Revised since its screening last year at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, this fascinating and troubling documentary by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley chronicles the tortured history of Fortunate Son, the sensational 1999 biography of George W. Bush that was pulled out of stores by St. Martin’s Press after the Dallas Morning News revealed that its author, J.M. Hatfield, had been convicted of soliciting a murder 12 years earlier. Hawley and Galinsky wisely steer clear of the book’s controversial allegation that Bush was busted for cocaine possession in 1972, focusing instead on the tense relationship between Hatfield, a 43-year-old Texan laconically observing the disintegration of his career and personal life, and Sander Hicks, the enthusiastic punk publisher whose tiny Soft Skull Press reissued Fortunate Son in 2000....

As anyone who’s been on a road trip knows, touring the U.S. in a car means eating a lot of bad food. It’s the same for rock bands–during long drives from gig to gig, sustenance comes more often than not from highway rest stops. When you’re on your second tube of Pringles in one day, Denny’s never looked so good. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Most musicians I know are either hot dog eaters or they’re vegans that don’t cook, so they’re eating processed soy products,” he says....

Hyung Chong Kim became an artist when Korea could still be called “the land of the morning calm.” As a young man he learned to paint beautiful landscapes in his country’s 1,000-year-old style: spare studies of mountains, orchids, and young pink-cheeked women. After his family survived the Korean war, Kim gave his son, Sung Ho, two rules to live by: You must go to church every Sunday, to thank God for sparing us....

Mary Lou Zelazny’s dreamy images of young women and girls in nine new collaged paintings at Carl Hammer flirt with kitsch but ultimately transcend it to reveal an unusual spirituality. In Love in a Puff, a nude young woman in a diaphanous, billowing skirt walks a narrow plank suspended over an abstract nighttime cityscape; every element is a pastiche of differently shaped swaths of color painted on separate pieces of canvas....

Much Ado About Nothing, Signal Ensemble Theatre, at the Athenaeum Theatre. The tragedies and histories may gush more blood, but for all their ferocity, they’ve got nothing on the archaic sexism of Shakespeare’s comedies. The troubles visited on their luckless heroines often seem sprung from the savage mind of a 13-year-old patriarch, and the underlying complacency throws it all into stark relief–to a modern audience, more than a few of the insults and agonies inflicted are wildly alienating, especially in the context of light entertainment, and their resolutions are even more dumbfounding....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On June 28 in Orange County, California, sheriff’s deputy Owen Hall was standing next to a car he’d pulled over when he was struck in the leg with an arrow. Deputies combed the neighborhood and the next day arrested amateur archer Tri Thanh Lam, 44, who’d apparently been practicing in his backyard when one of his shots went awry....

Punk Primer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There aren’t a lot of duds among the 100 selections–though I could’ve done without the entries by chameleonic British poseurs 999 and kitschy proto-new wavers the Rezillos. And it’s hard to believe somebody thought the Boomtown Rats, even in their early punk mode, really warranted two slots. There’s a decent, if predictable, history lesson by Billboard columnist Chris Morris; Ira Robbins and Dave Schulps, cofounders of the influential punk and new-wave mag Trouser Press, pithily annotate the songs....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s ambitious yearly showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Over the years it’s mushroomed from a neighborhood happening to an event of citywide significance–especially now that it’s been taken under the wing of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs as part of a laudable effort to bring an off-off-Loop sensibility into Chicago’s downtown theater district....

When I was in the 9th and 10th grades I had no friends and I felt alone. When I entered the 11th grade, I started to hang with “cool” kids. Before school let out last summer some of my friends came over to my house for a party. My uncle and his boyfriend showed up and my so-called friends started to rag on them about being gay. My uncle is not one to let things go, so he put my friends in their place....

BLACK-EYED SNAKES 9/19, SCHUBAS Alan Sparhawk seems to think side projects are for catharsis, not relaxation–the Black-Eyed Snakes are primal and dirty in a way his other band, Low, never has been. Far from your typical country-rock- or garage-revival exercise, their second album, Rise Up!, harks back to the abrasive but simple junkie-cowboy chic of the Divine Horsemen or the Gun Club or even the latter-day Birthday Party, though something about its slinky, stylized menace suggests that their snake role model is the cobra that Bo Diddley wears for a necktie....

Dear Mr. Williams: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I worked very hard to create a cohesive sound for the show that would not only have the dystopic “taste” of Alex’s world, but it also had to echo and support Burgess’s themes. The strongest element that I worked from was the strange dichotomy of Alex’s tastes: his profane appetite for destruction (tongue in cheek there) to his love of the sublime manifesting in Beethoven and the classical idea of beauty....

Writers’ Theater Chicago continues to hack out the terms of its move from the back room of Books on Vernon, down the street, and around the corner to the Women’s Library Club of Glencoe. The troupe’s waiting for the club to approve a contract that’ll give them a lease on a larger performance space. It’s a slow process and the space will need work–executive director John W. Adams says that if they get the go-ahead in March, the curtain won’t go up on their first show there until September 2003....

A prostitute goads her father into having sex with her for pay, and that’s only the first taboo shattered in this 2001 video feature from Takashi Miike (Audition), heralded for his gleefully perverse take on contemporary Japan. The meltdown of the nuclear family continues when the father (Kenichi Endo) returns home to find his heroin-addicted wife being beaten by his school-age son, and a drifter invited to stay with them becomes both a catalyst for and a witness to the sadomasochistic mayhem....

Jeffrey Amon didn’t expect trouble when he left work on the evening of Tuesday, October 1. Amon is a 25-year-old musician whose specialty is the djembe, a West African drum. He’d just finished accompanying a dance class at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Lincoln and was hurrying to a class he teaches on the near west side. At this point, Amon says, he had two options. He could shut up and take the ticket, or he could plead his case....

Collectors of vintage paperbacks, pulp magazines, and the pinup-in-distress art that goes with them will convene this weekend in Elgin for the second annual Windy City Pulp and Paperback Show. Attorney Doug Ellis, coauthor of the Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (and the owner of 12,000 vintage magazines), says this year’s event offers 70 dealers, 100 tables of work by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dashiell Hammett, and a festival of films based on pulp stories....

The shame of Illinois. Daniel Dighton writes in the fall issue of the “Compiler”: “In 1970, with an operating budget of $65 million, there were six adult prisons holding about 7,000 inmates in Illinois. There was optimism that a newfound emphasis on rehabilitation of the offender would control inmate population growth by cutting down on recidivism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A simple ‘get the state off our backs’ position may look attractive when we are thinking about the sex lives of middle-class men,” writes the University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum in the New Republic (January 3)....

Control Issues IAP had offered a more odious version of Sharon’s boast. Claiming as its source a broadcast on the Israeli radio network Kol Yisrael, it had Sharon snapping to Shimon Peres, his foreign minister, “Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” The difference in language suggested that Geyer had tidied up Sharon’s boast so it wouldn’t be red meat for anti-Semites....

There’s an old joke that says any fortune-cookie fortune can be improved by appending the phrase “in bed”: You will experience great success–in bed. You will overcome many obstacles–in bed. In the same way, the principles set out in Richard Florida’s recent book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, can be improved, or at least clarified, by adding the phrase “if you’re a prosperous white man under 40....

It’s not every day you see big, burly men in skirts hurling what look like telephone poles around a field. But throwing the caber–an 18-to-26-foot log weighing anywhere between 75 and 150 pounds–is what Kevin Carpenter does for fun. He also tosses around 22-pound hammers and 56-pound stones, among other weighty objects, in a sport called Scottish heavy athletics. In fact, the 30-year-old Mount Prospect resident ranks among the top ten amateur competitors in the United States....

In the three years since Neal Pollack hustled to minor-league celebrity with the publication of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, he’s inspired his share of critical bile. Ask the bookish if you should pick up his first volume–a parodic portrait gallery of literary cliches–and the response will often be “Pfft. One-trick pony,” or the pithier “What an asshole.” But the strangest dismissal of the former Reader writer to date has to be the one made early on by a San Diego writer who said he didn’t exist–that “Neal Pollack” was a pen name for McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers, whose publishing imprint put out the book....