It may well be that here in the West, we’ve all grown so resigned to living in a decadent society that we’ve just gone numb. But hopefully we still retain a vestigial third ear that enables us to hear the sounds of genuine, unalloyed joy—sounds we’re no longer so good at producing ourselves, but that we’re still capable of responding to. This could explain Shonen Knife’s ability to appeal even to hardened noiseheads like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore (who guests on their new album Rock Animals) or the tough-looking guy standing in front of me in the audience at their Metro show last December who started out scowling but eventually took to screaming gleefully at the band: “I love you, I love you, I love you!...

Antonio, a 19-year-old who lives in a homeless shelter on the north side, says he rarely sees his mother and only recently discovered who his father is. “My mother had 18 kids and not all by the same father. My mom and I don’t get along too well. My mom would get mad at me and throw me out. I wanted a real life, and she wanted me to stay home all the time to take care of my brothers and sisters....

Jeff Garlin’s going Hollywood: a whore by his own proud admission, he’s leaving Chicago to star in a “dumb,” “stupid,” and “bad” (by his own admission as well) TV sitcom. The plan, as he lays it out, is to get famous and make lots of money so he can come back and make filmic rhapsodies to his hometown. (“I want to be to Chicago what Woody Allen is to New York....

Who will walk my iguana? According to recent publicity, Near North pet-sitter Bonnie Marty “offers pet-sitting services for all animals with the exception of reptiles.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We regret to inform you that this position has already been filled. From a recent publicity letter by Blue Dolphin Publishing: “Master of Love and Mercy is the life story of Dharma Master Cheng Yen, a Buddhist nun who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and has been awarded the Eisenhower Medallion for her contributions to world peace....

“Misty? A butch named Misty?” Vernita Gray said in utter dismay. She leaned over the railing around the dance floor and stared incredulously at the seven women lined up to compete in this year’s Butchiest Dyke Contest. Out under the hot lights Misty, long hair tied back, decked in leathers and flannel, was gamely getting ready to do the Walk. The Walk–a nonverbal part of the program–was designed to show coolness....

Vocalist Tyrone Davis has taken great pains to deny that he’s a blues singer, but ask most of his fans what they think of him and odds are they’ll call him one of the best bluesmen in the business today. Davis spins his tales of love and infidelity–usually with a moral attached, always with a smooth combination of streetwise assertiveness and disarming warmth–over sophisticated rhythms and unique, ear-catching instrumental arrangements that seldom employ the traditional 12-bar blues form....

Up Down Fragile With Cote, Denicourt, Richard, Anna Karina, Andre Marcon, Bruno Todeschini, Wilfre Benaiche, Enzo Enzo, and the voice of Laszlo Szabo In a way, the title of Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us says it all. Solitude and togetherness are the two great themes of his work, often intertwined like the melodic lines of a fugue, and Paris often seems to function as the orchestra that performs and places those melodies, charts their coexistence and their interplay....

Pat O’Neill makes a living doing special effects for the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but he’s also been making his own independent 16-millimeter films since 1963. Most use optical printing (a kind of image manipulation through frame-by-frame rephotography) to produce unusual imagery, a process O’Neill once described as attempting to represent paradoxical visions–for example, the misperceptions that sometimes appear on waking. In the early 80s he began working improvisationally on a longer work, filming with a computer-controlled time-lapse camera and incorporating footage from his other projects and old movies....

ZASTROZZI Zastrozzi is seeking revenge against the artist Verezzi, who apparently had something to do with the brutal murder of Zastrozzi’s mother. The crazed Verezzi maintains that Zastrozzi is merely a figment of his assistant Victor’s imagination; it is Victor’s cunning that has allowed them to escape Zastrozzi for the past three years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Alec Wild and Folio Theatre can be faulted in their production, it’s for sticking too faithfully to Walker’s text....

By Michael Miner Bowles reasoned, “The issue of homosexual marriage involves a great deal more than ‘live and let live’ tolerance for that which is different. It opens doors that are best left closed. What will we say to the bisexual who demands the right to marry the man and woman of his choice? What will we say to the pedophile who swears he never chose to be what he is?...

Artist Goes Gallery Hopping Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I didn’t think it was right to just steal Steve, because I knew Fitz didn’t want to lose him,” Klein says, adding that he wanted to help Fitz Gerald out because he admired his taste in art and the way he’d managed Space Gallery during the six years of its existence. According to Klein, while relatively young galleries such as Space serve a valuable purpose by helping emerging artists get noticed by collectors and others who can boost their careers, his own gallery cannot afford to traffic in the inexpensive work of emerging artists....

The impassioned music of this Bay-area Afro-Cuban combo provides a serious challenge to New York’s hegemony on the salsa scene. With their somewhat folkloric stylistic diversity Conjunto Cespedes paint a significantly more inclusive picture of Cuban music than the reigning stars in New York, many of whom aren’t even Cuban. On a pair of excellent albums for Green Linnet, including the recent Vivito y Coleando, this large ensemble freely interprets and updates Cuba’s myriad musical flavors....

CRIMINAL HEARTS, Strawdog Theatre Company. Strawdog worked for more than two years to win the rights to this work by Jane Martin, the pseudonymous feminist playwright. After all, it’s Martin’s first comedy set in Chicago, specifically a Gold Coast condo. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It hardly seems to have been worth the trouble, however, despite the playwright’s sympathy for life’s underdogs. Predictable and heavy-handed, glib and oversimplified, the play contrives to connect two women from very different backgrounds who’ve both been exploited....

There is a lot of talk these days about our city’s critics. The talk is both negative and positive. Most often the conversation fills me with more questions than anything else. One common scenario is that of the freshly blasted theaterite condemning the critic that just defecated all over his/her show. It is almost humorous to watch as the freshly anointed one goes through the ritual of “dissecting the review” and slowly but surely removing any trace of the critic being an experienced theatergoer, and rationalizing them into broom-carrying trolls who should not be allowed out of their crypts to attend our glorious productions....

CUTTING BAIT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six of the artists are women, and it is largely their work that gives this show its punch, as they poke fun at a medium whose hierarchies have (until recently) pretty much excluded women. There is a pithy anger in some of the work. Rachel Hecker and Barbara Kass parody Lichtenstein and Warhol respectively, using familiar American icons....

ROLLING STONES I’m sneaky as a snake Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whoa–down, boy! That’s not from some novelty song, please note: that’s from the supposed-to-be-dangerous grinder, “Terrifying,” from Steel Wheels. Its rather strained chorus goes, “I get these strange strange strange desires.” Jagger has had five years between albums to come up with new songs. For Voodoo Lounge he has a germ of a song idea: his love is–what?...

For a boisterous and manly ego, there’s nothing like being a dissident in a free country. The risks are few and the rewards can be magnificent. Rush Limbaugh has made himself a millionaire many times over by saying, many times over, what he thinks is unsayable. Noam Chomsky has been playing a similar role for many years, though to a much smaller crowd. He hasn’t gotten rich, but he has achieved a kind of political sainthood, which may be the equivalent at his end of the spectrum....

HARDHEAD FLAIR: IN SO MANY WORDS, PART TWO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I once taught a child–one of my favorite students–who was diagnosed as mentally retarded. Unaware of the diagnosis, I had described her to one of the school counselors as unable to grasp social subtleties but able to plunge effortlessly and imaginatively into all her art projects. Once given a little guidance nothing ever stopped her, and she worked arduously until the end of the period, deep in her world, making beautiful things....

Through a series of intertwined frank confessions from a cross section of eight American and English subjects, this feature documentary made for the BBC by Vikram Jayanti and John Powers explores the phenomenon of the pleasure principle running amok. With a mixture of narcissism, cynicism, and sadness, each of these self-proclaimed sex addicts recounts past encounters and fantasies, all too willingly serving up his or her own pathology for scrutiny. What they also seem to share is a penchant for Freudian analysis: parents, baby-sitters, and wayward spouses are cited as chief causes for their loneliness and inability to love....

Joel Meyerowitz on the Street: New York City, 1969 is truer to the improvisational tradition of street photography. The overall composition is not perfect, not particularly beautiful in itself–in fact it’s somewhat chaotic. We see a group of pedestrians on a footbridge in Central Park; a photographer with his back to us appears to be setting up for a fashion shoot. This ironic little joke on street photos–which are generally shot spontaneously with a hand-held 35-millimeter camera–becomes even more evident when one notices at left, outside the central composition, a shirtless man who’s just jumped off the bridge....