QWhile visiting my family for the holidays, my 72-year-old father informed me that a 29-year-old Russian woman was coming to America to be with him. He could hardly contain his excitement. Dad didn’t want me to tell my brother and sister, because he knew they would be critical of him being with a 29-year-old Russian virgin. He’s correct. They would judge him. But I couldn’t care less who he fucks....

Q My partner and I have a dilemma. A Funny you should ask, HTRC, as last weekend the boyfriend-in-America/husband-in-Canada and I attended the wedding of some dear straight friends. We weren’t the only same-sex couple at the wedding; there were “a number of people in attendance [without] access to the rights” our straight friends were signing up for. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All us homos at the wedding were delighted to be there and deliriously happy for our friends, and not one of us would’ve asked them to wait to marry until gay marriage is legal in all 50 states—something that isn’t going to happen until 2024 at the earliest, according to number-crunchin’ superstar political blogger Nate Silver (tinyurl....

QI’m a bi male in my early 20s who until recently was in the closet. I’ve been exploring my sexuality for the past year; I didn’t want to label myself and open a Pandora’s box of oppression in the American south before I knew who I was for sure. I learned through my exploration that I have a few kinks, and I’ve been acting on those kinks, seeing what I am and am not into....

Instability was a constant throughout Savage Republic’s decade-long career–they had a different lineup on every one of their four studio full-lengths and often sounded like a different band from song to song. Tragic Figures, their 1982 debut, ranged from apocalyptic rants set to the rattling shudder of massed scrap-metal percussion to ultracatchy guitar tunes that sounded like Glenn Branca fronting the Ventures; Customs, their 1988 swan song, mixed Einsturzende Neubauten clang and Flipper sludge and threw in a handful of lilting, Aegean-tinged acoustic instrumentals....

The nonprofit arts industry might be the new General Motors. Last week, just before a congressional subcommittee was to suggest a funding level for the NEA, Americans for the Arts released partial results from “the most comprehensive economic impact study of the nonprofit arts and culture industry ever conducted in the United States.” Guess what: the industry’s still booming! Or at least it was in 2005, the year studied, despite recent warnings from other quarters that philanthropic and government support is not keeping pace with its growth....

Amitabh Bachchan (left) in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby This week the River East 21 is showing two new Bollywood releases: Go Goa Gone, a horror-comedy about zombies attacking a rave party, and Shootout at Wadala, an action film inspired by the real-life standoff between Mumbai police and gangster Manya Surve in 1982. I suspect either film will make for a decent double feature with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (also playing at River East), which feels closer in spirit to a Bollywood spectacle than to F....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though they certainly weren’t the first DJs to tap into regional traditions, Tijuana’s Nortec Collective have engineered some of the most convincing and satisfying collisions between electronic music and indigenous sounds–they mostly draw on Norteño (Nortec = Norteño + techno) and its sister genres, making novel use of pumping accordion, banda’s brass swells, and the drunken-sounding but unfailingly in-tempo drum pileups that distinguish so much Mexican border music....

In 2002 sample master DJ Shadow released his second full-length, Private Press, but I didn’t get the reference in the title till a few years later. In the mid-aughts, obscure private-press albums that had been fetching ridiculous prices from rabid record collectors—Red Hash by Gary Higgins, You Think You Really Know Me by Gary Wilson—were reissued in a steady stream. There have been thousands upon thousands of private-press records, and only a few are indisputably accomplished pieces of art by musicians who simply didn’t have the good fortune to find a label to release them....

QI am a 22-year-old straight female. I used to babysit for a wealthy family, but their children have outgrown babysitters. The dad of this family is very into martial arts/fighting and has invited me over several times for “self-defense training.” I have accepted his invitations a few times, and it has always started off as a normal workout in their home gym—treadmill, weights, swimming laps—but he is always pretty anxious to get to the self-defense part....

Steppenwolf Theatre has announced that ensemble member Rondi Reed and frequent guest artist Deanna Dunagan, who both won Tony Awards for their performances in August: Osage County on Broadway last season, will reprise their roles when the play heads to London for an engagement at the National Theatre this fall. Dunagan and Reed won their Tonys for best actress and best featured actress respectively for playing roles they created when the drama–written by ensemble member Tracy Letts, who garnered both a best-play Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for his work–debuted at Steppenwolf last year....

Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Next Up gives directors and designers from the Northwestern University MFA program a chance to show what they can do. This year’s edition is running three plays in repertory: Keith Reddin’s Life and Limb, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and a new one by Emily Schwend called South of Settling. Schwend’s script has its good points, but it’s also way too amorphous—a collection of issues, characters, and conflicts waiting to be developed....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Newspapers are getting smaller, and there’s not a damn thing that can be done about that. In a letter to Romenesko (that I can’t, unfortunately, locate), a reader mentioned that the much-vaunted era of big papers was not a result of an expansion in the market but rather the contraction of it. Most cities don’t have as many papers as they did during the middle of the century....

Library-science student by day, independent label honcho by night, 27-year-old Rainbow Body Records founder Chris Sloan works at a high-end home audio store to finance the music. Having written his last rent check a year ago, he crashes mostly with his girlfriend. All in all, he says, he’s been “between places for a little while.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2006, deep in the throes of a heavy Brian Eno phase, Sloan and his roommate at the time were trolling MySpace for new bands, as they often did....

The pop charts have been a dangerous place for much of the past two decades. When N.W.A’s Efil4zaggin hit number one on the Billboard 200 in 1991, it established gangsta rap as a viable commercial product—and in the music’s majority white and middle-class audience, it ignited a seemingly insatiable appetite for vivid lyrical portrayals of black men working in the violence-­wracked crack trade. “Gangsta” soon became hip-hop’s default pose as far as mainstream culture was concerned, and the charts were full of men with reputed gang connections and allegedly itchy trigger fingers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Given the retrospectives devoted to Sergei Eisenstein, Mikio Naruse and Sergio Leone currently underway in Chicago—not to mention the Robert Bresson retrospective beginning tomorrow at the Siskel Center and the new print of Wages of Fear that opens at the Music Box today—it’s easy to overlook the one-off screening of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970) at Doc Films this Sunday at 7 PM....

Not Illegal, Not Obnoxious Either However, the minute anyone got up to speak in opposition, we were reminded that the so-called hearing was only in regard to adherence to the Lakefront Protection Ordinance and that all our comments should be specific to that. Shame on the city. The Park District did a clout-drenched deal with the Latin School. It got found out. Citizens protested the privatization of our parks. They objected to the wealthy private school getting priority service while public schools go lacking....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve noticed three stages to the coverage of the senseless slaughters that are coming at us fast and furious. The first stage begins with the bulletin, and then details are rapidly fleshed out as reporters race to the scene and survivors with cell phones begin transmitting words and pictures. The second stage offers profiles of the victims, the killer, and the community....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The news that Broadway producer Rocco Landesman has been nominated to become the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts brought to mind Landesman’s history in off-Loop theater. Back in 1994, Landesman’s Jujamcyn Theaters operation joined forces with erstwhile Chicago producer Bob Perkins to acquire the Royal George Theatre across the street from Steppenwolf. As then-Reader columnist Lewis Lazare reported, Landesman and Perkins envisioned the Royal George as “a busy venue for new work, commercial revivals, and the more challenging Broadway transfers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since arriving here back in 1997, drummer Nori Tanaka has made an ever-increasing impact on the local jazz scene. A native of Fukuoka, Japan, he moved here to study English at Roosevelt College and planned to relocate to a city on the east coast, but after meeting and playing with important mainstream figures like Bobby Broom, Robert Shy, Ron Dewar, and Dennis Carroll he decided to stay....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are so many impressive screenings around Chicago today—and all of them showing from film stock, no less—that you’d think it was Friday or Saturday. At 4:30 PM, the Experimental Film Society at the School of the Art Institute (112 South Michigan Avenue, Room 1307) will present The Devil’s Cleavage (1972), a feature-length soap opera spoof by the recently departed George Kuchar....