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Japan’s Taku Sugimoto has become an anomaly in the ever expanding world of electroacoustic improvisation: when he plays his guitar, it actually sounds like a guitar. When sound for sound’s sake is the name of the game, an identifiable instrumental sound–let alone a linear instrumental statement–can absolutely rupture the context. But on the 1999 album The World Turned Upside Down (Erstwhile), where he plays with AMM’s brilliant tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe and percussionist-electronicist Gunter Muller, Sugimoto’s contemplative, softly articulated lines emerge from the undulating harmonics, electronics-enhanced scrapes and thwacks, and humming static like lights shimmering up from the depths of a fountain....

Teddy Blessing’s Adult Swim, Swab Productions, at Live Bait Theater. Written and directed by Dave Taylor, this rough but occasionally inspired comedy revue looks at obsessive behavior in dating, religion, art, employment, and a few other areas as well. The cast of seven (including Taylor) brings youthful if sometimes unfocused enthusiasm to this late-night show’s 13 sketches. In “Starbuck Trek”–a delightfully silly send-up of Trekkies and latte culture–a beleaguered team of baristas deals with the meltdown of critical coffeehouse systems....

New Releases PONYS I probably shouldn’t be recommending the M’s, since my girlfriend is their publicist, but their debut album–actually a collection of three EPs–is too good to ignore. A charmed collision of the Kinks, T. Rex, and even some of Sabbath’s trippier tendencies, it isn’t trapped by the limitations of the standard-issue power-pop platter. All four members write and three sing; they’ve got choral hooks big enough to snag a marlin and songs that build to some delirious highs–like the album’s centerpiece, the mini rock opera “Big Baby Bottoms”/”Break Our Bones....

Materia Prima In fact, somewhere in the middle of this hour-long solo piece you begin to see life-changing profundities in images of baby poop. These come after you’ve watched Shaw prowl about her makeshift kitchen late at night, traumatized by her young daughter’s terror at her own bowel movements. The beleaguered Shaw’s terry-cloth robe, unstyled clump of hair, and darkly circled eyes make her look more like a torture victim than a suburban mother of three....

Rock, Pop, etc. TOM CHAPIN & STEVE CHAPIN Tribute to Harry Chapin; sold out. Sat 6/1, 8 PM, Harold D. McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, Park and Fawell, Glen Ellyn. 630-942-4000. ARETHA FRANKLIN Sun 6/2, 7 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 and U.S. 30, Merrillville, Indiana. 773-734-7266 or 312-559-1212. INCUBUS, PHANTOM PLANET Wed 5/29, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, 6920 Mannheim, Rosemont. 847-635-6601 or 312-559-1212. LUCID DREAM ENSEMBLE performs as part of the symposium Art, Technology, and Spirituality, which features Suk-Jun Kim’s audio installation Thinking Tree, Gary Kendall’s sound installation Wayda, presentations, panels, and video....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, including a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. dance 52 classical 66 concerts BADLY DRAWN BOY Free in-store performance. Fri 8/2, 7 PM, Borders Books & Music, 830 N....

It’s easy to forget that after the Islamic revolution of 1979 there was more than a year of flux in Iran, amid the violence, when issues were debated and University of Tehran classes were filled with women in veils as well as female Marxists in khaki pants and loose shirts. In such a class Iranian-born and American-educated professor of literature Azar Nafisi taught Twain, Hemingway, Gorky, and Fitzgerald. But the fundamentalist regime clamped down in 1980, and a year later Nafisi was dismissed for refusing to wear the veil....

Music helped Billy Joe Shaver pull through the disastrous years in which his mother and his wife died from cancer, his son Eddy died of a heroin overdose, and he himself suffered a heart attack onstage. The solo acoustic “Fame,” the best song on his new album, Billy and the Kid (Compadre), is a touching meditation on what keeps him going: “Desire, that all-consuming fire / Is racing through my veins / Like lightning through the wire....

Chicago’s annual literary festival, formerly known as Chicago Book Week, is now a monthlong event. This year’s edition runs through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, tours, and children’s activities at locations throughout the city. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. See separate listing in Readings & Lectures for “One Book, One Chicago” discussions of Willa Cather’s My Antonia....

On September 11, Daniel Buckman was in New York City for his book tour. While jogging in Manhattan he saw the first plane as it headed toward the World Trade Center. “It was like, ‘One thousand one, one thousand two,’” he says. “You just knew something terrible was going to happen.” What did the former 82nd Airborne paratrooper do next? “I did what every good soldier boy does, man. I ran!...

Interpol Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there’s a distinction to be made between the natural emulation that a group might begin with while finding its own sound and the calculated sort done for the immediate nostalgic thrill. In the 50s Britain was awash in cheap copies of American rock ‘n’ rollers. Young rabid fans of American R & B, rock, and blues tried to reproduce note for note the music of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, or Muddy Waters....

A few years ago Wendy Miller, a Los Angeles-based cartoonist and writer, suffered a head injury and went into a coma. She says she was vaguely aware of being in a hospital room with nurses monitoring her and her family sitting beside her. Despite being unresponsive, she also remembers hearing a struggling contestant on Wheel of Fortune. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miller is fine now....

LUCINDA WILLIAMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few singers are so adroit at etching wrenching emotional details into their music as Lucinda Williams–and few guitarists are so empathically gifted as Gurf Morlix, who accompanied Williams on Lucinda Williams (1988), Sweet Old World (1992), and her breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998). But Williams ditched Morlix (along with a sizable cast of other supporting players and producers) while making that record, and his absence on her new album, Essence (Lost Highway), is noticeable....

Francisco Ramirez was having trouble sleeping. It was January 1999, and he’d just come home from a gig at the Fireside Bowl, playing bass with notoriously rowdy local punks the Traitors. “I couldn’t get to bed because my stomach was hurting,” he says, “so I went to the hospital.” For the first two years after his diagnosis, Ramirez kept the cancer at bay with pills and other relatively noninvasive treatments. He even managed a couple more tours with the Traitors, though not without making concessions to his illness....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an August article in the Washington Post, Maura Hall of Washington, D.C., has spent more than $25,000 on a kidney transplant and postoperative care for Lily, her gray long-haired cat. And an August BBC News dispatch from Sao Paulo reported on veterinarian Edgard Brito and the various cosmetic procedures he offers for dogs and other pets, such as wrinkle reduction, eyebrow correction, and even full face-lifts....

In response to Michael Miner’s useful article on [Steve] Chapman’s role in the Tribune series on the USA Patriot Act (“Trib: A Government’s Gotta Do What a Government’s Gotta Do,” December 5). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attorney General Ashcroft is prosecuting the environmentalist organization Greenpeace for “sailor mongering,” and might shut them down completely. “Sailor mongering” refers to an 1872 law which prohibits anybody from inducing a ship’s crew to desert their posts....

The Knife in Studs’s Back Ayers and Dorn weren’t the column’s only target. Neal also pulled the trigger on Terkel, noting that “the former radio personality…who does a pretty fair impression of the village idiot, gushes that this book is ‘a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world. Ayers provides a tribute to those better Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The other night while my wife and I were having dinner with another couple we got into a discussion about whether it was safe to let our two children, ages 12 and 11, ride public transportation. Drawing on my own experience riding buses and trains through some tough neighborhoods as a city kid, I maintained that it was reasonably safe if one took elementary precautions. The other dad remained agnostic, but the women were adamant that my childhood experiences were of no relevance–crime is far worse now, random violence is more common, “there’s a lot of nuts out there,” etc....

The Way of the World, Mom and Dad Productions, at Heartland Studio Theater. The worldwide craze for all things 80s marches on, with ever odder results. Take this foray into Restoration comedy. It’s common knowledge that the 80s were kind of the 50s (skinny ties, etc) and kind of 18th century (Les liaisons dangereuses, etc). But who knew they were the 17th century? Mom and Dad Productions has transposed Congreve’s sparkling work of 1700 to 1980s London and recast the roles....

In the last few years Darren Brown has dodged and darted around lots of obstacles that might have destroyed the little coffee shop he runs under the Ravenswood el stop at Montrose. But even the new Starbucks down the street wasn’t as big a threat as the CTA. More precisely, the CTA’s proposal to expand the waiting platforms at stops all along the Brown Line, an ambitious plan that will clear about 80 pieces of property from Kimball to Chicago Avenue–including Brown’s coffee shop, Beans & Bagels....