In the back room of a Logan Square art gallery, Victor Lundin takes the mike for a couple of songs. He’s already spent a full day meeting fans and signing autographs at a Star Trek convention in Rosemont, where he’s known for being the TV show’s first Klingon. Tonight Lundin’s playing a different role–“singing spokesperson” for the Child Welfare League of America. “We’re gonna do ‘La Esperanza,’” Lundin says. “It’s in Spanish and English....

Restaurant owner Bill Krekel is known around central Illinois for his hamburgers. Since 1953 he’s been serving up “Krekelburgers,” as people call them, at hamburger stands in Decatur, Springfield, and Mount Zion. Bill Madlock, formerly of the Chicago Cubs, grew up in Decatur and swears by Krekelburgers. So does country singer Crystal Gayle, who stopped off for a sandwich on her way to the Nashville North nightclub in nearby Taylorville. Krekel says that years ago he sent the first American hamburgers to Russia, when a group of exchange students attending Eisenhower High School in Decatur took home a dozen Krekelburgers in a cooler....

You know your band’s gonna be all right when your fans get pissy about a positive Pitchfork review, as if even getting props from the snobbiest of snobs does some disservice to your genius. But that’s just one review, and Toronto duo Death From Above 1979 is currently enjoying a Slip ‘n Slide journey down a stream of critics’ drool–UK mags Dazed & Confused, Kerrang, and NME can’t invent hyperbole too outrageous for them....

Investigating the rape-murders of two little girls, a weathered police inspector (Lino Ventura) summons a prickly attorney (Michel Serrault) to police headquarters on a rainy New Year’s Eve, and the prolonged interrogation that follows ultimately forces both men to see themselves in a colder light. Based on a novel by John Wainwright (and remade in 2000 as Under Suspicion), this tightly paced 1981 French drama provides a fine showcase for Ventura and Serrault, who won a Cesar for his performance....

When Sandra Jackson-Opoku was on a book tour for her first novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, she heard from her readers–whether she wanted to or not. “There always seems to be one brother in the bookstore who is interested in how black female writers treat black male characters,” she says. “I’ll admit I was sometimes put off by those questions. ‘When are you going to write a book about the man, what about the male character?...

James Brown was the single most vital and influential American artist of the second half of the 20th century. OK, that’s impossible to prove, but this grandiose, insupportable claim sounds slightly less ludicrous than it might with any other name inserted, and really Brown’s larger-than-life persona demands that kind of hyperbole. In fact, referring to him simply as “Brown” sounds wishy-washy–the man has accumulated so many sobriquets because a mere legal name sounds pitifully insufficient, and descriptions of his career require plenty of capital letters and exclamation points and grandiose (but not always insupportable) claims....

In his compelling fictionalized biography of Rudolf Nureyev, Dancer: A Novel, Colum McCann paints a picture of a man both representative of his time and unique. Of Tatar descent, Nureyev experienced both incredible hardship in Stalinist Russia and–at the height of his career in the West, after he defected–unimaginable luxury. Reportedly sexually rapacious, he was consistently described as a superbly passionate and charismatic performer. So there’s something a little odd, even self-defeating, about a program that revolves around him, a dancer who can hardly be emulated....

In John Repp’s second full-length collection, The Fertile Crescent, the past rear-ends the present, leaving the poet to sift the wreckage for whatever meaning he can find. It’s work he doesn’t relish. “I’m sick / of points,” he says in one place, and in another, “I don’t want to be in this poem. I want I killed, / but I can never die.” But the man knows the duty consciousness thrusts upon him, and so he shoulders it from the time when his grandmother was a girlish immigrant through his own youth of dismal day jobs and dope to these bleak days listening to war news as he puts his son to bed....

“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.” So proclaimed Charles Baudelaire and so begins Drinking & Writing, an evening of musings, quotes, and trivia built around the drinking habits of the world’s greatest authors and performed by Chicago’s Neo-Futurists (best known for their long-running 30-plays-in-60-minutes marathon, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind)....

At Wit’s End comes home this week. The musical, inspired by the literary and theatrical minds who met regularly for lunch at New York’s Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s, was crafted in Chicago over a six-year period by lyricist Cheri Coons and composer Michael Duff. Northlight Theatre artistic director B.J. Jones committed to staging it right after the first public reading, in 2001, but was scheduling shows two years in advance....

Not many would-be rock stars survived that brief period in the early 90s when major labels swooped down on Chicago–and as a bit player in two of the era’s more troubled acts, Triple Fast Action and latter-day Veruca Salt, Kevin Tihista seemed a less likely candidate than most. But in September he released his first solo album, Don’t Breathe a Word, on Atlantic Records’ Division One imprint, and not only is it good–it’s entirely different from anything he’s played in public before....

CANE CORSO 7/5, ABBEY PUB I was all set to like this Chicago band’s big-room blend of vintage boogie rock and G n’ R swagger. Checking out their independently released CD, I was digging the tight production values and joyous guitar bluster and shameless cock-ness of the rock, thinking how good it would sound in a beater car with 2/60 air-conditioning–and then the guy I live with came in from another room, looked at me strangely, and said, “I thought you were listening to Sammy Hagar for a minute there....

ENON 5/16, METRO Brainiac guitarist John Schmersal took a break from music after the band’s front man, Tim Taylor, was killed in a car accident in 1997, but he reemerged two years later with a new project, Enon, named after a small town in his native Ohio. Begun as a solo affair, Enon developed into a full-fledged band once Schmersal moved to New York and hooked up with two members of Skeleton Key; the resulting albums were full of crunchy electronic postpunk....

Bands break up for a reason. By the last album in Steely Dan’s initial run, 1980’s Gaucho, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had buffed their jazz-pilfered chordings and fusionesque tonalities to a sheen as cynical as their increasingly claustrophobic lyrics. But when they reunited in 2000 for Two Against Nature (Warner Bros.), their jaded posturing had been replaced by an all but shameless indulgence in superficiality and lechery. Twenty years earlier, on their last great single, “Hey Nineteen,” a 32-year-old Fagen despaired that he and his sweet young bedmate had nothing to talk about in the morning; on the new “Janie Runaway” he was less concerned about keeping the conversation lively than orchestrating a threesome with his jailbait honey and her friend Melanie....

Nepalese Flavors Kharel, who lives in Edgewater, had his eye on Evanston for a long time. “This is a cosmopolitan community with a sophisticated customer base,” he says with a nod toward the busy scene outside his front windows. “In addition to being a college town, it’s an easy drive from Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What really sets the momo apart is the accompaniment....

Dan Scesnewicz used to drink only beer. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side, “I thought wine was foreign, too esoteric, snobby,” he says. “I had no exposure to wine other than Mogen David.” Then, in his early 20s, he got a job bartending at the East Bank Club. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the next ten years Scesnewicz worked at Como Inn, Stefani’s, Trattoria Gianni, and Cyrano’s Bistro....

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 19th year, runs Friday, October 25, through Sunday, November 3, at City North 14; Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton; and the Vittum Theater, 1012 N. Noble. Tickets are $6 for children and adults, $4.50 for Facets members; various discounts are available for ten or more tickets. Professional actors will be on hand to read subtitled films. For more information call 773-281-9075 or 773-281-2166....

Georgia bluesman Chick Willis learned his stagecraft in the mid-50s touring with his cousin Chuck Willis–the turbaned “King of the Stroll”–and also shared bills with X-rated comedian Rudy Ray Moore (aka Dolemite). The influence of these early role models is obvious on Willis’s raucous 1972 hit, “Stoop Down Baby, Let Your Daddy See,” and on subsequent novelties like “Mother Fuyer” and “I Want a Big Fat Woman.” But he’s also got a serious side, as 2001’s I Won’t Give Up (Deep South) makes clear....

Blackglama used to run magazine ads showing venerable stars–Lauren Bacall, Pearl Bailey–swathed in its minks; the caption always read “What becomes a legend most?” That’s the question raised by Dance Chicago’s review of classics created here in the past century. Though the program is heavy on stuff from the 1990s, it also includes reconstructed pieces of the 1920s and ’30s. So who has become a legend? Is it Ruth St. Denis, who was inspired by “Eastern” art (including a cigarette poster showing the Egyptian goddess Isis) to create such pieces as the 1925 White Jade, danced here with equal parts restraint and passion by Stephanie Clemens of Momenta Performing Arts Company?...

Listings of holiday craft fairs, trunk shows, open studios, and special gallery events will run through December. Send information to artlistings@chicagoreader.com. Artists Studio Sale with ceramics, drawings, paintings, and photography by five resident artists. Fri 12/3, 6-9 PM, Sat-Sun 12/4-12/5, 1-5 PM, 4052 N. Western, 773-539-6047. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Depart-Ment Quarterly craft sale featuring jewelry, clothing, accessories, furniture, stuffed animals and toys, books, and more....