DetroitSteppenwolf Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Receiving its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre under Austin Pendleton’s meticulous direction, Detroit unfolds in the adjoining backyards of two homes. Mary and Ben, a married couple struggling to escape their middle-class doldrums, live in one house. Mary is a paralegal with no real interest in her work. Ben is unemployed but hopes to launch his own financial planning business after reading a how-to book and building a website....

Q I’m a 27-year-old divorced woman. I married the first man I ever had sex with, and we had a very vanilla sex life. He refused to try any play with dominant/submissive roles. My fantasies have always involved submission, and my favorite porn features women being submissive. A Keep talking to your boyfriend, leotard, and you’ll be just fine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A I measured out three tablespoons of half-and-half, GSP, and you couldn’t drown a kitten in it, much less a GGG sex partner....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A little over five years ago, a group of former Chicago improv and sketch comedy whizzes returned from LA with their new show, Le Comedie du Bicyclette. Featuring songs by Mark Nutter–whose writing and performing credits range from off-Loop theater (including David Mamet’s fabled Saint Nicholas and the innovative Friends of the Zoo) to Saturday Night Live and 3rd Rock From the Sun–the show played at iO (ImprovOlympic at the time) before transferring to the Lakeshore Theatre....

Chicago’s filmgoing scene isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity, says cinephile and programming prodigy Gabe Klinger. Things are pretty chilly and distant. We slink silently into one of our handful of art houses, spend an hour or two in front of a flickering screen, and slink anonymously back out. No matter how mystifying or inspiring the film, in most cases there’s nothing said, nothing shared, no sense of an event. We might just as well watch alone in our bedrooms–which, increasingly, we do....

Robin Thicke in the “Blurred Lines” video Making fun of Robin Thicke is almost too easy, which may explain why I do it so often. There was that corny-ass video for his otherwise impressive debut single, “When I Get You Alone.” There’s his current “James Murphy goes to Vegas” look on display in the video for “Blurred Lines.” And even when you get tired of making fun of Thicke’s sartorial aesthetic there’s always the fact that he’s Alan Thicke’s son left to make fun of....

This dance-punk combo from Richmond, Virginia, grabbed me by the lapels with its self-titled 2003 debut. The EP showed up at the radio station where I sometimes DJ, and when I got an eyeful of the perfectly awful cover art–just the word VCR in a tacky early-80s-style font, like the logo Osco might use for a house brand ofcologne–I thought, “There’s no way this can’t rule.” And rule it does. In songs like “Rad” (sample lyric: “Rad!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » – This September, the duo’s first film, Electroma, is coming out on DVD through Vice Records. The press release says, “Daft Punk’s Electroma is an odyssey of two robots (played by Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich) who journey across a mythic American landscape of haunting, surreal beauty on a quest to become human. Their symbolic quest, which takes them from endless two lane highways to small idyllic towns to the arid desert, finds Daft Punk once again resisting conformity and developing new ways to highlight their inventive vision,” but I think it’s mostly going to boil down to “sad robots discover the power of the American road trip,” or “Daft Punk’s Crossroads....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pitchfork reported yesterday that none other than Prince has started using Twitter; but I’m dubious. While following Prince on Twitter is something I would do reflexively, this is not a proper “Prince” account but rather the official account of 3rd Eye Girl—the Purple One’s latest musical project—a quartet that consists of the man himself and three women on guitar, bass, and drums....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past week or so, I’ve been intermittently listening to the outstanding mix that Norwegian producer/DJ Todd Terje created for BBC’s Essential Mix series. Though it covers everything from disco to house to jazz fusion to a dub version of Men at Work’s “Down Under,” I find myself listening to the mix’s opening chunk the most, which includes Jim Morrison’s discofied “Ghost Song” and Herb Alpert’s slow-burning “Rotation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m anxiously awaiting the third and final installment of this month’s One Man Metal documentary—the first two have already been posted by Noisey, a video-based music division of Vice. The series profiles three of the most punishing one-man black-metal projects: Leviathan, Striborg, and Xasthur. While watching it, I found myself most fascinated with Scott Conner, aka Malefic, the man behind Xasthur....

Astringent naturalist August Strindberg, who anatomized the war between the sexes and classes in Miss Julie, went on a magical mystery tour with A Dream Play. In his attempt to “imitate the inconsequent yet apparently logical form of a dream,” a daughter of the gods spends time with the troubled children of men. Jaclyn Biskup’s adaptation (from Edwin Bjorkman’s translation) for the Mill Theatre is only partly effective. The text has been lightly updated and intelligently streamlined, but Biskup’s staging lacks fluidity and the performances lack confidence....

Stavros “Steve” Giannopoulos of the Atlas Moth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stavros “Steve” Giannopoulos handles the lion’s share of the lead vocals in the Atlas Moth, a three-guitar metal outfit whose towering roar carries bits of ass-shaking southern rock, misanthropic New Orleans sludge, and narcotic psychedelia the way a hurricane carries bits of aluminum siding. (They’re also the only band to date whose Kuma’s burger has involved collard greens and a waffle....

Best Rock or Pop Act aplatetectonicmusic.com. amyspace.com/projectmayhem617. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Reed formed this quartet, which also includes saxophonists Greg Ward and Tim Haldeman and bassist Jason Roebke, to interpret lost postbop classics written in Chicago in the late 50s. The rapport within the band is electric, particularly between Ward and Haldeman, who alternate sharp contrapuntal lines, cajoling ad libs, and inspired solos—and neither ever simply lays out while the other takes the spotlight....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except maybe it’s not so startling, since it pretty well describes my attitude too. Why worry about literal replication when you can get that by rereading the original material? And why make a movie at all if you’re not giving back more than you already have? What you want is something the book doesn’t provide . . . since, more than likely, it can’t....

While companies pushing drugs like Viagra and Cialis keep stalking their middle-aged male audiences with commercial after commercial on NFL Sunday—hawking little blue pills meant to evoke suggestive smiles and the dimming of lights—Dr. Craig Niederberger, professor of urology and engineering at the University of Illinois-Chicago, aims to investigate and reverse links between erectile dysfunction and his own target audience: male bicyclists. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once an avid cyclist himself, Niederberger, 51, is leading a study of the effects of bike seats on male pelvic blood flow that, down the line, will result in the engineering of what he hopes to be the least detrimental bike seat possible....

Few observers of city government would argue that the work force isn’t padded anywhere. But it wasn’t just padding that was cut to “balance” this year’s budget, and it won’t be this year either. From graffiti removal to pothole repair, services that citizens pay for through taxes have drastically diminished—though tax rates have gone in the other direction. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This has created a mounting political problem for many aldermen....

“Why did I choose to leave?” says John Ambrosia. “I believe very deeply that ethics matter and truth matters, and I don’t know if those things were always as honored as they should have been.” It wasn’t personal, he insists. He simply knew what was coming and didn’t want to be part of it. Green had instructions to undo damage, but the only change Ambrosia believed would make a difference wasn’t going to happen: spending more money on the product....

Jerry Quickley, one of two headliners at this second annual event, is a performance poet–and a natural-born comedian. But his Live From the Front covers the dark subject of Iraq and our presence there. Quickley was in Baghdad as a correspondent for Pacifica Radio in LA when the war began, and in the piece he adopts a flat voice to read chilling descriptions of bombs exploding and windows shattering and a dog trying to hide....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t mean to alarm anybody, but rap legend and fashion icon Kool Moe Dee turns 50 years old today, which seems completely insane. Is it possible that I feel this way because he was one of the first real rappers I ever heard, and that his 50th birthday reflects on my own advancing age and reminds me that we’re all on a path that leads inevitably to our deaths?...

When Evanston’s Maple Avenue Gallery closed a month ago, artist Mary Barnes-Gingrich—who’d shown there for five years—lost the venue where she’d hoped to sell a suite of allegorical oils called The Four Seasons. The technique she’d used to create them (up to 20 layers of paint, building to a luminous surface) is straight out of the Renaissance, but the subject matter couldn’t be more personal: the series is subtitled “The Life of a Violinist,” and the lissome musician Barnes-Gingrich portrays at the mercy of the seasons is her daughter Dawn Gingrich, an emerging classical musician....