Vocalist Andrea Marcovicci created her concert I’ll Be Seeing You: Love Songs of World War II in 1990, at the suggestion of Walter Cronkite, but hasn’t performed it here since a show at Park West two years later. Interspersing wartime classics by the likes of Frank Loesser, Oscar Hammerstein, Jule Styne, and Sammy Cahn with readings of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and others, she structured the solo show like a musical, framing it with a story about a young woman’s relationship with a soldier during America’s “good war....

The seventh annual Around the Coyote Winter Arts Festival runs through this weekend, with some 95 visual artists exhibiting at the Flat Iron Arts Building, 1579 N. Milwaukee, and the Northwest Tower Building, 1608 N. Milwaukee; hours are Fri 2/10, 6-10 PM, Sat 2/11, 11 AM-10 PM, and Sun 2/12, 11 AM-6 PM. A visual arts day pass is $5, theater programs are $10 per show or $15 for a day pass, spoken-word/music programs are $5, film/video programs are $7, and an all-access weekend pass is $40....

Vassie Watts saw his life as a giant animal, plowing methodically ahead. All he could see of it were the ridges of a spine under dull black fur. Some days the haunches towered over him and blocked his view of the horizon, but mostly the beast was hidden in fog, pulling Vassie by a tether. He couldn’t let go because the thing would turn around and trample him. Santana, Vassie’s upstairs neighbor, had been a regular at the bookstore....

Since releasing his Boy in da Corner (XL) in 2003 and emerging as the popular face of England’s recalcitrant grime scene, Dizzee Rascal has played only a handful of U.S. gigs, including a charmingly explosive performance at South by Southwest last year. But now that grime has evolved from a hard-to-parse novelty to a craze, Dizzee’s first significant American tour isn’t the hype magnet it might have been mere months ago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In what initially looked like yet another depressing sign of the declining music marketplace, last week Dr. Wax in Hyde Park announced that it would be shutting down at the end of August. The Dr. Wax in Edgewater closed this past winter, making the Hyde Park store the last outpost of the enterprise long owned by Sam Greenberg. (Full disclosure: for a couple years back in the late 80s I worked for a Dr....

The eighth annual European Union Film Festival, with entries from all 25 member states, runs Friday, March 4, through Thursday, March 24, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 175 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are listings through Thursday, March 10; a full schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. SATURDAY 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Joachim Lafosse’s 2004 Belgian feature, based on Euripides’ Medea, a wife tries to break up with her husband, who refuses to go away, saying he still loves her and their young son....

Johnny Rawls came of age during the classic soul era of the 60s, serving as a guitarist and bandleader for groups founded by O.V. Wright and Little Johnny Taylor. Since going solo in the 80s he’s grafted pop and rock stylings onto that sound, but on his latest album, this year’s Heart & Soul (Deep South Soul), he sounds determined to reclaim his roots. As with much of his recent output, the instrumentation tends to be pretty rudimentary, but Rawls’s vocals sound more wounded and knowing than ever, and his melodies artfully blend pathos and heaven-bound ecstasy....

Over the past 30 years the Kronos Quartet has established itself as one of the premier ensembles dedicated to modern music. At first the members played works by familiar composers such as Bartok, Berg, and Ives, along with more contemporary fare by, among others, Penderecki, Crumb, and Feldman. But they were also early proponents of minimalism, a style that now dominates their repertoire. These days they play almost exclusively music they’ve commissioned, resulting in more than 450 new works–a stunning figure, though the Arditti Quartet, which also plays mostly the work of living composers, has commissioned a similar number....

One day last June, Detra W. walked into a 15th District police station looking for an officer she knew as Spider. Among drug dealers on the west side, Spider was feared and hated–he had a reputation for going to great lengths to make arrests, even crawling out from under cars and bushes. Spider had busted Detra back in the summer of 1999 for selling cocaine, and now she wanted to thank him....

Though there’s a dead body onstage for most of Corn Productions’ new show, no one eats, has sex with, or otherwise violates it. What’s going on? If it weren’t for the vaudeville farting routine and whopper of a premise, I’d think this usually transgressive troupe was undergoing some form of behavior modification. Still, there’s no shortage of fresh ideas in Real Aural Talent, as the inner circle at an audiobook company plots to drive one of its producers insane by saddling him with a tedious translation and no-talent actors....

This fourth annual celebration of experimental art–four weekends of exhibits, performances, tours, and screenings–takes as its stage the “underused urban geography” of Bridgeport, or as the organizers, who also produce Lumpen magazine, call it, “the Community of the Future.” Programs are scheduled at various venues, mainly Texas Ballroom and Hey Cadets!, both at 3012 S. Archer; Iron Studios, 3636 S. Iron; Kaplan’s Liquors, 960 W. 31st; and, somewhere north of the future, Skylark, 2149 S....

For “Wounded in America,” an exhibit opening this weekend at the Peace Museum, photographer Robert Drea traveled around the country taking photographs of victims of gun violence. Writer Stephanie Arena collected their accounts of being shot. Here are some stories they found in Chicago. Shot March 5, 1999, at the Eisenhower Expressway and Morgan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was a semiautomatic. It had those dumdum bullets in it–they’re made to maim, to do more damage, and upon impact they explode....

On Smog’s 12th album, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (Drag City), Bill Callahan fixates on water metaphors–water as a reflector, water as a chasm, water as a place to meditate on life’s travails. Using austere arrangements rendered by Dirty Three drummer Jim White and bassist Connie Lovatt–along with occasional guests on hammer dulcimer, fiddle, and piano–Callahan spins modest yarns and ponders existential questions in his usual elliptical fashion. But though his narratives remain fractured and imagistic, his ability to get a story across–despite his limited vocal range– has never been greater....

Small presses have been putting out some really good books lately, and it’s often hard for them to get noticed, but Stefan Kiesbye deserves whatever hype can be scrounged for his debut novella, Next Door Lived a Girl (Low Fidelity Press). Set in small-town working-class Germany following World War II, it follows 12-year-old Moritz and his gang, the Badgers, as they do what unsupervised boys do: battle their enemies, the Foxes; spy on the neighbors having sex; explore spooky abandoned bunkers (metaphor alert!...

This experimental video documentary (2003, 54 min.) by the talented Harun Farocki takes a subtle and provocative look at industrial photography and automation, especially as they relate to the launching, monitoring, and recording of missile strikes. Farocki begins by considering the “smart bombs” used during the first gulf war, which provided precise video imagery without any sign of human casualties. From there he examines the wider technological developments in factories as well as military systems, and the elimination of people from both....

Ancient Rome meets the borscht belt in this 1962 musical by Bert Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (his first crack at writing both–and what a crack!). Based on the comedies of Plautus, the story revolves around slave Pseudolus’s attempt to win his freedom by helping his master’s son marry a courtesan who’s been sold to a military captain. Despite a competent ensemble and some wonderful performances–including Guy Adkins as a sprightly Pseudolus, Dale Benson as befuddled Erronius, and Catherine Smitko as Domina–this high-speed farce never finds its center....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your reviewer Noah Berlatsky [“Wishful History,” February 18] offers a comparison of abolitionists and pro-lifers as if this were a fresh insight on his part and not a tired cliche (a Google search of “abolition” and “abortion” will get you just under 100,000 hits). As banal as the analogy is, it doesn’t hold water. Pro-lifers are good at staying united and on message; the abolitionists were notoriously sectarian and divided their energies among a whole slew of causes (temperance, marriage reform, female suffrage, etc)....

Reggaeton rules the Latin American pop charts, and this tour, headlined by Puerto Rican superstar DADDY YANKEE, is solid proof of its growing popularity in the U.S. Since July Chicago has had its own full-time reggaeton radio station, WVIV 103.1 FM, and Latino music promoters must see a growing market here if they’re booking this show the same night as a major Latino hip-hop show with LA’s Akwid and others at the Aragon....

On her underground gem “Random,” British grime MC Lady Sovereign hilariously nails why it’s taken so long for England to develop its own brand of hip-hop: slipping in and out of an exaggerated drawl a la Chingy’s “Right Thurr” she spits, “Not get off your churr, I mean chair / Some English MCs get it twisted / Start sayin’ cookies instead of biscuits.” The slew of tracks that 19-year-old Louise Harman has released on import singles and EPs are rooted in familiar grime elements like bass-heavy, spazzy, dancehall-inflected rhythms and herky-jerky stops and starts....

I can’t think of a more misleading title than “Illusion of Progress,” which is what local percussionist Michael Zerang and German reedist Peter Brotzmann decided to call the half-hour epic that opens their recent duo disc, Live in Beirut (Al Maslakh). Not only does the piece cover a lot of ground, ranging in mood from unbridled ferocity to dignified tenderness, but it also shows how far Zerang has come in his long career–this month he celebrates 30 years as a performer and improviser, and in that time he’s refined his approach repeatedly....