New Video, New Europe Shannon Wright Adrian Paci’s Albanian Stories would work equally well on film or witnessed in person: a charming three-year-old girl tells an improvised fairy tale. The story is a bit hard to follow, but when she starts referring to Italy–she and her father are refugees from Kosovo–and international forces, the threat to their safety emerges in a way that’s all the more affecting because she seems unaware of the extent to which her innocence has been compromised....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s more than a comedy,” Cheryl insisted in so many words, this tale of a delusional schmo with an inflatable girlfriend and the patronizing locals who help keep his fantasy alive. “Kind of a compressed metaphor for life. And look at the words you’ve been choosing: delusional, patronizing—already the argument’s skewed in the wrong direction.” Except they’re the right words—and since when is it commendable to abet the self-deceptions of others, what in more pejorative language we’d normally call “enabling” behavior?...

I’m no fancy-shmancy art historian, so I couldn’t tell you for sure what a pink sky in a painting means. Is it the beginning of a new day? Or the end of an old one? In the reviews I’ve read of Gregory Jacobsen’s work, most critics look on the bright side, referring to the rosy skies behind his gruesome, puffy, hypergenitalized creatures–garish pink piles of meat with improbable orifices dripping with translucent juice and wrinkled, bedsored, snaggletoothed people with flagpoles penetrating their vaginas and heinies–as beautiful sunsets, as though all this moist depravity is about to come to an end....

Milwaukee’s lakefront turns into one big global village each summer, from the Asian Moon Festival in mid-June through Mexican Fiesta in the dog days of August. But if the five-year-old Arab World Fest hasn’t yet drawn the crowds claimed by its more established brethren (an estimated 250,000 pack in each July for Festa Italiana), it’s not for lack of trying. This year the weekend-long celebration of things Arab includes music, food, a bazaar, traditional dancing, a fashion show, belly dancers, and “Arab karaoke....

A Republican with a brain. “Ten years ago, in 1994, Republicans won control of both houses of Congress,” Senator John McCain told a Washington, D.C., forum on May 18 (ndol.org). “For one brief shining moment, we employed true fiscal restraint and eventually managed to balance the budget and even attain that which had seemed unattainable–a surplus! Now, at a time of national crisis, we have thrown caution to the wind and continue to spend, and spend, and spend–all the while cutting taxes…....

A clumsy documentary that tells a fascinating story, this 2003 Canadian-UK feature chronicles the 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in Manhattan. After Kasparov lost the second game of the match, he suggested that IBM was cheating, and in fact Deep Blue’s play had been remarkably creative for a chess computer. Shooting on video (later transferred to 35-millimeter), director Vikram Jayanti shows Kasparov revisiting the hotel suite that served as his home base and collects reminiscences from journalists and members of the team that programmed Deep Blue....

The Reader’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The exuberant, rhythmic dancing in Bollywood films is derived from bhangra, an Indian folk form that originated in the Punjab region of India and Pakistan. The Discovery Center offers classes in a contemporary variation that combines bhangra with hip-hop and belly dancing, while the Old Town School of Folk Music offers lessons in the traditional version. Either is sure to be a good workout that’s more fun that the StairMaster....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city just began offering curbside recycling to single-family homes and residential buildings with four or fewer units in the North Side’s 46th and 47th wards. This means 7 of the city’s 50 wards now have ditched the low-performing Blue Bag program in favor of the Blue Cart pilot. In the new program, residents in homes and “low-density” apartments and condos put all of their recyclable commodities–paper, glass, plastic, and metal–into a single blue cart (which they literally place at the curb in some areas, and in the alleys next to their trash bins in others)....

Ten performers improvise a long-form montage inspired by the original Star Trek series. Under Jack Bronis’s direction the show is neither spoof nor impersonation: the cast wear the correct monochromatic outfits and reference teleporters, replicators, and phasers, but nobody lampoons Kirk or Spock. Here theme becomes form, producing mutinies, Klingon-esque villains, and intraship romances. With this large, mostly talented cast, the momentum swings wildly from scene to scene, but some nice musical touches–like spacey keyboard sounds–help bind the bits together....

The Jazz Posse Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the truth is that the local scene is as strong as ever, and these kinds of setbacks are nothing new. Since the early 90s, when Ken Vandermark’s regular gig at the original HotHouse in Wicker Park became the nucleus of a young free-jazz community in Chicago, up-and-coming musicians have relied on the kind of venues that are likely to fold if audiences dwindle or property taxes jump–Urbus Orbis, Xoinx, the Nervous Center, the Candlestick Maker, and many others have all come and gone....

“The way I see it,” Taalib-Din Uqdah tells me, “I’m coming to Springfield, Illinois, to free the slaves. I am a modern-day abolitionist. And the cosmetology industry is the last legal bastion of chattel slavery in the United States.” He’s calling from the hair salon he owns with his wife in Washington, D.C.; their shop is nationally famous among people who care about the upkeep and the politics of black hair....

friday24 MAHJONGG For a while there it looked like we might never see a second album of Mahjongg’s neon–brilliant world-beat junkyard dance funk. They became orphans when Cold Crush, which released their 2005 debut LP, Raydoncong, called it quits, and they’ve been at loose ends in other ways too, losing a couple members and nearly breaking up. But then Calvin Johnson of K Records came calling–he’s been a fan since Dub Narcotic Sound System played with Mahjongg back in Missouri–and now the band has somewhere to put the recordings it’s been piecing together over the past couple years....

friday17 CRACKLIN MOTH This Chicago quintet has thus far rationed out its store of talent a little bit at a time, putting out a pair of EPs almost two years apart and playing a recent run of high-profile gigs. It’s been a good strategy for them: like rocks in a tumbler, they get more polished each time around. Released in May, My Heart Is Leaking retains the alt-country patina of 2005’s Redbird–largely in the form of lots of keening, creamy pedal steel, provided by Rocco Labriola–but now the voice of Kentucky-bred front man Matt Ammerman curls and unfurls in a romantic blue-eyed-soul mode, finding a new sophistication to match his tales of lovers’ ambition....

In the early 70s muralist Bill Walker covered the front outside wall and the back interior wall of the San Marcello Mission, a Catholic church near the corner of Larrabee and Clybourn, with messages about neighborly love, social justice, and what he called the “unity of the human race.” The interior work made the church “a little Sistine Chapel,” says Jon Pounds, executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group. “It’s also important because there’s so few examples left of what Bill Walker brought to the city....

Chicago’s music scene has a bench so deep it’s possible for any of a dozen bands at any given time to blindside you with something that’ll make you wonder where on earth that came from. This local quartet, formed about five years ago, had a not especially auspicious start, slowly and unobtrusively getting better and better across an EP and a full-length. But their second album, Water Everywhere (Stars/No Stars), is my favorite local rock record of this young year–and I think it’ll stay that way well into the fall at least....

Samuel Beckett’s theatrical genius reveals itself best in his short plays, many of them less than ten minutes long, as director Sean Graney illustrates in the Hypocrites’ trio of finely done one-acts. Stripping his work to its essence, Beckett never loses sight of the fact that these are not philosophical tracts but seriocomic pieces written for specific actors playing specific parts. The introverted woman in Not I, who spends her time endlessly ruminating about the past, is not the same at all as the hysterical middle-aged woman who chatters obsessively about the past to her mother in Footfalls, and neither resembles the three backbiting gossips in Come and Go....

God help me for falling into the trap of writing to the Reader about Liz Armstrong, but this week’s column on M.I.A. [Chicago Antisocial, May 27] got me thinking. I can sympathize with the contortions Liz must go through before she can express genuine enthusiasm for something (heard the music at the cool parties but was turned off by the hype, then enjoyed the music live and regretted being “too cool” earlier, became aware of earlier encounter with artist that cheapens the entire experience), but I think the “when I was a stripper in college” anecdote might offer a clue to the real problem....

The Hypocrites’ production of what may be the most analyzed of Arthur Miller’s plays succeeds for lots of reasons. But a key factor is director Sean Graney’s ability to weave together Willy Loman’s present and past with a tensile intelligence and visual elan, evident in the clever set Graney designed with Jim Moore. It helps that Willy and Linda are played by real-life couple Bill and Donna McGough, who deliver performances with a lived-in level of believability....

Monday afternoon I woke up next to a glass of water and two tablets of Alka-Seltzer, which must’ve been my boyfriend’s doing, and a note I didn’t remember writing. “I’m really sorry I got so fucked up,” it read. “It wasn’t the plan. Please make sure I’m still alive.” Wright, who used to teach personal finance and investment at Roosevelt University, got her first Spiritual Response reading in February 2001. The next day, she said, she could communicate telepathically with animals....

Guitarist Matt Pike brought a new and necessary sound into the world with his 90s band, Sleep–together with Earth, they established the audacious, black-hole-dense baseline against which all that’s slow, stoned, and heavy has been charted ever since. So maybe it’s understandable that some expressed disappointment when his second big project, High on Fire, turned out to be in many ways such a traditional metal outfit. I don’t share that feeling, not even now that Pike’s primordial vision has subsumed new bassist Joe Preston and his experimental-sludge-metal pedigree (Thrones, Melvins)....