Rudy Bilotta and I are on our way to the off-track betting parlor in Oakbrook Terrace, where Bilotta–a 90-year-old big-band piano player and gambler who has finally gotten around to writing a book on handicapping–is going to give me a lesson in playing the horses. “Three,” I say. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the money pours in before the first race at Hawthorne, Bilotta stares at the TV next to our table, scribbling down the shifting odds on his program....

In “Rasa Takes On . . .” artistic director Van Collins challenges his dancers to perform pieces by not one but several other choreographers. He says he didn’t want his guests to “fast food” new work on the troupe, though, so he invited them to spend time in the studio getting to know the dancers–and maybe that’s why many of the program’s six premieres have a psychological bent. A prominent feature of Brock Clawson’s Shaun’s Room, created for the expressive Shaun Ricks, is her manipulation of her long red hair....

By the standards of mainstream rock history this bill looks like a meeting of the footnotes, but for pure-pop fetishists the appearance of these four friends and frequent collaborators on a single stage rates as a fairly momentous occasion. Arguably the biggest name in the bunch, Don Dixon spent about a decade and a half playing with North Carolina legends Arrogance before attaining college-radio prominence in the early 80s as coproducer (with Mitch Easter) of the first two R....

Julie Falco’s breaking the law, and she doesn’t care who knows it. Every morning, Falco isn’t ashamed to say, she eats a small marijuana brownie to deal with the effects of multiple sclerosis. Falco, who’s 39, uses a walker to get around her Ravenswood apartment. She uses a wheelchair when she goes out. There are nine steps up to her apartment, where she lives alone; it takes her about five minutes to climb them, using her arms to hoist her legs up each step....

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic With Sarah Silverman, Laura Silverman, Brian Posehn, and Bob Odenkirk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have the opposite problem with Jesus Is Magic, the big coming-out party for radically witty comedian Sarah Silverman: it’s the most exciting stand-up performance I’ve seen in years, yet in all honesty I can’t say it made me laugh that much. I probably laughed more at an insipid Ellen DeGeneres monologue I stumbled across on TV the previous night....

The St. Lawrence Quartet, a Canadian group founded in 1989, has earned a reputation for spontaneity and informal persuasiveness. Their latest CD, of three Shostakovich quartets, stresses the music’s humanity; it’s less menacing than some recordings, and the playing–anchored by cellist Christopher Costanza, a former member of the Chicago String Quartet and the Chicago Chamber Musicians–is vibrant and never top-heavy. This concert was supposed to consist of Franck and Beethoven quartets, but the first violinist is bowing out to attend the birth of his child....

If, God forbid, Ted Fishman should die tomorrow, his epitaph might read, “He saw it coming.” Not death. China. A Highland Park native who once traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and now writes primarily about economic issues for Harper’s, Money, Esquire, USA Today, and the New York Times Magazine, Fishman recognized earlier than most that the Middle Kingdom has moved far beyond assembling cross trainers and knocking off DVDs: it’s a giant in expansion mode, on its way to global economic dominance....

“We’re telling everyone who sets foot in Chicago,” the mayor said last June. “If you solicit a prostitute, you will be arrested. And when you get arrested, people will know. Your spouse, children, friends, neighbors, and employers will know. . . . I don’t have to tell you how fast information travels on the Internet.” So far, no lawsuits have been filed. But it’s turned out that the site hasn’t been humiliating sex tourists from parts elsewhere, the “everyone who sets foot in Chicago” whom the mayor seemed to be warning....

When you duck under the Metra tracks at 47th Street you do it through an underpass whose walls gleam with fresh white paint. But it’s not supposed to be that way, says Sam Mulberry, who helped paint murals on those walls in the mid-90s. A few weeks ago, the city painted over them without explanation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He asked a neighborhood graffiti artist he idolized named Wyatt Mitchell–best known as Attica, though he’s used half a dozen other monikers–to bring some people over to teach him how to paint....

Bands with regular engagements are easy to take for granted–until I saw A Cushicle again last month, I’d been telling myself “I’ll just catch them next week” for more than a year. But such engagements are perfect for jazz: the musicians get the time and space to develop a deep rapport. This trio of guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Jason Ajemian, and drummer Nori Tanaka has been playing together at Rodan weekly since 2003, and they’ve evolved a telepathic connection: they deliver scorching set-long jams, stoked by roiling polyrhythms, that change shape and tone in the most naturalistic, satisfying fashion, and though the music’s improvised they’ll also work in the occasional standard....

A Scanner Darkly Richard Linklater has been preoccupied with dropout culture since the earliest days of his career: in the loopy Slacker (1991) and the larky Dazed and Confused (1993) he developed archetypal characters fueled by experimental lifestyles, mood- and mind-altering substances, and endless conversation. But more recently, as in the vertiginous Waking Life (2001), he’s tracked the gradual disillusionment of the dissolute, the drift of those once-sunny optimists toward an uneasy dystopia....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You knew this was coming, right? Like, if you’ve ever heard me unload on him (except why would you?) over the past 30-odd years, you’d realize there’s no love lost between us. I’m referring, of course, to Jean-Luc Godard, great cinematic pooh-bah and critical monstre sacre, whose every work I pretty well loathe, the whole damn filmography, and maybe, for all I know, even the putative “genius” behind the lens....

For the most part, despite its adventurous structure, The Seven Faces of Jane shows us features we’ve seen before. Stereotype and cliche remain alive and well on the big screen. Panahi’s latest film interrogates the limits of art, placing cinema and documentation under a critical eye. Overall, Missing is just about as fun as a couple of hours flicking through Instagram or knocking out levels in Candy Crush. What do you call a vampire movie with no teeth?...

History is littered with great art sunk by censorship, but oppressive regimes have also incidentally suppressed a fair amount of flawed work. Like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, novelist-playwright Mikhail Bulgakov suffered mightily under Stalin; but in the case of the Russian civil war drama Flight, quashed midrehearsal in 1929, Uncle Joe might have done him a favor. It’s not that the play isn’t fascinating historically or topical today–it’s just in need of a ruthless edit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The sci-fi list, which claims to be maintained by an Australian wildlife ranger, also has top TV, films, and short fiction. Online voting is allowed, though I couldn’t find any way to tell how the votes are counted, or how many votes actually separate different places on the list. So far I’ve been able to vote two days in a row....

It was an off night for this place. I had three friends in from LA, and we were dreadfully bored. So my friend Parker, who’s not content unless Paris Hilton is running around with her tits on fire, decided to take action. He asked to speak to one of the club’s managers, then began an elaborate story about how he was the contract supervisor for a condo that was being built next door....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs 9/7-11/12. This year’s festival includes an emphasis on work by, or inspired by, Samuel Beckett. All performances are at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston, unless otherwise noted. Several performances will be at Roots, an offshoot of Curious Theatre Branch located in a private home; the address will be provided when the reservation is made....

SOLID CITIZEN, at the Neo-Futurarium. “I’m numb to this,” a grand jury member says in response to the testimony of a young sexual abuse victim. But Lisa Buscani’s character really isn’t–and neither are we, thanks to the power of this writer-performer’s storytelling. Her five monologues, linked by each character’s desire to help others, are so intimately detailed, poetically penned, and intensely delivered that we can’t keep our distance. Buscani also takes us into a room filled with babies under state custody, onto a subway train where a man is punching his female companion, into a friendship strained by a dissolving marriage, and to an abortion clinic surrounded by protesters....

“This brewery right here is probably the most flexible and technologically capable brewery in town,” says Randy Mosher. And what’s more, since the laundry machines are on the second floor of his Rogers Park Victorian, it has the whole basement to itself. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This setup may not sound like much, but if home brewers were ranked, Mosher would be among the best in America....

Theater Oobleck playwright Mickle Maher is a master at creating complex, paradoxical works that encompass their own contradictions. While his comedies leave a somber aftertaste, his forays into satire with a serious edge are gut-bustingly funny. His translation-adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, produced last season by Court Theatre and Redmoon, tossed out much of the original’s structure and content yet seemed truer to its sublime romanticism than many slavishly faithful productions....