Right at Your Door When Daily, through Thu 8/30 STRANGE CULTURE sss Two new independent features–one dramatic, the other documentary–show how badly fear eats away at the national psyche and how easily the government can become as threatening as any terrorist. Right at Your Door, the debut feature from writer-director Chris Gorak, imagines what might happen if terrorists detonated a series of dirty bombs across Los Angeles, releasing a lethal virus and forcing people to duct-tape themselves into their homes....

Kieran Hebden first turned up playing guitar in the British post-rock band Fridge, but when going solo as Four Tet he comes off like DJ Shadow with a pre-rock record collection. On his third album, last year’s Rounds (Domino), Hebden floats a library of acoustic-instrument samples–banjo, harpsichord, kalimba, bass clarinet, glockenspiel, piano, harp–as well as his own spacey keyboard lines over programmed beats ranging from slow-motion rim-shot patterns to frenetic funk breaks....

Shortly before Christmas, Dan Schneider got a call from someone claiming to be Paul Brownell from the UK label Poptones. “Out of the blue there’s a guy on the phone with a thick British accent saying, ‘Dan, we just love your songs and we can’t stop listening to them. We want to sign you and put a record out as soon as possible. Would you be interested?’ To me, it just didn’t seem real....

The unwitting progenitor of what we now call world music, Nigerian juju legend King Sunny Ade was signed by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell after the 1981 death of Bob Marley–the label wanted a new third-world star with boundless charisma. The three albums Ade released on Mango, an Island subsidiary, brought him international acclaim, but the difficulty of creating a broad crossover audience for a musician who sang in Yoruba prompted the industry to coin the reductive marketing term “world music....

These two Toronto dudes really want you to understand their love for the synthetic–there’s not a single warm tone on their new debut album, The Looks (Last Gang). This perverse fixation on canned, sterile sounds makes MSTRKRFT’s vocodered penis-pump disco almost charmingly funny, especially when you know it’s the work of guys with one foot in a sweaty, hairy rock band–Jesse Keeler plays bass in Death From Above 1979 and Al-P is DFA1979’s producer....

Aaron Gingrich and Mychal Utecht, aka sketch-comedy duo Competitive Awesome, have stretched out a bit from the crisp but conventional funny of The Story of Joseph King. This makes for rougher sailing, but if less of the material works, more of it goes beyond well-oiled gagsmanship. Some sketches remain earthbound, like a riff on Jesus and Joseph, while others are promising but don’t deliver, like a Lewis and Clark bit that inexplicably (albeit hilariously) saddles the pair with outrageous French accents....

The Berlin-based duo at the core of Stereo Total certainly does its part on behalf of European unity. On Do the Bambi (Kill Rock Stars), Francoise Cactus and Brezel Goring once again assemble a cast of transnational noisemakers under the banner of chintzy, synth-ridden dance pop–the closest thing to a common language the continent can claim these days. Cactus plays the sensual French naif who’s self-aware in a down-to-earth way; she spoofs performance-art provocation on “I Am Naked” with interjections like “Oh, shocking!...

THE ADVENTURES OF REX DANGER: THE VENGEANCE OF THE BLACK LAMA, Corn Productions, at the Cornservatory. This send-up of James Bond action films is vintage Corn: rough, silly, energetic, with a smidgen of gratuitous drag. Boyishly suave Danger (Stephen Lydic) and his sidekicks Fred and Ginger (Tom McGrath and Liza Kayne) battle a stream of bizarre thugs–shape-shifting demons, homicidal teddy bears–to thwart the Black Lama’s attempts at world domination. An unflappable mastermind, Danger possesses superhuman knowledge of science, criminal psychology, and the martial arts, allowing him to triumph in impossible situations....

By touring together or appearing on one another’s recordings, important artists like Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, and Tortoise have helped establish Chicago’s reputation as a friendly musical community unconstrained by stylistic orthodoxies–and that reputation has proved irresistible to many up-and-coming jazz players in the last decade. But when reedist Keefe Jackson moved to Chicago in 2001 from Arkansas, he wasn’t thinking about all that. “I was familiar with the history of music that had happened here, but I didn’t really know what was currently taking place,” he says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wal-Mart is way liberal. Charles Fishman at Fastcompany.com: “In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers–100 million in all–one swirl bulb [compact fluorescent light, or CFL]. In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the United States, and energy consciousness, too. ....

In the column in your online archive about why the missionary position is called that [1992] you repeat the myth that the term missionary position was coined by unidentified natives as a reaction to shocked missionaries’ proselytization against unorthodox sexual positions. To your credit, you mention that there is no hard evidence supporting this assertion. However, Robert J. Priest (yes, the coincidence is amusing) in his article “Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Post-Modernist” (Current Anthropology, February 2001) carefully picks this story apart....

Ever since I was a kid the media have warned about not looking directly at a solar eclipse. The principal at our school would always keep us inside to avoid our burning out our retinas sneaking a peek. Are we all being fooled by an urban legend that keeps getting recirculated every time there’s an eclipse? I’ve never seen a rash of stories after an eclipse about people being blinded or needing glasses because they couldn’t resist the temptation to gaze....

They Won’t Go Quietly Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s the beef? Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly died in 2000, opening one of the most desirable positions in journalism, but the Tribune has never filled it. Last month the Tribune Company’s Los Angeles Times fired its cartoonist, Michael Ramirez, and said it would run syndicated cartoons instead. The Christian Science Monitor’s Clay Bennett, who’s president of the AAEC, protested to the Tribune Company’s CEO, Dennis FitzSimons....

WEAPON OF MASS IMPACT | A RED ORCHID THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwright Brett Neveu takes a careful look at the world of unidentifiable and unquantifiable but ever-present menace in his new Weapon of Mass Impact, which revolves around three professional women who’ve been sent by their companies to a terrorism-preparedness program before going overseas. As in most Neveu plays, the dialogue in this one is indirect, even banal....

Rogue Theater opens their new Andersonville space with a quartet of short plays by men about women breaking free of domestic traditions. J.M. Barrie’s waspish chamber comedy about an ex-wife-turned-typist meeting her soon-to-be-knighted former husband, The Twelve Pound Look, is the sole gem, bolstered by the thoughtful performances of Victoria Kallay and Ryan McCabe. The two Tennessee Williams pieces, The Case of the Crushed Petunias and Adam and Eve on a Ferry, suggest that wild phallic energy alone unleashes women’s passions–passions that are not apparent in the uncertain performances of Ashley Blake and Allison M....

Billy Crystal’s masterful autobiographical monologue, based on his memoir and directed by the keen-eyed Des McAnuff, illuminates universal experiences by pinpointing specifics, making this an evocative chronicle of the boomer experience. Crystal’s joyous, bittersweet, sometimes poignant stories recall his exuberant and eccentric Jewish family; his early exposure to jazz (his uncle, producer Milt Gabler, recorded the likes of Billie Holiday); adolescent romances and heartbreaks; playing basketball (being short didn’t stop him); the influence of such comedians as Sid Caesar, Bill Cosby, and Danny Kaye; and his father’s untimely death when Billy was a teenager....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Coup‘s got a metric ass-ton of talent, but they’re seriously lacking in luck. As if it’s not hard enough for a heavily political, stylistically untrendy rap group to get over in the world, they also have to catch shit like having a record with artwork showing them blowing up the World Trade Center come out on the day that the WTC actually blew up....

For his latest solo show, premiering as part of Live Bait’s annual Fillet of Solo Festival, thrift-store archaeologist David Kodeski turns away from the journals of strangers, the basis of many past shows, to investigate the strangest relationships of all: those within families. Projections of faded photographs from Kodeski’s large blue-collar, Polish-Catholic clan in Niagara Falls provide the visual texture for this touching and sometimes acerbic portrait, which includes a short primer on Polish phrases, snippets of polka music, and Polish jokes that refer to renowned Poles like Copernicus and Roman Polanski....

The third annual Chicago International Documentary Festival continues Friday through Sunday, April 8 through 10, with screenings at the Beverly Arts Center; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division; Facets Cinematheque; Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art; Northwestern Univ. Thorne Auditorium; and Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $8.50, $7 for seniors and students, and $6.50 for shows before 2 PM or after 10 PM. Passes are available for $250 (all screenings), $125 (20 screenings), and $70 (10 screenings), but only the first includes admission to the closing-night gala; for more information call 773-486-9612....

Gladys Aponte lives less than a mile west of Revere Park. So it’s easy for her to swing by there and pick up her daughters, ages 11 and 7, on the way home from her data entry job downtown. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year Aponte chose the Neighborhood Boys & Girls Club program because it would be free: she qualifies for help from Child Care Assistance, a program funded by the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Child Care Assistance pays for the club program but not Park Kids....