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Contemporary Irish drama checklist: Nearly indecipherable blue-collar brogues? Check. Crude euphemisms for sex with ugly girls? Check. Whiskey? Check. Stories detailing grotesque violence? Check. Mark O’Rowe’s two back-to-back monologues have all the most corrosive elements of recent Irish plays, but in Mike Tutaj’s staging they also offer humor and poetry. Pickled blackguards Howie and Rookie tell different stories about the same night out carousing. Brendan Melanson is impressive as Howie, a randy but seemingly harmless chap who’s looking for a poke....

Early one morning in the late 80s a penniless, sleep-deprived, filthy Ayun Halliday propped her foot up on a sink in a Munich train station restroom–“the better to wash my malodorous vagina,” she later wrote. It was a low point of an ill-starred Eurail excursion with her musician boyfriend, Nate, who’d crossed the Atlantic carrying only $200 and a briefcase full of harmonicas. Oktoberfest was in full roar, and the two “scuzzy vagabonds” had spent the previous evening in a beer garden, scavenging food from abandoned plates and trying not to think about trench mouth....

If you ask, most authors will tell you why they wrote their books. Hans J. Massaquoi’s reason has more to do with others. “My friends knew about my life, and they kept asking me if I was going to write a book,” says Massaquoi, retired managing editor of Ebony magazine. “I wrote it partly so they would stop asking.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like many German schoolboys, Massaquoi initially embraced the Nazis, who had come to power in 1932....

In the late 70s and early 80s, after stints with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and Horace Silver’s quintet, trumpeter John McNeil first pursued a solo career, for which he received strong notices from a handful of influential critics around the country. They admired the subtle iconoclasms of his style: a pure, slightly pinched tone, which contrasted sharply with the brashness of the day’s reigning horn men (such as Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw), and solos marked by graceful, even ethereal melodic contours....

Darren Jackson reminds me of just about every white boy with an untucked shirt and a lackadaisical approach to guitar tuning who slacked his way through the 90s, but he also does a damn good job of hiding his influences. On Kid Dakota’s So Pretty (Chairkickers, 2002) the downcast Minneapolitan and his bandmate, Christopher McGuire, don’t quote Archers of Loaf or Pavement or Built to Spill or Sebadoh so much as speak their language–a vocabulary of untrimmed edges, squeaking guitar strings, and deliberately misplaced beats....

“Eesinnuh, eesinnuh.” My mind flashed to Citizen Kane and Rosebud. I imagined Ben decades from now on his deathbed, uttering his last thoughts to someone who has no more idea what he means than I did. “Eesinnuh, eesinnuh.” It had been a nice day. Ben’s occupational therapist had called to cancel his standing appointment, which meant we had no scheduled activities for him that day. That can be a challenge. But the weather was nice for January, and Ben always loves the train....

Rene Letzgus’ 1998 French documentary of a 1976 concert is hampered by a few distractions such as shots from inside a car cruising through Paris and actor Richard Bohringer in a studio muttering comments in unsubtitled French. (To all appearances these intrusions are simply efforts to paper over gaps in the visual continuity.) But the event being documented is so riveting and so eccentric in its own right that the interruptions hardly matter....

On “Truth Serum,” from Smog’s latest album Supper (Drag City), Bill Callahan evades queries from an apprehensive lover, singing, “Honey, I love you and that’s all you need to know.” But it’s not like he can’t supply details when he wants to–it’s his gift for nuance that makes him one of the most compelling of contemporary songwriters. He rarely tackles obvious themes and favors evocation over declamation; when he sings “And the rain washed the price / Off of our windshield,” the only lyrics to “Driving,” it comes off as a hypnotic meditation on getting lost in emotion....

IDLEWILD 3/21, DOUBLE DOOR Those Brits–always trying to pull a fast one. Now they’re painting this quintet of cuties as the latest, hippest thing going, though the band’s been making records for six years. It took several producers and preproducers (most notably Lenny Kaye) and an awful lot of elbow grease to transform these former postgrunge yobbos into the post-U2 songwriting machine that churned out their latest album, The Remote Part (EMI)....

If you have any doubts about how difficult it is to sing jazz, just compare how many people attempt it with how many do it well. Even among the latter, Steve Evans stands out, for a couple reasons. For one, he approaches the job as a musician, rather than as an actor using melodies; he studied with Kevin Mahogany at Berklee, a school that emphasizes theory as much as technique. For another, he doesn’t have the deep baritone pipes that have distinguished most male jazz singers, from Joe Williams and Mark Murphy to Mahogany and Kurt Elling....

Over the past eight years there have been lots of productions of Jeff Goode’s jaundiced reindeer’s-eye view of the goings-on at Santa’s sweatshop. And all these shows have been at least passably entertaining: Goode expertly combines a satirist’s urge to skewer intellectual and moral cowardice with a flair for nonstereotypical comic characters. But only Frank Pullen–who staged the play in 2000 and revives the Journeymen’s production now–seems to know how to make this Santa send-up both outrageous and touching....

As a child, Bill Kimpton loved Monopoly. As a grown-up investment banker and entrepreneur, he now gets to play on a much grander scale. Kimpton’s formula of buying up run-down historic buildings and transforming them into intimate, idiosyncratic hotels with stylish adjoining restaurants has made his Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group one of the fastest-growing such enterprises around. The most recent additions to the Kimpton family are the Hotel Burnham and the affiliated Atwood Cafe, both in the Loop’s landmark Reliance Building....

Catholic School Girls Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whether it was a collective epiphany or something in the water, 1982 brought a higher-than-average offering of nun-centric theatrical exploration, from Jonathan Pielmeier’s dark, distressing Agnes of God to John R. Powers’s musical frolic Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? Casey Kurtti’s Catholic School Girls also dates from that year. She starts out very Powers-like, introducing the four girls we’ll follow from first through eighth grade at St....

In the 1780s his house was disgraced. Their baronetcy forfeit, their fiefdom seized, the petty nobles yet went on living, dazed and landlorn. Not knowing what else to do, they giddily embarked on a dumb show of picturesque fairy-tale peasanthood. They tried begging, but their tattered robes and ineffaceable dignity betrayed them at once. Next they tailed a caravan of Gypsies, who of course set their half-wild dogs on them. They fled across the river, where they tried to join the bargemen, but too weak to do their share, they were pitched from the boats....

Friday 11/14 – Thursday 11/20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To get the most out of a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, audience members should check their expectations at the door, says Bonnie Brooks, chair of the Dance Center of Columbia College. “The best thing is to go in with an open mind and bring your own life to it, and it can be wondrous....

Chicago Moving Company Nana Shineflug, 65, exemplifies the idea of “moving” in 1972–which is not to say that her ideas are dated but that she’s still invested in social criticism. For the company’s spring concert, “Places of Meeting,” she’s taken a chance on Atalee Judy, a self-proclaimed bad kid whose choreography recalls the tumultuous social climate from which the Chicago Moving Company emerged. When Shineflug asked Judy if she would make a dance for the troupe, Judy worried that they wouldn’t be up to her “bodyslam technique,” but Shineflug said, “I trust you…do whatever....

Big Love Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This ancient tale–and its rendition by Aeschylus in his drama The Suppliant Women–is the inspiration for Charles L. Mee’s offbeat, uneven, but compelling comedy-drama Big Love. Commissioned for the 2000 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville–and directed there by Les Waters, who’s transplanted that production largely intact to the intimate Owen Bruner Goodman auditorium–Big Love is an imaginative reworking of the myth and its implications, which are both timeless and oddly immediate....

Good news: artistic director Jim Vincent can choreograph. And well. Hired by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago less than two years ago, he once worked for Walt Disney setting up fashion shows and fireworks displays. That’s where he honed his organizational skills, but he learned dance from two masters, Jiri Kylian and Nacho Duato (who’ve also set pieces on HSDC). Vincent’s new work for the company, Counter/part, is a supremely musical piece for ten set to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos....

For nearly five decades, Jonas Mekas has been eminent in avant-garde cinema–as critic, publisher, exhibitor, archivist, and especially as filmmaker. The rapid-fire editing he brings to his film diaries provokes a perpetual refocusing of attention from instant to instant, intensifying the viewer’s experience of the moment even as it slips into the past. Scenes From the Life of Andy Warhol (1990) turns flickering glimpses of Warhol and various celebrities (Allen Ginsberg, John and Caroline Kennedy as children) into a fragmentary memento mori....

You don’t have to bang out primitive synth patterns or rudimentary electro beats to sound like an 80s revivalist. Take the Kills, the London-based duo of VV (aka Alison Mosshart, former singer of Florida indie-punk band Discount) and Hotel (Jamie Hince, who used to front the English power trio Scarfo): their bruised little debut EP, Black Rooster (Dim Mak), puts me in mind of Reagan-era blues-punk combos like the Gun Club and, particularly in the coed call-and-response vocals, X or Royal Trux....