This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music runs through 10/31 at Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston. Rhino Fest is coordinated by the Curious Theatre Branch, and features emerging and established artists from Chicago’s fringe. Performances take place in Prop’s north and south theaters. Admission for most shows is $15 or “pay what you can”; exceptions are noted below. For information and reservations, call 773-267-6660 (except as noted below) or visit www....

A great movie (1989), but not a pleasant or an easy one. Directed by the transgressive Kira Muratova in her mid-50s, it has been rightly called the only “masterpiece of glasnost,” though it was banned by the Russian government for obscenity. Beginning as a powerful black-and-white narrative about a middle-aged woman doctor in an exploding, aggressive rage over the death of her husband (who resembles Stalin), the film eventually turns into an even more unorthodox tale in color about a schoolteacher (cowriter Sergei Popov) who periodically falls asleep regardless of what’s happening around him....

The Romantic idea of the artist as a closed but chaotic system permeates the Seldoms’ new hour-long work, Recluse. Begun during a residency that artistic director Carrie Hanson and assistant artistic director Doug Stapleton held at the pastoral Ragdale Foundation in February, the piece is far from quiet, instead envisioning the artistic process as “vigorous and violent,” in Stapleton’s words. The first section, a duet set to texts on nature by Thoreau and Goethe among other writers, is fairly measured and lyrical, but when four wood nymphs show up in the second section, set to crashing organ chords and percussion, all hell breaks loose....

On June 14 Kerry Skarbakka plans to jump off the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He’s not trying to kill himself–in the name of art the Brooklyn-based photographer has also thrown himself down stairs, leaped off cliffs, porches, and overpasses, and flipped backward off the rungs of a ladder. His life-size color photos of these stunts–sometimes he’s supported by climbing gear he later digitally erases, sometimes not–have landed him on the covers of Aperture and Foto +....

Nearly everything written about Tommy Keene since his mid-90s comeback has hinged on his bad luck with the record industry–the veteran singer, songwriter, and sometime sideman has become a symbol for a legion of gifted but commercially frustrated pop practitioners. But watching him play one perfectly realized song after another during a solo set at Schubas last June, it became clear to me that none of that matters–Keene’s music has such a pure, incandescent quality that it’s folly to consider him through the prism of his SoundScan figures....

Scott Urban, 24, fashions eyeglass frames out of wood and old records. They’re available through his Web site, urbanspectacles.com. Basic designs are $400; custom work starts at $500. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Optical shops have always been really stuffy to me; I can’t stand the way there’s a salesman right in front of you while you’re trying things on. I used to wear my dad’s glasses but I kept cracking them....

There’s something wonderfully cheesy about the MacArthur Fellows Program, which since 1981 has been dropping a small fortune and the mantle of genius on its grant recipients. The program is pretty genius itself, with a mystique anchored in that moment when the phone rings and the gift is announced, “out of the blue–$500,000–no strings,” as the foundation headlined its press release this year. I’m reminded of The Millionaire, a fictional 1950s TV series in which a super-rich recluse, John Beresford Tipton, amused himself by conferring sudden wealth on randomly selected ordinary folk and observing the consequences....

Thirteen people have died of hypothermia in Chicago this winter, most of them outside. Sterling Coleman was unusual: he froze to death in his own home. Coleman never married or had any children, and the remaining family he did have he kept at some distance. “My brother was a private person who didn’t tell us anything,” says his sister Rosetta Craig. “He always told us he was OK. He said we didn’t have to visit....

Most contemporary French pop makes frothiness a virtue–the songs might tackle sad themes, but they rarely sound sad. Keren Ann’s songwriting is different: there’s a delicious melancholy to her music that’s clear even on her first two albums, where she sang in French. Not every song on her first disc in English, last year’s Not Going Anywhere, was sad, but the acoustic production and her whispery but flexible voice gave it a coherent feel....

The Lost City With Garcia, Steven Bauer, Richard Bradford, Nestor Carbonell, Lorena Feijoo, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Tomas Milan, and William Marquez Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sixteen years ago Garcia decided he wanted to adapt Cabrera Infante’s unadaptable, pun-packed, joyfully multicultural Three Trapped Tigers, an epic about Havana nightclub life during the late Batista period. Garcia’s dream kept mutating, and Cabrera Infante wound up writing a gargantuan screenplay with an entirely new story line....

The plot of Lydia Millet’s brilliant new novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull Press), hangs on a rather remarkable premise: Ann, a Santa Fe librarian, dreams about the Trinity A-bomb test; subsequently three of the Manhattan Project physicists–all long dead–reappear. Robert Oppenheimer awakens in a Santa Fe hotel room, Enrico Fermi turns up in a gutter in the pouring rain, and Leo Szilard materializes under a University of Chicago cafeteria table....

Piero Procaccini not only wrote, produced, directed, and performs this show, he controls the lighting, video, and sound and even takes tickets. What he doesn’t do is entertain much. Shortly into this hour of sketch and improv, after singing “It’s a one-man show,” he acknowledges he may be overcommitted, out of touch, and wasting our time. His anticipation of a negative response might be intended to disarm it, but it doesn’t....

In this solo show, writer-performer David Chapman demonstrates self-deprecating wit and a keen sense of audience expectations, which he pointedly mocks or manipulates. Detailing a young man’s adventures as a “Kinsey refugee,” this autobiographical comedy has a structure dictated by the solar system, which inspires Chapman’s anecdotes and analysis of his sexual confusion. Though he’s winningly open about adolescent awkwardness and misguided dating strategies, over the show’s 70 minutes he proves himself a better writer than performer: he’s not versatile enough to differentiate the other characters he briefly portrays....

BEMBEYA JAZZ 7/9, SUMMERDANCE; 7/10, CHICAGO FOLK & ROOTS FESTIVAL This Guinean group has a backstory similar to that of Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab: both bands are decades old, and at one point were state sponsored; both were moribund when a record producer spurred them back into action. (In Bembeya’s case it was Christian Mousset, who runs the Marabi label in France.) On Bembeya, released stateside last year on World Village, melismatic Mande melodies unfurl over swaying Afro-Cuban polyrhythms, and the multiple guitars and precise brass section deliver a sound that’s at once elastic and drum-tight, stuffed with plush harmonies....

If you still miss the campy, feral 50s garage punk of the late, lamented Spaceshits but weren’t too attached to their drummer, this free show is gonna make your Monday. King Khan is the erstwhile Blacksnake, that Montreal band’s slippery bassist, and BBQ was Creepy, the notoriously camera-shy lead singer. In their current duo BBQ makes like a one-man band, playing kick drum, snare, tambourine, and guitar to accompany his inimitable howling vocals, King Khan adds a second guitar and sometimes takes over on the mike....

Rock, Pop, Etc. CRAIG CHAQUICO Sun 5/23, 7 PM, McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, Park & Fawell, Glen Ellyn. 630-942-4000. PATTY GRIFFIN, CRAIG ROSS Sold out. Sat 5/15, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. MARGARITA & KOSTA LOIS, ELECTRA & others perform Greek pop music. Fri 5/21 and Sat 5/22, 8:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 312-915-0181. SOUTH SIDE IDOL Contest based on American Idol (must reside south of the Sears Tower to enter)....

For the last year and a half–ever since I moved into my Albany Park apartment–someone’s been snatching my Sun-Times. It happens at least once a week, but sometimes as many as four days running. And though I subscribe to both dailies, it’s almost always the Sun-Times. The thief discriminates. The notice invoked chapter 38, section 399, of the Illinois criminal code. There’s no trace of this provision in the current code, so I asked the Tribune’s law department if anyone had ever been imprisoned for molesting papers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the second album by Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, The Malcolm X Memorial (A Tribute in Music), had been reissued on CD by a new Hyde Park indie called Katalyst Entertainment. The album, recorded live in 1968 at the Affro-Arts Theater, was released sometime in the early 70s on Cohran’s Zulu Record imprint....

Alpana Singh When Wed 10/18, 7 PM Singh, the director of everything enological for the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant chain, has just published her first book, the elaborately titled Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine & Having Great Relationships. Published by Academy Chicago, it’s intended as a primer on everything the wine-phobic woman needs to know. Including this, from the chapter “Pairings: Wine, Hooking Up, and Dating”: “Looking super hot in a really expensive dress can be immediately undermined if you order a diet cola....

Black Sheep, the Queens-based duo of Dres and Mista Lawnge, was the least-known group in the Native Tongues crew, but a party still isn’t a party in America until the DJ drops “The Choice Is Yours”–something you can’t say about any song in the Jungle Brothers catalog. Black Sheep’s 1991 debut, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, is a seminal work of conscious hip-hop, but after their 1994 follow-up, Non-Fiction, sold poorly they faded into obscurity....