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Over the last four or five years the world of improvised music has become infatuated with electronic sound: if a musician isn’t accompanied by someone generating muffled gurgles, high-frequency sine waves, or low-end rumbles, chances are his acoustic output’s getting fed into a laptop for real-time processing. But these experiments are old hat for a handful of musicians, two of whom are spotlighted on this bill, part of this year’s Outer Ear Festival of Sound....

Bernd Brandes was recorded on video in 2001 eating his own penis. Brandes isn’t an autofellator, like others who’ve written in, but a man who wanted to be eaten by a cannibal. He found one on the Internet, and allowed this man to cut off his penis and fry it in a pan. Brandes’s penis was overcooked and rather tough, it turns out, but the man who fried Brandes’s penis, Armin Meiwes, killed Brandes anyway and ate other parts of him....

Rich with comic flourishes, Gary Griffin’s 80-minute family-friendly condensation of Shakespeare’s pastoral mating ritual for classical heroes, feuding fairies, and foolish mortals is surprisingly streetwise. Happily, Griffin’s cuts don’t cut deeply, and the shtick he’s added serves the characters and story well. Jason Denuszek’s punk Puck bursts into infectious rap while Felicia Fields as the “wall” belts the blues, paying tribute to lonely partitions everywhere. Clever bits abound: Oberon beeps Puck to make him haul ass....

Jeff McMahon Katy Fischer: Highlands Commute Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The photograph Copper Art 2 both invokes and parodies the idea of the image as powerful. We see almost 50 copper medallions hanging on a Peg-Board (the occasion was a swap meet). Here the artist tweaks mass-culture image making as arbitrary conjuring: a horse or mushroom medallion is presented with the same care, or lack of care, as a Madonna and child....

SOFT BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If ever a band got together at the wrong place and the wrong time, it was the Soft Boys. In England in 1976, first-generation punk rockers like the Clash and the Sex Pistols were setting the tone in rock ‘n’ roll with power chords and proletarian posturing. But singer-guitarist Robyn Hitchcock, guitarist Kimberly Rew, drummer Morris Windsor, and bassist Andy Metcalfe (later replaced by Matthew Seligman) played ambitious pop that mated Hitchcock’s surreal lyrics to soaring Byrds-esque harmonies, acid psychedelia a la Syd Barrett, Beefhearty avant blues, and antique folk rock....

AZITA 12/26, EMPTY BOTTLE Azita Youssefi would, in a fairer world, make anyone’s short list of the city’s most interesting avant-garde musicians. In her noisy early-90s band, the Scissor Girls, the bassist and pianist proved she had nothing to prove as a no-wave revivalist. Her subsequent project, Bride of No No, broke up last year but released an untitled final album this year on Atavistic. Chilly, intelligent, and more suggestive than declamatory, it sounds closer to her solo work than the group’s first record did....

AFFLICTIONS 9/13, BEAT KITCHEN I’ve only seen this band once, at Cal’s–a comfortably skanky and ancient-feeling bar in the Loop–which was the ideal place for it. Garage and its ilk ought to be heard (if not in a garage) in a place like that, in the middle of a city that looks like a city, under a half-on, half-off neon liquor sign, with no stage of any sort to prevent a hyperkinetic front man like Jeremiah McIntyre from falling right into you....

Friday 17 NINA SKY Not the solo act you might expect from the name but a sister act–the 18-year-old Nuyorican identical twins Nicole and Natalie Albino, who are responsible for one of this summer’s most infectious jams, “Move Ya Body,” a minimalist cocktail of sly entreaties over a tough dancehall groove. While it may well be their only hit, their self-titled album is surprisingly listenable, nicely conflating current tastes in electronic R & B, dancehall, and hip-hop....

Too Many Presidents Jarrett and Angela Harkless were CABJ board members together in 1998, she a comer in the organization and he an eminence whose enthusiasm was ebbing. “He came to the first two board meetings and never came back,” she recalls. “He’s made his opinion known about me as a journalist. I gather he does not approve of me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Harkless was elected president in 1999 and just stepped down....

Rock, Pop, Etc. MARSHALL ALLEN, MICHAEL GIBBONS perform at a screening of films by James Harrar. Fri 9/26, 8 PM, Ferguson Theater, Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan. 773-293-1447. IRVING & RAGINA BUNTON with Judith Arleen Mitchell & Crystal White. Sun 9/28, 4 PM, University Church, 5655 S. University. 773-363-8142. DADA, GOLDSTARS All-ages. Sat 9/27, 7:30 PM, Pickwick Theatre, 5 S. Prospect, Park Ridge. 847-604-2234. FROM GALWAY TO BROADWAY with Ciaran Sheehan, Fiona Murphy, Eily O’Grady....

AMM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To borrow a metaphor from an old fable, British percussionist Eddie Prevost is an ant. Though some improvising musicians thrive for a season and disappear, like the proverbial grasshopper, Prevost has dug in for the long haul–since 1965, when he founded AMM with guitarist Keith Rowe and saxophonist Lou Gare, he’s worked tirelessly in the trenches, serving as both a self-effacing booster of improv and a personification of its grassroots politics....

Friday 3/8 – Thursday 3/14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1915, using the political intrigues of World War I as cover, Turkish nationalists forced the deportation of almost two million Armenians from Ottoman Turkey. En route to Syria and Mesopotamia, 600,000 to 1.5 million are estimated to have starved or been massacred. The survivors fled into exile, and most of their stories remained untold as they tried to shed difficult memories and start new lives....

The city’s annual literary festival continues through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, and children’s activities at bookstores, public libraries, and other venues. All are free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www.chicagopubliclibrary.org, or contact the hosting venues. SATURDAY 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Literary Chicago” Guided tour departing from the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

Ten or so years ago, clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre’s cool jazz was generally considered way uncool: too soft, too unassertive, too short on grit. Nowadays folks think more kindly of him, his case made both by numerous reissues of once forgotten classics and by admiring clarinetists such as Michael Moore and Francois Houle. (Giuffre’s still with us, but is retired from active duty.) His influence is evident in the local clarinet-bass-drums trio Design Flaw too, though this is hardly a band of copycats–Giuffre’s trios often dispensed with drums....

In an age that worships fame and wealth it’s inevitable, I suppose, for most people to remember the celebrities who took classes at ImprovOlympic: Chris Farley, Andy Dick, Mike Myers. But what makes that talent factory remarkable–and partly accounts for its longevity–is how egalitarian it is, churning out scads of strong, funny, committed performers. Most ImprovOlympic alums are not famous. Or they’re famous only among other professionals: Brian McCann, who writes for Conan O’Brien (and occasionally performs on his show), is respected by his fellow comedy writers, and teacher-director Susan Messing casts a long shadow in Chicago’s improv world and almost no shadow outside it....

One of the things I did right away when I got back from Iraq was come here, where I used to drink when I went to UIC. I went over to Iraq in April 2003 and was sent home in August until February, then back until April. From April until August I was in Kuwait–which was great because they kinda have nightlife. The malls are bumpin’ and crowded with people. It’s like “California Dreamin’” on the Gulf Road, or like Lake Shore Drive–these guys have Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Ferraris, and they’re cruisin’ about....

One night I was here at one of the outside tables. At another table was this attractive lady, then an empty table, and then another man. They were talking across the empty table. Then I see this gentleman who is a frequent visitor here take the table between them. I’m not passing judgment, but he’s a psychotic socializer. He just walks up and talks to anybody. He works the crowd almost like a politician, shaking everybody’s hand....

Vince Gill Gill captures that moment in every country star’s career when the stylistic vogue shifts and the slide from the top begins–a process that gets short shrift in country-music discourse even though it’s been going on ever since the music’s commercial beginnings in the 1920s. Songs about the changing of the guard tend to be superficial laments that conveniently avoid the messy facts of history. The Dixie Chicks’ “Long Time Gone,” written by Darrell Scott, voices the party line when it complains about country radio: “Now they sound tired but they don’t sound Haggard / They got money but they don’t have Cash / They got Junior but they don’t have Hank....

By Ben Joravsky Designed by landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, the Point stretches east from 55th–a long promenade of grass, trees, and plants rimmed by limestone blocks that allow people to wade or jump into the water. “The beauty of the Point is not just the trees and the meadow–it’s the water access,” says Clement. “You can launch little boats from the rocks. You can dive or wade in and take a swim....

The national and international galleries exhibiting in Art Chicago this year all display work not previously seen here, but many of the 31 Chicago galleries in the fair are also unveiling art that’s unknown hereabouts–often because it has just arrived. Among the strongest pieces making their debuts are four wonderfully supple color-field works by Jim Hodges at Rhona Hoffman (booth C211). They’re created by drenching paper pulp with raw pigment and using a press to transform it into a sheet of paper; the colors seem at once transparent and luminous....