I can only imagine the shit blizzard you’ve been subjected to after ragging on Mr. Watkins of San Francisco. Why anyone would rag on you, as opposed to ragging on Mr. Watkins, is beyond me. I’m a 41-year-old straight woman. If I could get it together after my divorce and learn how to use a goddamned condom after 15 years of monogamy, then certainly Mr. Watkins can do the same. Christ!...

Presented by the Chicago-based documentary production and distribution company Terra Nova Films, the ninth annual Silver Images Film Festival continues Friday, May 10, through Wednesday, May 29, at Advocate Health Center-Evergreen Park, 9435 S. Western, Evergreen Park; Bethany Hospital, 3435 W. Van Buren; Casa Central, 1335 N. California; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Copernicus Center, 3160 N. Milwaukee; Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State; Holy Covenant MCC Church, 9145 Grant, Brookfield; and the Levy Center, 2019 W....

MARK EITZEL 12/6, CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER & HIDEOUT Whatever your opinion of his music (I think it darts wildly between genius and tedious myself), you’ve got to admit that this veteran singer-songwriter’s work ethic alone merits a cult following. Each of the 11 solo albums the former American Music Club front man has released over the past decade attests to a certain level of care–whichever primrose path of poisoned pop he’s following, Eitzel puts a lot of thought into his itinerary....

The Exiles The Seventh Victim A Tale of Two Sisters *** (A must see) Two 1961 films showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week and one from 1943 that will screen there in January qualify as casualties of this neglect–and of lack of imagination in classifying them. One of the ’61 films, The Exiles–a low-budget independent feature that follows a few uprooted Native Americans over a 12-hour period in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles–can hold its own next to John Cassavetes’s Shadows, which came out a year earlier....

This trio of early Tennessee Williams one-acts reveals the playwright to be a master documentarian. Each offers a finely observed, almost photographic miniature of a certain kind of down-and-out southerner: the aging traveling salesman, the half-crazy southern belle, the alcoholic outcast huddled in a dirty hotel room. Paradoxically, though, the more naturalistic Williams makes his portraits, the more symbolic and dreamlike they seem. It’s as if he’d discovered, a good decade before Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, that there’s a devastating spiritual beauty in life’s most mundane moments....

Working on the Railroad Was this tale based on Heirens’s confession? So far as he knew, he hadn’t made one. Maybe he’d confessed without knowing it after being injected with sodium pentothal, though the transcript of that interrogation has never surfaced. At any rate, there was no arguing with the Tribune. That paper would later boast: “For the first time in newspaper history, the detailed story of how three murders were committed, naming the man who did them, was told before the murderer had confessed or had been indicted....

Cellist Lynn Harrell is reliable, often brilliant, and this week joins the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for its first performances of the Lutoslawski concerto, one of the most important cello concertos of the 20th century–yet audiences still take him for granted, apparently because he doesn’t have the star power of someone like Yo-Yo Ma. Harrell’s career stretches back to 1960, when at age 16 he made his debut recital; a few years later he became the cello principal with the Cleveland Orchestra, playing under maestro George Szell....

On the train tracks Love and I sat together watching the endless horizon. The planks were warm from the beating sun. On one side of the tracks was a brick factory and on the other was the dump. At night my mother and I took our garbage in a wheelbarrow and dragged it a few blocks there, past house after house. There was an occasional dog bark. If it was a full moon we never went....

Bubonic Homunculus WNEP Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the “useful findings” come from The Bubonic Homunculus, part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. Writer-director John Hannon has a smart, wry touch with genre boilerplate and metatextual references, and his cast is equally sharp, talented, and versatile. Everyone seems well versed in the specific tropes–Universal and Hammer horror films, goth-rock androgyny, and buckets and buckets of Poe–that Hannon dusts off, which goes a long way toward justifying the sometimes showily knowledgeable script....

When writer-director Jefferson Root was making his first film, a romantic comedy about four guys, their obsession with mix tapes, and the women who put up with them, he naturally wanted to stack the sound track with his own favorite songs. By the fall of 2002 a rough cut of Mix Tape had been shot and edited–a process that took two years–but Root still hadn’t gotten permission to use the songs he needed, including Sebadoh’s “Think (Let Tomorrow Bee),” which plays a pivotal role in the plot....

Reeling 2002, the 21st Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, continues Friday through Thursday, August 2 through 8. Screenings are at the Three Penny and Landmark’s Century Centre. Advance tickets can be purchased from 10 to 6 weekdays, noon to 5 Saturday, at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark; same-day tickets are available only at the venue box office. Tickets are $8, $6 for screenings until 5. Discount passes are available; for more information call 773-293-1447 or the festival hot line at 312-458-9117....

Around 25 people huddled under the overhang of the Blue Line station at Kimball and Belmont on a rainy, sticky Saturday afternoon, waiting for the 77 bus. A short white woman loaded down with plastic shopping bags shoved her way into the crowd and asked two Hispanic men how long they’d been waiting. An elderly woman rocked back and forth on her cane, mumbling. The bus arrived 15 minutes later, tailed closely by another 77....

Tell you what, Dan. If you do your job and answer some fucking questions, all of your readers promise to run out and buy your book and make it a best-seller. But if you keep boring us with the details of your boring book tour, none of us will buy your book! No more bullshit about your boring book tour. Do your job. Answer our questions. For instance, I’m writing this column sitting at the bar in the lobby of Milwaukee’s Hotel Pfister (pronounced “fister,” just like the word for someone who puts his arm up your ass)....

I’m a 30-year-old straight male. I am successful and reasonably good-looking. Anyway, here’s the deal: There is a woman about my age that I find mentally stimulating, but only moderately physically attractive. I’ve found through experience that single, independent women who’ve made it to their 30s alone are the types of women I respect and enjoy talking to and spending time with. But–and here’s the shitty part–I’m not sure I want to be with a woman who’s, um, less than stunning....

TIMEOUT DRAWER 11/28, EMPTY BOTTLE A Difficult Future (Someoddpilot), the beautiful 2001 album from this Chicago band, harks back to the glory days of lazy psychedelic Moog eruptions; its pulsing density makes it sound faster than it ever actually gets. The players seem fully aware of what year it is but uninterested in catering to shorter attention spans. This is a release party for the new limited-edition EP Presents Left for the Living Dead....

The Norwegian improv quartet Supersilent doesn’t give you much to go on. Its albums and songs have numbers for titles (the lead track on 4, for instance, is “4.1”), and the CD packaging for the last two releases (5 and 6, both on Rune Grammophon) omits any kind of ornament as well as the players’ names, providing only recording information. (As member Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, told the Wire last year, “Each piece may generate personal images for each listener....

Twin Lakes, Wisconsin Lodging in the Twin Lakes area is available, though hard to come by. People who remember Nippersink Golf Club and Resort (1055 N. Tombeau Road, outside of nearby Richmond, Illinois, 262-279-5281) as a Catskills-like Jewish resort will be disappointed to find that the new owners are developing it into a corporate retreat center. The pier on Lake Tombeau and the tennis courts are worn, but the green-and-white cottages can still be rented by individuals ($77 per night in June, $87 in July and August)....

Odd Obsession Movies is underground in more ways than one. The rental store and screening room, which specializes in unreleased, foreign, and extremely rare films, is squeezed into the small basement of an old house across from Steppenwolf Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think a lot of people think Brian’s quirky and kinda weird,” says Melina Paez, his 29-year-old girlfriend, who quit a marketing job to help with the store....

Jody Andre is once again banking on the idea that location isn’t always the secret to success. After selling off her first restaurant, Tomboy, earlier this year, she’s opened SPEAKEASY in a three-room space at Devon and Glenwood, almost as odd a location for a trendy eatery as Broadway and Hollywood, where she opened her second venture, the Room, two years ago. But she’s pulled it off again, making the potentially too-large space feel like a hidden gem....

Cafe Society, A Reasonable Facsimile Theatre Company, at the Cornservatory, and US, Open Cage Ensemble, at the Cornservatory. If a woman’s too nice, she’s likely to find herself in trouble. That’s what happens in Robert Simonson’s new play when Karen (Amanda White), a program editor for New York’s Lincoln Center, hesitantly agrees to be friends with Lucy, a puppyish 15-year-old who works the counter at her family’s gourmet coffeehouse. Lucy (Robyn Accetta) seems harmless, but it turns out she’s as determined as a pitbull....