Far from here, where the earth meets the sea, there’s a colorful land that belongs to neither but is alternately claimed by both. It was founded by woodsmen, soldiers, convicts, and whores, and at various times has been inhabited by pirates, traders, and zealots. The people of this land knew that their pretty pink houses would one day sink into the silt upon which they were erected, and so for one week every year they diverted their worries with an extravagant, lawless street party....

Hey Cecil, here’s one that’s been bugging me: Did Wile E. Coyote ever catch the Road Runner? I’ve seen one “sanctioned” cartoon by Warner Brothers where the Coyote has been shrunk and catches the Road Runner’s huge leg, but I’ve heard rumors of a cartoon where he actually catches and eats the damn bird. Supposedly, it was shown to soldiers heading off to Vietnam, to boost morale. Does this thing exist?...

Chicago photographer Bob Natkin died in 1996, and for years his pictures sat in boxes in the basement of his West Rogers Park home, where his widow, Judy Lewis Natkin, still lives. Then last year his son Paul, a prominent local music photographer, and the staff of the Stephen Daiter Gallery began sorting through them to put together the first exhibit ever devoted to Natkin’s work, which opens at the gallery this Friday....

Rock, Pop, Etc. CHAPTER 6 with Adam Richman. Thu 3/6, 7:30 PM, Business & Social Science Center Theatre, Harper College, 1200 W. Algonquin, Palatine. 847-925-6100. LINDA EDER Sat 3/8, 8 PM, Ford Center for the Performing Arts/Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph. 312-977-1700 or 312-902-1400. LAST POETS Sun 3/2, 2 PM, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. 312-344-7459 or 773-947-0600. Mon 3/3, 2 PM, Hokin Annex, Columbia College, 623 S....

The loudest sounds are small. The sound of snow crunching under the tires of Jubal’s Crown Vic, the thunk as he shoves the transmission lever out of drive and up into park. “Here,” he says, nudging it out of the clamp. “Just in case.” He slips the safety off and pumps the wooden handle, chambering a shell. This is the second weapon he’s armed in the car, definitely not standard operating procedure....

Loren Robare started photographing old movie theaters back in 1978, while she was working on her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When she moved to Chicago in 1982, the year after the ornate Uptown Theatre at Broadway and Lawrence was shuttered, she became fascinated with the building. She finally got access in 1990, and she spent six months shooting. The resulting black-and-white photographs–which document the interior of the Uptown’s 4,381-seat auditorium, the deteriorated art deco ornamentation, and even the basement–have been exhibited several times over the years....

“It’s very difficult to know exactly how many new immigrants will cross the Chicago border on any given day,” says photographer Gina Grillo. When she was given permission by the INS to wait at O’Hare for new immigrants to arrive, she sometimes sat as long as eight hours to capture their images on film. Grillo, an artist in residence at Columbia College whose grandparents all came to Chicago from Italy at the turn of the last century, became interested in the contemporary immigrant experience because, she says, “I was disturbed by comments from people who felt that it was somehow different now–that we were having too many immigrants coming in....

The so-called Marvel Age of comics began with the 1961 publication of the first issue of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Writer Lee and artist Kirby are widely credited with revolutionizing the superhero genre when they created a set of characters who didn’t wear outlandish costumes and who’d acquired their powers in a freak accident but weren’t so crazy about it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Fantastic Four prompted an unprecedented amount of fan mail, which inspired Lee to develop a stable of complex, humanized characters....

MAY As part of last year’s inaugural Free Comic Book Day, Chicago Comics gave away thousands of books, says manager Eric Thornton. The now-annual nationwide event is designed to bring new patrons into comic book stores–the majority of which are independently owned and operated–and expose them to the full range of the genre. But Thornton says that “the biggest effect I’ve seen is that it gets people who read just a little bit of comics to try something they normally wouldn’t....

Jitta’s Atonement, ShawChicago, at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. At the conclusion of World War I, Austrian writer Siegfried Trebitsch, who’d translated many of George Bernard Shaw’s plays to great success, faced two crises that might have ended his career: his country lay in ruins, and he was in danger of becoming known principally as Shaw’s translator. So Shaw offered a modest reparation. He would translate his translator’s newest play despite a near complete unfamiliarity with the German language....

On behalf of working people and particularly the working poor, I would like to express frustration with the Reader’s coverage of Social Security “no-match” letters. “Work Stoppage” (August 23), by Ernesto Londono, contains factual errors, errors of omission, and worst of all a snide attitude toward the workers whose plight he reports on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Londono’s article focuses on Hilda Vasquez, a worker from Gingiss Formalwear who was dismissed due to a no-match letter....

Dear Cliff Doerksen, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why the bitter diatribe [March 14] on Lou Reed’s present man-of-letters persona? Maybe you just had a bad week? Wanted to stir the pot a little for provocation’s sake? Or how about you really are the philistine that your review of Reed’s latest work, so affectionately titled “Birdbrained,” makes you out to be? Dismissing the longtime music innovator and cultural icon because of his literary pretensions alone is so wrong....

JOSH ABRAMS Cipher (Delmark) The quartet on Cipher first got together for a one-off gig at Lula Cafe in early 2000, and bassist Josh Abrams (a founding member of rustic minimalists Town and Country and the jazz trio Sticks and Stones) wisely decided to reconvene the personnel in a semiregular project. Trumpeter Axel Dorner lives in Berlin, so they’ve been able to play only a handful of shows since, but now at least we have a superb document of their work....

Like other memoirs about serious illness, Mike Watt’s new The Secondman’s Middle Stand (Columbia) is at times disarming and painful: as song titles like “Puked to High Heaven” and “Pissbags and Tubing” indicate, the inspiration to be found here is not of the greeting-card variety. In early 2000, after five-plus weeks of misdiagnosed fever, Watt underwent emergency surgery for a life-threatening burst abscess in his perineum–“between the legs, just rear of the balls,” as he explained in a postoperative e-mail to fans....

Since the late-80s heyday of bands like the Nomads and Union Carbide Productions, the Swedes have been quick to remind us that rock sounds best at its most primal and unadorned. But though the Hives, Division of Laura Lee, and Sahara Hotnights are continuing that tradition, there’s more to Swedish rock than Stooges adulation, as two recent intimate albums from former pro soccer prospect Nicolai Dunger reveal. Dunger’s been kicking around since the mid-90s, but the singer didn’t start attracting attention on this side of the pond until 1999, when he released The Cloud Is Learning, made with some of the guys from the Soundtrack of Our Lives....

Right now I’m rehearsing a show, so I walk by here a lot. I moved out of this space at the end of last year. Whenever I see it I’m reminded of my very favorite night during the year that I lived here–one of the most memorable nights I’ve ever had, period. It took place on the Fourth of July. We had friends come over and join us up on the roof....

We’re sick and tired of hearing about your sick fascination with Ashton Kutcher. Whatever happened to making cheese from breast milk, ejaculating into women’s shoes, or screwing your sister? You should be careful when you tell people that consenting to sex when you are drunk or high is not rape. Technically you are right; if you give consent, it is not rape. The problem is that it is legally impossible for someone under the influence to grant consent in many states....

DANIELLE HOWLE & THE TANTRUMS 5/31, EMPTY BOTTLE Danielle Howle, a South Carolinian with a swaggering twang, isn’t just another self-absorbed singer-songwriter strumming an acoustic guitar: she’s got a distinctive dusky alto and knows how to get power out of it without resorting to Alanis-style histrionics. But neither does she strike me as the shining songwriting talent her press and her long list of label affiliations (Simple Machines, Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars) would seem to indicate....

The Old Man and the Sea Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best known for its huge community-based spectacles, Redmoon Theater also aspires to narrative on occasion. Sometimes these attempts fall flat, as when the company stretched an adaptation of the American folk ballad about ill-fated lovers Frankie and Johnnie into an overlong, gaseous evening of puppetry and dance. But sometimes these forays result in a show like The Old Man and the Sea, a short, sweet, dreamlike piece that begins as an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novel but soon jettisons Hemingway’s stoic prose for a panoply of playful images: puppet fish curl across the stage, other fish jet across the screen of a postmodern magic-lantern show, a small wooden boat bounces haplessly on cardboard waves....

Some filmmakers say this is my work and I want it to stay that way. That is their right, and we respect that right. Those are the films we don’t buy, and those are the films we don’t transmit. —TV executive in The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins His latest magnum opus, La Commune (Paris, 1871) (1999), runs only five hours and 45 minutes, but I missed it at Toronto and Rotterdam, and saw only part of it in Buenos Aires last month (I saw the rest on video here; it’s playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center in various two-part installments this week)....