When I briefly attended college in Columbia, Missouri, ten years ago, I fell in with a group of townies who called themselves D.L. Punks, the initials standing for Desperate Living, the title of John Waters’s gritty and murderous 1978 fairy tale. The “punk” part wasn’t what it means today: no bondage pants made with sweatshop labor and purchased at the mall, no $100 Mohawks, no pierced eyebrows, no hardcore music, no Food Not Bombs meetings....

In its story line, this wacky tale from Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) about estranged wealthy brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, cowriter Jason Schwartzman) reunited for a strained spiritual journey through India is pretty unconvincing as character development. Every bit as precious as Anderson’s preceding features, it differs this time from late Salinger only in the way that these spoiled neurotics are implicitly ridiculed as both ugly Americans in the third world and spiritual poseurs–unlike their more committed mother (Anjelica Huston)....

Sex, cheek, and contemporary pop culture turbocharge Noble Fool Theatricals’ cleverly designed update of the Gilbert and Sullivan standby, directed by Amy Binns-Calvey. The gentlemen of Japan shed their kimonos, for example, in favor of pinstripes, cell phones, subways, and sushi bars, where they ogle porn and Little Maids in SailorMoon anime schoolgirl outfits. The love story of two hotties kept apart by the terms of their arranged engagements holds up remarkably well thanks to nuanced performances by Mick Houlahan (a deliciously sleazy Mikado), Brendan Kelly as weakling prisoner-turned-executioner Koko, and Patrick Mellen as the long-suffering Pooh-Bah....

I’d like the Straight Dope on one of the great controversies: Who was first to reach the north pole? I lean towards Robert Peary because of Frederick Cook’s background, but is it that simple? –Richard, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not unless you’ll take “maybe neither of the above” as an answer–the claims of both men were bitterly disputed at the time and things haven’t cooled off much since....

Manufactured Self at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye at the Museum of Contemporary Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe because humor undercuts rational assumptions, the photographs that work best have a sense of levity. The Ghanaian subjects of Philip Kwame Apagya’s studio portrait photos pose with various possessions: an airplane, an entertainment center, a giant boom box....

Grady Jordan was on hand when Collins High School opened its doors in 1976. Now he’s watching the school board shut it down. Like many west-siders, Jordan is skeptical of the board’s explanation. True, Collins’s enrollment has been falling–with a capacity of 1,500, it dropped from 1,052 in 1997 to 869 last year. But enrollment is falling at high schools all over the west side, as the area loses population due to diminishing housing stock and rising rents....

1.OUTKAST Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (Arista) The most fascinating record of the year was this matched set of solo albums by Outkast’s Big Boi and Andre 3000. Both are obsessed with love and sex, not necessarily in that order, but all subject matter here is overshadowed by an amazingly polymorphous musicality. Andre 3000’s disc is more eclectic, recalling Prince at his late-80s best, and contains the highest of the many highs–the dark, minimal slow jam “Pink & Blue,” the irresistible pop hit “Hey Ya!...

The idea behind Rob Becker’s 1991 solo show is that the differences between men and women stem from caveman days. Women are gatherers of information–that’s why they’re always talking to their girlfriends. Men are strong, silent hunters–they flip through channels because they’re killing them as they go. In this touring production, burly, bearded Chris Sullivan delivers Becker’s lines affectionately if somewhat impersonally: he always seems to be performing a role, not telling fresh stories about life with his partner, Nicole....

Diverse’s debut full-length, One A.M. (Chocolate Industries), is one of the best hip-hop albums of the last year, but though it’s earned the Chicago MC plenty of underground acclaim, he’s yet to blow up nationwide. But the nation’s loss has been the city’s gain: he’s been playing local shows more regularly than ever. As the album demonstrates, Diverse is that rare hip-hop figure with both a firm grasp of the music’s history and fundamentals and a willingness to partner with producers who ignore the strictures of commercial hip-hop–namely Rjd2, who offers some of his strongest work to date, and Prefuse 73....

On Gala Mill (ATP), the fourth full-length from Australia’s DRONES, the tunes move at a patient crawl, buffeted by a storm-tossed sea of seething guitar, their Crazy Horse howl only occasionally quieting to let through a sliver of delicate folk rock. But no matter how punishingly noisy or molasses slow they get, they never feel murky or sluggish; the band creates tension and urgency with a keen melodic sense and cunning deployment of sonic space....

Robert Parker, editor and publisher of the Wine Advocate, is hands down the most influential critic in the history of wine. A self-taught oenophile with a healthy ego, he launched his publication as a mimeographed newsletter in 1978 and is now a hugely polarizing figure on the international wine scene, beloved by those who credit him with bringing an American, democratic sensibility to a world long dominated by snooty French winemaking dynasties and loathed by those who see his unprecedented market power–a favorable review can send prices through the roof–as a homogenizing influence....

1500 W. 17th Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Behind the striped awnings and ketchup red ironwork you’ll find a white box of a space filled with arty products ranging from highbrow to dirt-ass: a thick catalog, on creamy matte stock, from a Swiss art show on symbols of spiritual physics; a spiral-bound cookbook of real and invented celebrity recipes by local artist Lauren Anderson; Danielle Aubert’s limited-edition volume of drawings made in Excel; all the records on LA now-punk label Teenage Teardrops; Luke Fishbeck’s hand-painted stickers; trinket jewelry by Dramastically Cute Treasures....

You could argue that what makes Hamlet difficult to produce today is its sheer familiarity. This efficient, concept-free staging by veteran British director Terry Hands is more intelligent than passionate: he refuses to belabor the obvious or the notorious in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Free of doubt even when he’s indecisive, Ben Carlson’s Hamlet broods brilliantly. He makes few discoveries before our eyes but knows so perfectly what he’s saying, as well as why, that surrendering spontaneity to clarity feels right....

Hive Mind’s “songs” are like chopped ‘n’ screwed remixes for beardy intellectuals who don’t dance. Instead of going the shock-schlock route and trying to scare you by screaming through a digital processor, Detroit native Greh Holger (who also runs the noise label Chondritic Sound) keeps faith with the school of drone punishers. On first listen most of his sounds could pass for cranked-up field recordings–a busy runway, a furnace kicking on, an electric shaver buzzing in a sink, the squealing and chattering of a conked-out power-steering belt, somebody stomping down a concrete sewer tunnel–but they’re all electronic, and more sinister than anything you could get by sticking a mike out a window....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what is a libertarian — besides good conversation? I’ve always thought of libertarians as necessary antibodies that keep government from smothering us and theocrats from tapping our phones, but who on their own terms are a little preposterous. It comes down to their idea of government, and mine. I don’t believe the less government the better. I believe there are certain things that people do collectively or not at all, and government — when its face is washed and its tie is straightened — is the people looking after themselves....

I’ve been a volunteer at WLUW since I was a freshman communications major 11 years ago, and I’ve seen the station go through a lot of changes over the years [“Picking Up Its Marbles” by Deanna Isaacs, July 27]. At each growing pain, Craig Kois, along with Shawn Campbell, pushed through and made WLUW a better place to learn, work, and listen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WLUW has become the only independent community radio station in Chicago, and one of the most successful in the country both in terms of listeners and programming as well as financial considerations....

Like Andy Kaufman before him, comic Neil Hamburger (the alter ego of prankster Gregg Turkington) often leaves audiences wondering whether they’ve just seen the worst comedian in the world or the most ingenious. To be honest, he’s more the former than the latter. Appearing in a cheap tuxedo with a sweat-soaked comb-over, he delivers “jokes” that range from the painfully bad to the jarringly offensive–sometimes they’re both at once–and his timing is virtually nonexistent....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Edwards has the right answer: nukes cost too much and are unsafe. Hillary waffles but agrees with Edwards that nukes are too dangerous at present. It’s left to Obama to actually advocate ‘explor[ing] nuclear power as part of the energy mix’ (as if it hasn’t already been deeply explored for decades and found to be [a] too expensive and [b] too unsafe)....

The opening-night program of this experimental film and video bash is unusually star-studded, with short works by Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr. Anger’s Mouse Heaven (2004) does for Disney creatures what his Scorpio Rising did for bikers. In Poetry and Truth (2003), Kubelka plays with the phoniness of advertising footage. Mekas’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2003) works with sorrowful and pungent home movies from two distant periods....

Writer-director Stuart Ross, creator of the phenomenally successful 1990 musical Forever Plaid, claims that he wrote this holiday-show sequel as a response to 9/11. Riiiight. Well, I suppose a sequel was inevitable. What’s remarkable is that Ross hasn’t lowered his standards. This show, like the earlier one, is pitched at a middle-class, middlebrow, late-late-middle-aged audience–the same people, judging by the material, who kept Ed Sullivan and Perry Como on the air for so many years....