Slinging language hash to various beats–hip-hop, nursery rhymes, blues, boleros–the five members of Universes kick ass in a 90-minute tour de force of spoken-word performance and song. Products of the South Bronx and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the original artists tossed together a word salad made up of their own verses plus appropriations from Poe, Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, and Muhammad Ali. The lineup has changed slightly since the group began in 1998, but Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz, and Gamal Abdel Chasten remain constants....

The tenth annual International Exposition of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art brings 90-some dealers in ceramics, furniture, jewelry, and other three-dimensional media to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, 600 E. Grand, Friday and Saturday, October 17 and 18, 11 to 8, and Sunday, October 19, noon to 6. A series of lectures takes place Friday and Saturday; the schedule follows. Presentations marked * focus on special exhibits. Admission to the talks is free with ticket purchase: $12 per day, $10 for students and seniors, or $20 for a three-day pass....

This somber black-and-white drama (1950) about a small-town preacher (Joel McCrea) in the postbellum south, narrated by the boy he raised (Dean Stockwell), is one of the most neglected films in the history of cinema as well as Jacques Tourneur’s favorite among his own pictures. (Best known for Cat People and Out of the Past, Tourneur seemed to thrive in obscurity, and by agreeing to direct this picture at MGM for practically nothing he reportedly sabotaged his own career....

Hillary Frank gets the best fan mail. “Your book was absolutely amazing!” wrote one teenage admirer in 2003. “Every time I read a book I mark pages I want to go back and write down in my journal. That was hardly possible with your book. I marked about every other page! The words, the humor, and the romance . . . everything was so real.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

A fixture on Lincoln Avenue, Zacek was born and raised in Pilsen, not far from Cook County Jail. “My father was an aspiring artist, and he wanted to go to the Art Institute, but my grandfather thought he should do something more practical, so he became a machinist. He was the head machinist at a printing firm. In many ways I’m vicariously living out my father’s artistic dreams.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“The undisputed crown prince of Chicago architecture” is what they were calling Helmut Jahn 20 years ago. His wife, Deborah, had transformed the hardworking but scruffy German emigre into a glamorous fashion plate worthy of a GQ profile, and Jahn was ready to set the city on its ear with a building for the state of Illinois that people compared to a spaceship and a blue-glassed Northwestern Atrium Center shaped like a cascading waterfall....

Rock, Pop, etc. JONATHA BROOKE Fri 8/17, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. STEVE COOPER ORCHESTRA performs ballroom music at Chicago Summerdance. Sun 8/12, 3 PM (preceded by dance lessons at 2 PM), Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, Michigan between Harrison and Balbo. 312-742-4007. E-MICS Free concert. Fri 8/10, 12:15 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. BRUCE HORNSBY Fri 8/17, 8 PM, Pavilion, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook Rds....

As of last week food writer Paul Zeissler was still working on the menu for A Roman Orgy of Food. The eighth in a series of historical and literary eating events at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore (past spreads included “Food on Campaign” and “Dining With the Saints”), the feast will offer food popular from 27 BC into the third century AD. The recipes are drawn from Apicius de re coquinaria, the Western world’s oldest extant cookbook, translated and edited by Joseph D....

Friday 4/12 – Thursday 4/18 West Side Mentally Retarded Children’s Aid/Austin Special promises “good, clean, used items for less” at its annual rummage sale today. Proceeds benefit the developmentally disabled; it’s from 9 to 4 at the Austin Special Sheltered Work Center, 5414 W. Diversey; call 773-282-9992. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 17 WEDNESDAY Tonight, as on the third Wednesday of every month, the self-proclaimed “beer geeks” of the Chicago Beer Society will relax their tasting standards and enjoy gulps, not sips, of brew during social night at the Map Room, 1949 N....

Enter the Night, Will Act for Food, at Stage Left Theatre. This is one of the more obscure pieces by a playwright known for her avant-garde work. Maria Irene Fornes bases one important revelation here, for instance, on a scene from D.W. Griffith’s 1919 film Broken Blossoms. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Enter the Night is nevertheless intriguing, exploring the affectionate reunion of three friends and their dealings with death, love, gender roles, and sexuality....

This week the Film Center launches a retrospective of Ernst Lubitsch’s Hollywood pictures with two of his finest: The Love Parade and Trouble in Paradise (many would add Ninotchka, also playing this week, but not me, even though it has Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas). The Love Parade (1929, 110 min.), Lubitsch’s first talkie and musical, helped to define continental romance as well as opulent operetta for Depression-era audiences. Racy and innovatively shot, it pairs Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald for the first time, and it’s one of their funniest films, with some of the best laughs coming from secondary leads Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane....

Front, A Reasonable Facsimile Theatre Company, at the Cornservatory, and Chairs, CarniKid Productions, at the Cornservatory. This production of Front, Robert Caisley’s play about the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, raises many questions. But not the kind you want an audience asking. Why is this play so long? Why can’t the actors maintain their British accents? Why are the characters so shallow? And what did Caisley have to do to get Lanford Wilson to select this tiresome work for the Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award in 1996?...

Ten albums and 15 years into their career, these guys are still on Dischord, and they’re not even from D.C. (though Baltimore’s close). Never huge stars, they’ve unglamorously built a reputation for subtly gripping, intelligent ferocity, and they’re in fine form on the new Love Is Love–if newly returned bassist Sean Meadows has used up any energy playing in June of 44, it doesn’t show here, and Daniel Higgs and Asa Osborne seem invigorated by their side project work as the Pupils....

Though Eric Pfeffinger’s world-premiere satire on homeland security and paranoia is slow to catch fire in Kimberly Senior’s staging for Noble Fool Theatricals, ultimately it proves a sly treat. The first act approaches sitcom territory, as a high-energy operative for the feds (Kathleen Logelin) and her slacker husband (John Gawlik) alternately bicker and bond over their attempts to eradicate a wee rodent (an adorable Debra Ann Miller) who’s taken up residence in their home....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an April story in the New York Observer, sleep-disorder specialist Michael Thorpy says that more and more people are suffering from “delayed sleep phase syndrome,” a strong urge to stay out late followed by an inability to wake up on time. And doctors testifying before a judicial disciplinary commission in May said that Los Angeles superior court judge Patrick Couwenberg suffered from “pseudologia fantastica,” which caused him to pad his resume with false achievements....

The irreverent Heaven Gallery in Wicker Park held an informal screening last August of work by local filmmakers, and at the last minute the curator agreed to add a five-minute digital video just completed by Kristie Drew, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, and her boyfriend, Usama Alshaibi. The dreamlike Slaughtered Pigtails shows Drew, her hair in pigtails, running scared across a field, seen from the perspective of someone who’s chasing her with a hunting knife....

Over the past two years the Ravinia Festival has been doing Stephen Sondheim right, delivering splendid revivals of Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music. This weekend’s concert staging of Passion marks the halfway point of Ravinia’s “Sondheim 75,” a five-year tribute to the revered Broadway composer (the series culminates in 2005, when he turns 75). Based on a 1981 Italian movie that was itself an adaptation of a 19th-century novel, Passion snared four Tonys when it premiered in ’94–even though it’s not an easy musical to warm up to, since it focuses on a woman’s morbid obsession for a young lieutenant....

The Uptown building that until recently housed the Rainbo roller rink has always been a “community magnet for entertainment,” says David Bahlman of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. In the days before air-conditioning, people congregated in the picnic groves and outdoor beer gardens that used to cover the two-plus-acre site, on Clark Street just north of Lawrence. The building, constructed in several stages and completed in 1928, has had many incarnations over the years, among them a movie theater, a bowling alley, and an ice rink....

In her debut as a solo artist, writer-performer Dee Bolos treads some of the same ground as Mike Houlihan in Goin’ East on Ashland, his hit one-man show about growing up in Chicago’s Irish-Catholic enclave. But Bolos’s perspective is distinctly female: clearly influenced by (and sometimes strikingly reminiscent of) Lily Tomlin, she focuses on the lives of schoolgirls and soccer moms in a series of sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant sketches. Her characters are misfits: “I don’t want to live in a home that could realistically be carried away to another part of town on a flatbed truck,” declares one, but her tone is more plaintive than rebellious....

David Cronenberg isn’t credited often enough for his literacy, which anchors him as a filmmaker much as Method acting can anchor some performers: he seems to immerse himself so deeply in the warped visions of certain writers that he re-creates their work whereas most literary filmmakers would simply imitate it. This tour de force, which Patrick McGrath adapted from his own novel under Cronenberg’s supervision, draws us into the consciousness of a schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been incarcerated for most of his life and whose boyhood traumas merge seamlessly with his current existence in an east London halfway house; apparently Cronenberg’s model is not only McGrath but Samuel Beckett in his early novels....