Steve Earle’s latest album, Jerusalem (E-Squared/Artemis), is less a response to September 11 itself than a response to this country’s response to September 11. In the liner notes Earle writes, “Back [in the 60s], as now, it was suggested by some that second-guessing our leaders in a time of crisis was unpatriotic if not downright treasonous.” In “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)” he excoriates boomers for swapping ideals for wealth....

The Wal*Mart-ians, Boxer Rebellion Theater. There are some uproariously funny moments in this broad comedy, written and directed by Steven Young. It’s the 70th birthday of peevish matriarch Jan Gunter (the feisty Jeanie Grace), and her daughters, Gina and Lorraine, have dragged their families to their mother’s Iowa farm (perfectly rendered by set designer Jim Boley) to ensure their places in the will. Gina is an uptight woman with a penchant for pills married to a petulant actor with a mentally handicapped daughter (a hilarious Jennifer Willison) who spouts pop-culture and Apocalypse Now references....

A Humble Life By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most or all of Sokurov’s work since has been made in either Germany or Japan. (To the best of my knowledge, Japan is the only country where several of Sokurov’s films are available on video.) The language of this work is usually Russian–with the exception of Moloch (1999), which chronicles a day in the life of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun–and the English translations are often so slipshod that they only confuse matters....

Todd Dills is wearing those leather pants again. It’s a Tuesday night in early April, and he’s holding forth at Quimby’s Bookstore, reading from his novel in progress to a small, attentive audience. “My mother was a crazy whore,” he begins, his oratorical voice filling the room. “My father, Professor Hank Ledbetter, was perpetually drunk in the family room.” At this there is laughter from the audience, but silently a number of people are wondering: What’s with the leather pants when you read, Todd?...

Thai Pastry & Restaurant Cho Mung Som Tum (Papaya Salad) 3 With Bok Choy Greens 4 Just south of Argyle Street is this cheerful Thai eatery where contrasting tastes and textures find balance and harmony. There’s a broad selection of appetizers, noodle soups, and curry dishes plus house specialties like frog legs, whole red snapper, and eel. The combination of hot, sour, sweet, and salty flavors, at times within a single dish, calls for wines that emphasize balance rather than strike a single powerful note....

Abourgeois factory owner is found lying in bed with a knife in his back, and the finger of guilt passes from one occupant of his richly appointed home to another: his coolly fashionable wife (Catherine Deneuve), his beautiful and willful daughters (Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier), his morally loose sister (Fanny Ardant), his miserly mother-in-law (Danielle Darrieux), his rabidly neurotic sister-in-law (Isabelle Huppert), and the home’s two domestics (Firmine Richard and Emmanuelle Beart)....

A Little Night Music, Porchlight Theatre, at the Theatre Building, and Pacific Overtures, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. With its tender, hummable songs and wry comic tale of sexual intrigue and midlife romance, composer Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince’s A Little Night Music–scripted by Hugh Wheeler, based on Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night–was a 1973 Broadway hit. Rather than repeat themselves with another love story, Sondheim and Prince followed up in 1976 with Pacific Overtures, about the socioeconomic revolution that followed Commodore Perry’s 1853 visit to Japan....

Friday 12/19-Thursday 12/25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang ‘Cherry Ripe,’ and another uncle sang ‘Drake’s Drum,’” wrote Dylan Thomas in A Child’s Christmas in Wales. “Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed....

Chicago’s streets are clogged with cars, but the city has come up with a proposal that may well put even more on the street: it wants to change the zoning code so that many new residential units will have to have two parking spaces instead of one, as the current law requires. The parking proposal is in a chapter titled “Enhancing Transportation Options.” The commissioners made it clear that they’re simply trying to be logical and accommodating: “While a principal goal is to encourage use of mass transit, we also recognize the need to accommodate the automobile and to tailor solutions to different communities....

Von Freeman celebrated his 80th birthday amid much-deserved hoopla, but another great Chicago tenor man will reach an even more significant milestone under a virtual cone of silence this week. Rock Island native Franz Jackson turns 90 on November 1 with his skills still remarkably intact–for evidence, check out his most recent disc, Yellow Fire (Delmark), recorded two years ago, or one of his regular gigs at Andy’s. Jackson is a walking, talking jazz-history book: in his teens he worked in Chicago with boogie-woogie savant Albert Ammons; he played with clarinetist Jimmie Noone and remembers the young Benny Goodman dropping by to pick up pointers; he starred in bands led by Roy Eldridge, Fats Waller, and Earl Hines; and he fought tenor battles with the likes of the legendary Chu Berry....

BALDWIN BROTHERS Cooking With Lasers (TVT) In the last few years laid-back electronica, be it trip-hop, acid jazz, or watered-down techno, has supplanted Muzak in the sort of eateries where brightly colored cocktails constitute a first course–and the Baldwin Brothers’ full-length debut will surely be on many a restaurateur’s grocery list. The shuffling breakbeats, retro Fender Rhodes licks, unremarkable turntable work, and toothless lounge grooves don’t serve great songs–they’re all there is, and the ease with which vocalists (including Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori and Frente’s Angie Hart) dominate the tracks on which they make cameos only emphasizes the lack of personality elsewhere....

A handsome and well-acted bodice ripper, this 2001 Spanish feature by Vicente Aranda dramatizes the early adulthood and brief reign of Queen Joan of Castile (1479-1555), known to her subjects as Joan the Mad. Shipped off to Flanders for a political marriage to Philip of Burgundy, the mild and virginal Joan (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) is haunted by the impression that her parents wedded for love; promptly deflowered by Philip (Daniele Liotti), a leonine hunk with a royal sense of sexual entitlement, she defines their shaky romance in physical terms and responds to his affairs with a series of jealous rages that undermine her authority....

When Ornette Coleman lit the fuse of the free jazz revolution in the 1950s, he wasn’t trying to foment anarchy–he just wanted the option to improvise wherever a melody might take him, without being boxed in by prescribed chord changes. Since then musicians have embraced other sorts of freedom: espousing radical liberation politics (Joe McPhee’s album Nation Time), emancipating themselves from meter (Sunny Murray’s drumming on Cecil Taylor’s Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come), even stepping outside “jazz” altogether (Evan Parker, originally a Coltrane-inspired saxophonist, has recorded with Tuvan throat singer Sainkho Namtchylak)....

If you’re not interested in feeling anything but confused, New Orleans’s MC Trachiotomy will rock your world. On …W/Love From Tahiti (Bulb) his sound collages are so crude you can practically hear the Scotch tape holding together his splices of drippy fox-trot music, hilariously lame slow-jam beats, and samples from The Jerk. The “melodies” are seven-second loops that he stretches out over multiple minutes and the lyrics are seriously dain bramaged....

Human Nature With Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Robert Forster, Mary Kay Place, Rosie Perez, and Miguel Sandoval. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film has three central characters who take turns narrating portions of their collective story in flashbacks: After being arrested for murder, Lila (Patricia Arquette) begins by saying, “I’m not sorry.” Puff (Rhys Ifans) testifies before a congressional committee, saying, “I’m sorry....

This local cabaret collective takes its name from the Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish troupe that flourished in Vienna from the early 1890s until the 1930s. The original group’s brand of cabaret was just as biting, bohemian, and risque as that originating in Paris (usually regarded as the birthplace of the form), but according to Philip Bohlman, a University of Chicago musicologist and cofounder of the New Budapest, Jewish performers brought something of their own to the cabaret scenes in Vienna and Berlin: drawing from Yiddish theatrical traditions and Eastern European folk music, they developed a style that was both more provincial–that is, concerned with the day-to-day hardships of the people, rather than with the decadent demimonde of French cabaret–and more overtly political....

Susan McDunn had been a lawyer only nine years when she decided to run for Cook County circuit judge in 1990. She ran because she thought she was perfect for the job. “I know what my giftedness is,” she says. “I’m an extremely fair person and have been since I was a child. I have very strong analytical abilities. But my most important quality is character.” In Illinois, circuit judges serve six-year terms, after which they must win a retention election if they want to keep their jobs–jobs that now pay $150,000 a year....

Out of Sight, Out of Mind Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “How much time you got?” league board member and Goodman Theatre resident director Chuck Smith wondered when we called to ask him what happened. Back in the 80s, African-American actors weren’t getting much play in Chicago theater, Smith says. In 1984 he and three colleagues founded the Chicago Theatre Company, and in 1985, when they attended their first League of Chicago Theatres retreat, they voiced the complaint that black actors weren’t getting their share of jobs....

PABLO MILANES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Along with a handful of other musicians attending film school in Havana in the late 60s, Pablo Milanes was a key instigator of Cuba’s nueva trova, or new troubadour, movement. Traditional trova singers strolled the countryside playing songs of love and patriotism–which is why Castro favored the form over the more cosmopolitan son. The new school tried to find ways to write songs that were more personal but still in line with Castro’s ideals, but despite their best efforts these were met with suspicion by cultural hard-liners....

By Ben Joravsky She’s been a study in contrasts since her days as a tomboy growing up around 70th and Stony Island. “I was heavy into sports as a kid,” says Terry. “I loved basketball. I played all the time at the courts at 70th and Dante. I wouldn’t back down. Guys’d be talking their trash and I’d beat them.” After her discharge in 1989, she returned to Chicago, where she had a variety of jobs repairing cars, selling car parts, and managing auto parts stores....