Aside from being a business manager, I’m a performance entertainer, playwright, and poet, but I’m perhaps most well-known as an Ira Glass look-alike. You know, the host of This American Life, the radio program on NPR. Isn’t it funny that someone would be mistaken for a radio personality to begin with? This is just one of many places around town where I’ve been mistaken for him. The first time it happened was when I walked into a rehearsal for a show and another performer mistook me for Ira....

When United Airlines told Julie Dworkin she didn’t have enough frequent-flyer miles for a trip to South Africa, the Logan Square resident and her boyfriend, John Edel, opted instead for southeast Asia. During the three weeks last summer they spent traveling from Bangkok to Hong Kong by bus, train, truck, bicycle, hydrofoil, tuk-tuk, and foot, the pair were struck by the vast gulf between the haves and the have-nots. In Cambodia, taking a boat to Siem Reap, Dworkin and Edel saw people in rags, living in shacks....

Brazilian filmmaker Sergio Bianchi says filmmakers who let themselves be “colonized” by Hollywood are trying to “copy a reality which isn’t our own,” and though this 1987 film eschews emotional manipulation for post-Godardian stylistic fragmentation, it’s entertaining anyway. An anarchic and mordant vision of 60s political radicalism and sexual liberation, it concerns a reporter investigating the mysterious death of Antonio, a left-wing journalist who propounded conspiracy theories about the chemical industry and toxic pollution....

I am a 30-year-old male, married to a woman for five years. Our sex life is average, with sessions typically including a little oral and mutual fondling, followed by missionary-position intercourse. My wife has requested a spanking from time to time, which I have reluctantly given her. Recently on our shared credit card bill I noticed a weird charge. I called the credit card company and they informed me it was for an adult Web site....

Travis Culley was getting strangled by a trucker last month in the middle of Halsted, on a warm and clear Friday afternoon. The driver, a young man with short blond hair, was an inch or two shorter than Culley but much more muscular. As they struggled on the asphalt, Culley’s bicycle helmet was pulled behind his head, and the nylon strap tightened around his neck, pinning him to the pavement. His assailant climbed on top of him and began to throttle him with both hands....

Suzhou River By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s increasingly apparent that Hollywood is the main supplier of master narratives to national cinemas around the globe–with a few interesting exceptions, such as India, which still has an autonomous film industry. Other countries–including mainland China, Taiwan, and Iran–have been inundated only recently with commercial American pictures and consequently have been able to develop their own traditions independently....

Rock, Pop, etc. BIG WU Sat 11/17, 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. CELIA CRUZ, MICHAEL FEINSTEIN Fri 11/16, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-902-1500. Kerry Lynn McSweeny, Stefan Mantyk, and Robby Nothstine. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 PM, Bijou Theater, 1349 N. Wells. 312-409-8100. PHIL KEAGGY Sun 11/18, 3 PM, Elburn Countryside Center for the Performing Arts, 525 N. Main, Elburn. 630-365-3260....

Friday, September 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ely Guerra is one of the most original and arresting musicians Mexico has produced since the late 80s, when Spanish-language rock bands began turning to native traditions for inspiration. Her most recent album, the gorgeous Lotofire (EMI, 1999), has inexplicably failed to see release in the U.S., even though it was recorded in New York with a raft of well-known musicians, including guitarists Marc Ribot and Chris Whitley, bassists Melvin Gibbs and Greg Cohen, and violinist Eyvind Kang....

In the early 1960s, artist Alison Knowles and her husband, Dick Higgins, were part of the informal international art movement that came to be known as Fluxus. Higgins, Knowles, and fellow Fluxists like Yoko Ono emphasized the beauty of ordinary objects and attempted to break down distinctions between artists and other people and art and everyday life. Knowles, who started out as a painter, created performance pieces that included beating up on old furniture, finding an object in the street and giving it away, and eating the same lunch–“a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with butter and lettuce and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup”–every day for two years....

Biker’s Update: Boub Reconsidered Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That day, by a vote of four to three, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against Jon Boub (a case I wrote about for the Reader in 1998, on June 19 and November 20). In 1992 Boub, a former triathlete, rode his bicycle onto a wooden bridge in western Du Page County after a work crew had removed the asphalt filler, leaving inch-wide gaps between the bridge’s planks but not posting any signs warning of the hazard....

“We used to be a city that was relatively inexpensive,” says Josh MacPhee. “But Chicago is catching up real fast.” This weekend at public sites all over town, the Department of Space and Land Reclamation, a loose-knit group of more than 100 artists and activists, will launch a flurry of guerrilla “reclamation projects” aimed at raising awareness of the costs of gentrification and consumerism. MacPhee, who’s one of the organizers, says the goal is “to get activists, progressives, and community groups more concerned with the cultural aspects of what they do....

“Remember that MGM musical with Judy Garland and Van Johnson working in a music shop on Wabash?” said Lois Weisberg, head of the Department of Cultural Affairs, to Brad Thacker one day in April. “Isn’t it called Good Old Summertime? They sing from sheet music, don’t they? We should celebrate that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She knew she had a receptive audience. Thacker, a project administrator at the DCA, has been collecting sheet music from the 1930s and ’40s–flyer-size pop scores arranged mostly for piano and voice–since 1984, when he mounted a dinner theater revue called Sentimental Journey in Bloomington, Illinois....

Perhaps no classical Greek playwright invites updating more readily than Euripides. In his plays the grandeur of archaic myth collides with the sordid, often hypocritical politics of democratic Athens, producing an irony that feels subversive and playful in a particularly modern way. Like all good postmodernists, Euripides provides multiple points of view, and this polytonality has led today’s critics to label him a humanist, pacifist feminist, rationalist, irrationalist, and nihilist....

Live Bait Theater’s showcase of one-person performances features old and new work by a slew of fringe artists, among them Stephanie Shaw, Lotti Pharriss, David Kodeski, Mark Gagne, Judith Harding, Karin McKie, and Kristin Garrison. The festival climaxes with a salute to the late James Grigsby, whose solo show Terminal Madness was Live Bait’s first production in 1988. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The seventh annual Fillet of Solo Festival runs through August 25 at Live Bait Theater, 3914 N....

A New Brain Pegasus Players Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These are the premises of two musicals by playwright James Lapine currently playing in town. A New Brain, written with songwriter William Finn, is receiving its Chicago premiere from the recently renamed Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago, which had a deserved hit with the Lapine-Finn Falsettos a couple of years back. And Lapine’s Pulitzer-winning 1984 Sunday in the Park With George, featuring a score by Stephen Sondheim, is enjoying a revival at Pegasus Players....

Shortly after Kevin Crowley arrived in Chicago on August 19, he called his friend Anna Bahow to check in. Bahow was set to direct the world premiere of Crowley’s play Disgruntled Employees with Terrapin Theatre this fall, and rehearsals were scheduled to start that night. Bahow had to tell Crowley the news she’d just learned herself–that Terrapin artistic director Brad Nelson Winters had been found murdered in his apartment earlier that day....

I’m standing there on the platform looking into the parking lot of the convenience store right below the stop. There’s a Jeep parked below with two people in it. One is a woman reading a newspaper in the driver’s seat and the other is a guy who works in the store–I know because I used to go in there on my way home. So he’s sitting there, and I realize all of a sudden that he’s got his thing out and he’s masturbating and she’s just reading the paper....

When it comes to the occult–stuff like astrology, fortune-telling, life after death, and the stock market–I’d like to be rational, but I just can’t. I sort of believe in all that crap. A waiter calls from across the room: “Veectoria!” Another table has requested her services, but she doesn’t rush away. We just ordered coffee, and she’s promised to read the future in our grounds. “It’s like a picture,” she explains....

Julie Caffey’s autobiographical piece about her rocky relationship with her disgruntled older brother and reclusive father doesn’t take long to reach its inevitable conclusion: who we really are is who our parents made us. Water is the dominant motif: framing her tale with the biblical story of Jonah, she suggests the importance of destiny and biology and the regenerative properties of a cataclysmic storm. Still, the most penetrating moments in this hour-long self-help session are personal, when Caffey makes uneasy attempts to untangle the snarled branches of her own dysfunctional family tree....

After three long years, Latin America’s best rock band has finally released a new record–an EP containing four covers of tunes by the defunct underground Chilean rock band Los Tres. That’s hardly what Cafe Tacuba’s fans have been waiting for, but they should know by now how slow the Mexico City quartet is to record: prior to the epic double CD Reves/Yo soy (Warner Brothers, 1999) the band’s last original material dates back to 1994, when they released the classic Re....