Over the last few years, artists from Timbaland to the Anti-Pop Consortium have proved that hip-hop has plenty of room left to grow without becoming something else entirely, but there’s still a significant faction of the underground that believes two turntables and a microphone are all any true head will ever need. Among these folks, the fly rhymes of Evidence and Iriscience and tough cuts of Babu–also a member of the mighty DJ crew the World Famous Beat Junkies–have made heroes of LA’s Dilated Peoples....

The screen persona of the late Hong Kong star Leslie Cheung (A Better Tomorrow, Farewell My Concubine, Happy Together) combined boyish openness and vulnerability with intimations of buried emotional torment. In this 2002 supernatural thriller, Cheung’s last film, he brings characteristic concentration to the part of a psychiatrist literally haunted by his past. He leads the hectic but lonely life of an unmarried professional until a woman who sees ghosts (Karena Lam) comes to him for help....

There’s a buttload of politically inspired offerings on local stages right now, but Michael Garvey’s late-night solo show is something different, neither a hard-hitting satire nor a histrionic gripefest. Instead, in just under an hour, he poignantly raises a question familiar to many Americans since the 2000 election debacle–do we belong in this country anymore?–by reading a series of letters he’s sent to Bush over the past few years. Not interested in easy polemics, Garvey is sincerely perplexed–and often witty–in his ruminations....

I was at a bachelorette party. We had a great dinner and played fun games, and then my girlfriend said, “I have a surprise for you.” She brings us here, we walk in and there are all these naked guys with G-strings dancing on the bar. Everyone was kinda shocked. There were like 12 of us, and the guys kept whispering, “We’re not homosexual, we’re straight. We’re just doing this for the money....

A mainstay of San Francisco’s hip-hop scene, Peanut Butter Wolf (producer of Kool Keith’s “Wanna Be a Star” and Ozomatli’s “Super Bowl Sundae,” among others) has just released two different compilations: Fusion Beats, on Japan’s Brown Sugar/Cold Fusion, is a mix CD that ranges from old-school funk to underground hip-hop to classic reggae. The brand-new Peanut Butter Wolf’s Jukebox 45s, on his own Stones Throw imprint, compiles 22 of the label’s collectible seven-inch singles; artists range from the Highlighters and Breakestra, who re-create the instrumental funk of the late 60s and early 70s, to scratchadelic DJ A-Trak (“Enter Ralph Wiggum”) to rapper Quasimoto–aka Madlib, the middle act on this bill....

It was in 1990 that Gregg Bassett had his first close encounter with a squirrel, when she pressed her nose against his back porch window. “I was never the same after that,” he says. Squirrels began approaching cautiously when he and his wife, Kathy, took their evening walks. Bassett coaxed one squirrel to take a nut from his hand, and eventually a squirrel he named GG—short for “Gray Girl”—began taking peanuts from his mouth....

Gilbert and Sullivan fans are big on the rhetoric of obsession. They call themselves “nuts” and refer to each other, admiringly, as “mad.” They all seem to have a story about the moment they got “hooked for life.” And the rhetoric fits–they really are crazed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only thing that distinguishes Thespis, besides its chronological primacy, is the fact that it’s come down to us all but stripped of its music....

The Circle Game, Nectar Productions, at the Harrison Street Cooperative of Performing & Fine Arts. This chaotic one-hour program of two plays tells the story of ethnic hatred in the former Yugoslavia, but so haphazardly that one is likely to leave feeling more confused than enlightened. Jeff Helgeson’s Full Circle covers the low points of 1,000 years of Serb-Croat-Muslim conflict. Under Kym Crawford’s awkward direction, the actors stiffly intone a list of facts peppered with banal axioms, like “A place of departure is a place of return....

One of the best handicappers I know is an ex-nun who married a horseplayer. Mary Schoenfeldt goes to mass every day, but one afternoon a month her husband Creighton drags her to the racetrack. Creighton bets on horses 364 days a year and would do it 365 “if they were open on Christmas.” But this is not a source of friction in their marriage. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

My wife and I are having a disagreement on whether multiple personality disorder is real or not. She works in a substance abuse clinic and says she sees people with this disorder quite often. I on the other hand feel that multiple personality disorder is a crock of dung. I have looked this up on the Internet, and views seem to be split fifty-fifty. What do you think–does this disorder exist?...

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 19th year, continues Friday through Sunday, November 1 through 3, at City North 14; Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton; and the Vittum Theater, 1012 N. Noble. Tickets are $6 for children and adults, $4.50 for Facets members; various discounts are available for ten or more tickets. Professional actors will be on hand to read subtitled films. For more information call 773-281-9075 or 773-281-2166....

News bulletin: the schools are broken. According to the April 2001 “The Nation’s Report Card: Fourth-Grade Reading 2000” (http://nces.ed.gov), American fourth-graders scored about 217 out of a possible 500 in reading on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. That’s about the same as fourth-graders in 1992. But the top students scored significantly better than their counterparts did eight years ago, while the worst readers scored lower. Only 32 percent of fourth-graders can read at or above the “proficient” level, identified by the National Assessment Governing Board as the level all students should reach....

Send in the clowns–but keep the kids away. This three-week festival of clowning features adult-oriented shows by local and visiting artists, along with a late-night cabaret, a “clown jam,” and workshops. Running through April 15 and featuring two to three shows a night, it’s the first edition of what organizers hope will be an annual event. All performances take place at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Admission is $10 per show (except where noted otherwise below); a four-admission pass costs $30....

This double-headliner bill is traveling as the “Death and Dismemberment Tour,” but while the name may be clever, it’s also a bit misleading: neither Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie nor D.C.’s the Dismemberment Plan are going to kill you with their songs, softly or any other way; they’re not even going to injure you. Granted, the Plan’s material has often taken some fairly disorienting twists: both 1997’s The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified and 1999’s Emergency & I demonstrated a knack for spazzed-out funk, with singer Travis Morrison proving himself an ace comical ranter....

Defender Prepares Its New Offense Picou said he had in mind the years the Defender has spent staggering along in trusteeship since Sengstacke’s death in 1997, but the Defender’s been failing for decades. In the glory years Pullman porters took it south with them, and its message of opportunity helped inspire a vast migration. But circulation dwindled from 250,000 to 20,000, and for that handful reading it fell somewhere between a habit and a chore....

“The world’s first completely liberated film market,” also a festival for the public, runs Friday, August 1, through Sunday, August 10, at Water Tower. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $10. Following is the schedule through August 7; a complete schedule is available on/line at www.chicagoreader.com. SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 Spook Barry Levy directed this fact-based drama (2002, 93 min.) about a Canadian man who served as a CIA sniper in Vietnam. Also on the program: Lorin B....

The road from Chicago has been a long one for alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and he doesn’t get back often enough. He left town with a big band in the 1940s, and by the time the decade was out he’d recorded early more-or-less free-jazz sides with Lennie Tristano and played in Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool nonet. He’s led his own bands for aeons, worked with mainstream rhythm players all over Europe, and crossed paths with stubborn Euro-improvisers like Derek Bailey and Misha Mengelberg; in recent years he’s divided his time between New York and Germany....

This down-to-earth comedy by UK indie filmmaker Shane Meadows (TwentyFourSeven) often seems like a Mike Leigh movie viewed in a fun-house mirror: his modest working-class characters are so genuine that he can get away with having one of them, a two-bit hood played by Robert Carlyle, take part in a botched carjacking against a trio of birthday clowns. Years after abandoning his lover (Shirley Henderson), Carlyle spots her on a tabloid talk show turning down a surprise marriage proposal from her mopey boyfriend (Rhys Ifans) and returns to Nottingham to reclaim her....

Sigur Ros Before the next track (and the second half of the album) begins, you’re forced to sit through 35 seconds of silence. Only it’s not absolute silence. Listen closely and you’ll hear an almost imperceptible hiss, the song’s death rattle. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper–with a whisper. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course, not everyone who’s plopped into this sonic wasteland turns to T....

Starlight Express, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre. This revamped 1984 musical about toy trains that come to life for a championship race wallows in ethnic and sexual stereotypes. The contenders, played by singer-dancers on roller skates, are a strutting Italian-American diesel engine named Greaseball; an electric androgyne, Electra, who sings “AC, DC–OK with me”; and a scrappy little steam engine named Rusty. While the body-armored males vie for first place, their flirtatious, skimpily costumed female coach cars dither over which of the engines they should, um, couple with....