There’s no place I’d rather be come New Year’s Eve than in a Second City audience. That said, this year’s edition of the company’s Dysfunctional Holiday Revue at Metropolis is a tad uneven–which means you’re only in stitches, say, 90 percent of the time. Some of the best moments come when unsuspecting audience members are pulled into the action, as often happens during Bridget Kloss’s hilarious turn as a high school teacher from hell....

On January 13 Governor Rod Blagojevich announced that the state was in danger of spending $5 billion more than it takes in this year. The next day a report appeared criticizing the state for having put hundreds of millions of dollars a year into feel-good economic development programs that aren’t paying off. Taxpayers, it made clear, have been paying for giveaways to big business that produce little or no public benefit....

Close Your Eyes The shot is only two minutes long, but it establishes everything Lynch needs to give his tricky fable credibility. He needs a world where the pure and the corrupt, the pristine and the grotesque, are inseparable, where every moment of comedy is tinged with the threat of violence and every image of perversion holds the seed of parody. Thanks to the camera’s magical subterranean dive at the very beginning, we know that Lynch will take us to the most horrid, discomfiting recesses of his imagination....

Some lost plays are better off that way–whatever made them noteworthy in their own era just doesn’t resonate in a later time. But Tina Landau and Curt Columbus, who jointly translated Elsa Bernstein’s 1908 drama for this English-language world premiere by Steppenwolf, handily make the case that Maria Arndt deserves resurrection. It’s not quite a masterpiece, but it is a wonderful complement to Ibsen’s familiar images of repressed women: Bernstein makes central something Ibsen could never be bothered with–a complex, loving mother-daughter relationship....

Occasional Detroit, a self-described “experimental hip-rock” group from (duh) Detroit, is the brainchild of a man who calls himself Beyababa. In 1995, two years out of high school, he and a friend who’d inspired him in art class formed a lo-fi duo, equipped with a guitar Beyababa had bought while in the marines, an ancient tape recorder, and a microphone. The lineup has changed several times since, but the aesthetic hasn’t: it’s still as awkward and amateurish as an open-mike poetry slam, with the same potential for cringe-inducing disaster or inexplicable brilliance....

When he was a student at Simeon High School back in the mid-1970s, Ronald Harris figured it was only a matter of time, maybe a year or two, before he and his classmates got the new school the Board of Education had promised. The existing building, at 82nd and Vincennes, had a leaky roof, peeling paint, crumbling walls, and lots of mildew. “This was a converted factory–it was never supposed to be a permanent school,” says Harris....

In 1935 ICOR embarked on what was perhaps its most ambitious project: acquiring a collection of contemporary art that would be used to start a museum in Birobidzhan. One hundred and twenty American artists–including William Gropper, Max Weber, Jose Clemente Orozco, and many of the Chicagoans who two years later contributed to “A Gift to Biro-Bidjan”–donated more than 200 oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, prints, and drawings to this gesture of cultural solidarity....

[snip] The Blagojevich environmental philosophy. Not only has the budget of the state’s Department of Natural Resources been cut by one-sixth in three years, the cuts appear to be more drastic in natural-areas preservation than in recreation (hunting and fishing). “Economics are involved here,” DNR director and former Democratic state legislator Joel Brunsvold told Todd Spivak of the Illinois Times (October 7-13). “It’s because recreation tends to generate money and natural areas don’t....

Why are the “seven deadly sins” so deadly? You got your gluttony, envy, greed, etc. Those things, while not admirable, will not kill you. I mean, there’s no commandment in the Bible against pigging out. Of course your lust kind of fits in with the neighbor’s wife commandment, but still, what’s the deal with anger? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They don’t mean deadly in the sense of putting you in physical danger, muttonhead, they mean destructive of your immortal soul....

Friday 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BOB PAISLEY & THE SOUTHERN GRASS Although his name scarcely appears in most histories of bluegrass, 73-year-old singer and guitarist Bob Paisley has kept pace with the genre’s luminaries. Born in the North Carolina mountains but raised in southeastern Pennsylvania, Paisley began playing guitar as a child, absorbing the old-timey music his parents loved as well as the early country music he caught on the radio....

Nuevo Latin seems to be the cuisine du jour, and newcomer COOBAH (located in the former Viennese Kaffee-Haus Brandt) is sure to give neighboring Otro Mas a run for its money. Chef/partner Jimmy “Tasty J” Madla, most recently Veruca Salt’s drummer and before that a chef at Zaven’s, whips up some tasty dishes: A flatiron steak (a shoulder cut similar in texture to flank steak) is marinated with parsley, oregano, and cilantro and served with black nightfall beans and caramelized plantains....

By Steve Zwick You’ve just entered the Patel Zone. Three thousand people named Patel recently descended on Miami for a convention weekend that surely would have perplexed every hotel clerk in the city if not for the fact that many of those clerks and their bosses are also named Patel. So are nearly 30 percent of all hotel owners in America, as well as at least half of all the convenience store owners in England and a growing number of Dunkin’ Donuts franchisees....

The traditional, Freudian view is that collecting represents an anal retentive bent. That’s kind of scoffed at these days; it’s a colorful way of classifying people. [A more contemporary view is] that collecting satisfies the need for closure that many people have. Some people don’t need completion; they never finish anything. But those who really need to finish [things] are the ones that are more likely to collect. “Certainly we’ll need to have it finished by Thanksgiving,” Ron says....

In his first three films Bela Tarr–conceivably the most important Eastern European filmmaker currently working–betrays an impatience with cinematic style, focusing almost exclusively on content, but that tendency was radically overturned with this 1984 feature, whose taste and intelligence are specifically (and exquisitely) cinematic and revealed Tarr as a master stylist. Set entirely in an apartment inhabited by an elderly woman, her son, his former teacher, the old woman’s nurse, and the nurse’s lover, the film consists mainly of intense two-part dialogues and encounters largely concerned with the old woman’s money....

BUILT TO SPILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Built to Spill’s new Ancient Melodies of the Future (Warner Brothers), front man Doug Martsch sure sounds tired–maybe tired of something, maybe tired of everything. The music is the most intricately arranged of the band’s career, a woozy concoction of cello, violin, and multiple overdubbed layers of casually masterful guitar, frequently backward and wah-wahed, that bloom psychedelically at every turn....

Since breaking out internationally in the mid-90s, Cesaria Evora has single-handedly ensured that the Cape Verde Islands would evoke something more for music fans than that Horace Silver tune. Her mastery of her homeland’s national song form, the morna–a beautifully melancholic type of ballad that’s thought to be a mixture of the Portuguese fado, the Brazilian modinho, and native rhythms from Angola–has always been the core of her art. Despite years of whiskey drinking and chain-smoking, Evora’s voice remains a model of emotional clarity....

And God said, “No way I can divert all four airplanes, so I’ll let New York go and concentrate on rural Pennsylvania.” The August 28 issue of PBS Web publication “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” (www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week552/cover.html) visited Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for the obligatory September 11 anniversary story and came away with a theologically challenged quote from a local pastor’s wife: “I believe God had a lot to do with the timing of that plane and where, if it had to go down, where it went down–where not another soul was harmed or hurt....

Damn The Torpedoes! Stockyards Theatre Project, at the Heartland Studio Theater. Disney meets A Clockwork Orange in Jill Elaine Hughes’s rather rudderless tale of six offenders locked in the detention center of Whimsey World, a theme park housing a cartoon-worshiping cult. A repressed British couple, a trailer-park mom and her four-year-old son, a stoner Pepperdine student, and a world-renowned Indian novelist have been incarcerated for such offenses as throwing feces at little robot singers representing children from around the world....

Last month at Chinatown’s “Little” Three Happiness on Cermak a table of eight sat dining on salt-and-pepper shrimp, blue crabs, black-pepper beef ribs, crispy chicken skin, water spinach with fermented tofu, and panfried rice noodles with duck and barbecued pork. As they dug in Gary Wiviott, a large, gregarious man in black, put down his chopsticks and stood up. With a bit of pomp, he presented Three Happiness’s owners, Raymond and Betty Yau, with a white laminated card proclaiming the nine-table Cantonese eatery “one of Chicago’s Great Neighborhood Restaurants....

By Michael G. Glab She places her forefinger over her lips, contemplating the question for a moment. “Umm, yes.” The WCHL has grown stronger by the year and now has 24 teams in three divisions. Its players range from novices who stepped on the ice for the first time mere months ago to former collegiate stars and Olympic hopefuls. There are lawyers, artists, and housewives. There are Dara Thompson, Lisa Magad, and Andrea Meenahan....