with your computer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dispatcher: OK units, 352 is at Roscoe and Sheffield, he has the victim in his car, said this happened about 15 minutes ago. It’s a male black, six feet five inches tall, wearing a fedora, carrying a gun. Dispatcher: I don’t know what a fedora is, but it’s something you wear....