Asimina Chremos says that, after doing her cabaret-style Zeibekika last January, her aim in CutUp was to “recommit to dancing.” For the new solo work, she says, she was thinking about sewing, about following the body’s thread of movement–she often improvises–and about discontinuity and rupture. The first half of the 45-minute show is accompanied by Carol Genetti’s snipped and overlapped tape loops of spoken phrases and mechanical sounds; Chremos calls this the “black” section, and it does close with a chilling image....

This ten-program retrospective covers the full range of Raymond Depardon’s diverse career and includes excellent films in several different styles, most of the films Chicago premieres. Depardon learned photography as a child and became a photojournalist in his teens. His first films were inspired by the “direct cinema” documentaries of Ricky Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, but later he made fictional films as well as impressionistic film essays not unlike those of Chris Marker....

A GLANCE AT the Reader’s live music listings makes it plain that navigating the scene here can be tough. Rock, jazz, blues, hip-hop, international, folk, country, and experimental music are all well represented here year-round, and up-and-coming and veteran locals can be seen in bars across the city on any given night. Touring national acts play a smaller selection of venues. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Schubas (3159 N....

The eighth annual edition of this sprawling celebration of improvisational comedy brings together performers from around the U.S. and abroad; Chicago, of course, is heavily represented. The lineup ranges from fledgling talent to returning stars who have won fame and big bucks appearing in and/or writing for movies and TV. This year’s festival, the largest and most diverse yet, is divided into several series–Mainstage, Showcase, Sketch, Solo, Duo, and Fringe–as well as an all-night improv session, a series of daytime “Lunchbreak” performances (presented in conjunction with the city’s cultural affairs department), forums, workshops, and numerous special events....

Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, the delicately whimsical 1946 comedy that inspired this 1969 Broadway musical, champions colorful eccentrics against venal venture capitalists who want to exploit Paris’s petroleum and uranium deposits. But the musicalization often feels blatantly polemical. Jerry Herman’s peppy score only reminds us of the richer work he did in Mame and La Cage aux Folles, though the very French “I Don’t Want to Know” definitely deserves continued life....

Jazz vocalist Dee Alexander grew up idolizing R & B singers like Angela Bofill alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, but horn men have played just as vital a role in shaping her style: in the 80s the Chicago native sang with Breath, a group led by her mentor, reedist “Light” Henry Huff, and more recently she’s worked with trumpeter Malachi Thompson. Alexander favors relatively straightforward structures and lyric themes and seldom diverges radically from standard Western harmonies, but within these parameters she’s audaciously free....

Last week Shabazz, senior editor of the thug-lifestyle quarterly Don Diva, drove his girlfriend’s white Lexus to a storage locker in the shadow of the downtown Greyhound station. In the locker were 200 unopened boxes, neatly stacked, each containing 12 R. Kelly bobbleheads. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bobbleheads were made for the R. Kelly and Jay-Z “Best of Both Worlds” tour. They sold well in six cities, where they were priced at $29....

It was the boozing and the smoking that John Green thought he’d get in trouble for. Touring the country in March to promote his new young-adult novel, Looking for Alaska, he expected booksellers to complain about the rampant substance abuse–buying cigarettes by the carton, swilling vodka and cheap wine–practiced by the teenagers in the book. But no one seemed to mind those things. The paragraph that bothered people was the one about the blow job....

Last year’s The Man in a Blue Turban With a Face (Ace Fu), the first full-length by this Philly band, set a new standard in a genre I can only call short-bus prog. The various members bring in what seems like way too many instruments–marimba, trumpet, sax, Fender Rhodes, and more–to run rampant over the very idea of New Weird America, but it works because it doesn’t sound like they think they’re weird....

Since Missy Elliott’s first album, Supa Dupa Fly, dropped back in 1997, she and her regular collaborator, the groundbreaking producer Timbaland, have delivered a steady stream of brilliant singles. Only two of her five albums aren’t weighted with filler (the debut and 2002’s Under Construction), but the audacity and ingenuity of her best material easily compensate for the duds. The brightest tracks on her most recent album, This Is Not a Test!...

I’m sitting here looking out the window wondering if the killer squirrel is still out there somewhere. I was walking near here at sunset when I just happened to see this little squirrel with its cheeks puffed out–like when they have nuts or something in their front claws or whatever. I instinctively made that little tsk-tsk-tsk sound you make when you look at cute little animals. This squirrel stopped what he was doing, looked up at me, then started bounding toward me–when he got really close I stopped walking....

Nobody Wins But once a century it actually is. And that’s why it was finally my chance to confer immortality. I would award the BAT to any sportswriter farsighted enough a year ago to pick the Sox to run the table. I’d extol this scrivener in language befitting gods on earth. I’d hand him or her a free pass to Valhalla. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No particular perspicacity was required to pick the Yankees for the 2005 playoffs–or the Cardinals, Angels, or Braves....

The first time Linda Ellis ordered the Dutch pancakes pannenkoeken, she asked for the bacon on the side. The waiter in the tiny Amsterdam cafe Le Soleil looked puzzled. He asked her to wait a moment, then went to the kitchen to consult the elderly proprietress. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A native Chicagoan, Ellis fell in love with Holland on that first trip in 2001–the bikes, the easy pace, the friendly people, grumpy chefs notwithstanding....

Singing Their Praises Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LOCAA’s already riding high on the celebrity of a recent alum, 27-year-old soprano Nicole Cabell, newly crowned BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. Vocal competitions are handily dissed in Murray’s book—he calls them “absurd” as a “dumb TV reality show”—and Pearlman, he wrote, found them meaningless except as a source of prize money. But when Cabell—who has the looks to match her extraordinary voice—triumphed at Cardiff and became an international media darling overnight, LOCAA began issuing press releases about the competitive prowess of its brood....

Competitive Awesome–Aaron Gingrich and Mychal Utecht, the latest duo to crawl from the primordial ooze of this city’s sketch-and-improv academies–hits the stage with a fair degree of momentum, sporting endorsements from Eddie Izzard and Tim Kazurinsky in an ongoing local-media blitz. There’s no denying their accomplishment as writers and performers; the sketches are clever and well crafted, and no joke is too brief or lingers too long. But however excellent the execution, less than fresh riffs on Bush-Cheney (“How ’bout–Puer-to Ree-co?...

Erba 4520 N. Lincoln 773-989-4200 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Erba, the “urban Italian” restaurant from the owners of nearby Brioso, is sleek and dark, with the barest hints of decoration. The menu’s equally spare, totaling just 22 dishes including appetizers. Choices include a variety of homemade pastas, among them “discombobulated lasagna,” and larger plates like herb-crusted rib eye, roasted pork loin, and sea scallops served, according to the menu, with “expensive olive oil....

Wanda Jackson is often referred to as the First Lady of Rockabilly, but I think the current online edition of Creem gets closer to the mark when it calls her “the Original Riot Girl.” Jackson’s snarling, hiccuping vocals were just as brazen a challenge to white middle-class propriety as Elvis’s hips, and the abrasive sneer in her delivery carried not just rebelliousness but contempt. She even mocked her own music: though she’d gotten her start singing country in the early 50s, on her 1956 tune “I Gotta Know” she poked fun at the genre’s sentimentality, whining “If your love’s the real thing, where is my wedding ring?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Heartland Institute misrepresents her statement, en route to regurgitating the libertarian party line that relative inequality never matters as long as everyone gets a crumb. The chair of a university economics department is too busy setting up straw men to grasp the point. For a reality-based approach to this issue, Chris Bertram’s post at Crooked Timber is a good place to start, not because he’s necessarily right, but because he lists some of the arguments and where to find more....

Assassination Vacation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In her new book, Assassination Vacation, Vowell leads readers on a virtual tour of the murders of three late-19th-century presidents: William McKinley, James A. Garfield, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. Strapping the narrative to an exhaustive physical exploration of sites associated with the murders–from Ford’s Theatre to the seaside Jersey town where Garfield went to die to the Adirondack rail depot where vice president Theodore Roosevelt learned of McKinley’s death–she gradually develops her canny thesis, which maps the excesses of the Gilded Age, its nascent imperialism in particular, onto the capital-stoked interventionism of our own day....

Visiting a friend last year, painter Anne Siems was struck by her ten-year-old daughter. “She had an odd beauty that you have to look twice to see. She’s a redhead, and you can’t see her eyebrows or eyelashes very well. She doesn’t have the normal social graces–she isn’t trained to be cute. Unlike most little girls she seems unconcerned with showing herself off or with what other people will think of her....