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Visitors to Tangential Pleasures, an exhibit of work by eight local artists at the Suburban Fine Arts Center, are invited to write down their pleasures–visual, auditory, bodily, gustatory–and post them as part of the exhibit. Dogs and chocolate show up pretty often, and the nice little buzz that comes with a great flea-market find is mentioned more than once. Also listed are “a strong tail wind on the bicycle,” “the feeling of cleaning your ears with a Q-Tip,” and this five-word description of a relationship: “Rick in a good mood....

Michael Weyna was sipping wine at Weinhof Wieninger in Vienna when the idea of opening his own establishment kicked in. Weinhof Wieninger is one of Austria’s many Heurigen, taverns devoted to serving young, locally produced wines and often located near the wineries themelves. “We were at a communal table enjoying great food and fabulous house-made wine, and you could tell the owner really cared,” says Weyna. “I thought, why can’t we have that feeling in the States?...

Man on the Moon, Milos Forman’s new film biography of Andy Kaufman, opens with a bit borrowed from The Andy Kaufman Special, a TV show the comedian made for ABC in 1977. Jim Carrey plays Kaufman as Foreign Man (better known as Latka Gravas from Taxi); he fidgets, his eyes dart around, he stammers out a welcome and an apology. The film is terrible, he says, full of distortions and lies, so he’s edited it down to this: nothing....

“Harold is incredibly prolific,” says Brett Bloom of fellow artist Harold Jefferies. “I’ve been sorting through work for the show and I’ve gone through about a hundred pounds of drawings. He just doesn’t stop.” Bloom met Jefferies, who’s 40 and developmentally disabled, through his work with the Little City Arts Center’s studio arts program in Palatine. Jefferies has been in the program since its inception in 1994, and his work–which includes elaborate renderings and 3-D models of houses and drawings inspired by monster movies–has been featured in several group shows over the years, including exhibits at the Chicago Cultural Center and the MCA....

In the 1970s, movie theaters one step ahead of demolition covered their crumbling marquees with titles like 18 Fatal Strikes and Shogun Assassin. It was the golden age of the Hong Kong kung fu flick, with its off-kilter dubbing, arm chops that sounded like whiffing golf clubs, and villains sporting shaggy Ron Wood hairdos. Every Saturday and Sunday, Grant Rogers and his little brother Simeon took their buck-fifty to the movies to watch Bruce Lee kick it with that week’s horde of ninjas....

It’s been four years since the much-ballyhooed centennial of George Gershwin’s birth, and these days not even the most conservative jazz purists or classical concertgoers question his status as an American original. But Gershwin’s legacy in the classical realm consists of half a dozen orchestral works, one opera, and a few pieces for solo piano–so a symphonic Gershwin tribute more or less has to feature Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, or the Piano Concerto in F....

Hybrids can be strange two-headed monsters, and the program being presented by the 52-member Beijing-based China Dance Theatre, making its North American debut in Chicago, promises to be no exception. The 12 pieces, called collectively “August Rising,” are “modern” (that is, Western) interpretations of “traditional” (Chinese) dance movements and concepts, sometimes of recent vintage–Ode to the Red Flag, for instance, pays tribute to “motherland China.” The dancers are clearly talented and well trained: in various pieces, a man holds a woman aloft by the ankles as she releases her long, blowing scarf (there’s lots of billowing fabric throughout the evening); a man tosses himself with unbelievable confidence and fervor into somersaults, barrel turns, and handsprings; and a group of men play drums strapped across their chests with all the bravado of warriors about to plunge into battle....

Last year Vanguard Records released Avalon Blues, a tribute to the legacy of Mississippi John Hurt. Folksinger Peter Case, who conceived of the project and assembled the album, says he first heard Hurt’s music at age 13, a couple years after the bluesman’s death in 1966, and he’s been smitten ever since. On Avalon Blues Case performs a duet with roots rocker Dave Alvin, while their colleague here, acoustic bluesman Chris Smither, takes a song for himself; the other artists on the compilation include Alvin Youngblood Hart, Gillian Welch, Beck, and the team of Steve Earle and his son Justin....

Jeraldyne Blunden started her dance training at the age of eight, when some African-American mothers in Dayton, Ohio, approached Josephine and Hermene Schwarz and asked for classes for their kids. It was 1948, and the two sisters apparently weren’t comfortable offering integrated training at the Schwarz School of Dance, but they started community classes at a recreation center in the black part of town, which is where Blunden first learned to dance....

“Hey lady!” reads the flyer. “Does a showcase celebrating and encouraging the artistic, organizational, and political work and talents of women sound good to you?” It sounded pretty good to Marf Wright last fall, after she got back from Olympia, Washington. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It was just amazing,” says Wright, a grant maker for a small local foundation. “I went halfway across the country and, getting there, I really felt a part of something....

GUSTAVO CERATI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As singer and guitarist for the Buenos Aires trio Soda Stereo in the 1980s and ’90s, Gustavo Cerati helped launch rock en espa–ol. Not that the group ever incorporated native traditions into its music, the way Cafe Tacuba or El Gran Silencio later would–most of Chau Soda (Sony Latin), a two-CD set from 1997 that covers most of the band’s 15-year career, is unlistenable, a sickly-sweet melange of Simple Minds, the Police, and U2 flecked with ska, goth, and electronica....

I hate the person who got between me and a virgin experience of Michael Fosberg’s one-man show, Incognito, though I’m not sure who it was. The buzz about this play was flying so fast and loud after it opened–first in a single reading at Chicago’s Mercury Theatre last March and then in a successful run this fall at Bailiwick Repertory–that it was hard to stay clear of it. Incognito is based on Fosberg’s real-life search for his birth father and includes a discovery that’s said to pack a wallop....

Gay pride’s being celebrated again in Chicago this week with all the usual trappings and trimmings–parade, festival, wigs and boas, countless rainbow flags, and pointed public displays of affection. Conventional wisdom has it that all of these are hard-won privileges enjoyed only in the post-Stonewall era. But David Deitcher’s recent book, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (Harry N. Abrams), shows that not everything you’ll see under the sun at the parade is new....

Finding a good Thai curry these days is about as difficult as locating a legal parking space in Lincoln Park on the weekend. I’m talking about the Bangkok original: a modestly hot, complex curry, redolent with fresh chilies that startle the tongue, slowly revealing its mysterious layers of salt, sour, and citrus. There’s no shortage of Thai restaurants in Chicago, yet few cooks go to the extra effort of making homemade curry....

Brutally honest and beautifully acted, this debut feature by Jordan Melamed follows an explosively violent high school kid (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Third Rock From the Sun) as he’s committed to a private mental hospital and enters group therapy with other teens whose problems are as intractable as his own. Melamed and screenwriters Blayne Weaver and Michael Bacall spent 18 months researching their subject and revising the script, and the actors met with troubled teens as part of the lengthy rehearsal; the handheld DV cameras enhance the sense of verisimilitude, but what makes this consistently gripping is Melamed’s fidelity to the bleak but penetrating outlook of real adolescents....

After a six-month search that included four open casting calls, producers Lee Alan and Jennifer Erfurth found the 18-year-old lead actress for their first feature, Lizzie, in a bar. “We didn’t know anything about her, except that she looked too young to be in the bar,” says Alan, who also wrote and directed the digital-video thriller. “She was talking to my friend, who’s a bartender there. We said, ‘Sally, who’s that girl?...

Although the dandelions were out in force in Washington Park, the weather was unseasonably cool. But the chill in the morning air didn’t discourage the players, who’d been waiting all winter long to take to the pitch and compete for runs and wickets. In their white shoes, shirts, pants, and V-neck sweaters, the all-male assembly looked more like caddies than athletes, but their careful stretching routines suggested that something seriously athletic was about to happen....

In 1946 Wayne F. Miller was a little lost. He’d recently completed a tour with a navy combat photo unit led by Edward Steichen in which he’d been one of the first westerners to photograph the destruction of Hiroshima. Then he’d won a $3,000 Guggenheim award to document “The Way of Life of the Northern Negro.” He’d moved his family to 95th and Jeffery. But Miller, who is white and grew up near Broadway and Montrose, had never actually set foot in the city’s Black Belt, whose center was 47th Street and South Parkway (now King Drive)....

The photo looks east from the el onto Armitage Avenue in Lincoln Park. In the distance, a lone high-rise pokes up into an overcast sky. Below, a guy is crossing the street, which seems too wide and too empty to be Armitage. You can see the Armitage Hardware sign, a little larger and less discreet than it is today, but otherwise the scene is foreign: no cars, no boutiques, no Starbucks, no rehabs....

“Don’t write genre fiction” is the first rule you learn in a creative writing program. I heard this from a friend with an MFA, who told his own students that beginners should learn fundamentals like character development rather than lean on the codified tropes of their favorite junk books to churn out plots. But in workshopping his own work he found that though he wasn’t writing anything like genre fiction, his plotless and ruminative stories didn’t sit well with a majority of his peers....