In an era of MySpace pages and MP3 downloads, this San Francisco singer-songwriter landed his record deal the old-fashioned way. Stoltz’s long journey to his contract with Sub Pop began with 2001’s bedroom-recorded full-length Antique Glow, for which he crammed a small army of instruments and influences–the Beatles, Small Faces, Nick Drake, and Joy Division most prominently–onto his eight-track. After pressing up about a hundred vinyl copies, Stoltz passed the album on to folks like Chuck Prophet and the Dirtbombs’ Ben Blackwell, who helped it get released on CD in Australia and the UK before it was ultimately issued in the States on Jackpine Social Club in 2003....

There’s a certain frustration attached to any attempt to describe the work of Lucille Clifton, whose wise, rounded verse feels as if it’s already said it all. Clifton’s poems are quiet but also furious. They’re spare, funny, often biblical, and heartbreaking–testaments to her commitment to “the balance of intellect and intuition” and the challenge of “involving oneself authentically” in life through poetry. More often than not she succeeds in this challenge, grappling honestly with her experience as an African-American woman as well as universal human issues....

Flamenco music emerged centuries ago from the Gypsy slums in Andalusia, in southern Spain, and it maintains a strong connection to those roots; many of its greatest practitioners were or are proudly loyal to Spanish Gypsy culture. But as the music installed itself within the cultural landscape of Spain, flamenco lured non-Rom listeners into the once seedy tablaos (nightclubs) that spread north over time. These days, attaching flamenco music to Rom heritage is a somewhat outdated notion: “Flamenco isn’t exclusive to any race, nor any place in particular,” Barcelona-based singer Mayte Martin said in a 2001 interview....

Dan Noonan’s new semiautobiographical script is a minor miracle, avoiding the pitfalls that hobble so many AIDS plays. Melodramatic pity, facile moralizing, and PC proselytizing have no place in this piece about Patrick, a nebbishy HIV-positive hemophiliac searching for love in his doctor’s waiting room. Instead Noonan turns a TV-movie premise into a carefully observed tragicomedy about workaday endurance in the face of perpetually crushed expectations. Each of his three HIV-positive characters confronts his or her imagined impending doom in a different but very human way....

At 2:30 on a cool, overcast April afternoon in 1998, a white sheriff’s bus pulls up behind the Cook County Criminal Courthouse, and the Locallo entourage boards. Judge Daniel Locallo had asked the sheriff’s office for the bus and a driver this morning, annoying the chief of security in the courthouse, Ed Hassel, who would have preferred a little more notice. But it’s par for the course for Locallo, according to Hassel, who says Locallo makes more special requests of the sheriff’s office than any other judge at 26th and California, and often with little regard for the difficulties the requests might impose....

Carol Ann Carter’s three-month stay in Nigeria in 1984 was the first great influence on her art, she says, but not in ways she’d expected. She already knew that her prints of geometrical designs unintentionally resembled African textiles, and while in Nigeria she visited a number of museums. But she was most entranced by the “street wanderers” of Lagos. “They traveled with their shelter,” she says, “sometimes under umbrellas, with piles of fabric....

Don’t Be Scared Anymore (Premonition), the 2000 debut studio date from drummer Paul Wertico and his trio, immediately marked the group as a delightful anachronism. They played music that hadn’t been heard since the heyday of fusion–when such groups as the Tony Williams Lifetime and the Mahavishnu Orchestra roamed the earth, unapologetically powered by rock–before the dilutions of the 80s robbed the term of whatever integrity it once had. Spurred on by dark, lapidary lines from bassist Eric Hochberg and the snarling guitar of John Moulder, Wertico indulged the wild side of his wide range....

Any words of wisdom on girlfriends, boyfriends, and spouses who claim to be GGG but systematically take away much of what they give by making it clear that they are not “into it” even as they fulfill their lovers’ fantasies? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I strive to be fair and balanced, WHIPME, but lately some Savage Love readers have accused me–me!–of gender discrimination....

Boston-based keyboardist Steve Lantner isn’t averse to the dense language that’s favored by so many contemporary jazz pianists, and his music has its share of dissonant harmonies and emphatic percussive accents. But he only uses those devices to emphasize the fundamentally melodic nature of his improvisations, and his clean, darting lines tend to incorporate plenty of space. That gives his fellow musicians ample opportunity to increase the tension of a piece by making contrasting statements, but they never get in the way of the ceaseless forward momentum....

Geoffrey Darrow and his family recently moved to Chicago from Paris, and apparently customs officials were less than delicate while inspecting their stuff. “The piano was delivered upside down in the crate,” he says. Fortunately his foot-tall Bruce Lee doll, which is sitting on top of a drawing table, survived the trip. “You can put it in any pose and put the little clothes on it,” he says. “It’s good to see the folds and the anatomy beneath it....

Michel Gondry, known for his music videos (for Bjork and others) and his collaborations with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (directing Human Nature and cowriting and directing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), debuts as a full-fledged writer-director in this charming comedy. Gael Garcia Bernal stars as an obsessive young Mexican illustrator trying to settle down in Paris with his French mother (Miou-Miou) and reach some kind of emotional equilibrium with an equally obsessive neighbor (Charlotte Gainsbourg)....

Lisa Stone remembers the first time she visited Jesse Howard, a self-taught artist who festooned his Missouri farm with hand-painted signs. “He called his place ‘Sorehead Hill,’” says Stone, curator of the School of the Art Institute’s Roger Brown Study Collection. “He was one hell of a sorehead. We’d be standing by the side of the road, talking, looking at signs and so forth, and a car would drive by. And if the car didn’t stop he’d yell, ‘No cooperation!...

Maybe you’ve noticed that Strawberry Shortcake is back–only this time she’s on tiny T-shirts worn by adults instead of on TV. The trappings of Reagan-era childhood are being embraced all over again by consumers between the ages of 18 and 49 who, according to Nielsen Media Research, watch more Cartoon Network than CNN. These grown-up kids are not only looking back to the Saturday-morning icons of their youth. They’re also playing Grand Theft Auto 3, reading graphic novels, and getting friendly with a new breed of toy made just for them: designer creations such as Furilla, a monocular, furry creature who comes bizarrely packaged in a FoodSaver vacuum-sealed bag....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe that’s the problem … because for the life of me I can’t figure out how to watch Zemeckis’s new film and make any visual sense of it. But only in the 3-D version, since when you take off the correcting glasses (unless the problem’s only mine), the 2-D almost seems manageable. Aside from the doubling of images, of course—though notice that conventional 2-D focus in the middle ground of every 3-D frame is like a knife … or in this case sword....

Thank you for covering the efforts of the local radical activist group Pomegranate Radical Health Collective [Chicago Antisocial, March 17]. I thought it was good of you to share your own experiences–the more openness and dialogue, the better. I did find one aspect of the analysis disconcerting. The film made a point that Jane mostly serviced low-income women of color who sought to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Although you didn’t mention this fact, you did make room to portray unflattering images of low-income women twice in your column: one a crotch-grabbing “crack whore” and the second a 22-year-old single mother, “a carny....

Last month, at a picnic in the Salt Creek Forest Preserve in Wood Dale, Illinois, Jan Rebmann finally met Guinevere, the cotton-white Angora rabbit she’d scoured shelters across the midwest to find. No other rabbit would do, Rebmann said. It had to be an Angora. Rebmann’s rabbit infatuation began Christmas morning nine years ago with Angel, a tiny English Angora her husband tucked under the tree. “I had two dogs at that time,” Rebmann recalled....

When John Manion was a teenager back in the 80s, he used to hop on his old Vespa scooter and struggle to keep up with Dan Ryan traffic on the 15-mile trip from Calumet City into Chicago, where he came to see his favorite local mod bands. “I used to take my life into my own hands doing that,” he says. “You tend to do that kind of thing when you’re 17....

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Fun Home begins Bechdel’s father is a high school English teacher, part-time mortician, and closeted homosexual. A perfectionist who treats “his furniture like children and his children like furniture,” he’s like a cross between Joan Crawford (the Mommie Dearest version) and Jane Wyman’s miserable homemaker in All That Heaven Allows, two queer icons he would probably fail to recognize....

David Greig’s contemporary take on the Casanova legend is a glib, aimless dalliance lacking dramatic structure, theatrical plausibility, and political savvy. The title character, a libidinous art collector who beds 1,001 women for sport, imagines himself a revolutionary because he acknowledges women’s right to sexual pleasure. A subplot involving a cuckolded cabinetmaker trying to exact revenge on Casanova through the services of a shapely female detective is ludicrous even within Greig’s playfully distorted universe....

THE SPORTING NEWS proclaimed Chicago the top sports town Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Cubs are the city’s favorite baseball team, and Wrigley Field, at Clark and Addison, is justifiably renowned as the most beautiful and inviting of big-league ballparks, but the Friendly Confines are considerably less friendly lately. The Cubs almost making the World Series in 2003 (they missed by five outs) raised fans’ expectations: ever since, the laughing flesh in the bleachers is still a debaucher’s paradise, but otherwise Wrigley isn’t as jolly as it used to be....