This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/12. This year’s festival includes an emphasis on work by, or inspired by, Samuel Beckett. All performances are at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston, unless otherwise noted. Several performances will be at Roots, an offshoot of Curious Theatre Branch located in a private home; the address will be provided when reservations are made....

In the best of Robert Schultz’s 14 pencil drawings at Printworks the models’ faces aren’t visible. Randall Reflecting II shows a nude sitting with his knees up, head nestled between his arms. With no facial expression to study, the viewer is drawn to the exquisitely precise rendering of anatomical detail–we can almost feel the different layers of skin, veins, and muscles of a foot. Schultz clearly takes pleasure in delineating the physical world, and that’s alluring....

“Smoking is one of my bad habits,” Paula Killen says near the beginning of her new show. “So is missing Chicago.” A fixture on the early- to mid-90s performance scene, Killen decamped for Los Angeles several years ago. Since then, having struggled with single motherhood and encroaching middle age, she’s discovered a truth many before her have unearthed: “All Hollywood has the charm of a hangover.” Anecdotes about her experiences are counterbalanced by the equally tormented–and equally hilarious–tales told by her longtime “wing woman,” Chicago actress-singer Karol Kent....

Neo-Futurists Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda continue their examination/celebration of the hard-drinking writer archetype–equal parts romantic fancy, morbid fetish, and scholarly pursuit. Their original 2002 Drinking & Writing, a modest survey of legendary lit-scene lushes combined with first-person accounts of bouts with the bottle, has spawned sequels, a touring production, and a radio show. They’ve also spun off alco-literate events at watering holes from Rock Bottom Brewery to Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, including Festivus Veisalgia (named after a fancy Greco-Norse medical term for “hangover”), starting this weekend....

If you like geometry, you’ll love Chicago. The grid is straight out of math class, except Lake Michigan ate the right half of your homework. Everything starts at State and Madison, whose coordinates on the numeric plan that describes the whole city are 0 and 0. Addresses move out from there, with each 800 representing about a mile: 800 N. State is about a mile north, 800 W. Madison a mile west, 800 S....

My gaze followed a chewed-down fingernail pointing at an office building with a Wells Fargo sign. “See that?” my companion said. “I held a seven-karat diamond there.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once I’d made the decision, everything in Chicago took on a new weight: a view of the skyline at night coming in north from the Kennedy; a final perfect $34 manicure and pedicure at Nail Gallery on Damen, where every time I visit they put my socks back on for me, tie my scarf around my neck exactly how I like it, and reach past the snotty tissue in my handbag to dig for my keys before sending me out the door with a cheerful good-bye; finally cashing in free-movie coupons at North Coast Video; a last shameful late-night visit to the Taco Bell drive-through on Clybourn; spending too much money on my pooch at Doggy Style, the friendliest pet store in town; a final shot in the ass of B vitamins and magnesium from my doctor, who reads this column and has never once clucked at me about the damage I do to my body; one more meal at De Cero and another at Green Zebra; and one more coast down the smooth, freshly paved section of Loomis between Cermak and Archer, my favorite stretch of road in the city....

Art or Bioterrorism? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Kurtz saw that his wife wasn’t breathing he called 911 for help; the paramedics and police who responded noticed petri dishes, a mobile DNA extraction laboratory, and other scientific equipment in his home. Kurtz is a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, a performance group that tries to demystify science and illuminate the effects of technology in the hands of major corporations....

Jesus Sound Explosion These days Anderson teaches writing at the University of Minnesota and drums in a country-gospel-punk band at the nontraditional House of Mercy Church, voted “Best Church for the Nonchurchgoing” by the Twin Cities weekly City Pages. Before that he spent about 15 years as a clerk at the Electric Fetus record store in Minneapolis. It’s not an elaborate resume, and Jesus Sound Explosion is a remarkably down-to-earth, unpretentious read....

The biggest Chicago jazz story of the year so far is the release of the first CD by the Latin-jazz-fusion nonet Chevere–an event a quarter century in the making. Costa Rican drummer Alejo Poveda, a veteran of a dozen or more local jazz bands, formed Chevere here in the late 70s as a small percussion ensemble; even today his occasional interludes with ace percussionists Ruben Alvarez and Joe Rendon are the high points of Chevere’s sets....

Corinne May Botz: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Corinne May Botz stumbled on Frances Glessner Lee’s 18 miniature re-creations, now housed in Baltimore, while working on a video about women who collect dollhouses. Lee would have recoiled in horror to hear that term applied to her projects, which were intended not to acclimate girls to a comfortable domestic life but to train policemen in the nascent field of “legal medicine....

EMBRYO CULTURE: MAKING BABIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYBeth Kohl Kohl, a Winnetka-based freelance writer, was frustrated by what she found when she began looking for info on IVF. “I wish I’d had a regular person’s voice in my head,” she says. “There’s a certain fertility-speak and I found it off-putting.” These days there’s an abundance of blogs and chat rooms devoted to IVF, but some women who frequent them also use a kind of insider language; Kohl says they call their frozen embryos “embies,” give them nicknames like “Frosty,” and generally anthropomorphize them....

Elizabeth Ernst’s pieces at Catherine Edelman captivate the same way the circus does, creating layers of illusion. Her miniature installation, G.E. Circus, consists of performers made of Sculpey painted white and arranged on a table with a few tiny props she made herself. Ernst has also taken black-and-white photographs of the figures, lightly painted over them, and written life stories for her “characters,” printed in wall texts; other photographs of the performers place them in miniature sets she created, and there are four collages that include painted-over photos....

The sky’s always yellow around Gang Gang Dance–even when their vaguely mystical music veers dangerously close to hippie drum-circle nonsense, violence is brewing close at hand. The New York quartet’s latest album, last year’s Hillulah (Social Registry), could be the sound track to a momentous and dreadful trek, maybe to meet a holy recluse or get crucified. Liz Bougatsos processes her wounded, wondering vocals with distortion, turning them into a sort of exhausted, delirious sickbed wail....

Gary Shteyngart’s 2002 novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, charts the rising panic of hapless Vladimir Girshkin as he drifts, stateless, from the USSR to the Lower East Side to the cartoonishly Slavic city of Prava, a crumbling post-Soviet capital of opportunists, wastrels, and thieves. Manic, absurd, and mournfully comic, the book gives coming-of-age tropes a bracing kick in the balls, but it’s also a wistful meditation on identity, played out against the backdrop of eastern Europe’s own late-20th-century struggles with the same....

Diana Mucci-Beauchamp’s interviews with 100 single men distinguish her debut script from other ruminations on the ruminated-to-death subject of dating. The guys at the play’s central location–an airport bar–alternately reinforce and disprove the notion that men want only sex, food, and football, relaying stories that range from surreal (one man gets sex when he dresses like Superman) to sweet (another waits too long to reveal his feelings and loses a true love)....

Bluesman Little Milton began his recording career at Sun Records in the 50s, but until he arrived at Chess Records in the early 60s his output mainly consisted of well-crafted but undistinguished pastiches of ideas from established artists. Working with producer Billy Davis and saxophonist-arranger Gene “Daddy G” Barge at Chess, Milton forged his signature sound: trenchant, worldly-wise lyrics delivered in a muscular baritone, with brawny horns and lithe, string-bending guitar lines....

For me, listening to a Peanut Butter Wolf mix is like eating at an Indian buffet: everything’s delicious, but half the time I have no idea what it is. (Doubly embarrassing, since I’m not just a music writer but part Indian too.) In fairness, Wolf doesn’t exactly make it easy to follow along–his recent holiday mix (released by Stones Throw, the label he runs himself) skips between festive tunes from familiar faces like the Beach Boys, Bob Marley, and Marvin Gaye and yuletide oddities like Rudy Ray Moore’s potty-mouthed riff on “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” the 69 Boys’ jingle-bell booty-music “What You Want for Christmas,” and Caetano Veloso’s ethereal ditty “In the Hot Sun of a Christmas Day....

Just coincidentally, I finally saw the chilling German film The Lives of Others late last month, when I was in the midst of talking with—or trying to talk with—residents of what used to be called the Acme Artists’ Community. Maybe the movie colored my worldview, but attempts at communication with residents at what’s now the Bloomingdale Arts Building suggest an environment with parallels to life in East Germany. On West Bloomingdale, as in East Berlin while the wall still stood, you can find the cautious, urgent sharing of a few facts, the fearful concern for anonymity, the angry outburst followed by a perplexing silence, the weariness that gives way to submission....

The Blue Moon Studio Theater makes a sparkling debut with George Howe and Frances Limoncelli’s new one-act musical, based on Eileen Spinelli’s children’s book about the “constantly friend-resistant” Mr. Hatch. His dour demeanor changes, however, when he gets a valentine from a secret admirer. Bradley Bartolo’s clever bare-bones staging racks up one delight after another; the four actors are in delicious sync and they give the lyrics panache, really selling the wordplay....

Cary Baker first met Blind Arvella Gray almost 35 years ago, when he was a budding blues enthusiast attending high school in Wilmette. “I was 15 and one day my father took me down to Maxwell Street,” he says. “There were a lot of street musicians playing at the time, but as soon as we happened upon Arvella, I stopped dead in my tracks. There was something about him that harkened back to field hollers and country blues, stuff you didn’t hear even back then....