Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s usually no deader week on the local concert calendar than this one, but for fans of improvised music there are a couple of Christmas presents: On Wednesday reedist Ken Vandermark and drummer Tim Daisy meet up at the Hideout for an evening of spontaneous music-making that will surely be akin to the fine 2006 Empty Bottle gig captured on August Music (a limited CD-R release)....

Of all the searing portraits of Hollywood, David Rabe’s Hurlyburly must be the nastiest, most brutish, and longest. Even in Michael Patrick Thornton’s well-paced production, it’s more than three hours with two intermissions. Set in 1980 and ’81 and first performed at the Goodman in a pre-Broadway engagement in 1984, Hurlyburly concerns a pair of jaded drug- and alcohol-abusing casting agents and the lowlifes–failed actors, struggling writers, oversexed runaways–who slither through their lives....

Cross-cultural musical mashups have caught on like wildfire in recent years–the thinking seems to be that two (or three) styles are better than one. Not every combination works like chocolate and peanut butter, but Kayhan Kalhor, a master of the Iranian kemence (spike fiddle), has an uncommonly sensitive understanding of such fusions. He’s one of the finest, most committed practitioners of his homeland’s classical tradition, but in Ghazal, his long-running group with Indian sitarist Shujaat Husain Khan, he’s carefully studied the common ground between the music of Iran and India and preserved the essential qualities of both....

A career in power pop isn’t for the fainthearted. The subgenre’s biggest names have been cranky cult stars (Alex Chilton, Dwight Twilley) and major-label also-rans (Jellyfish, the Posies), and when you consider the tragic fates of Chris Bell and Badfinger, plain old obscurity starts to look pretty good. But such dreary prospects haven’t discouraged Philadelphia’s Bigger Lovers, whose singer-songwriters, Brett Tobias and Scott Jefferson, come on like two Tommy Keenes hot-rodding the Big Star sound with plenty of sugary psych and mod muscle....

The Fluidity of Time It seems the museum intends to “recontextualize” the work here through disjuncture–but the outcome is often disarray. Half of another room is inhabited by a 1962 George Segal sculpture, two life-size white plaster figures arranged as lovers on a bed; an early (1964-’65) Christo, a small orange storefront he constructed, with fabric obscuring the windows; and the 1983 Bruce Nauman neon sculpture Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain, with a large flashing circle that illuminates these words by turn....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features two full-length trilogies, “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly and the “Danger Face Trilogy” by Idris Goodwin. Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, and elsewhere as noted below....

Ruth Reichl made her name as a restaurant critic, but in her two best-selling memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, she proved herself a compelling storyteller as well. The latest (and allegedly final) installment in the trilogy, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (Penguin), not only contains better actual food writing but is full of the vigorous prose that made the first two such page-turners....

Mexx Kitchen at the Whiskey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If star chef Richard Sandoval of Modern Mexican–the group behind luxe neuvo Latino restaurants such as New York’s Maya and Pampano and Las Vegas’s Isla–hadn’t collaborated on Mexx Kitchen at the Whiskey, no one would pay much attention to the cozy folk-art-decorated room tucked behind Rush Street’s see-and-be-seen Whiskey Bar. And even though the press has taken notice of the food, drinks and quick bites seemed to be what the handful of businessmen, tourists, and locals wanted on my visit....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Liberated? Well, I dunno…though the not-making-sense part seems about right. But this isn’t a slag, it’s an appreciation. Because from one extravagant setup to the next, there’s hardly a frame in Taymor‘s Across the Universe that doesn’t do more than it reasonably ought to—or ever would have in the hands of anyone less attentively committed. It’s a film that never stops working, at a tightrope level of awareness, even when what it’s working at—a musical tale of “peace and love” in the shadow of Vietnam, as refracted through the prism of 60s Beatles lyrics—is certifiably brain-dead....

Who says the United Nations never does anything for you? Here it’s selected more than 900 do-gooder advertisements that “address sustainability issues” (from an original set of 40,000) and put them into a searchable database divided into categories like “disaster reduction,” “education & awareness,” and that box-office favorite: “production patterns.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under “Human, Labour & Social Rights,” Wal-Mart employees praise their employer for coming to LA....

Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand–the Art Institute’s magnificent exhibit of almost 300 stunningly beautiful Amerindian objects, some as old as 7,000 years–offers evidence of a very different worldview from our own. As curator Richard Townsend says in his catalog essay, these ancient peoples in the southern and midwestern United States believed they were participating in a “network of connections” that included the “powers inherent in rivers, rocks, mountains” and the “all-powerful forces of life, death, and renewal....

Someone will make a quick fortune publishing a joke book about the Katrina disaster. It will have a name like “Easy Does It: Drowning in Incompetence in New Orleans.” Each page will be about a paragraph long. It’ll be a bathroom book, enjoyed wherever there are still functioning bathrooms, and it will give various nonentities the immortality that is now their due. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They’ll remember New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who sent his cops off to Las Vegas for R & R while most of his city was still underwater....

I read your article about the development at Polk and Clark streets in my ward [The Works, May 5] with great interest. Peter Ziv provided your publication with one side of the issue. In the interest of providing your readers with both sides of this issue, I will give you, as Paul Harvey puts it, “the rest of the story.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The developer Terrapin has an as-of-right zoning for this parcel of land....

If your songwriting partner were also your significant other and the two of you had a nasty breakup after nearly eight years, nobody would be surprised if you dissolved the band you’d been playing in together. In the summer of 2003, Joseph Costa and Lindsay Anderson, the core of L’altra, had been split up for more than three years without either one quitting the group–but their infighting had decimated the rest of the lineup and cost the band its relationship with longtime label Aesthetics....

Bertolt Brecht’s early, rarely performed “didactic play” is a 45-minute jumble of vaudeville, poetry, lecture, audience participation, and agitprop that feels as much like 1970s performance art as Weimar cabaret. Interrogating three stranded trans-Atlantic pilots, a Learned Chorus hopes to discover whether technological “advances” actually help mankind or merely fuel our greedy, power-hungry natures. The issues have contemporary urgency, but Red Tape Theatre Company’s bare-bones production, stuck in a church social room, is only competently performed, and director James Palmer hasn’t orchestrated Brecht’s fragments into a satisfying whole....

The seventh edition of this annual celebration of the art of improvisational comedy brings together performers from around the U.S. and abroad; Chicago, of course, is heavily represented. This year’s festival, the largest yet, is divided into several series–Mainstage, Showcase, Sketch, Solo, Duo, and Fringe–as well as an all-night improv session, a series of daytime “Lunchbreak” performances (presented in conjunction with the city’s cultural affairs department), forums, workshops, and numerous special events....

A superb interpreter of German art song, bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff has an extensive vocal range and the ability to change color and mood to express the full meaning of every word. He’s performed with all the world’s major orchestras and has been collaborating regularly with Daniel Barenboim since making his CSO debut in Brahms’s A German Requiem in 1999. Their 2005 recording of Schubert’s Winterreise delivers a spellbinding portrait of a brokenhearted man....

Shortly after Seinfeld ended in 1998, Jerry Seinfeld did an HBO special called I’m Telling You for the Last Time. He wasn’t kidding–after that performance the master of his domain retired all his old stand-up material and started over from scratch. During that period he made surprise appearances at New York comedy clubs, notes in hand like a novice, to hone new jokes and his timing. Christian Charles’s 2002 film Comedian documents this process....

Without batting an eye, Jim Skafish will tell you that he’s “the sole originator and godfather of punk in Chicago.” And that’s not all–he takes credit for launching new wave and alternative rock as well. It all started in February 1976, when his band Skafish first walked onstage at B’ginnings, a club in a Schaumburg strip mall. That was the moment, he says, “when we created an art form.” None of them had a rock background, but they were willing to follow the lead of their front man, who liked to be in control....

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly tells the story of Cio-Cio-san, a poor 15-year-old geisha (nicknamed Butterfly) who marries a callous American naval officer (Pinkerton) and renounces her religion, causing her family to disown her. The first act is filled with rapturous husband-and-wife duets, but Pinkerton abandons Butterfly, and in the second act, three years later, she sings the achingly tender “Un Bel Di Vedremo” (“One Fine Day We Shall See”), imagining his return....