Not only can local cartoonist Ivan Brunetti draw ’em, he can pick ’em too: An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, a hefty, gorgeous tome he edited, featuring work by more than 70 artists, was published in October by Yale University Press. The scope is staggering. In addition to the usual suspects–Lynda Barry, Kim Deitch, Adrian Tomine, the brothers Hernandez, to name just a few–the volume is a showcase for a diverse collection of Chicago-area artists, from Henry Darger to Jeffrey Brown, with Daniel Raeburn (The Imp) contributing a concluding essay....

When musicians of discipline and intelligence get together, disparate elements can be fused into a marvelous equilibrium. This quartet’s debut CD, Cipher (Delmark, 2003), works because the players, who were born on three continents and range in age from 30 to 62, draw selectively from their respective stylistic bags. While bassist Abrams and guitarist Parker thrive in groove-oriented settings, trumpeter Dorner is a laptop-carrying member of the international electroacoustic improv underground, and reedist Gregorio’s CV includes musique concrete and performance art....

Hello Pineapple, this is Miss Foozie, and I want to personally thank you for taking the time out from your busy schedule to write an article about little ole me. “Miss Foozie: The transvestite, bouffant-blonde Hostess of Halsted Street. ‘Nuff said” [“Where the Gays Are,” September 22]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Miss Foozie was so happy about the article until you mentioned that I am a transvestite?...

Women: are we fundamentally strong or weak? Virgin or whore? Dirty or clean? In her latest book, The Female Thing (Pantheon), Laura Kipnis tries to nail down the crippling ambivalence she argues is born of all these mixed messages. In four slim chapters on “envy,” “sex,” “dirt,” and “vulnerability” she mines a broad range of material, from radical feminist takes on rape to a mother lode of pop-culture inanities (Brazilian waxing, Caitlin Flanagan), to produce another volume of provocative cultural criticism....

Atlanta playwright-performer Tyler Perry likes to impersonate a bigmouthed grandma who messes in people’s business for their own good: his Madea–the star of four previous Perry plays and his first film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman–is a vulgar evangelist for family values. This rowdy, music-packed, melodramatic crowd-pleaser, which elicits sing-alongs to dusties and affirmations of its homilies, includes shirtless beefcake, exhortations to women to fix hot meals for their husbands, and allusions to Calumet, Cicero, and Roger Ebert (who called Madea “a writing and casting disaster” in his review of the film)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “my own experience with this blog has only hardened my belief in the intrinsically derivative nature of blogging. As those of you who read the New Yorker know, I wrote a review of the book Wages of Wins this spring, and then blogged about it. The review and my posts prompted a good deal of comments, both on this site and on other blogs....

Clowning can be charming, as veteran Bristol Renaissance Faire entertainers Philip Earl Johnson (doofus Moonie) and Brian Howard (acerbic Broon) prove here. Working separately and together, they offer a potpourri of circus specialties and vintage vaudeville and busker routines–the obvious result of having too much free time and even more imagination. The stunts include juggling, eating fire, warbling impromptu ballads, escaping from a straitjacket, and the ever-popular having a concrete block broken on your stomach as you lie on a bed of nails....

It was a surprise when Hubbard Street Dance Chicago executive director Gail Kalver announced this fall that she’d be leaving the organization. She’d been with HSDC for 23 of its 29 years and, at least in Chicago, was as much the face of the company as founder Lou Conte or artistic director Jim Vincent. But Kalver said she was itching to try something new–and who wouldn’t be after all that time?...

It was a Saturday evening, and I was coming here to get chicken for my family when a man my age approached me and asked for spare change. I immediately recognized him from high school. I said, “Joe?” and he said, “No, I’m not Joe,” and I said, “Well, I’ll see if I have anything after I get out of the store.” So I went in, and standing in front of me in line was another familiar face....

This weeklong festival of Japanese action films, screening in new prints, runs Friday through Thursday, March 3 through 9, at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets for each film are $9.25, $8.25 for the first screening on Monday through Thursday. For more information call 773-871-6604. Samurai leader Toshiro Mifune conducts his princess, Misa Uehara, across a war-torn landscape to safety in a casual, often satiric action film directed by Akira Kurosawa....

It’s a Friday in late March–the same night as Coldplay’s show at the United Center–and former Guided by Voices front man Robert Pollard is onstage at the Metro, deep into a midset rant about the state of popular music. “Fuck Coldplay!” he yells, then walks over and throws an arm around his guitarist, Tommy Keene. “You know what else? Tommy Keene says fuck Coldplay too! You know why? ‘Cause Tommy Keene likes rock!...

I went to lunch with some friends on Sunday. There’s one girl who thinks she knows everything and is always peppering us with stories and factoids to show off. Sunday she throws this nugget out: In domestic killings, the number one weapon used is not guns, but frying pans. This can’t be true, can it? It sounds like something Saturday Night Live would have the NRA saying in a skit. –Hokienautic, via the Straight Dope Message Board...

Friday 8 MIKA MIKO Purists may dismiss Mika Miko as just another goddamn Slits clone, with their buzzy, hiccupping guitar riffs and bouncy bass lines, but I’m a fan of the tight-jeans-and-middle-finger style of these five ladies from LA. I prefer the seven-inches they put out on PPM to their latest, C.Y.S.L.A.B.F. (Kill Rock Stars)–the singles are more hectic and fist-pumpy, with slack-jawed Valley-grrrl screaming–but the full-length’s cleaner production values likely won’t follow them to the stage....

When TV on the Radio emerged out of the New York art-rock scene three years ago, they seemed fully formed: a brilliant, gnomic, and mildly confounding group of experimenters. Their debut EP, Young Liars, was a bracing collection of hip-hop, trip-hop, free-jazz, and doo-wop sounds that was hard to describe without resorting to wild hand gestures and comparisons to things of great size. Even without the deconstructed Pixies cover at the end it would’ve been enough to turn TV on the Radio into the biggest indie-boner It Band around....

You Get What You Pay For “I guess I just haven’t codified a philosophy of Fluff,” she said. “If it’s fun and goes down easy, then I run with it.” She did point out that the Sunday paper isn’t all fun and games. When the Sun-Times added Fluff five weeks ago it also added Controversy, a growly new commentary section (with an impressively expanded books department). “And you know ‘Scurrilous’ has been immensely successful, and ‘Scurrilous’ lives in Fluff....

In May of 2004 Paul Klein closed the door on his west-side gallery, Klein Art Works, and his 23-year career as a Chicago art dealer. He said his new ambition was to run a small museum, but by the end of that year he was the surprise choice to commission art for McCormick Place West, the billion-dollar expansion of what was already the nation’s largest convention center. Beating out experienced public-art curators for the job, Klein was handed $1....

You smile too much, an Iranian friend chastised California-born journalist Azadeh Moaveni shortly after she moved to Tehran in 2000. Despite the reforms of the “Khatami spring,” corrupt Islamic fundamentalists were still in charge, and ordinary Iranians knew better than to drop their guard. Since the 1979 revolution they’d taken to heart the lesson learned by people living under repressive regimes: to survive you must create a thick wall between public and private....

Beach Brawl The history of the two magazines would make for good beach-blanket reading in either. Owned by the Small Newspaper Group, Lake was launched as a quarterly in 2000 by Deborah Loeser Small, a journalist who married into the Small family and became infatuated with the dunes and beaches east of Chicago. Small published four issues and moved to California, but she stayed in close–perhaps uncomfortably close–touch with her new editor, the wife of Gary’s deputy chief of police....

FORGET THE ARGUMENT about how keeping up with the news is a civic duty. If you live in Chicago and don’t read the papers you’re missing out on one of the joys of life. Most cities have one daily paper, and it probably thinks of itself as a utility like the water works, bland and inoffensive. In Chicago there are two metropolitan dailies (and others in the suburbs). Reporters here compete by oneupping each other....

The third annual Chicago International Documentary Festival runs Friday, April 1, through Sunday, April 10, with screenings at the Beverly Arts Center; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division; Copernicus Center; Facets Cinematheque; Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art; Northwestern Univ. Thorne Auditorium; Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee; and Univ. of Chicago Doc Films. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8.50, $7 for seniors and students, and $6.50 for shows before 2 PM or after 10 PM....