It's not hard to imagine: Frank Capra, who directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life, would have made Swing Vote had he lived today. He might have made this civics lesson in American politics more concise and a bit sharper, but he would applaud the spirit, the message and the delivery. Swing Vote is a movie dramatizing the hopeful democratic idea that everyone's vote counts. Kevin Costner is no Jimmy Stewart but he's a plausible stand-in for Capra's other favorite actor, Gary Cooper. In Swing Vote, Costner's . . .

Warsaw, Ind., a little almost-all-white town on a flat stretch of Red State nowhere, is one of those fabled meridians of Middle America. The town, and especially its high school, is the setting for a documentary that was the talk of Sundance: American Teen. Directed by Nanette Burstein, whose rsum includes the amusing The Kid Stays in the Picture, American Teen is a polished film with beautiful swatches of cinematography, creative animated segments illustrating the fantasies of the principal actors and a breezy tone and pace. It tells a story of insiders and outsiders in that treacherous. . .

In this two-disc album dedicated to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith (with My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields) provides a live rendering of Smith's 1996 book The Coral Sea. The deceased photographer took the cover shot on Smith's remarkable debut album, Horses, and was a source . . .

The Alice Cooper "traveling musical and theatrical extravaganza" made its way to Milwaukee again last Friday, for the third time in the past three years. The Coop must like Brew Town-his bassist Chuck Garric is a local boy-and the feeling i...

In pigtails and a prim frock at the Miramar Theatre last Tuesday night, with her childlike façade pianist and singer-songwriter Vienna Teng belied a lyrical maturity and vast musical range that shifted from chamber pop to soul and jazz, spliced with bits of wit and candor. Channeling the canny ease of a nightclub's resident crooner, she encouraged audience participation, solicited requests and graciously played them all . . .

Many people haven't heard the name of Charles Thwaites, a Wisconsin artist who was born in Milwaukee in 1904 and graduated from the city's Layton School of Art during the 1920s. However, they may be familiar with his work: Thwaites was one of America's foremost portrait painters before moving to New Mexico in the '50s. The Museum of Wisconsin Art's exhibition "Charles Thwaites: A Retrospective" displays works from a successful career that spanned half a century, connecting Thwaites, who died in 2002, to his former home . . .

Italy is a country of many distinct regions, mutually incomprehensible dialects, squabbling political parties and great artistic fertility. The history of Italy is a lot to fit into one book, even if limited to the past two centuries, but British historian Christopher Duggan manages in around 600 well-written pages. One of his persistent themes is the country's doubtful search for identity. Even Mussolini failed. The dictator . . .

Anyone who encountered the Lotus Eaters while reading Homer already suspects that mind-altering drugs flourished on the fringes of the ancient Greek world, the matrix for much of what we call civilization. In The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press), D.C.A. Hillman argues that the Lotus Eaters weren't confined to one isolated island but were in the mainstream of Greek and Roman society. In other words, Haight Ashbury in 1967 had nothing on Athens in 300 B.C. With degrees in the classics and bacteriology, Hillman is interested in both the natural world and the cultivated garden of humanity. The convergence makes stuffy academics uncomfortable. As the Madison author tells it, he originally hoped to present his findings on ancient drug use in his doctoral dissertation at the

Milwaukee was fertile ground for arts and architecture in the early 20th century, with many ideas transplanted from Europe. The new expanded edition of The Domestic Scene examines the work of George Niedecken, perhaps best known for collaborating with Frank Lloyd Wright, but also a significant force in his own right . . .

Some books are written in such exquisite detail that even if you somehow don't care for the overall story, you can't help but enjoy reading them. Robert Coover provided a perfect example with The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., in which the title character, a disappointed accountant, spends his solitary nights immersed in his own world, manipulating a kind of fantasy baseball league of his own creation wherein every action is determined by throws of the dice. Even if the book wasn't your cup of tea, you would still be fascinated by the complexities of the baseball league and the lives of its players.