Chicagoan Robbie Fulks is often tagged as an alt-country artist, but unlike a lot of his peers he doesn’t reject mainstream country wholesale. He has his problems with Nashville, a place he got to know firsthand as a songwriter in the early 90s, but he’s never lost his deep and abiding love for its history, and on his terrific new album, Georgia Hard (Yep Roc), he tips his hat to the much-maligned 70s–pedal steels, electric pianos, and all....

Holy cow, Dan! What a mean response! I totally disagree that there’s a direct parallel between mugging old ladies and having unsafe sex with a positive HIV diagnosis. The old ladies have no way to protect themselves, whereas every single partner that sleeps with an HIV-er has the choice of using a condom. I work at an HIV service agency, and we deal with the issue of disclosure all the time–it’s one of the hardest things for sexually active gay men, especially those that feel validated by sex, to handle....

Adapted by Alan Bennett from his celebrated play, this British drama about a boys’ boarding school in the early 80s draws on the sentimental tradition of Goodbye, Mr. Chips but also offers a sharp critique of the means and measures of education. Richard Griffiths stars as a lovable old English teacher who endorses A.E. Housman’s principle that “all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.” His philosophy is challenged after eight young history scholars score high enough on their exams to be considered for Oxford or Cambridge and the headmaster hires a clever young instructor (Stephen Campbell Moore) to school them in the rhetorical smoke and mirrors that impresses college examiners....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What the Tribune called a “bizarre twist” came as the City Council’s Finance Committee decided to table for two weeks discussion of the settlement being negotiated between Chicago and three former Death Row inmates exonerated by Governor Ryan on grounds their confessions were false and tortured out of them. The three — Madison Hobley is one — then sued the city....

If you’re like me, you might feel some reluctance about going to a show by and about a disabled person. Not because you’re bigoted–necessarily–but because you don’t want to spend an evening doing something you’re sure will bum you out. Overcome it. Now. Tekki Lomnicki is a dwarf who’s also a great monologuist with a funny, powerful, vivid autobiographical show it would be a bummer to miss. A sort of sick man’s Wizard of Oz, Blurred Vision presents Lomnicki as a hypochondriacal Dorothy wandering among the doctors–from radiologists to naprapaths, neurologists to her new age friend Debbi–asking not how to get home but whether she has cancer....

After more than 15 years of playing together, core Charalambides members Tom and Christina Carter have bid au revoir to outside collaboration, esoteric instrumentation, and free-form improvisation. That’s not to say that the new A Vintage Burden (Kranky) is a complete break with the past: the relatively conventional verse-chorus structures, gorgeous folklike melodies, and guitar-dominated arrangements recall the duo’s haunting mid-90s Siltbreeze LPs, and Christina’s swooping, multitracked vocals defy gravity as fearlessly as the hair-raising wordless maneuvers she executed with Heather Leigh Murray on more recent efforts like Unknown Spin and Joy Shapes....

“Improv as Theater,” the theme of the ninth annual edition of this sprawling showcase of performers from around the world, links improvisation to its roots and emphasizes its potential–and rightly so. When Viola Spolin taught character games to the folks who went on to found Second City, she called the form improvisational theater. This year’s CIF jury members selected participants who exhibit an inclination to experiment beyond standard short-form sketch comedy and long-form montage, including actors, writers, monologuists, dancers, musicians, and video artists....

Matthew Churney, 47, has been cutting elaborate patterns into his T-shirts for the past 20 years. He’s also occasionally made pieces for other people–including Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlain. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Matthew Churney: Razor-cut work. People, if they want to get fancy, would call me a fabric artist. It’s nothing more than drawing, but with a razor blade....

An instant classic, Alexander Payne’s 1999 high school comedy seems even more scathing now that we’re losing control of our own election machinery. Reese Witherspoon was born to play Tracy Flick, a frighteningly perky overachiever whose obsessive campaign to become student council president touches a nerve in her devoted civics teacher (Matthew Broderick). Angered by her recent seduction of a fellow teacher, he recruits a popular student athlete (Chris Klein) to run against her, and the buried sexual politics make for a particularly knotty satire of modern morality....

Maxim Vengerov has a rare combination of gifts–supreme virtuosity, profound musicality, and the ability to truly communicate emotion. At 29, he’s among the world’s busiest violinists, playing about 130 concerts each year in 100 different cities, and in his first recital here since 2002 he’ll perform sonatas of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. In Bach’s lovely Sonata no. 1 in B Minor for violin and keyboard, the violin starts with a single, sustained note that opens into a heartbreaking lament....

As Stephan Wanger pedaled east into Indiana on July 21, 2004, it seemed a perfect day for a bike ride, sunny and not too hot. But just on the other side of Michigan City, he was ambushed by a summer storm. Strong winds pushed his flagpole–flying the flag of the city of Chicago–so far forward that it hit his bike’s handlebars, smashing his $270 navigational computer. When Wanger, then 37, got back to Chicago he had no job and, as he’d sublet his Printers Row loft before the ride, no place to live....

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....

I am a 15-year-old boy who’s never had a girlfriend, and I wanted to ask you personally, How do you get girls? Like the best way to get them, so they think I’m interesting. I await your orders. –Teenager Going to Waste Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But don’t despair, TGTW: your awkward/repulsive stage will pass. In the meantime, worry less about getting your 15-year-old self laid and start thinking about getting your 18- or 20-year-old self laid....

Margaret James unplugged her Twike from an outlet in her garage, lifted the roof–the “canopy,” she called it–and told me to climb in. We were about to embark on the inaugural ride of the first Twike in Illinois. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So after the run-in with the motorist, James became smitten with the Twike, which she discovered on the Web. “It’s just a brilliant vehicle,” she says....

American Dead Neveu’s material is well suited to the socially conscious, militantly intimate sort of drama that Chayevsky and an infant television technology favored. Set in a small midwestern town that’s getting smaller by the day as people drift away, businesses close down, and buildings go to seed, the play centers on a broken soul named Lewie. A former housepainter, Lewie was probably always an amiably marginal kind of guy; he lost whatever equilibrium he had, however, when his sister, Grace, and a young clerk named Mark were gunned down during a robbery at the local grocery store....

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada With Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, and Melissa Leo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both Haneke’s and Jones’s films are political. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a western, protests the abusive treatment of Mexican immigrants in west Texas, and Cache, an anxiety-ridden crime thriller, protests the abusive treatment of Algerians in France....

Palindromes The other night, as a refresher course, I sat down and watched Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), and Storytelling (2001) all in a row. It’s a wonder I didn’t hang myself. His characters are so lonely, so unhappy, and so helplessly cruel to one another that as a group they make a convincing case that the human race is doomed. Among the people I spent my evening with were a suburban father who’s secretly a pedophile, a portly man who makes dirty phone calls to women, a Latina maid slaving away for a spoiled white family while her own son is executed, a white college student so consumed by liberal guilt that she lets a black professor sodomize her, and of course homely Dawn Wiener from Welcome to the Dollhouse, possibly the most hounded and wronged preteen in movie history, who responds to her junior high gauntlet of humiliation with a silent rage of epic proportions....

Nowhere is the influence of Stoppard on Python more evident than in these farcical one-acts. The bowler-wearing cipher and interloping buffoon of a police constable in After Magritte, a tightly wound absurdist trifle, scream Terry Jones and John Cleese. And The Real Inspector Hound, an Agatha Christie parody, seems the forerunner of the troupe’s even better riffs on the same genre. Both playlets are self-consciously organized around a stereotypically provocative, out-of-control spaz–though Hound also features some delicious skullduggery involving critics and pecking orders....

The crowd that gathered for the 24th anniversary of B-Fest, the 24-hour marathon of so-bad-they’re-good movies at Northwestern University, was the greatest collection of indoorsmen ever assembled in one auditorium. They began filing into the Norris University Center just before six, carrying sleeping bags, pillows, laptops, Cheetos, bags of paper plates, and inflatable mallets with American-flag designs. Every kind of trash-culture mania was represented, often on the body of a single person: one man sported a soul patch, a crew cut, and a Hawaiian shirt worn over a T-shirt with the command cut your mullet....

CHICAGO HAS LOADS of galleries, and museums (see listings in Section 2), and fall is a great time to explore them because of all the openings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Other places on the second floor include Bodybuilder & Sportsman (312-492-7261), Chicago’s blue-chip independent space. Started by Tony Wight nearly a decade ago, Bodybuilder showcases what I call Chicago’s “carny” style—art that’s often scuffed, gloopy, and crowded with detail....