David Bowie sleepwalking his way through The Man Who Fell to Earth, William S. Burroughs scamming his buckshot-splattered paintings into galleries–plenty of artists skilled in one medium misguidedly think they can step right into another. But Alan Licht–whose first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, was published last year by Drag City–is no dilettante. He’s an eloquent champion of New York’s underground musicians and filmmakers, whom he’s written about in Black to Comm, Forced Exposure, and the Wire....

Empty Brett Neveu’s Empty is set in the days immediately prior to and following September 11, 2001, but it isn’t about the World Trade Center atrocity. It’s about the significance of the counterculture. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jessi D. Hill’s staging appears to endorse this point of view. But it seems to me that DJ’s making the same mistake the hippie nostalgists make, which is to think of the 60s and the people who lived through them as monolithic....

Portraiture, not analysis, is Robbie Conal’s strong suit. Reared during the 60s, he made his reputation as a guerrilla poster artist in the Reagan years, then scored a regular art column with the LA Weekly in the late 90s. In the recently released Artburn, a bong-table book named after his Weekly page, his gruesome, fleshy caricatures are accompanied by brief essays that betray his tendency toward glib mockery (he thinks calling Al Gore “Gore the Bore” is funny) and the undigested horror of authority that leads the American left to continually blow off its own feet....

CHIEF STEPHEN OSITA OSADEBE & HIS NIGERIAN SOUNDMAKERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the last few decades a variety of Nigerian musical exports–from the juju of King Sunny Ade and I.K. Dairo to the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti to the fuji of Barrister–have squeezed out good old highlife in the U.S. world-music market. But the form, which originated in Ghana and was introduced to Nigeria by the legendary E....

Berlin-based choreographer Felix Ruckert is known for attacking the distinctions between audience and performer. Formerly a dancer with Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, he struck out on his own in 1994, creating such pieces as Hautnah, modeled, according to his Web site, on the “human and social activities” of a brothel: individual spectators paid to observe a single dancer in a private cubicle. Most of the time, says critic Burt Ramsey, the performer got the viewer to dance with him/her, or they interacted in some other way–in one case by running around the block together....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sula is right in the fact that the project was a collaboration between Jeff Spitz and myself since day one of my involvement in the film. The problem comes when he states that “Spitz made the last trip to Zuni…reedited the film, put music down on the sound track,…tightened and fine-tuned until it was ready to go....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While I am impressed with Monica Kendrick’s brilliant Marxian analysis of the Chicago bar scene, and share her nostalgia for “sawdust-floored juke joints where down-and-outers paid pennies for stale beer scammed from higher-class establishments” as well as her haute working-class disdain for “scholarly…gray-headed Brits,” I am compelled by my own sense of petty righteousness to point out that her backhanded recommendation of a “bar that’s dealt such a nasty blow to labor recently” (Spot Check, January 11), aside from its blatant editorializing and one-sided portrayal of what the author well knows is a two-sided issue (“Clipped,” Post No Bills, by Peter Margasak, December 21), is a bit much....

“In love or in cyberspace, everything’s fair / And it’s OK to steal, ‘cuz it’s so nice to share,” sings Loudon Wainwright III to Dylan-esque acoustic accompaniment in “Something for Nothing,” a mocking commentary on Internet music piracy from his latest CD, So Damn Happy (Sanctuary). It’s a classic Wainwright move to simultaneously inhabit and subvert the role of the folkie troubadour: for almost a quarter century he’s been firing curare-tipped musical barbs at the sacred cows of the folk subculture and society in general....

Pickett’s Charge Debra Pickett trembles on the cusp of stardom. She knows it; her readers know it, colleagues at the Sun-Times know it–though none have called to complain she’s a callow princess unfit to mop the floors at midnight (which is the sort of thing I heard years ago when Richard Roeper trembled on the cusp of stardom). And of course everyone knows it across the street at the Tribune, a place that doesn’t want its own writers getting swelled heads....

I’m a big fat liar! I’m 24 years old and still a virgin. Only my high school friends know this. I’ve lied to all my college friends and everyone thereafter. I’m a decent-looking guy, just never got laid, not even a blow job. Hell, I have practically no sexual experience. I have some really good friends now and still make up everything when we talk about women. This is really starting to guilt me out because I try to be as honest as possible....

Hey, everybody: I’m on vacation, and this column is a repeat–but a very, very special repeat. I recently told a woman who signed herself Confused that it was unreasonable of her not to give a few blow jobs to save her marriage. The mail has been pouring in ever since from angry women (and their fathers), all insisting that no woman should give head if she doesn’t dig it. When I replied that oral sex is now standard and not some bizarre kink that a guy has to feel guilty about expecting or asking for, even more mail poured in....

Actor Rick Miller says he’s changed his one-man farce, MacHomer: The Simpsons Do Macbeth, since Reader critic Jack Helbig wrote about it three years ago. Helbig was enthusiastic, noting that the show, which Miller had developed at fringe festivals, “combines Miller’s two loves, Shakespeare and silliness: his somewhat shortened adaptation transforms the dark, murder-filled Scottish tragedy into an episode of The Simpsons. Homer is the ambition-driven Macbeth, Marge his unscrupulous wife, Ned Flanders is Banquo, Mr....

Experts disagree about the root causes of Jamaica’s crushing poverty: some hold that the nation’s economy has been undermined by ruinous import-export policies dictated by first-world creditors; others contend that the growing number of sodomites among the populace has incurred the wrath of Jah. I wish I could say roots-dancehall superstar Capleton really rips the IMF a new one on his most recent album, More Blazin’ (VP), but I’m afraid the composer of “Pure Sodom” is still preoccupied with bashing “battie boys”–though where he once called upon the Lord to burn gays off the face of the earth, he now proposes to take matters into his own fists on “Punchline 2 Hit....

The Viennese waltz has been synonymous with year-end revelry at least since 1874, when Johann Strauss Jr. scored the New Year’s Eve party in his operetta Die Fledermaus with waltzes. The seductive, lilting feel of the waltz, cozily familiar to ballroom dancers the world over, depends on a delicate and rigorous approach to its 3/4 meter: each lighthearted glide and turn must also carry the tang of suspense, which comes from a slight drag at the end of every measure....

It’s late Monday morning and Jack Lynch is on call. His pager beeps, interrupting his snack of coffee and chocolate cake from Debra’s Dough at Dearborn Station. He reads the messages from his pager out loud over the cheerful jazz music that fills the atrium. “Twenty-six-year-old African-American male gunshot wound to the head…37-year-old African-American male head trauma.” Lynch lowers his head with a sudden weariness. “I get these types of pages five to seven times a week, and 75 percent of the time these people are victims of some kind of social trauma....

Don’t ask me how I was anointed with the captaincy of the Von Humboldt elementary school 1948-49 basketball team. Any possible explanation long ago made its jailbreak through a crumbling cell wall of my memory. Forward Robert Iwonski, five-four in his dirty-stockinged feet–but five-seven if you counted his formidable Russian brush, a stand of immovably Brylcreemed hair, each filament ascending in perfect perpendicularity to his aircraft-carrier-flat cranium, as if snapped to military attention....

I used to stage-manage a lot of concerts and events here. I could tell you about the time the Boss sprung a leak and couldn’t hold it before going onstage–so the alley got a bit of a Springsteen shower. But one of the most memorable nights was the one I worked a magic act that included a Siberian tiger, which must have been 500 pounds. The show goes fine; the tiger does his bit....

Poseidon! An Upside Down Musical, Hell in a Handbag Productions, at the Theatre Building Chicago. The ultimate disaster movie, The Poseidon Adventure is a dizzying mix of good and bad. Example: Shelley Winters transcends her role as a walking fat joke in a death scene that would make Nurse Ratched weep. Then Ernest Borgnine delivers her epitaph: “You had a lot of guts, lady.” (Sound of screenwriter missing own pun.) “A lot of guts....

Right!, International Theater of Chicago, at Berger Park Cultural Center. George Jean Nathan characterized Pirandello’s early play Right You Are (If You Think You Are) as “written for intelligent blind men.” And this three-act exploration of existential relativism is indeed heavy on philosophy and light on spectacle. When the townsfolk in a small Italian village discover that their newest resident, Mr. Ponza, keeps his wife and mother-in-law locked up in separate apartments and won’t allow anyone to visit either, they’re overcome by a mania for explanation....

On the long way home from Troy, Odysseus and his men made an early stop among a people who greeted them warmly and offered them the lotus, the native delicacy. But those who tasted this fruit lost their memory–and all desire to continue the journey. Odysseus had to force these men back aboard the ships and tie them down before he could push on. Best of Chicago voting is live now....