AUGUST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A publicity shot for Blood and Sand, with Rudolph Valentino clutching the breast of a bejeweled and swooning Nita Naldi, provides a glimpse of the frankly sexual packaging that rocketed Valentino to fame. In this 1922 movie, directed by Fred Niblo, he plays a bullfighter led astray by Naldi’s vamp. It screens tonight as the final installment in the Silent Film Society of Chicago’s “Silent Summer” series; Dennis Scott accompanies the film on the organ and the West End Jazz Band opens the show at 8 at the Copernicus Center’s Gateway Theatre, 5216 W....

Listings of holiday craft fairs, trunk shows, open studios, and special gallery events will run through December. Send information to artlistings@chicagoreader.com. Bucktown Holiday ArtShow This eighth annual sale includes work by 50 different artists each weekend. Friday ArtNosh offers food and drinks while shopping. a ArtNosh Fri 7-10 PM, $5. Through Sun 12/17: Sat-Sun 11 AM-5 PM, 1914 N. Milwaukee, 312-409-4658, bucktownpromotions.com, $2. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Greenleaf Art Center Gift Shop Moderately priced paintings, drawings, prints, jewelry, glass art and ornaments, T-shirts, hats, and more by the center’s artists....

A husky man in a puffy coat, a pinch-nosed woman attempting to walk forward, a throng of other humans trying to move in various other directions, and a wall–these things had me pinned for a full minute on Friday night at Van Harrison Gallery. For one scary, thrilling instant it actually felt like it could’ve turned into another Chicago trampling disaster. People kept spilling plastic cups of wine on my new dress, and Van Harrison himself kept having to nail art back to the wall that’d gotten knocked askew or completely off....

In the early 1960s Bill Moll, then an analytical chemist, enrolled in an evening painting class at Wright College and struck up a friendship with the teacher, Seymour Rosofsky. Rosofsky had grown up on Chicago’s west side, served in the military during World War II, studied at the School of the Art Institute, and was one of a group of local artists that included June Leaf and Leon Golub-the generation preceding the Chicago Imagists....

Thanks for covering Malachi Ritscher’s story in the Reader [Hot Type, November 24; Peter Margasak’s Post No Bills blog, November 7]. I did not realize I knew him until I saw the picture–I’d confused him with Malachi Thompson, who also died this year. To refute “tim,” whom you quoted, Malachi had a long commitment to human rights–this is how I knew him. In the late 80s and early 90s he and I both worked as volunteers with Amnesty International’s local group 570....

Rogue’s Oresteia Poor judgment saturates the conceptually promising event; the plays, performed in repertory, are so stylistically and thematically disparate that they hardly inform or build off one another. And who can trust a company that justifies Iphigenia at Aulis, a sort of prequel to the original “Oresteia,” by asserting, “We couldn’t find a version of Agamemnon that we all thought was great.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Director and translator Stephen Fedo has a better handle on Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, a seminal retelling of the Greek myth originally staged in Berlin by Max Reinhardt in 1903....

With all the false jocularity of kids’ show hosts, the Iconoclasts set out here to undo the work of the “round earth cabal.” Timothy Racine and Marc Chrisler are obviously having a great deal of fun as they energetically attempt to debunk gravity or space travel and recast pivotal discoveries with absurd counterarguments and silly “historical reimaginactments” depicting everyone who doesn’t support intelligent design as a rapist, or Hitler. However, this 70-minute show suffers, as many self-directed endeavors do, from a lack of focus....

“I’m going to say a horrible word,” warns UIC architecture professor Roberta Feldman. “Trailer trash. We link it with people we consider uprooted and mobile.” Housing built in a factory doesn’t exclusively mean double-wides, and it may offer an affordable alternative to the usual–and more expensive–practice of building homes from scratch on-site. But it’s hard for many people to get comfortable with a type of housing they usually encounter only in jokes....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features two full-length trilogies, “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly and the “Danger Face Trilogy” by Idris Goodwin. Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, and elsewhere as noted below....

If you think you got everything out of this love story from high school or college readings and the Zeffirelli film, think again. Director Mark Lamos and his cast find new twists in Shakespeare’s famous words and familiar family dynamics, giving this production a contemporary sensibility despite its period setting. Lamos presents the Capulets and Montagues not just as parental units but as identifiable married couples; Friar Laurence (played charmingly by Mike Nussbaum) is not so much a pious confessor as the lovers’ gleeful accomplice; even the ball breaking by the rival Verona gangs feels fresh....

QI’m a 21-year-old female and I know the my-boyfriend-has-a-diaper-fetish thing has been done to death. But… AYou’re right, SODS—we have done the boyfriend-has-a-diaper-fetish thing to death. In fact, I responded to a woman who signed herself Beyond Annoyed in February; she was married to a diaper-loving adult baby who was neglecting her desire for vanilla sex. Now normally I wouldn’t run a letter from a reader with an identical problem, SODS, but I’m going to make an exception in your case....

QI’m a single gay male in my late 20s. I’ve met a guy I really like. We chat all the time and we’re attracted to each other. We haven’t yet been sexually active with each other, but we’re planning to get naked and sweaty (and break out the ropes and blindfolds) over Christmas break. Why do we have a date “scheduled” for the sex? Well, because he lives six hours away and that’s when he’s next coming to visit....

Select Media Festival 5, a mashup of video programming, anticomedy, visual Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What follows are this week’s listings; for the complete schedule see chicagoreader.com. For further program information or to buy a $25 festival pass (good for everything except the performance by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, creators of the Adult Swim cartoon Tom Goes to the Mayor, on October 21) go to selectmediafestival....

I’ve noticed that when people want to “prove” that humans are capable of amazing things under stress, they often cite the 90-pound mother who lifts a car off her trapped child. I know humans can do incredible things, like the guy who chopped his own hand off to get free from a fallen boulder, but have mothers really hoisted cars? Has anyone actually seen this happen or is it an urban legend?...

Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers are two minimalist features about burned-out individuals picking over the wreckage of relationships they can barely remember and about the special art of not really giving a shit. (A third is Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, scheduled to open here next week.) With its sprawling and far from symmetrical plot, Saraband, made in 2003 for Swedish television, is stark and economical, with a small cast of characters and sparse rural settings, and it seems like an apocalyptic endgame in terms of Bergman’s own career—the end of the world as he knows it....

Chef Jacky Pluton’s new restaurant is one of the most beautiful rooms in the city. The curved entryway opens into a cream-colored dining area with brown and green banquettes and striking red chairs, with rocks and gravel around the floor’s perimeter. PLUTON serves only prix fixe meals–four courses for $60, five for $70, six for $80, or ten for $110–but you still have plenty of options, since you can pick your courses from any of the menu’s categories: appetizers, seafood, meat or poultry, cheese, and dessert....

This slice-of-life piece, produced by the Disciples of Clyde, suffers from an excess of verisimilitude. With flashes of wit and wisdom, writers Kenneth Paul Drews and Dan Filowitz uncompromisingly replicate a scenario played out thousands of times each weekend. Their seven bar-bound twentysomethings display a completely plausible postgrad ambivalence about the future. The characters’ looping discourse, more chains of pop-cult associations and band names than anything else, rings woefully true–as does their self-consciousness....

The massive Brown Line reconstruction is only a few months old, but already the city has made two mistakes that allowed the CTA to break local landmark laws. In December the CTA demolished the Gothic Hayes-Healy Athletic Building next to the Fullerton el stop after landmarks division officials mistakenly approved a demolition permit for the protected structure. And now the CTA has permission to violate landmark regulations in its reconstruction of the historic-district el stop at Armitage....

This singer-songwriter-pianist scored a minor hit in 1973 with “Avenging Annie,” a rambunctious yarn about Annie Oakley and Pretty Boy Floyd that was later covered by Roger Daltrey. Since then he’s stayed below the radar: though he never stopped recording and performing, his 1979 conversion to Christianity (and overtly Christian music, at least for a while) and his subsequent move to Europe pretty much sealed his fate as a cultish obscurity....

Fair warning: the Brighton-based quartet British Sea Power set sail with a heavy load of affectations. They have no surnames, and the first names they go by–Yan, Hamilton, Wood, and Noble–are less than reassuring. Sometimes they wear woolen military coats onstage. Their debut release, The Decline of British Sea Power (Rough Trade), has the word “classic” stamped right on the cover. But however off-putting the gimmicks are, their music is in the right place: on the visceral, hook-driven end of the Britpop spectrum....