Like his father, author Larry, singer-songwriter James McMurtry brings a high-art sensibility to his portraits of common folk: the more prosaic the scene or downtrodden the characters, the more elegant his lyrics. It’s a good thing he has that talent, because too often his music is full of middle-of-the-road Mellencampisms–not quite rock ‘n’ roll or country, and despite the occasional Cajun squeeze-box-and-fiddle arrangements, not very southern either. On the new Childish Things (Compadre), he alternates between bittersweet ruminations on a rural upbringing (“See the Elephant,” “Memorial Day”) and harrowing dispatches from cow towns in economic and moral decline....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While dining at Angellino’s in Palm Harbor, Florida, with his girlfriend in March, 54-year-old Ralph Paul ate the five shrimp and five scallops that came with his entree, then sent back the rest of the dish and asked that it be taken off the check because there hadn’t been enough seafood. After an argument with the owner, the couple left without paying their $46 bill; soon police contacted Paul, saying he’d be arrested for fraud if he didn’t pay up....

I come here for the dollar drinks on Monday nights, and I love it. I’ve met some superfabulous people here, both physically and mentally. My life has been one huge nightlife adventure after another. For starters, I ran away from home at 13. I grew up on the streets of LA with drag queens as my moms and all kinds of street urchins teaching me how to survive. When I was 14 I started doing tricks with some older people....

At 26, with a year to go on his MFA at the School of the Art Institute, Rashid Johnson is a bit young for a retrospective, but his solo show at the Noyes Cultural Center–a sampling of photography and sculpture from the past few years–explains the buzz about him. Johnson has said his work is not thematic, but his tightly focused portraits suggest an emotionally charged context, and his photograms, done with a 19th-century process in which he places objects on chemically treated paper and exposes them to the sun, spell it out–literally....

Twice now young Matthew Adam Hart, aka the Russian Futurists, has holed up in his Toronto apartment with a bunch of cheap keyboards and crawled out some months later with an album of wintry electronic pop: first 2000’s The Method of Modern Love, then 2002’s Let’s Get Ready to Crumble. Over gamely aggressive synthesized beats and under a reverb-fluffed blanket of harp, xylophone, and jingle-bell sounds, Hart’s slightly adenoidal voice trips through his brokenhearted-smarty-pants songs like a kid headed for the sled hill in Spider-Man moon boots....

If gamesmanship is what we do to them and cheating is what they do to us, one of the reasons steroids are despised in America is that our enemies used them first. Do you remember 1976, when our graceful women swimmers were routed at the Olympics by East German amazons with mustaches? That calamity put steroids on the map as a commie tool. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer Ankiel was more than “Young Musial....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New York reedist Ned Rothenberg plays duets tonight with British improvising saxophone legend Evan Parker over at Elastic, reprising their duo appearance at the Empty Bottle back in April of 2000. Bill Meyer’s recent Critic’s Choice focuses on Parker, but don’t forget Ned. As Rothenberg writes in the liner notes of the recent two-CD set The Lumina Recordings (Tzadik), which collects the three solo albums he made for his titular label in the early-to-mid 80s, Parker was an important influence on his own playing: “I immediately realized that he was making use of a sonic language that could give the solo saxophone context unprecedented range,” he writes of hearing him for the first time....

When Robert Lowe unveiled his one-man improv band, Lichens, at the Empty Bottle last August, Kranky Records co-owner Bruce Adams wasn’t expecting to find his next signing. But soon after Lowe started playing, fingerpicking acoustic guitar and layering eerie wordless wails with a sampler pedal, he was hooked. “I was standing there with Tom and Christina Carter from Charalambides watching Rob, and it’s one of those sort of moments where you look at each other and go, ‘Did you just see what I saw?...

This darkly comic Israeli feature (2004) revolves around the Druze, a close-knit minority scattered throughout the Middle East; their political allegiances follow national borders, but their tradition prohibits marriage outside the religious community. A wistful young Druze woman in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (Clara Khoury of Rana’s Wedding) is betrothed to a TV star in Damascus, but on the big day her father (Makram J. Khoury) escalates tensions by marching in a pro-Syrian rally....

Three weeks ago at Betty’s Blue Star Lounge, on the corner of Grand and Ashland, Hayden Thompson and Dale Hawkins took turns fronting the club’s usual Wednesday-night band, Rockin’ Billy& His Wild Coyotes. It was a rare treat for the country and rockabilly fans who’d caught wind of the underpublicized show: Hawkins is the man who wrote and originally sang “Susie-Q,” back in 1957, and at around the same time Thompson was recording at Memphis’s legendary Sun Studios....

Friday 5/28 – Thursday 6/3 It’s Indiapalooza today at the Zee TV Heritage India Festival. Besides more than 100 vendors hawking colorful clothes, jewelry, and fabric paintings, there will be a troupe demonstrating ghumar and other traditional dance styles from the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan, plus puppetry and special kids’ activities like mehndi henna tattooing and kite making. And then there’s the food–you can count on popular items like lassis, chicken tikka, and samosas in addition to more adventurous fare....

It’s been a while since anyone referred to Calexico as a side project for John Convertino and Joey Burns, but that’s how the band started out nearly a decade ago. Back then the duo was better known as the rhythm section for Howe Gelb’s desert rock ensemble, Giant Sand. They continued to pull double duty for years but are conspicuously absent from the forthcoming Giant Sand release (due in September on Thrill Jockey), which Gelb made with a crew of Danish musicians....

Brazilian singer Cibelle was introduced to the world on Sao Paulo Confessions, a 1999 release by Yugoslavian-born producer Suba; the three tracks of electronically driven club cool on which she sang suggested a more idiomatically liberated Bebel Gilberto. Suba having subsequently died in a house fire, Cibelle teamed up with like-minded Sao Paulo knob twirler Apollo 9 to make her eponymous debut (Six Degrees/Ziriguiboom, 2003), for which she wrote or cowrote every song but one....

Patrick Marber’s exasperatingly self-ignorant characters never manage to fall in love at the right time. Instead a doctor, photographer, stripper, and writer who bed and betray one another over a period of five years prove that “lying is the currency of the world” and jealousy can live in a vacuum. A bitter pill is best swallowed quickly, but Michael Persad’s staging for A Dreaming Experiment is a full 45 minutes longer than Steppenwolf’s 2000 local premiere....

Floyd Lee’s life story seems bluesy enough on the facts alone, and that’s before he starts dropping dark hints and leaving the details to the imagination. Born in Lamar, Mississippi, in 1933, Lee was musically inspired by his father, a local juker who went by the name Guitar Floyd. When Lee was about ten, a spot of bother with the authorities (“Well, you might just say school trouble,” he hedged in a Living Blues interview last year) precipitated a migration to Chicago....

Funny Ha-Ha is a literary-humor reading series staged roughly quarterly since 2005. It’s “slightly more highbrow” than Zanies, says cofounder Claire Zulkey, a freelance writer and blogger (zulkey.com) who hosts and occasionally performs, because it focuses on “laughing and using your brain.” At this installment James Finn Garner (Recut Madness) and Wendy McClure (poundy.com, Bust) will read from their short works and books, and Mark Bazer (RedEye, markbazer.com) is bringing along a so-true narrative about a pickup basketball game with players like The Guy Who Plays Defense Way Harder Than Is Appropriate....

January may seem an unlikely time to start thinking about farm-fresh tomatoes, but most community-supported-agriculture shares are sold on a first-come, first-served basis, and they sometimes sell out before the growing season begins. Note too that some CSAs give discounts on early subscriptions. A full share typically gets you a bushel of farm-grown vegetables for weekly pickup; half shares tend to be delivered every other week. On March 10 and 11 an expo at the Chicago Cultural Center will bring together representatives from more than 400 midwestern farms and will feature workshops, movies, cooking demonstrations, and exhibits with the theme “Know Your Food, Know Your Farmer....

For complete information see Theater & Performance at chicagoreader.com. A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Scrap Mettle Soul’s version of the Thomas classic, on a double bill with their version of The Snow Queen (see separate listing), Ravenswood Fellowship United Methodist Church, 4511 N. Hermitage, 773-275-3999. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 500 Clown Christmas, a musical circus/theater production by 500 Clown, Storefront Theater, 66 E....

A couple years ago Ivan Brunetti published a comic in the Reader in which a weepy, scruff-jawed character recounts his attempt to off himself with 300 aspirin dissolved in whiskey and Coke. “That’s a true story,” he says. “I put it to my mouth many times, but I couldn’t do it in the end.” He finds it a little disconcerting to look at that strip now that “everything’s just hunky-dory.” Without a trace of the sarcasm you might expect from a guy who’s notorious for his bile-soaked outlook on life–and for cartoons about baby killing, raunchy sex, and homicidal pranks–he adds, “I’ve got nothing to complain about anymore....

David Catlin’s acrobatic new adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is as chaotic as its sources. Or maybe there is an underlying logic: Catlin seems to ask whether Alice should grow up or not, and if so, how. The answer is far from obvious. The tragedy is that none of us has any choice in the matter. The show’s tone is far from tragic, however–in fact it’s brilliant at being dumb and making kids and adults alike laugh....