The circumstances surrounding Linda Thompson’s retirement from music in 1985 were as bizarre as they were unfortunate. One of the most important voices in British folk rock, Thompson had just moved on from her divorce from guitar hero Richard Thompson to release her first solo album, the mediocre One Clear Moment, when she began suffering from a rare psychological disorder known as hysterical dysphonia–a kind of stage fright so brutal that sometimes the affected can’t even speak....

Hannah and Martin –Martin Heidegger, from a letter to Hannah Arendt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play is based on fact: In the 1920s Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most important thinker of the 20th century, and Hannah Arendt, who would become famous for her coverage of the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, met as professor and student. An intense affair ensued, which ended with Heidegger sending Arendt off to study with a colleague, Karl Jaspers....

I was here with my friend Steve after an annual awards show that our theater company used to host. Everybody used to dress to the nines or wear goofy costumes. Steve had on a bunny costume. We went out on the dance floor, and one of the guys from behind the bar came and tapped him on the shoulder and said he couldn’t dance in the bunny suit. We thought the guy was kidding, because you look around and see people with nose piercings and body piercings and dressed in their particular way....

Demonstrating a certain prescience or, as she’s said, a desire to get an inconvenient love interest out of the way, Sara Paretsky sent V.I. Warshawski’s journalist lover to Afghanistan to cover the Taliban at the end of her last novel, Total Recall (published September 9, 2001). In Paretsky’s new book, Blacklist (Putnam), Chicago PI Warshawski does her detecting amid 9/11 domestic fallout. The mechanics of the story, more political than usual for Paretsky, cast Warshawski’s familiar run-ins with the police inside the shrinking civil rights noose of the Patriot Act; the mystery lies in a secretive nest of fellow travelers, traitors, slumming aristocrats, and Bronzeville artists, and the specter of proto-McCarthy hearings hangs over all....

This third annual “exploration of international movements in the digital underground of electronic media” runs Saturday through Thursday, October 16 through 21, at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Admission is $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2600. Short digital animations from the Netherlands and the U.S. 75 min. a Sunday, October 17, 3:30 PM; Wednesday, October 20, 6:15 PM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greg Palast conducts a muckraking probe of the Bush dynasty, but most of the muck has been common knowledge for some time (e....

Smokey Joe’s Cafe: The Songs of Leiber and Stoller Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last time this revue of 50s and 60s rock and soul hits by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller played at the Shubert, it came off as a slick, shallow nostalgiafest that shifted emotions with the mechanical efficiency of a jukebox flipping 45s. That’s all changed in the latest touring edition of the recently closed Broadway production (which began life here at the Royal George in the mid-90s, under the title Baby That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll)....

Fans of Indian cinema may be appalled by this American version of a Bollywood musical, and to be fair, its production numbers are awful, lacking the color, composition, and editing rhythm that makes their Eastern counterparts so magical. But as a romantic comedy this is a cut above the norm, satirical in its treatment of both spiritually bereft New Yorkers and materialistic Indian immigrants. Jimi Mistry stars as a Delhi dance instructor with a head full of old John Travolta movies who journeys to Manhattan in search of wealth and stardom but soon discovers that the only career paths open to him are waiting tables or driving a cab....

Verses., Hermit Theater, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at the Lunar Cabaret, One Two Three Four Five, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at Prop Thtr, and Mazel, Still Point Theater Collective, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at Prop Thtr. Diverse subject matter and performance styles have long been a hallmark of the Rhino fest–but cultural diversity has been less prominent. Idris Goodwin’s Verses., dramatizing the shifts in a longtime friendship between two African-American men, marks the playwright-director as a talent to watch....

Whenever the Detroit trio Wolf Eyes comes to town, you can count on prismatic layers of art-damaged bleating, plop-stomp from cheap drum machines, calliopelike feedback, and tortured lyrics delivered with Wizard of Oz-style grandiosity–all processed through reams of distortion and delay. Since 1997 Aaron Dilloway and Nate Young have been coaxing obsessively dark noises from all kinds of equipment–from out of the mysterious black suitcases they haul onstage they’ve produced oscillators, reel-to-reel machines, a horn modified with pickups, and recircuited Casios....

Friday 8/23 – Thursday 8/29 24 SATURDAY Stanley Tigerman’s parking garage at 60 E. Lake is the only edifice featured in today’s A View From the Road tour designed by a “serious” architect–though the ten-story structure, modeled after a Rolls-Royce grille, certainly doesn’t look it. Other stops on the 50s-car-culture-inspired expedition include the Esquire Motel on Elston, the Superdawg hot dog stand, the original Ray Kroc McDonald’s in Des Plaines, and the Par-King Skill Golf miniature golf course in Morton Grove....

NOVEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eight actors play nearly 100 roles in Moises Kaufman’s new play, The Laramie Project, which tells the story of the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard through the eyes of his friends and family as well as citizens of the Wyoming town where he lived. The character studies are taken from two years’ worth of interviews conducted by Kaufman and members of his NYC-based Tectonic Theatre Project, who’ve used their subjects’ real names and own words....

Pork–the possibly cloned white meat. “Jon Fisher, owner of Prairie State Semen Inc. of Champaign, Ill., paid a then-record $43,000 in 1997 for a beautiful Hampshire boar at an auction in Texas,” writes Justin Gillis in the Washington Post (September 16). “The new animal, much in demand, greatly elevated Fisher’s reputation in the world of pig breeders. He named the boar 401-K, after the retirement account.” In 2001 the boar suddenly died, and it was several hours before Fisher could “salvage ear cells and ship them off to Infigen Inc....

Ask your state representative why he or she voted to make it illegal to photograph or videotape animals at a factory farm. According to Bill Berkowitz, writing for the July 18 Working for Change (www.workingforchange.com), in April the Illinois House of Representatives passed House Bill 5793 by a vote of 118-0. According to the Peoria Journal Star, the bill would “prohibit state inspectors [of factory farms] from taking pictures to document their investigations,” but Berkowitz figures it’s also aimed at thwarting the many grassroots activists monitoring the gigantic, foul-smelling hog and dairy operations....

Joseph Cornell’s famous boxes create flights of fancy out of the most ordinary materials–marbles in drinking glasses might suggest the solar system–and like some of those works, his films can be deceptively simple. For instance, in Midnight Party (codirected by Larry Jordan) Cornell makes a poetic leap between a freeze-frame of sleeping children and the image of a comet. Several Cornell films were shot outdoors in New York City and make their everyday locales seem extraordinary: despite the badly faded colors of the Nymphlight print, Bryant Park becomes a magical arbor as Cornell focuses on women and girls, birds, and a fountain, and the office buildings towering over the park become a sheltering grove....

In early 2003 Weasel Walter quit Chicago for Oakland, where he assembled the latest Flying Luttenbachers lineup: bassist Mike Green of Burmese, former Colossamite guitarist Ed Rodriguez, now of the Gorge Trio, and of course himself on drums. The band’s sole constant member throughout its 13-year history, Weasel has mastered a distinctive compositional style–superfans can almost predict the music’s harsh blasts, burps of silence, and peculiar interludes. I was sure I’d heard the Luttenbachers playing the stripped-down stuff on their latest, The Void (Troubleman), when they still rehearsed in my attic, but Weasel says I’m wrong–the music probably seems familiar, he explains, because it’s a “suite comprised of smaller movements that fit together in various theoretical ways....

Sixty-five-year-old Joe McPhee embodies what AACM cofounder Roscoe Mitchell calls the “super musician”: a jazz player who “moves freely in music,” negotiates past and present idioms, improvises, and composes, all with consummate skill. That’s McPhee: He’s used his tenor sax to explore the lyricism of Benny Golson’s melancholy ballad “I Remember Clifford” (from 1982’s Oleo, recently reissued on Hatology), led the Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet on trumpet in a spirited charge through “All Things Being Equal” on the group’s latest album, Images (Okka Disk), and wreathed Raphe Malik’s trumpeting with ghostly, unpitched whispers (via pocket trumpet) on “Space March,” from Sympathy (Boxholder), a trio session with drummer Donald Robinson....

“There is a vicious circle of babies having babies having babies,” says Luther Goins, whose play Love Child premieres this weekend at Live Bait Theater. “I believe that there are people who should not be allowed to have children, and I believe there are people born who shouldn’t be here. I believe it; I grew up with it….I’ll read about some horrible crime: rape, shooting people, murder. Whether it’s black, white, Hispanic doesn’t matter–you see the same type of background, and my mind goes to: ‘Should not have been born....

Writer-director Kevin Foose’s satire on the evils of gentrification for Why a Duck Theatrical Productions has some obvious problems: a rambling script, awkward performances, nearly nonexistent direction. The nine chorus members who slump onstage to provide mostly unison vocals seem so ill at ease they might have been rounded up in an alley before the show. But such amateurism creates a rawness befitting this gritty reworking of The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy, kicked out of Cabrini-Green, stumbles toward City Hall intent on assassinating the mayor, accompanied by panhandler Rags, Dumpster diver Tin-Can Man, sexual-abuse survivor Scaredy-Fuckin Cat, and the perpetually bored Ratty-Ass Dog....

This annual festival, sponsored by the Columbia College Chicago fiction writing department, is themed “Culture, Class & Conflict” and features readings, panel discussions, and book signings with local and national authors. The festival runs Monday, March 25, through Friday, March 29; events take place at several Columbia College venues, the Adventurers’ Club, the Harold Washington Library Center, and the Metro nightclub, and all are free. For more information call 312-344-7611....

The Deep Blue Sea, Bailiwick Repertory. The complexity of Terence Rattigan’s characters and their moral dilemmas generally compensates for the dated depiction of gender relations in this 1952 drama: the less-than-successful painter Hester would sooner commit suicide than compromise her vision of romantic love. Her attempt to gas herself when her lover, an alcoholic pilot, forgets to come home on her birthday may strike a note more melodramatic than tragic. But Hester commands attention for her unwillingness to conform to social conventions and the dictates of class, rejecting her wealthy but apparently impotent husband’s efforts to win her back....