Occasionally It was hot May 9. Poetry Center of Chicago head Ken Clarke says he worked up a bit of a sweat hauling boxes of books and other paraphernalia into the Art Institute’s Rubloff Auditorium to set up for a much anticipated reading that night by neosoul diva Jill Scott. St. Martin’s Press had just brought out Scott’s first book of poetry, The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours, and the publisher had called the Poetry Center a couple of months earlier to see if they’d be interested in hosting an event....

Rock, Pop, Etc. FRANZ BENTELER’S ROYAL STRINGS ORCHESTRA performs at Chicago SummerDance (preceded by dance lessons at 4 PM). Sun 6/20, 5 PM, Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, Michigan between Harrison & Balbo. 312-742-4007. DAVID BYRNE with the Tosca Strings, Poi Dog Pondering; 6/17 sold out. Mon 6/21, 7:30 PM, Skyline Stage, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. 312-595-7437 or 312-559-1212. DJS SPIN at a postshow party for Nomenil Theater Company’s show “Love Pollution: A Tekno-Popera....

“There’s no one quite like you,” he said with a wistful sigh, caressing my instep, half a dozen vanilla-scented candles twinkling behind him on a grotesquely oversize entertainment center, the soft R & B strains of Kem floating from a boom box. I had just told my foot slave I’m leaving Chicago and moving to Las Vegas at the end of the month. This would be our last rendezvous, after seven years of semiregular meetings....

ROBERT WYATT | COMICOPERA (DOMINO) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Just as You Are,” which Wyatt wrote with his longtime partner in life and art, poet Alfreda “Alfie” Benge, takes the form of a nakedly honest conversation between an old couple. The woman’s lines, sung by Brazilian vocalist Monica Vasconcelos, are heavy with well-earned resentment, but it’s not enough to break the back of her affection....

This concert of romantic works includes one of the most glorious examples of the genre: Schumann’s Piano Quintet, whose virtuosic piano writing and scale almost make it a concerto. The exhilarating first movement alternates optimism and yearning tenderness; the second is mournful and tumultuous. The joyful third contrasts a rush of ascending scales and dotted rhythms with tranquil and dancelike sections, and the fourth introduces a double fugue that builds to a triumphant finale....

There are two chief gripes about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The first is that Pitchfork likes them, which carries even less water as an indictment than it does as a recommendation. But I can at least see where the complainers are coming from on the second point, which is that Alec Ounsworth can’t sing. His unpalatable yelp often sticks somewhere between Gordon Gano and Tom Verlaine–and in a live setting, where he doesn’t have the luxury of multiple takes to hone his affectations, it can get pretty grating....

When Through 10/14 Pozzi-Johnson was raised as a churchgoing Methodist in a Pittsburgh suburb. When she was nine, a family drive through Georgia gave her a glimpse of rural poverty, and she says it was then that she began to think in terms of social justice–still a concern as important to her as art. In 1970, after a year in college, she joined Koinonia Farm, a Christian community working with the rural poor in Georgia....

WHERE ARE POOR PEOPLE TO LIVE? TRANSFORMING PUBLIC HOUSING COMMUNITIES LARRY BENNETT, JANET L. SMITH, AND PATRICIA A. WRIGHT, EDS. (M.E. SHARPE) “Policymakers,” writes Wright, “continue to make the same major mistake of the urban renewal plan in the 1950s and 1960s–the presumption that experts know what’s best for public housing residents.” But Carol Steele, a longtime resident of Cabrini-Green, cofounder of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, and one of the few nonacademic contributors to the collection, didn’t trust the CHA to make decisions for her....

Tony Kaye (American History X) worked on this abortion documentary for 17 years, a period that encompassed both the wave of violence against clinics in the 90s and the incremental advance of legislation recriminalizing the procedure. But Kaye’s real achievement is less historical than ethical: he plunges into the irresolvable question of what constitutes respect for human life, finding strange bedfellows among people who are pro-life (Pat Buchanan, Nat Hentoff) and pro-choice (Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz)....

Grief twists through this new dark, sparkling gem of a play written and directed by Ronan Marra for Signal Ensemble Theatre. Twentysomething Diane has fractured a hand and a foot in a motorcycle accident, so her alcoholic brother comes to stay with her, partly to escape his crumbling marriage to the competent Sarah. Playing Diane, the magnificently ferocious Georgann Charuhas has a Sarah Vowell-like sarcasm based almost entirely on intonation; and as Diane’s brother, Christopher Prentice conveys a dark humor that shines through his flickering facial expressions....

If any one artist has come to personify soul-blues, it’s Marvin Sease. A former gospel singer who began his career in the 60s, he uses his emotionality and muscular timbre to invoke some deep soul on his ballads, but he’s all sauciness and arrogance on his notorious novelty songs, which all seem to have hair-curling titles like “I Ate You for My Breakfast.” For better and for worse Sease is defined by his lyrics: he’s deliciously naughty one moment and embarrassingly puerile the next, bulldozing through once-taboo subjects like oral sex–his breakout late-80s hit, “Candy Licker,” remains the standard against which all soul-blues tunes about cunnilingus are judged....

This venerable punk band has been almost completely silent for years, ever since founding guitarist Phil Suchomel succumbed to complications from asthma on the first day of a tour in 1998. He and front woman Kirsten Patches were music students together at the University of Wisconsin in Madison when they started the band in 1990, and when he died she lost more than the firmament-rending thunder that had backed her impassioned howl for all those years–she lost her husband too....

Boulder-based singer-songwriter Otis Taylor considers himself a bluesman, but few of his tunes adhere to standard blues changes, and his lyrics go well beyond stock themes of erotic infatuation and betrayal. He draws on both black and white rural American folk traditions and uses call-and-response motifs that nod to the African roots of jazz and blues. He sings these groove-based songs with taut emotion that gives urgency to the misty, dreamlike sound he and his bandmates create on a variety of stringed instruments....

Viennese musicians Burkhard Stangl (guitar) and Christof Kurzmann (computer), who together form SCHNEE, were among the first practitioners of what’s now usually called electroacoustic improvisation–a gestural, texture-oriented music in which an instrument’s traditional sound is often obscured and subsumed. (In particular, Stangl was a founding member of the paradigm-shifting group Polwechsel.) But Stangl has never been shy about letting his guitar sound like a guitar: on Schnee’s self-titled 2000 debut he complemented Kurzmann’s hovering, abstract sound sculptures with the occasional strummed chord or damped-string scrape, enhancing the music’s gorgeously meditative flow....

“People always think people in love are happy,” says Matilde, a Brazilian maid who hates to clean; she’d rather spend her time thinking up the perfect gag. “But love isn’t clean like that. It’s dirty–like a good joke.” In Sarah Ruhl’s wonderful play, a 2005 Pulitzer finalist, love and happiness blossom in the dirt of life’s disorder. Jessica Thebus directs a crack cast with such wit and panache that the plot’s surprising twist not only makes complete sense but resonates with a deep tenderness....

Griffin Theatre Company director Jonathan Berry understands perfectly the significance of J.B. Priestley’s title: time is as much a character in this 1938 play as any member of the Conway family. What could have been a simple family melodrama–a mother and six children celebrate the end of World War I, then reassemble 20 years later–instead becomes a meditation on the curdling of youthful optimism and promise into sour middle age. With a light touch, Priestley and Berry use foreshadowing to suggest that the characters’ beginnings both conceal and reveal their ends: we’re saddened but not surprised by what’s become of the Conways on the eve of the next war....

When We’re Good, We’re Very Very Good Let’s say that journalists do. The larger point is that journalists know they do. That’s because journalists, by and large, are righteous people whose moral development is significantly above average–or so we’re told by The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics, published in January. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The book, by journalism professors Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University, discusses their recent survey of 249 journalists across the nation....

Casa Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Encountering antiquities in situ can be an amazing experience. But the Art Institute has created a different kind of contemplative space. A mural of ancient figures very much like the ones I saw in southern Utah greets viewers at the show’s entrance. Photographic murals show aerial views of two archaeological sites: the ruined cities of Chaco Canyon in western New Mexico and the Paquime settlement in Mexico....

When Todd Hollandsworth stole a home run from Joe Crede with a leaping catch at the left-field fence of White Sox Park, he seemed to snatch back nothing less than the Cubs’ entire season. The Sox had clobbered the Cubs 12-2 the day before in the opening game of the three-game city-series rematch, as if to assert once and for all that they not only had the best record in baseball but were clearly the class of the town....

The Saddest Music in the World **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Guy Maddin Written by George Toles, Maddin, and Kazuo Ishiguro With Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox, and Ross McMillan. As usual with Maddin, I can’t even begin to furnish a synopsis without sounding hyperbolic and slightly breathless. The film is set in 1933, at the height of the Depression, in Winnipeg, Maddin’s hometown. Beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Rossellini), whose name appears to have been suggested by Laura Riding’s great 30s story “Reality as Port Huntlady,” announces a contest to find the “saddest music in the world” as a way to promote her brew....