Jane Eyre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given the book’s reputation as a protofeminist tale, what most surprised me about Jane Eyre was how preoccupied it is with men. Brontë struck a mighty blow for her gender when she created her title character and narrator, an orphaned girl who matures into a formidably self-possessed young woman; Jane’s moral sensibility is so detailed, so fully realized, that no reader could think her any less a person than the men surrounding her....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been bingeing on Sparks albums all day (Kimono My House, Introducing Sparks, Angst in My Pants, etc). This is entirely thanks to the charming (and preciously humble) performance by the Mael brothers last night at Lincoln Hall, the first of two shows they’re playing in Chicago as part of the “Two Hands, One Mouth” tour. In front of a crowd of mostly staunch devotees—some who have undoubtedly followed the art-pop duo throughout their four decades and 22 studio albums together—Ron and Russell performed alone on a stark stage, the former seated in front of his “Ronald” keyboard, stone-faced and brooding, and the latter working the small stage like a man whose been front and center the majority of his life, microphone in hand and theatrics in voice....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hyde Park’s isolation was by design. At its boundaries, the university bought and leveled city blocks that could serve as a buffer, or moat, from the surrounding South Side as it filled with impoverished blacks. The isolation brings a whiff of unreality to the neighborhood. The place seems unrooted. It’s neither one thing nor the other. Hyde Park lacks the freewheeling energy of a college town, and it lacks the surprises and variety of a healthy city neighborhood....

Count me among those who assumed Vallas’s entry into the race would change some of Peraica’s plans. In 2006 Peraica, a county commissioner, captured the Republican nomination for board president in a primary that wasn’t exactly fierce, since he was the only candidate in it. He went on to lose a bitter general election race against Democrat Todd Stroger, but by not getting slaughtered, and by spending the next three years reminding people that he was still not Todd Stroger, Peraica appeared to be positioning himself for another run in 2010....

Saint Patrick’s Day festivities begin this weekend and carry on right through the next. See chicagoreader.com for listings through 3/18. The South Side Irish Parade begins at noon on Sunday, March 11, at Western and 103rd and travels south on Western to 114th. Daylight saving time starts the night before, so don’t forget to spring forward, or you may miss your bus. The dyeing of the Chicago River kicks off Saint Patrick’s proper at 10:45 AM on Saturday, March 17, and is best viewed from the Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive bridges....

QI’m a 33-year-old man, married eight years and mostly happy. My problem seems common: my wife has lost interest in sex. We have sex once every two months, maybe once a month if I’m lucky. When we do have sex, it seems to be good for both of us. It wasn’t always this way—we used to have great chemistry and were both GGG in better days. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Q I’m a 41-year-old, very attractive, happily married woman. My husband and I have been together for 15 years. When we first met, the sex was absolutely incredible. After we got married, the sex was good, not great. This was because we were busy raising our children. (My husband had custody of four-year-old twins, children from his first marriage, when we married.) The reason I know our sex life suffered while we were busy raising the kids is that after the girls went off to college, things went right back to absolutely incredible....

Scenes from an earlier outbreak of bubonic plague The heyday of the bubonic plague ended about 400 years ago, but that doesn’t mean the disease doesn’t still exist. [Insert noise of impending doom here.] There are between 1,000 and 3,000 cases worldwide per year—a mere drop in the bucket compared to the 75 to 200 million during the Black Death of the Middle Ages—and scientists, in particular Wyndham Lathem, a professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, are curious about what made the disease tick....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On one hand, Blagojevich is the governor. Since the legislature did nothing, neither impeachment or rushing through legislation for a special election, to prevent Blago from making the appointment, it’s still his job and his right. And given that the subtext of the criminal complaint is that he’s crazier than a shithouse rat, he can’t be fairly expected to stop doing it....

It’s 1931, and Joseph Stalin wields more power over Russia than any czar ever did. Not content to lead his comrades into the new economic order, he means to reengineer their psyches as well. Private life has been abolished as a relic of pre-Bolshevik decadence. The new human is to be, wholly and completely, a component of the state. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stalin’s despotic vision reaches down into the quiet confines of the government publishing house depicted in John Lowell’s sharp 2009 play....

thursday8 Thursday8 Zemog el Gallo BuenoFay Victor Friday9 Fred Hersch TrioBaaba MaalMi Ami The Soft PackThe Tomasz Stanko QuintetFay Victor Saturday10 Fred Hersch TrioMajor LazerMission of Burma Monday12 Florence & the Machine Tuesday13 Gebhard Ullmann Clarinet Trio Wednesday14 Pissed JeansGebhard Ullmann Clarinet Trio FAY VICTOR The Freesong Suite (Greene Ave Music), the latest album by New York vocalist Fay Victor, genuinely surprised me: as soon as I thought I had a handle on its style, the next track would do something else....

thursday3 Thursday3 Barrington Levy Resonance Ensemble Kurt Rosenwinkel Group Tiger Bones Friday4 American Heritage Nicole Atkins Iron & Wine Junk Culture Kurt Rosenwinkel Group Saturday26 Bilal Sunday6 Rodney Crowell Junk Culture Resonance Ensemble Kurt Rosenwinkel Group Monday7 Janet Jackson Tuesday8 the Ex Janet Jackson Wednesday9 Nels Cline, Dave Rempis, Devin Hoff, and Frank Rosaly Janet Jackson Rafael Toral KURT ROSENWINKEL GROUP On his most recent album, Our Secret World (Word of Mouth Music), guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel feasts upon seven richly inventive orchestrations of his own tunes by three associates of Portuguese big band Orquestra de Jazz de Matosinhos....

friday15 PANTHERS One of these days Brooklyn’s cage-pacing Panthers (former members of the screamo band Orchid plus Turing Machine guitarist Justin Chearno) will have to decide if they want to be a neo-prog outfit with some stoner gravity, a tentacle of the brainy-metal octopus, or a Fugazi-damaged riff machine–sometimes I think they’d be happiest if they managed to write a “Black to Comm” or a “Sister Ray” and just jam out on that free-form for years....

Rookies and old hands converge on a level playing field during Thodos Dance Chicago’s annual company showcase, “New Dances.” In one of this year’s ten premieres, new Thodos performer Kyle Hadenfeldt skillfully treats an age-old subject—finding oneself—in his elegant, spare Familiar Faces. Music editor John Nevin layers the sounds of a thunderstorm over two stirring pieces of music as six dancers aggregate and separate in cascading formations that suggest isolation, support, and betrayal....

You can describe mixologist Paul McGee in a number of different ways: cultishly beloved, iconically bearded, preternaturally talented when it comes to slinging booze. Just don’t call him a sellout. But here’s the deal: While there’s only one Paul McGee—and while Logan Square scenesters were understandably distraught about their favorite bartender crossing over to the other side—there are plenty of hip, able drink makers who remain rooted in that neighborhood. In fact, some might say there are a few too many of them there, and that it’s time to share the artisanally bittered love....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His opponent, Republican incumbent Maureen Murphy, had challenged the validity of his nomination petitions. Word had it that behind the scenes no less than Democratic Party chair and house speaker Michael Madigan was working for Murphy. Madigan’s spokesman denied it, but one thing was certain: no major Democratic leaders from the southwest side were helping Houlihan, despite his coming from a political family (his father was a state rep from the far-south suburbs)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll tell you what: this fucking Writer’s Diet website, which was linked to in a recent New York Times blog post about “zombie nouns,” adjectives or verbs or whatever that become nouns with the addition of suffixes (“-ism,” “-ation,” etc). The author, Helen Sword, mentions that academics love this practice especially, and I was reminded of the time I attempted to read, for recreation, Jose Esteban Munoz’s book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (nouns can become zombie nouns too, Sword notes, with the addition of a stupid suffix) but did not actually make it past the first paragraph....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Beachwood Reporter’s Hipster 101 post on what you can’t read if you don’t want to be a snotty urbanite, combined with a lively discussion thread at Chicagoist, has me realizing there’s pretty much nothing I can read on the bus without marking myself as an unfortunate cultural stereotype. The Man With the Golden Arm is out (“only for Chicago hipsters”); I wonder if The Last Carousel, which I just purchased, is safe....

A car crash and the Oresteia helped shape A Crack in Everything, the hour-long quintet with which Zoe | Juniper make their Chicago debut. In an interview, choreographer Zoe Scofield discussed an accident she and her father had when she was 16, which they remember very differently. For her, the scene was well lit and silent; for him, it was dark and noisy. A Crack in Everything speaks to such pivotal, highly subjective “before-and-after moments,” Scofield said—to the “space between cause and effect....

Last summer I previewed a concert by an excellent New York jazz trio called Chives, led by the reedist Steven Lugerner, an ambitious composer, arranger, and conceptualist who seems to be overflowing with ideas. That impression is only reinforced by his strong new album, For We Have Heard (due May 14 on No Business/Primary), his second session with pianist Myra Melford, trumpeter Darren Johnston, and drummer Matt Wilson. Lugerner used texts from the Book of Joshua in the Torah to title each piece, and he further composed the music by using gematria, a traditional rabbinical system of assigning numbers to particular words or phrases....