Among the 14 Janice Elkins works at Cliff Dwellers are several elegant black-and-white paintings inspired by the Australian aboriginal artist Kngwaryee. Some have appealing wavy lines, but I prefer Three to the North, in which three mysterious black circular shapes sit near the center of a canvas while irregular, mostly gray brushstrokes swirl around them like halos, as if the circles were distorting the space around them. Better still are Elkins’s hermetic small collages, constructed mostly from junk metal....

Does Karen Volkman frown as she reads, “But my zero, sum and province, whole howl, skies the all”? Is there a trace of smile when she recites, “Hey bleach-blink, sheen-gaze, pearl-pith–root of worlds. Splinter in the void’s eye, orphan.” At times frustratingly enigmatic, Volkman’s poems talk to one another in their own language, following their own rules, and communicate to the reader almost by accident, leaning into whatever meaning they have....

Now in its tenth year, Thomas Blackman’s Art Chicago, one of the world’s largest international art fairs, is presenting the work of over 3,000 artists this weekend. In addition to modernist masters like Picasso and famous contemporaries like Gerhard Richter, the expo includes lesser-knowns with growing reputations whose work is rarely seen in Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until then Jankowski had also been a musician, but, bored by scored music, he preferred improvisation–“open dialogue between the musicians....

The Spitfire Grill Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A musical based on the 1996 film by writer-director Lee David Zlotoff, The Spitfire Grill is, as much as anything, about belonging and adopting. Percy (short for “Perchance,” oddly enough, as in “perchance to dream”) has spent the last five years “buried alive” in a women’s prison. Paroled, she heads straight for Gilead, Wisconsin–a dead little backwater outside Prairie du Chien–just because it looked good in a picture she cut out of a travel book....

Except for the brief–albeit awesome–descent to hell near the end, Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a klutzy comedy built around one of opera’s most outrageous libertines. A sort of Wilt Chamberlain of the 17th century, Giovanni (aka Don Juan) screws his way across Europe–1,000 women in Spain alone–while his servant keeps a running tally. It’s a prime example of opera’s penchant for linking the cheesiest of scripts with the most sublime music....

ROOMFUL OF BLUES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Midway through its fourth decade, Roomful of Blues has warranted a few names it didn’t choose: it’s logged more miles than Blues Traveler and outlasted the Soul Survivors. Muddy Waters, the story goes, used to call the band “House of Blues”–apparently he didn’t think one room was enough–a coinage Dan Aykroyd liked so much he made it the name of his nightclub....

“If a play has been produced, it has a history, a reputation,” says New York playwright Jill Campbell. It can survive an unfortunate production. A new play by a newish playwright is another matter. In February, Revolution Theatre, a young Chicago company, did a staged reading of Campbell’s play Starf**ker at the Red Lion Pub. Campbell wasn’t there for it, but she says it seemed to go well and she got some good feedback....

THE HAGGARD 11/29, 60DUM The bicycle-friendly lesbian politics of this Portland hardcore duo are funny and sharp, and the music on their latest full-length, last year’s No Future (Mr. Lady), more than keeps pace with the lyrics. To this old hag, it sounds like hardcore should–fiendish, raw, and true to its convictions. Nomy Lamm, a self-described “badass fatass jew dyke amputee, performance artist, writer and activist,” and Sextional, featuring Haggard guitarist Emily B....

The only commercial airlines that fly to Guantanamo Bay are Air Sunshine and Fandango Air, both out of Fort Lauderdale. To buy a ticket you need what’s called country clearance from the Department of Defense. “When you’re right at the epicenter of a crisis,” he says, “there’s a great pressure to react swiftly and aggressively to establish control and maintain safety. One pattern is that the military will assert the need to control people far longer and far more broadly than in fact they need to be....

I am a history teacher at LaPorte High School in LaPorte, Indiana (you know, that place that Stanley Changnon said had the worst weather in the United States). Anyway, my students and I would like to know how we can become UN weapons inspectors and how much the job pays. We would also like to know if you get benefits and get to keep those vehicles that they drive around Iraq....

When a review of one of Matt Harding’s plays appears, it’s better for him if he’s not mentioned at all. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recently Harding has been working in the world of prewar England, helping the cast of the Court’s upcoming production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever speak “Oxford speech” or “received pronunciation.” “R.P.,” Harding says, “is a manufactured class dialect” from the counties surrounding London....

Trib: A Government’s Gotta Do What a Government’s Gotta Do The Tribune rejected the end-run theory: “The fear rests on a mistaken premise….The government can get a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant only if it has probable cause that someone is involved in espionage or terrorism activities–which happen to be crimes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The law is not perfect,” said the November 5 editorial “Myth, reality and the Patriot Act,” “but it has hardly been the assault on civil liberties depicted by its most vociferous critics....

Turgs on the Move Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years after Chicago director Terry McCabe published Mis-directing the Play–a neatly argued book that treats the very existence of dramaturgs as a symptom of the worst problems in American theater–the turgs marched into McCabe’s hometown for their national meeting and pointedly omitted him from their speakers’ list. According to McCabe, who titled a chapter “The Show That Needs a Dramaturg Has a Bad Director,” these newcomers to American theater have diminished directors’ authority by taking over their most vital responsibilities....

Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, this festival of experimental film and video continues Friday through Sunday, March 7 through 9. Screenings are at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee, second floor; and the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. Screenings are free at the Cultural Center, $5 per day for Heaven Gallery and the Empty Bottle. For more information call 312-744-6630. Programs marked with an * are highly recommended....

Activity and course prices at the Chicago Botanic Garden can be a little stiff, but here’s a bargain: On Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays through October 26, round-trip shuttle bus tickets for a ride between the Garfield Park Conservatory and the garden are a mere $6 ($5 for seniors, $4 for kids 3 through 12). The 90 contemporary Zimbabwean sculptures that make up the exhibit “Chapungu: Custom and Legend, a Culture in Stone” are split between the two locations, and the gardens are glorious....

Why Senator Fitzgerald is not crazy. Ronald Rotunda, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes in the National Review Online (June 18): “The Constitution gives Congress plenty of ways to deal with O’Hare, but they all cost money: Congress can use its spending power to expand the airport; it can give the state money on the condition that it expand the airport; it can order federal officials (the Army Corps of Engineers) to build the O’Hare expansion....

Affluenza! Like Moliere, Sherman comments not only on the stupidity and cupidity of his characters but also on their corrupted milieu: the setting may be a Lake Shore Drive high-rise the day before yesterday (or the day after tomorrow), but the greedy look much the same as they did three and a half centuries ago in France. And like Moliere, Sherman also makes larger political and cultural points. When Jerome defends his disdain for work, he points to the fine example of our current president, providing details about the Texas Rangers and Harkin Oil....

The Emmett Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But perversely and in the face of all logic, many of us make the opposite choice, actually cultivating emotions like indignation and sorrow in response to vast crimes. And who’s to say that’s a complete waste of time? When millions of people turn out to protest a war before it even begins, it becomes possible to believe that a certain amount of progress is being made empathywise....

Ernesto Serrano says that some of his neighbors think he’s crazy, and maybe they’re right. Why else would he have 16 full-size wagon wheels welded to his fence? In the yard of his house at 20th Place and May, a menagerie of figurines sprouts from posts: a beaver, a gnome, an elf. Up on the roof a monkey shows its rear end to a mad bull held back by the lasso of a ranchero who looks like he once did duty as a bookend....

Adja Yunkers: To Invent a Garden Modern art has frequently been enriched by cross-cultural influences, but Adja Yunkers’s inspirations were unusually diverse, including religious icons, Renaissance art, social realism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. Born in Latvia in 1900, Yunkers ran off to Saint Petersburg to study art when he was 14 (encountering the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich), then worked as a commercial artist in Cuba in the 20s and as a fine artist in Sweden in the 30s and 40s....