Friday, October 15 The Center “Say whiskey,” a photographer tells dour Jacobo (Andres Pazos) and dowdy Marta (Mirella Pascual) as they pose for a lovers’ portrait in this deadpan comedy from Uruguay. They aren’t really in love: Jacobo, the Jewish owner of a small sock factory, has enlisted Marta, his long-suffering floor manager, to pose as his wife so he can look established and one-up his visiting brother (Jorge Bolani). The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction: when I saw it at the Toronto film festival the crowd seemed to find it pretty funny; I thought it was like a hangover without the drunk....

The dirt gets dished in Jeff Goode’s somewhat playful attempt to expose simmering scandals at the north pole. Santa has allegedly raped the salacious Vixen, and that’s contributed to Rudolph’s breakdown. Accusations fly about the mistreatment of elves by the alcoholic Mrs. Claus and about unfair labor conditions–no sick days or vacations. A strike by disgruntled deer is rumored. This is an increasingly depressing 80 minutes buoyed by fine performances from the cast of eight, including Mac Brandt as a cocky, very Chicago blue-collar Dasher, Brad Davis as a flaming stereotyped Cupid (he really likes Santa’s whip), and Lauren Fisher as Dancer (she really is a frustrated dancer)....

The fish was nearly as big as the man who caught it, and rode like a dead body in the car trunk. The pole was only a little over four feet long, and after so much stress, the ancient reel had given off a pale blue smoke, or maybe it was only dust. He was frugal and even reused tinfoil for cooking fish on a grill. He also was clever at finding practical uses for discarded objects....

On the morning after storms dumped nearly four and a half inches of rain on the city, Alody Flores woke up and discovered a plastic bucket in her garage half filled with little red “lobsters.” Thursday, August 22, got the most rain of any single day since 1987, and with it hundreds of strange red crustaceans came crawling up out of the murk in River Park, which spans the river between Argyle and Foster....

When Adam Voith sat down to start his second book, the first bit he wrote was a comedy routine called “The Diet,” wherein Ernie Baxter, a wannabe stand-up comedian, details his insatiable appetite for calorie-and-carb-laden value meals and bucketfuls of Dr Pepper. This is a diet Voith knows all too well. “He’s got a lot of energy for a guy who eats nothing but fast food,” says his friend and fellow micropress author Jim Munroe....

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: The Transportation of Place at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, through March 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the series “German Indians, 1997/98,” Meeting shows six people in full Indian dress in front of a tepee. Their Caucasian features and random poses–they seem to be just milling around–call their authenticity into question, as does the title. Knife Thrower shows a middle-aged mustachioed man sporting a headdress complete with horns, his face utterly lacking the fierceness his attire might suggest....

Driving into rural Elgin, I’m thinking about something Henry Miller once said when asked to describe the art of conversation. “We do not talk,” he opined. “We bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines, and digests.” I add my shoes to the pile by the door and follow them past a Jim Morrison poster, through a beaded curtain into the kitchen. The ceiling is hung with large sheets resembling sails....

David Kodeski is a master at using odd texts–verbatim interviews he conducted himself, old court records, obscure facts about Niagara Falls drawn from his spiel as a tour guide–as catalysts for his solo performances. Even more remarkable, though, is how much he invests in these pieces and how well his texts blossom into portals of discovery. In Another Lousy Day, first performed in 1999, he relies on a pair of diaries kept by a south-side woman named Dolores in the early 60s....

DENNIS DeYOUNG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » OK, I liked Styx. Not that I ever actually bought one of their records–I was, after all, well over 13 by 1975, when the group broke into the Top 40. But unlike most of my friends, I didn’t reflexively retch the moment “Lady” or “Come Sail Away” came blaring over the radio. I enjoyed the group’s blend of kitschy pomposity and self-parody, admired its sense of harmony and musical structure, and appreciated the broadly theatrical sensibility of Dennis DeYoung, one of the band’s two principal songwriters and a technically superb tenor....

Gangbanger.com He trashes most of the messages, including one from someone in Georgia who said he was having trouble with rivals and asked if Tony could send some guys down for backup. But he says he sometimes offers advice to correspondents, whether they’re worried parents or misguided brothers in a far-flung chapter. He adds, “I’m not into recruiting. I get a lot of stuff like, ‘I just moved to Florida, and I’m looking for a chapter to hook up to....

Years ago, Vernon Guider painted the south-side storefront of Hank’s Rib House. “The best barbecue on earth,” read Guider’s neat lettering. In the bottom corner of one of the windows he put a little pink pig. “The pig is down on his knees,” says Guider. “The pig says, ‘Oh Lord, when I die, PLEASE send me to Hank’s Rib House where I can be barbecued right.’ People used to stop their cars when they saw that....

Anyone who believes that folks from the northland are reserved or conventional should see Shirka Urechko’s 50-minute multimedia atavistic solo Pineappleheartofgoldpeacocks. Born in Flin Flon, Manitoba, to Ukrainian parents, Urechko has created a video backdrop for this piece that shows rippling water and a naked woman wallowing in mud; later, in a close-up, some black substance oozes from her mouth. Onstage, a nearly nude Urechko proceeds to viciously core a pineapple, then chews some pieces and cuts the rest of the fruit into rings, which she rubs over her body....

Neil Michael Hagerty is a stylistic drifter: as a member of Royal Trux and more recently as a solo artist, he’s floated from weird psychedelia to primitive preblues ditties to Rolling Stones raunch and back again. His sprawling third album, Neil Michael Hagerty & the Howling Hex (Drag City), plays up his peripatetic tendencies: it’s 21 songs recorded in four different clubs and studios with a shifting roster of players. “Watching the Sands” takes a heartfelt stab at southern-fried soul, “Firebase Ripcord” offers swaggering rock ‘n’ roll with meaty baritone sax supplied by sometime Chicagoan Matt Bauder, and “Clermont Heights,” a fart of faux-collagist chaos, simulates the disorienting muck of Twin Infinitives-era Trux....

Lead Stories Names in the News Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The ex-student suing Oklahoma University Law School for expelling him: Mr. Perry Mason….The 58-year-old man arrested for exposing himself in the front window of a business in Nashua, New Hampshire, in December: Mr. Joseph Dangle….The 25-year-old woman arrested in West Haven, Connecticut, in September for spitting on a police officer and then urinating in his patrol car: Ms....

NOW They Want a Recount “‘To publish illegal votes as legal votes would be to mislead the readers and the public,’ complained Tucker Eskew, a spokesman for Bush. ‘Anything that undermines Bush’s ability to govern is of my concern,’ fretted Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida.” No game, the 2000 election launched an important debate over electoral laws and procedures, states’ rights, federalism, the Constitution, and the judiciary that the Tribune could have been contributing to by arguing its positions instead of merely pronouncing them....

Polly Jean Harvey made the new Uh Huh Her (Island) at home in Dorset, England, and the music seems like sort of a homecoming too. She mixed and produced the disc herself and played all the instruments—save the drums, handled by longtime collaborator Rob Ellis—and in contrast to the lushly arranged Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, it’s stripped-down and raw, a return to the sound of early albums like Rid of Me and Dry....

Raven’s New Roost Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Menendian, this was opportunity announcing itself, clear as a two-minutes-to-curtain warning. After 15 hard-won years in a former Rogers Park post office, Raven Theatre was about to become homeless. The company—consisting of Menendian; his wife, actress JoAnn Montemurro (who is also the theater’s manager); and five other actors, all with day jobs—had been informed the previous May that the Board of Education would be tearing down their building to put up a new elementary school....

I’m in college and I live with my best friend. He and I tell each other almost everything–except he doesn’t know that I’m bi. What complicates things further is that I am completely in love with him. He’s straight and oblivious. Everyone says you can’t “convert” someone, but I’m wondering if he has bi-curious leanings he isn’t telling me about. Is there some way I can get him to open up to me without necessarily exposing myself?...

Dear Ms. Gronvall: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nowhere else did you extrapolate a political statement as you did when complaining that “by setting its tale before the start of the intifada, the movie only alludes to another group of outsiders–Palestinians are nowhere to be seen,” as if they were intentionally ignored. Did it not occur to you that perhaps the movie simply had nothing to do with the Palestinians?...

STEVE TURRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With his long braided ponytail and Fu Manchu beard, Steve Turre cuts a striking figure, and his resume is as colorful as his image. In the 70s he worked with one-man traveling circus Rahsaan Roland Kirk, in the late 80s he played for Dizzy Gillespie in his flamboyant United Nation Orchestra, and throughout the 90s he served in the Saturday Night Live band....