Richard Linklater goes Hollywood–triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock (1945). After meeting on a train out of Budapest, a young American (Ethan Hawke) and a French student (Julie Delpy) casually explore Vienna for 14 hours. What emerges from their impromptu date has neither the flakiness of Linklater’s Slacker nor the generational smarts of his Dazed and Confused (though it’s closer in its picaresque form and lyricism to the former), but it does manage to say a few things about the fragility and uncertainty of contemporary relationships....

Julien Alberts’s 1935 lithograph History Pastiche #1 is one of the 90 or so Depression-era prints in the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery’s permanent collection that go on display this week. The exhibit opens Thursday night, April 21, with a reception from 6:15 to 7:30 at the gallery, 1967 South Campus Drive on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. Beforehand Mary Kinzie, Reginald Gibbons, and Eileen Cherry will give a reading of Depression-era poetry at Northwestern’s Annie May Swift Hall, 1905 Sheridan Road, starting at 5:30....

“Dearly Beloved Friends,” the notice under the black wreath on the door reads, “Welcome to the Coven Funeral Home.” Inside, mourners sign the registration book, sit on the two tasteful couches under the Kandinsky print, and stare at the far wall where a body is lying in state. A dozen large floral arrangements ring the room, and the air is fragrant with the smell of gladiolas, mums, and carnations. The corpse appears to be female, well into her golden years, with red lips, tight black curls framing her face, and, um, hairy arms....

Festival of Comedy Quick, which of the following is obscene: a woman juggling dildos, or two bare-breasted women embracing? The lyrics to an old Beatles tune (“I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than be with another man”), or a lesbian in pasties entertaining her friends with “I Wanna Be Loved By You”? If you’re not sure, you can compare the options by seeing these productions. Girl Party–the companion piece to Party, a popular all-male gay comedy–offers straight talk about lesbian sex, some nudity, and a little sexual horseplay....

James Carr Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If James Carr had recorded only “The Dark End of the Street,” his place of honor in the R & B firmament would be secure. That 1967 hit, a chilling vignette of furtive love and romantic desperation, has been praised as the finest soul ballad ever waxed–Carr employs a pantheon of gospel embellishments yet remains utterly in control as he stares into the face of catastrophe (“They’re gonna find us!...

Solopalooza at Sheffield’s Beer and Wine Garden, through March 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People who hate performance art are probably thinking of the third category, with its beautiful but empty imagery, unfathomable symbolism, and fractured story telling (frequently coupled with a pathological dread of entertaining, or even engaging, the audience). True, a few brilliant performers–among them Goat Island, Michael Kalmes Meyers, the Baubo folks in their more inspired moments–can take these elements and fashion moving, beautiful, transcendent work....

On opening night of his all-new, all-glamorous, all-marionette Les Petites Follies, Ralph Kipniss, wearing a frilly tuxedo shirt and black tie, is moving through the crowd and shaking hands. He wants to personally greet the nearly 50 guests who have come to the Puppet Parlor, his theater in a Montrose storefront. He’s a showman, after all, and just like Florenz Ziegfeld he’s no slouch on opening night. Les Petites Follies are modeled on the Ziegfeld Follies, but include acts from the Folies Bergeres and vaudeville....

Hey, Faggot: Just because someone goes out on a couple of dates does not mean they owe you anything, least of all an explanation, should they decide that, no, they’re not interested in pursuing things further. Some Communication Queens think the courteous, healthy, functional thing to do is call, at least (sob) call, so as not to leave the dumped party hanging. CQs would also have us believe that someone who neglects to call you after one or two dates, thus denying you “closure,” has outrageously abused you....

Besides Steve Lacy, no other serious jazz artist has devoted his entire career to the soprano saxophone. It’s a problematic and unforgiving instrument that lacks the emotional range and flexibility usually associated with the saxophone family, yet Lacy has turned the instrument’s flaws into virtues. For instance, he eschews the glossy lines with which most players attempt to minimize the soprano’s intonation problems. Instead, he transforms the horn’s inconstancy into malleability, molding and shaping its sound so that it suggests a three-dimensional object; his starkly measured improvisations allow for a full appreciation of that sound, and of the improvising process itself....

Chicago’s hometown artists usually find themselves the proverbial beggars at the feast when it comes to local government funding or support. This tradition was upheld last month when 12 painters from all over the world–but none from Chicago–received the city’s red carpet treatment and a nice pot of cash as well. The dozen artists are involved in an elaborate program sponsored by the local branch of Sister Cities International to create 12 works of art, each measuring four by nine feet, that will eventually hang in the arrival halls of the new $618 million international terminal at O’Hare, which formally opened last week....

The stock market aside, what goes up need not come down, a fact the Flying Karamazov Brothers–juggling geniuses who seldom let an audience or a prop down–have been proving for 23 years. Over the last dozen years Goodman Theatre audiences have seen Paul Magid (Dmitri), Howard Jay Patterson (Ivan), Michael Preston (Rakitin), and Sam Williams (Smerdyakov) in a vaudevillian Comedy of Errors and in The Three Moscowteers, a freewheeling adaptation of Dumas’ classic....

It had been a miserable week of fraying friendships, snarling colleagues, trenchant headcolds. Finally we shucked our ratty sweaters and ventured out, leaving behind a crisis of pizza boxes and orange-juice containers. Scrubbed and dressed we felt nearly human and mightily hungry. We threw ourselves upon Redfish–rumored to serve excellent BBQ sandwiches at lunchtime–only to add insult to injury. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Redfish was swimming against the tide even before it opened....

The Sound of a Bubble Bursting Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rubin collected Fot-only material from everyone from underground cult heroes Daevid Allen (once of Gong) and Hugh Hopper (once of the Soft Machine) to more regional bands carrying on similarly unconventional missions: From Chicago alone he handled Maestro, multiinstrumentalist Winston Damon, and the genre-blending dance band Las Toallitas. After years of long stretches between releases,...

Wapello, Iowa, and Levee District Eight are about 40 miles south of the Quad Cities, home of Buffalo Bill Cody’s birthplace and other notable attractions. But the Big River is the big draw in this part of the world. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Twain once lived in Muscatine. He said it had the most beautiful sunsets he had ever seen. The chamber of commerce has been known to use that line in its promotional literature....

What’s Wrong With Melodrama? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some Chicago critics have labeled the play a shameless melodrama, but all have remarked favorably on the quality and power of the production. Reader critic Albert Williams described the script as a “heavy-handed…PC potboiler…bogged down by schematic propagandizing and unsubtle characterization,” yet he found Crocker’s staging to be “impressively acted and beautifully designed…making the production well worth seeing....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The other reason Chicago has bred writers but can’t keep them is that this is essentially a theater/performance town and probably people read even less here than they do elsewhere in America. Nobody, absolutely nobody, reads poetry, which is why there is a “performance” poetry scene. Those “poets” who get known in that milieu do so because they have some kind of personal appeal and they can read well; the content of what they are reading is vapid, pretentious and self-serving–but ultimately of no importance anyway....

Deftly juxtaposing the serious with the farcical and subtly blending sophisticated emotions and naive sentiments, Handel’s Xerxes is an opera ahead of its time, one that anticipates Mozart’s ironic, profoundly wise observations on human nature. Its score, one of the most imaginative from the composer who helped make Italianate vocal art all the rage in early-18th-century London, offers astute and vivid psychological portraits. Never mind that the plot, taken from an earlier Venetian hit, is a bit convoluted: Xerxes, king of Persia, falls in love with his brother’s beloved, whose sister harbors an infatuation with the brother....

Perhaps no one recording today has a more eclectic take on pop music than Air Miami singer/guitarist Mark Robinson. His previous band Unrest started out in 1987 as a punk band, yet their odd selection of covers (“21st Century Schizoid Man”) and steadfast refusal to adhere to the genre’s musical strictures put them on the fringes of both punk and alternative rock. Expressing Robinson’s indiscriminate obsession with pop culture and his willingness to try anything, their earliest records were bewildering stylistic grab bags of distorted guitar rock, uneven funk, heart-stoppingly beautiful pop, and more....

By Tori Marlan Javier regards himself as a true roosterman, a cockman, a sportsman. He distinguishes himself from the gamblers, who he says give cockfighting a bad name. Gamblers have different methods. Some show up with the scraggliest of chickens, purchased for $25, while others bring healthy, muscular birds that can cost more than $2,000 each. But they have the same goal: to rake in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars in less than the 20 minutes allotted for each fight....

Charles Brown is one of the pioneers of the smooth west-coast blues style that emerged during the 40s. Like other California hipsters–Johnny and Oscar Moore, Lloyd Glenn, Floyd Dixon–Brown took the jump blues that migrated west from Texas during and after the war and fused it with an elegant romanticism. Classically trained (his first public performance was an award-winning rendition of “Clare de lune” in 1944), Brown is nonetheless endowed with a swinging jazz sensibility that allows him to breathe life into even the most lugubrious of hard-times ballads....