Friday 7/13 – Thursday 7/19 14 SATURDAY “Leashed and behaved” pets and their owners are invited to attend today’s DOGooders breakfast panel at WomanMade Gallery, where the topic will be helper dogs that find missing people and provide animal-assisted therapy for children and people with disabilities. The discussion will include a dog-training demonstration and will be followed by a tour of the gallery’s “Cats & Dogs” exhibit, which has sold more work than any of its other shows....

HIS WAY: A TRIBUTE TO THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC, at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. This tony new theater, poised improbably beside a cement factory, features a handsome, intimate three-quarter thrust stage with bright acoustics and perfect sight lines, and it’s been given a name that makes it sound like a venerable Chicago institution. But I’m still worried–and not just because the clashing design disasters in the hotel-esque lobby are enough to make any tasteful theater queen run for his life....

Though he grew up in Athens, Andreas Georgas didn’t hear about rembetika, the music commonly known as the “Greek blues,” until 1994, when he was 18. He was studying piano at Roosevelt University when some American friends put on a rembetika concert. He liked it so much he joined the group for its next show, and started reading up on the form. “The classical music I was studying seemed cold to me,” says Georgas....

I play pool here and hang out with my friends. Some of my favorite come-on lines have happened here. Somebody once told my friend that she was like the prow of a mighty ship. I once had a schizophrenic guy tell me that every time he looked at me he fell into a trance. There was the guy who said, “I’m sorry, but if you ever marry anybody else but me I’m going to have to kill myself,” and I looked at him and said, “And me without my knife....

“I’m really moved by landscape–by the changing of the light as it comes into contact with earth and rocks,” says Victorina Z. Peterson, who shot ten experimental 16-millimeter films on the coast of Maine during the 1970s and early ’80s. “I wanted to find a vocabulary that matched that kind of energy.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In those days she was part of New York City’s thriving experimental film community, which revolved around Jonas Mekas’s Film-Maker’s Cooperative....

I’m not even going to try to promise that this will be good–but if you were ever a fan of America’s punk roots, how could you pass it up? Founded in part by the talented Peter Laughner, a passionate Velvets and Iggy fan who wanted to ignite some of that wildness in Cleveland, this Ohio band debuted in 1974 and spawned both Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys; Laughner might have gone on to greatness as well had he not succumbed to drugs, depression, and finally liver failure....

Since its explosive 1995 debut in Doorslam, Plasticene has done things ass-backward. Rather than building their physical theater pieces from stories, characters, themes, or even ideas, director Dexter Bullard and his tight-knit ensemble have started with stuff–luggage, folding tables, doors, encyclopedias–and messed around until they found interesting things to do with it. The resulting work was typically arresting, lyrical, and disjointed–at times frustratingly so. Last year the company took a risk and threw away their signature technique....

The original Seldoms were a 19th-century music hall troupe specializing in living tableaux: re-creations of grand historical and mythological scenes. The current Seldoms—Carrie Hanson, Susan Hoffman, and Doug Stapleton—took the name because, well, they liked it. But now they’ve come up with a piece honoring their predecessors, standing on pedestals to impersonate statuary in Ode. Believe me, it’s a lot more fun to watch than it sounds, in part because of Lara Miller’s inventive costumes: gauzy, formfitting affairs on top and heavy fantasias in fabric on the bottom (one dancer compared their lower halves to pasta salad) that ground the dancers both physically and visually....

Numerous tales originating in Asia (usually Hong Kong, although I have also seen references to Singapore, Thailand, India, Japan, Korea, etc) describe restaurants that serve monkey brains. The procedure for preparation is usually described thusly: A live monkey is brought to the table and immobilized by having his head thrust through a metal collar. In some versions scalding water is poured over his scalp to kill off the lice. Then a tool of some sort is used to smash the creature’s skull, and its brains are scooped out and consumed raw....

I was reading my son Crocodiles & Alligators by Seymour Simon (books about crocodiles and dinosaurs are, in my son’s opinion, perfect bedtime reading material), which claims that crocodiles have no tear ducts and that tales of crocodile tears are a myth. This shocked me, as I remembered your October 1978 article on the subject. Your claim that crocodiles used tears to “lubricate their food” did strike me as peculiar. I’d imagine that if the tears were reasonably acidic it would irritate their eyes....

Rock, Pop, Etc. JERRY ARMSTRONG & THE LUNATIKS Thu 7/24, noon, Millennium Plaza, Galena & Stolp, Aurora. 630-844-4396. BLACK EYED PEAS Free in-store performance. Thu 7/24, 5 PM, Tower Records, 2301 N. Clark. 773-477-5994. JOE COCKER, JOE BONAMASSA Sold out. Fri 7/18, 8 PM, Skyline Stage, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. 312-595-7437 or 312-559-1212. 8-TRACK: THE SOUNDS OF THE 70s Musical revue under the direction of Rick Seeber. Fridays, 7:30 PM, Saturdays, 6 PM, Sundays, 3 PM, and Wednesdays, 8 PM, Metropolis...

Mike Leigh paints a warm and tragic portrait of the title character (Imelda Staunton), a good-hearted wife and mother in 1950 London who works as a cleaning lady but also as an unpaid abortionist. Much of the film’s potency derives from its personal edge–the passion for precise period decor, the title dedicating the film to Leigh’s parents (a doctor and midwife), and even the childlike classification of many characters as either good souls or villains....

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were stars on radio long before they got into pictures, and this energetic 1942 mystery-comedy shows their exceptional verbal timing to best advantage, setting them loose in a radio station after the owner is murdered on the air. Stanley Roberts wrote the story, but the team’s material was by their right-hand man John Grant (who began his long association with them on The Kate Smith Show), and it’s a cornucopia of hustles, shortchange routines, and loony debates....

As a founding member of LA’s short-lived Freestyle Fellowship, one of hip-hop’s most original and intelligent groups, Aceyalone helped lay the groundwork for today’s anything-goes underground scene. His free-form rap slops over tight beat schemes like runny oatmeal, much in the style of Kool Keith; but unlike Kool Keith’s sci-fi fantasies, Aceyalone’s thoughts are rooted in the here and now. On his third solo album, Accepted Eclectic (Ground Control/Project Blowed), he shifts gears into straight-up battle rhyming–though with his wiggy imagination, the put-downs are rarely straight up....

Friday 4 October Chen Mo, a young man fresh from the countryside who’s scrambling to make a living selling flowers on the streets of Beijing, meets Meiting, a masseuse-hairdresser who, having repulsed the aggressive advances of her boss, has no place to live. She moves into his tiny apartment, and they forge a unique relationship, which grows increasingly tender and intimate. First-time director Liu Hao designed this ultra-low-budget independent feature (shot in 16-millimeter and blown up to 35-millimeter) as a chamber piece, focusing almost exclusively on his two leads and exploring the ways his handheld camera can animate the small space they call home....

FEBRUARY 15 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over 80 local organizations, ranging from the American Friends Service Committee to Weekly News Pakistan, are sponsoring today’s antiwar march–Chicago’s contribution to the international day of protest against war on Iraq. In addition to mobilizing opposition to the war, the event’s designed to protest and publicize the February 21 deadline imposed by the INS for the registration and fingerprinting of males over 16 from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan....

Based at the University of Chicago, the Contemporary Chamber Players have been championing new music for 38 years. These days the core of the ensemble’s fluid lineup is two groups with established identities of their own: the Pacifica Quartet and Eighth Blackbird, a young sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion. For the CCP’s season opener this weekend, Eighth Blackbird will perform under its own name, directed by Indiana University professor Carmen Helena Tellez....

Q: You cast “furries” in a bad light. Whatever your research indicated, “furries” and “furry fandom” arose in the mid 1980s, not the late 1990s. It grew out of a love for anthropomorphized (i.e., talking) animals, anything from Yogi Bear to Disney’s Robin Hood to Planet of the Apes. Just about every major science fiction convention of the time would have someone hosting a “furry” party, where people of like interest could watch G-rated furry videos, trade sketches of furry characters, and talk about their fan interests....

“I got my very first collectible book when I was about 13 years old,” says Doug Phillips. “After school, practically every day, I would go to this wonderful bookshop called Main Street Bookstore, which stood where the Marriott hotel is now on Michigan Avenue. There was a lady that worked there named Mrs. Vandermark, and she was a very colorful, really nice lady, who was very helpful in getting me involved with books....

Once upon a time, back when the 80s were ebbing into the 90s, New York City’s King Missile wrote songs. Oh sure, the songs were generally just a vehicle for the genially warped and deceptively deadpan spoken-word musings of John S. Hall. But one could hum these songs, and sometimes I did, and sometimes I still do. The latest incarnation of the band, King Missile III, however, dispenses with the tunecraft entirely....