The chance to return to a work again and again is the greatest benefit an art museum offers. The first time I saw the Art Institute’s new acquisition, Jasper Johns’s Near the Lagoon (2003), I was awed by this towering painting’s insistent silence. Draped across a dense forest of gray and off-gray daubs of paint is a lone strand of twine, hanging naturally in a catenary curve–a shape used in the design of suspension bridges and one that Johns has employed more than once in recent works....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and the French Cultural Services in Chicago, the eighth annual Festival of New French Cinema runs December 3 through 12 at Facets. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets Cinematheque members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in French with subtitles. This 2003 video documentary originated in the mid-90s when director Jean-Henri Meunier moved to Najac, a small medieval town nestled in a rugged cul-de-sac of the Midi-Pyrenees....

Everyday housewives, your dreams have come true. Glen Campbell’s brush with the law last month won’t keep him from taking his Rhinestone Christmas extravaganza on the road. The Cowboy, who was arrested for driving drunk and leaving the scene of an accident, is also accused of giving one of the officers a charley horse, but if that’s true (he’s pleading innocent), it’s out of character: Campbell’s always been a smoothie and an entertainer, not an outlaw....

Go Ahead, Call It a Comeback Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as difficult and disappointing as his performing years were, there was worse in store for him. In 1976 his 13-year-old daughter died in a fire; grief led him to divorce his wife of two decades in 1981. He began using cocaine, and by 1985 drugs had taken over his life. He lost his job....

God, the Devil, and David Spade TVisGOD started about five years ago, says the religion’s founder, Chicago freelance writer Amy Bugbee. “My sister April and I were always watching TV and talking about TV, and we had come up with this idea that TV is the modern God because everyone has one. My husband was like, ‘You two should start a religion.’” The sisters put out a few issues of a newsletter and then a zine, and a friend, Mark Hejnar, made a ten-minute promotional video featuring a sermon from Pope April....

Jenny Sheppard was a regular customer at the Mystery Spot, a vintage furniture and curio shop located on the rapidly changing stretch of West Division in Wicker Park. When the store went out of business in February, the 31-year-old artist and musician figured it was at least partly due to neighborhood gentrification, and she thought that topic was worth discussing with a group of Wells High School students she instructs through Street-Level Youth Media....

In early December, Philip Hale, Loyola University’s director of community relations, sat for two hours at the front of the Wilmette village hall and listened to residents condemn his school and its plans. The crowd asked only a few questions, and he refused to answer any of them. What Hale didn’t say was that current zoning allows a buyer to raze the former convent and fill the entire 17 acres with dozens of single-family homes....

Improvisers are itinerants who usually travel cheap; concert harps are big enough to make any trip an expedition. That’s partly why there aren’t many improvising harpists. Still, there have been some good ones: Caspar Reardon played the instrument with ragtime inflections in the 1930s, Dorothy Ashby transferred bop piano technique to it in the ’50s, Alice Coltrane got all cosmic with it in the ’60s (OK, that wasn’t so good), and Zeena Parkins made it downtown-raunchy in the ’80s....

A giant spray-painted truck was parked outside Mizz Nellie’s Soundtrack in early August, blasting tunes from Legit Ballaz: Respect the Game Vol. 3, the latest release on the label run by hometown hip-hop hero Twista. Inside the shop, at 2945 W. Madison, swarms of children were buying candy and CDs, asking the Legit Ballaz crew for autographs, and playing video games. The store’s owner, 46-year-old Nellie Thomas, reminded an unruly eight-year-old girl to be ladylike....

The world-renowned Lyon Opera Ballet is a classical company with a focus on cutting-edge choreographers–Maguy Marin, Angelin Preljocaj, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon–and a stable of top-quality dancers. Headed since 1988 by Yorgos Loukos, the 35-year-old French troupe makes its Chicago debut this weekend with a program of three works. At first William Forsythe’s 1991 Second Detail seems austere, even soulless, but Thom Willems’s purposely mechanistic music begins to sound funny, then gets wilder and wilder, perfectly suiting the escalating excitement of the dancing....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 36-year-old man from Arcadia, Florida, checked himself into a mental hospital in March after being identified as “the Choking Man,” who’d been pretending to choke on food in public in order to induce women to wrap their arms around him and give him the Heimlich maneuver; afterward he’d hug and kiss them lavishly and attempt to initiate a relationship, often showing them pictures of his wife and daughter to earn their trust before asking for a phone number....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now I’m not afraid to go walking down the street in Lincoln Park or Lakeview or for that matter Uptown, but those on the north lakefront should take the hint that high rent does not equal safety. Anyhow, a moonlit stroll down Marine Drive sounds about as romantic to me as a happy holidays trip to Beirut....

David Gordon has been making dances for more than 40 years–and has been married to Valda Setterfield for almost as long. Now the two of them appear in an evening-length piece, Private Lives of Dancers, that reiterates many of the themes running throughout his work, including a fascination with showbiz despite (or perhaps because of) his involvement with the Judson Church group and an interest in “framing the individual, fleeting act,” as dance scholar Sally Banes puts it in Terpsichore in Sneakers....

Pretty Girls Make Graves’ second full-length, New Romance (Matador), leads off with the jittery, expansive statement of purpose “Something Bigger, Something Brighter,” an indication of the raised emotional stakes this Seattle quintet is playing for–no diffident indie rock shuffles for them, no ma’am. Not that last year’s Good Health was a model of reticence–the opening track, “Speakers Push the Air,” celebrated the power of music (“And nothing else matters when I turn it up loud”) with a passion more heartfelt than corny–but their weakness for power-pop shortcuts and Andrea Zollo’s riot-grrl vocal tics dampened the music’s immediacy....

By Ben Joravsky The problem is that the intersection is two blocks south of a Stevenson Expressway exit in a neighborhood that’s a mix of residential and industrial properties. Trucks rumble in off the Stevenson at all hours of the day and night, and lots of other motorists zip through the streets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The residents are particularly concerned because Burroughs Elementary School is just one block to the east, at Washtenaw and 36th....

Last night I scared the bejesus out of myself reading about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1917, hantavirus, and the Ebola virus. Then I started to wonder. We can kill bacteria. If you come down with a nasty case of bubonic plague, it’s at least possible that your doctor could knock it out with an antibiotic. How come we can’t kill viruses once they’ve gotten inside a person? Is anyone working on figuring out how?...

Puccini’s extravagant operas haven’t fared well in the movies; the medium magnifies theatricality, and close-ups of singers belting out arias can be distracting, especially if they don’t quite look the part. Director Benoit Jacquot plays with these limitations in this 2001 version of Tosca, a melodrama so lurid it invites caricature. The libretto has been pared down to psychological portraits of the three principals: the tempestuous Tosca (soprano Angela Gheorghiu), who wrongly suspects her lover of having an affair; the object of her passion (tenor Roberto Alagna), an ardent painter and revolutionary who’s jailed during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy; and the police chief (baritone Ruggero Raimondi), who offers to trade the painter’s life for sex with Tosca....

Ever since the FDA announced last month that it was planning a crackdown on unpasteurized cheese imports, people have been making furtive requests of Matt and Sarah Parker, owners of the Lincoln Square shop the Cheese Stands Alone. “Customers come in and say, ‘Got any real Brie back there?’” Sarah says. “It’s like we’re selling fireworks.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Parkers used to think of Chicago as a cheddar town....

More than a few people were surprised when Joe Davis opened a contemporary art gallery in Highwood last April. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that Highland Park’s tiny neighbor to the north–covering about one square mile–had a reputation as a rough-and-tumble bar town. For much of the 20th century as many as 30 saloons did business within a couple of blocks (a fact that locals claim once earned Highwood a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records)....

Judgment at Nuremberg The occasion was the appearance of George Ryan. An unexpected corollary to his recent commutations of death sentences is that he’s been attending a lot of theater lately. Well, a lot by governor of Illinois standards. OK, two plays that I know of in the past six months, but that’s two more than I remember seeing any other governor, or recently deposed governor, at. (The other was The Exonerated, about people who become enmeshed in the judicial system and manage to fight their way out....