The Delgados had a tough time making their third record, The Great Eastern. The Glasgow band spent six frustrating weeks of 2000 in a British studio; fed up, they sent bassist Stewart Henderson and drummer Paul Savage to upstate New York to whip the recordings into shape with producer Dave Fridmann, who’s most famously worked with the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. But I’d never have guessed that the album was born from such chaos if I hadn’t read the bio that came with my review copy of the band’s latest record, Hate....

Burghers and bohemians were crying, together, right there on the corner of Damen and Milwaukee. Or at least a few of them were crying. More were merely cringing at the sights and sounds emanating from the truck parked there–a clean white vehicle not unlike an ice cream truck, but with TV screens and posters for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals mounted on either side. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Dr. Louis Silverstein was sipping tea in the Columbia College student union, unwinding after his “Education, Culture, and Society” class. “Drugs make people crazy,” said the professor, who bears a slight resemblance to Charles Manson. “Particularly people who don’t have any knowledge of them and don’t use them.” The 63-year-old soaked up his Brooklyn accent as the second son of eastern European immigrants and the only brother of four to attend college....

On Mood Swings (Chiaroscuro), her new second album, Detroit-area vocalist Kathy Kosins tries to do it all. She had a hand in composing the majority of the material on the disc, including my favorite tracks–several sparky jazz tunes on which her husky, honeyed voice stands out nicely against the rhythm-and-horns backdrops. She also pursues the smooth-jazz audience with a few earnest ballads that don’t ask much, targets nostalgic baby boomers with a surprisingly effective take on Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady,” and indulges a taste for the theatrical on a couple cuts, leading a slickly arranged choir reminiscent of the New York Voices–a group more at home at a supper club than on a jazz stage....

Violist and violinist Mat Maneri has a sound all his own: with his mahogany tone and muscular low register, he slithers from note to note like a satiated snake. But he’s also mastered the idiosyncratic microtonal scale employed by his reedist father, Joe, which divides each interval in an ordinary 12-note octave into six parts. Microtonality has always had a place in jazz (think pitch-bent blue notes and sobbing glissandos), but the Maneris have made it into a science–and Mat’s instruments, which can play an infinite number of minute gradations in pitch, are particularly well suited to it....

Friese Undine: Perdition in Chickentown Though neither Friese Undine nor Bradford Johnson claims Gerhard Richter as an influence, both make paintings based on photo-graphs and both step back from the role of artist as icon maker, as author of a compelling and complete universe. Indeed, questioning artistic and political authority, denying grand meanings, is part of their theme, as it is for the seminal artist whose work is now on view in a retrospective at the Art Institute....

Every time I’m here I’m reminded of the Jamaican vacation I went on by myself. I was hanging out at the beach–they had a club there at night: tiki torches, maybe 400 people dancing on platforms to a reggae band. I was chillin’ by myself, and the singer from the band said, “You gotta be a star to be with a girl,” kinda dissin’ me for being alone. And I said, “If anyone’s a star, Azhar’s the star,” and he said, “What makes you a star?...

Nobukazu Takemura’s recent Sign (Thrill Jockey) isn’t a major addition to the Japanese composer’s discography: two of the four pieces have been previously issued on vinyl (albeit in slightly different versions), and the remainder of the EP doesn’t drift far from the playful melodic minimalism of last year’s Hoshi No Koe. But the centerpiece of the release–“Souvenir in Chicago,” a 35-minute collaboration recorded here in 1999 with Thrill Jockey fixtures Ken Brown, Douglas McCombs, and John McEntire–does offer a fascinating look at Takemura’s process....

If Chase Myers can get approval from the notoriously straitlaced Illinois secretary of state’s office, his next set of license plates will say LUBE IT. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We were embarrassed, OK?” Myers says. “I came from a farm in northeast Missouri, and Ken came from a fairly small town in Iowa. It was just awkward for us to do this kind of thing....

In 1998, Cyndi Moran and Eric Scholl traveled to Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin to film a dogsled race for a documentary video, one of several the couple was then working on. There, they found an 11-year-old girl who was competing–in the pro class–for the second time, an exchange student from Italy who’d seen snow only once in his life, and a 60-ish county commissioner who’d started mushing after having a brain tumor removed....

The Aggressor, Theo Ubique Theatre Company and Overland Stage Company, at the Heartland Studio Theater. Watching the first act of this comedy-drama is like eavesdropping on a boring first date. The second is like eavesdropping on the same date at a bondage parlor. Together they compose a full evening that essentially recapitulates the announcement “Please turn off all cell phones and pagers.” Playwright Tommy Lee Beaver sets up a situation–female journalist interviews male writer whose Web-borne objections to technology attracted her attention–without either characters or conflict....

“A lot of people think they know about Benedict Arnold,” says Theatre of Western Springs artistic director Tony Vezner. But if they base their understanding of America’s archetypal traitor on what they remember from high school history or a recent A&E movie, Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor, Vezner says there’s room for surprise. In 1996 playwright Richard Nelson, working on a commission from England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and bothered (as he told a Playbill interviewer) by “how little of American history has been part of our dramatic culture,” wrote The General From America, a new take on Arnold’s story....

“When I enter his suite at the Plaza, he’s finishing lunch, expressing his regret about missing Godard in Cannes, remarking on the absurdity of prizes at film festivals, asking me what Soho News and Soho are. (The one he knows about is in London—he fondly recalls a cigar store on Frith Street.) We stayed in touch over the remaining decade of his life—he died in 1997—and I dedicated my book “Movies as Politics” to him....

= highly recommended What Jackie Knew Moshe Ivgy plays a Tel Aviv literature professor stuck in a loveless marriage and struggling with midlife, an overactive libido, and a bad case of writer’s block. Things only get worse when the affair he’s having with a beautiful, soulful former student (Yael Abecassis) begins to founder. At first glance, this wistful romantic comedy seems to have taken as its muse Woody Allen in his Annie Hall mode....

I’m not asking this out of prurient interest, as lame as that may sound. I’m curious about the physiology involved with the small percentage of women who experience ejaculation of fluid during orgasm. I won’t go into it, but I have personal knowledge that the fluid is not urine or a lubricating secretion. What exactly is the fluid, and from what part of the female anatomy does it emanate? –Bill B....

How loud does something have to be to kill someone? I heard once on BattleBots that it took 150 decibels to stop the human heart. Is this true? If so, I’m afraid, since I work in a VERY loud job environment (I assemble 747 engines). So is there a fatal decibel level? And if so, is it really 150 decibels? Please tell me. I’m scared. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Someone asked this question on another message board I go to. I’m asking it here because the other message board is mostly about video games and I figured someone here would have a better idea. But: It does. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Q: Why are we talking about this incredibly esoteric topic when there are so many more interesting things to discuss, like whether Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is wearing anything besides blue body paint in the new X-Men movie?...

Watching this evening-length performance piece, it’s easy to see Martha Clarke’s origins in the dance group Pilobolus: Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited) is filled with strange transformations of the human body. But unlike most Pilobolean productions, Clarke’s strings together images in the service of a single aim: re-creating fin de siecle Vienna as she imagines it. This is a dreamlike world informed by the ideas of Freud and Hitler and the images of Gustav Klimt without being tied down by any of them–a fanciful balloon floating above the concrete landscape of history....

Things Being What They Are Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This turns out to be a trickier question than it may seem. If MacLeod isn’t likely to be mistaken for Artaud on a formal level, she’s nevertheless dealing with a volatile social issue: masculinity in America. Even Simon’s 1965 hit turned on anxiety over the subject; dispossessed of their family roles, his Felix and Oscar spend the whole play dueling over their notions of appropriate male behavior....

The security guards on the seventh floor of the Marriott on Michigan, near the end of their 18-hour day, were sick of getting yelled at. At 6 PM in the banquet hall behind them, employees of ABC TV had begun administering an aptitude test to the day’s third and final flight of would-be contestants for the new syndicated version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Now it was 6:05, and the guards were facing ten tardy pilgrims who had just straggled in....