Dutch sound artist Jaap Blonk is returning to Chicago for the third time since last spring, and if you think it sounds like he’s fallen in love here, you’re right, sorta: “The Chicago musicians I got acquainted with have been very open-minded and generous in offering me opportunities to play improvised music with them in various settings to audiences that were really into it,” he writes on his Web site. Like German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, Blonk has decided to parlay his various musical relationships with Chicago players into a formal group: the Yaptette....

Incorporating influences from around the globe is especially fashionable in American music right now, but there’s nothing new—or particularly American—about the impulse to knock down ethnic and geographic barriers in the name of a good tune. As a member of Ivo Papasov’s great Bulgarian band and, since moving to New York in 1994, as a leader of his own superb ensemble, Yuri Yunakov has devoted his career to reconciling and recombining eastern European regional styles....

Friday 12/7 – Thursday 12/13 Tonight at 7:30 the Wicker Park Anti-War Committee hosts a benefit performance and open mike with local poets, musicians, writers, and others to further the group’s three-pronged mission: stopping the war in Afghanistan, preventing attacks on Arab-Americans, and defending civil liberties in the homeland. It’s at Center Portion, an “artists’ resource space” at 28501/2 W. Fullerton; a $5 donation is requested, and refreshments will be provided....

Unlike Bill and Ted, Jesse and Chester (Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott) aren’t aspiring musicians, though they do enjoy a music-video fantasy sequence as much as the next guy. Writer Philip Stark (That ’70s Show) and director Danny Leiner (Freaks and Geeks) apply mature comic instincts to an adolescent genre, whose conventions dictate that its slacker heroes go on a humble quest–to find Jesse’s car–and incidentally save the universe. Chester has learned everything they need to know from Animal Planet, having watched it religiously and in a particularly receptive state of mind....

The image is one most Americans would prefer to forget: Two black men, beaten and bloodied, hang from an elm tree in the Grant County Courthouse Square. A white crowd mills around beneath them, and in the foreground a man glares at the camera, pointing back at one of the bodies. A photographer snapped the picture on August 7, 1930, the night 18-year-old Thomas Shipp and 19-year-old Abram Smith were lynched in Marion, Indiana....

The Lost Sounds provide proof, in case anybody still needs more, that interbreeding is the way of the future. Formed in Memphis in March ’99 as a trio–with Jay Reatard and Rich Crook, formerly of ultraprimitive garage howlers the Reatards, and Alicja Trout, who’d collected a pile of analog synths during her stint in the Clears–the band mixes trashy, nervous rock with melodramatic metal and in the process tosses together two classes of spooky keyboard noise: the frantic sci-fi swoops and flutters of new wave and the towering, funereal organ double-stops of a Bach fugue....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former tennis great Bjorn Borg, responding to what he calls Europe’s “delicate problem” of having too few taxpayers to support a growing population of retirees, ran a full-page English-language ad in Sweden’s leading financial newspaper Dagens Industri in March urging people to step up their procreation. The ad, purchased by Borg’s clothing company, suggests that readers “get to it” and “fuck for the future....

Lead Stories Loose Body Parts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jack Wilke filed suit in August against police in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, after he asked for his wife’s personal effects following her suicide and they gave him only a container holding some of her internal organs….As part of a wrongful-firing lawsuit in Charleston, West Virginia, it was revealed in August that a box of remains allegedly belonging to murder victim David Allen Williams, which the medical examiner sent to Williams’s sister in 1998 and she subsequently spent $850 to cremate, were actually deer bones…....

One night I went with some friends to the Turkish Bakery for dinner for the first time. We were eating with our hands and smoking a hookah, and out came a belly dancer with those hand things–a totally new experience. Then, walking down the street on our way here, I started getting catcalled. I thought, “Wait a minute, are they yelling at me?” and I realized it was a carful of women....

The surreal side of Buster Keaton and the slapstick aspects of Luis Bunuel will come into focus when University of Chicago film professor James Lastra pairs Keaton’s 1927 comedy College with Un chien andalou, the surrealist classic that Bunuel and Salvador Dali made two years later. This juxtaposition kicks off the series “Luis Bunuel: Master of Surrealism,” which runs at the Film Center Fridays and Tuesdays through May 7 and includes lectures by Lastra at the Tuesday evening screenings....

The Coen brothers stay true to their bent for dense heroes and neonoir, and to their unshakable conviction that life usually turns out to be splendidly horrific. Here they’ve cast Billy Bob Thornton as a self-effacing small-town barber in the late 40s who’s slowly enmeshed in a doomed crime plot. Apart from a couple of screwy Coen-style flashbacks, several fancy plot twists, and a few other postmodern indulgences, this is straight out of James M....

Rock, Pop, etc. ROBERT ACRI QUARTET Mon 11/5, 1:30 PM, Saint Patrick Performing Arts Center, 5900 W. Belmont. 773-282-8844. KEN BURNSTEIN Free in-store performance. Fri 11/9, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1500 W. 16th, Oak Brook. 630-574-0800. LLOYD COLE, DAVID POE Sat 11/10, 7:30 and 10 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000. PATTI ECKER Free admission. Sat 11/3, 10:30 AM, Des Plaines Public Library, 841 Graceland, Des Plaines....

“Aren’t you afraid?” some of my stateside friends asked before I visited Iran for the first time last February. “Only of American bombs,” I replied. Notwithstanding all of the things that are currently illegal there—such as men and women shaking hands or riding in the same sections of buses—I’m not sure I’ve ever been anyplace where people display more social sophistication in terms of hospitality, everyday courtesy, or sheer enterprise in the use of charm and persistence to get what they want....

Kazimierz Kalkowski Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like many of Kalkowski’s reliefs (hung like paintings), Sculpture Composition IX seems to be set underground, among tree roots. At the left and right edges troll-like figures sit with stacks of papers before them as if they were office workers. The right figure leans forward, creating an implicit movement completed by the left figure’s backward lean and by a chest of drawers that swerves off to the left as if twisted by wind....

Three years ago a bootleg compilation called Divas of the 70s began popping up in south-side record stores, and among its contents were three tracks by a Chicago soul group called the Lovelites. The female vocal trio had caused a minor stir in 1969 with a sweet, catchy midtempo tune called “How Can I Tell My Mom and Dad,” in which lead singer Patti Hamilton wondered how to break the news to her folks that she was pregnant....

Nomenil’s debut production seven years ago, Pushin’ Up Roses, made it pretty clear that they did not want to be taken as “theater artists.” With this campy, lowbrow queer coming-of-age melodrama, cockily defiant and vulgarly silly, Nomenil seemed to indicate they hated theater altogether and hoped their show might finish it off for good. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Nomenil’s second show–Eat Your Art Out, produced later that year–was unapologetically outrageous, trashy, vicious, fey, and ridiculous from start to finish, banishing all vestiges of middle-class propriety....

Even if you’re not a comic book fan, you could easily be impressed and entertained by Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross. If you are a fan, it’ll blow you away. Written and designed by the equally celebrated Chip Kidd, Mythology is part Ross bio and homage, part history of cartoon illustration, and all big, bright, glossy reproductions of Ross’s photorealistic watercolors (he’s been called the Norman Rockwell of comics, an appellation he doesn’t shy away from, citing Rockwell as an influence)....

A Very Long Engagement With Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Marion Cotillard, Jerome Kircher, Jodie Foster Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Very Long Engagement reunites Jeunet and Tautou, and though it’s positioned as a holiday release, Amelie fans in a festive mood might be shocked by its grim scenes of World War I trench warfare (its opening image is a bomb-damaged crucifix with the shattered torso of Christ dangling from one hand)....

BROKEN GLASS | When Actors Workshop Theatre staged this Arthur Miller play three years ago, I saw the lead character, Sylvia, as a vulnerable but vibrant woman suffering psychosomatic paralysis, inspired either by sympathy for the Jews in Nazi Germany–it’s the 1930s–or by entrapment in a loveless marriage. Sylvia’s plight remains crucial, but watching this revival my focus shifted to her self-hating husband and well-meaning but vain doctor, perhaps because the actors in these roles are the most captivating among a capable cast....

June to September Milwaukee Festivals You already know about Milwaukee’s annual blowout, Summerfest, which takes place this year between June 27 and July 7 (11:30 AM-midnight daily, $9 general admission; 800-273-3378, www.summerfest.com), but the city’s also the midwest’s summer ethnic festival capital. A sampling: Asian Moon Festival, June 14-16; Polish Fest, June 21-23; Bastille Days, July 11-14; Festa Italiana, July 18-21; German Fest, July 26-28; African World Festival, August 2-4; Irish Fest, August 15-18; Mexican Fiesta, August 23-25; and Arabian Fest, September 13-15....