In the 1980s, when the Italian improvising scene really made its bones, no one had a bigger impact than reedist Carlo Actis Dato. He can make a battering ram of a baritone saxophone, with a sound that’s even and forceful in the upper and lower registers, and his precise attack lets him articulate sawtooth lines at high speed. He’s a good raspy tenor player too, and he gets a dense hardwood sound from his bass clarinet, which he uses as an all-purpose folk ax–from didgeridoo to popping Dixieland “gaspipe....

Pasties come in different sizes. That’s just one fact of the striptease life that Tara Vaughan Tremmel’s learned making a documentary on the history of burlesque. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As soon as she got back to Chicago, she started talking about making a film. Though she’d never made one before, through friends at Women in the Director’s Chair she was able to assemble an experienced team of collaborators: Courtney Hermann, Gwen Lis, Lisa Samra, and Ronit Bezalel, director of the 1999 documentary Voices of Cabrini....

Chicago’s annual literary festival continues through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, tours, and children’s activities at bookstores, public libraries, and other venues. Some events feature the city’s “One Book, One Chicago” selection, Tim O’Brien’s National Book Award-winning novel The Things They Carried. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www....

Video artist Jennifer Reeder is best known for her role as “White Trash Girl” in her series of B-movie parodies whose loud, wild humor compensates for a lack of visual elegance. But A Room With the Walls Blasted to Shreds and Falling (2000), Reeder’s fine contribution to this program, is a complete change of pace, a quiet, meditative, and thought-provoking study of midwestern landscapes. Swimmers in a pool, shot from slightly above the waterline, form abstract patterns of bobbing heads and arms, while a standing figure seen from above is mostly obscured by a tree that’s part of a driveway’s landscaping....

The second annual edition of this showcase of sketch comedy, presented by Posin’ at the Bar, features more than 50 local and out-of-town ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints, with two groups sharing the bill at each performance. The festival runs January 3-25 at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont. Performances are Wednesdays-Thursdays at 7:30 and 9 PM, Fridays-Saturdays at 7 and 9 PM, and Sundays at 4, 5:30, 7, and 8:30 PM....

Sexy Beast With Ray Winstone, Amanda Redman, Ben Kingsley, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, and Ian McShane. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The past stalks the crime film genre too: little has changed over the years, as plots are laid out before an audience increasingly well versed in connecting the dots. Perhaps the last great crime film was John Boorman’s Point Blank, which was released in 1967....

JOHN BUTCHER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his 20s, English saxophonist John Butcher studied physics and played jazz. After he finished his doctoral thesis on charmed quarks, though, he abandoned both pursuits–and, according to a 1998 interview in Coda magazine, discarded along with them “90 percent of what the saxophone usually does,” piecing together a highly individual voice out of the sounds that were left....

The quiet, meditative work of Julia Fish, one of Chicago’s best artists, became hard to see here after both Chicago galleries that exhibited her moved to New York in the late 90s. Now Rhona Hoffman Gallery is presenting her first Chicago show in four years, the centerpiece of which is the series of ten abstract gouaches “[ Drawings for ] Living Rooms.” Each follows the shape of a different room in her home, with protrusions that mark doorways....

About a year ago in a Shanghai shopping mall three young artist-curators opened an experimental exhibit called “Supermarket,” consisting of two spaces: a large one with a number of original works, including video installations and photographs, and a smaller “supermarket space” in which related works–“multiples”–were for sale. In a statement, the organizers declared that “commerce has become the predominant religion in Shanghai….Shopping centers…have become the city’s new temples. Everything is for sale....

Free improvisation remains one of the most potent forces behind Chicago’s creative music scene, but since the demise of the Monday-night sessions at Myopic Books last year there haven’t been many opportunities to hear it in its pure form. In most cases free improv is for the players, not the fans: musicians navigate theoretically uncharted waters and try to make the journey as one, or at least with a sense of cooperation, and when they fail it can be ugly....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was staged in a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in March, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Ensler and a troupe of local actresses, all wearing modest traditional clothing, performed for an invitation-only audience of 150 (in a country where women aren’t supposed to bare their arms in public, advertising was out of the question)....

This week Facets Multimedia Center kicks off a monthlong retrospective of work by the talented Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai (who will attend selected screenings Friday through Sunday). Pineapple (1983, 78 min.), a fascinating social history of the growing and processing of pineapple, extends back to 1898, when Sanford Dole became the first governor of Hawaii, and leaps geographically between the Dole headquarters in San Francisco, plantations in the Philippines, processing plants in Hawaii, and a wholly automated label-printing plant in Tokyo, contrasting the very different perceptions of management and workers....

My boyfriend of three years cheated on me with a girl in Canada. Then he came home and had a phone and e-mail relationship with her, and then he went to visit her in Canada again. When I found out what was going on I offered him an open relationship and he refused. He promised to never speak to this Canadian woman again, and I forgave him for cheating. But I need your help in understanding his behavior....

Sound Tracks by the El Tracks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like an opera, Alan Rudolph’s film The Secret Lives of Dentists has a musical theme for each of its major characters. “When you see David Hurst [played by Campbell Scott], for example, you’ll often hear nonlyricized vocal pieces,” says composer Gary DeMichele. The voice in those pieces–lilting above strings, piano, and percussion–belongs to DeMichele, who wrote the character themes and all the other original music for the film in the cluttered dining room of his north-side apartment, a graystone backing up to the el....

Members of Local One of the carpenters’ union had a surprise waiting for them at their monthly meeting in April 2001. On their chairs lay a copy of a magazine article reporting that their international leaders had pulled their union out of the AFL-CIO, the nationwide federation of building trades. Wilson and Quattrochi had been in the UBC more than 15 years, and they remembered a time when things were different, when a gulf didn’t exist between the people running the local and the people on whose behalf it was supposed to be run....

The CollaborAction showcase of 20 short plays (each under seven minutes long) includes world premieres by Warren Leight, Beth Henley, Wendy MacLeod, and others. The festival also features environmental design by Wesley Kimler and DJs between plays. “Summer Sketchbook” takes place nightly through June 16 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Show times are Thursday, 8 PM; Friday-Saturday, 7 and 9 PM; and Sunday, 5 PM. Each program features a different set of ten sketches, except for the “festival finale” on Sunday, which offers all 20 plays as well as a post-performance awards ceremony and closing party....

Facets Multimedia Center’s two-week retrospective on the Italian comedian Toto (1898-1967) continues with a rare local screening of this trenchant 1960 social drama, adapted from two stories by Alberto Moravia and directed by Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street). The film reunited Toto with the magnetic Anna Magnani, his frequent stage partner during the 1940s, and for one of the few times in his career he cedes the spotlight to someone else, giving an unusually subdued performance as a middle-aged bit actor who’s in love with a brassy movie extra....

Uninsured Liability Costs rose, and a couple of years later Unicut stopped paying for family coverage, though it still offered employees the option of paying the premiums themselves. But costs kept rising. Today, Kolb says, Unicut pays around $200 per employee every month for health insurance. Just one of the company’s 27 employees pays for spouse or family coverage, and Kolb says she knows some spouses and families are simply going without....

The October Revolution, a weeklong series of concerts held in 1964 at New York’s Cellar Cafe, united the city’s second wave of free-jazz musicians. Sun Ra, Bill Dixon, and Albert Ayler sounded as different from one another as each did from anything else going around, but they all had deep roots in the very same traditional jazz that they sought to surpass or transform. Inspired by the Revolution’s success, Ra and Dixon helped found the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild; predating the AACM by several months, it was the first attempt by avant-garde jazz musicians to organize and advocate for themselves....

The Stockyards Theatre Project presents its third annual showcase of woman-centered drama, storytelling, dance, improv, stand-up comedy, and other forms. The festival runs October 24-26 at Link’s Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield. Performances are at 8 PM; each evening features a different lineup of seven to ten pieces (scheduled times for individual presentations each night are listed below). Latecomers and early leavers will not be seated until intermission. Tickets cost $12 per night....