Jazz vocalist Ilona Knopfler throws together an odd assortment of ingredients on the opening track of her 2005 album, Live the Life (Mack Avenue). “I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song,” is a hymn written by gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, but instead of the church choir you might expect, Knopfler uses a chorus comprising multiple tracks of her own voice, purring substitute harmonies from the modern-jazz theory book a la the Manhattan Transfer or New York Voices....

Since 1995 these Swiss veterans of the European free improv scene have been seeking out and successfully adapting to a vast array of musical contexts. Although I haven’t heard their 1997 encounter with Cuban son players, Fidel (Intakt), their collaboration with the traditional Egyptian octet En Nil Troop on Heavy Cairo Traffic (Intuition, 1997) is astonishing. The two ensembles come together to forge an improv-heavy form of shaabi (Egyptian street pop) with funky but never overwhelming Western undercurrents....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/12. This year’s festival includes an emphasis on work by, or inspired by, Samuel Beckett. All performances are at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston, unless otherwise noted. Several performances will be at Roots, an offshoot of Curious Theatre Branch located in a private home; the address will be provided when reservations are made....

You should never ask anyone who looks fabulous at a party what she does for a living, and certainly don’t ask her her name–always pretend you know. Especially when the person in question is the ravishing Sofia Lamar, New York social royalty who’s been keeping company with the likes of Richie Rich, Amanda Lepore, and Kenny Kenny for over 20 years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sofia Lamar–wrapped like a pin-thin, doe-eyed present in a dress that looked like a wool army blanket remixed into a short, complicated concoction of loops and bows–pointed out some dude in a floppy beret and a pirate pendant....

So I’m watching Steven Spielberg’s remake of The War of the Worlds, and it’s a pretty good movie with great special effects up to the point where the creepy guy with the shotgun invites Tom Cruise and his daughter to take shelter in the basement. [Warning: spoiler follows. –C.A.] After that you know exactly what’s going to happen (icky confrontation with creepy guy, aliens succumb to deadly earth diseases). While waiting for this to play out, I got to thinking: How likely is it that invaders from space would be vulnerable to terrestrial microbes?...

3304 W. Foster Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last nine months, visitors to the Sweden Shop in Albany Park have found the gnome tchotchkes relegated to one room and the other three storefronts filled with boxy pitchers and triangular bowls by Hoganas Keramik and books on Swedish design and cooking. When the shop reopened last October, new owners Patti Rasmussen and Larry Anderson–who also own Tre Kronor restaurant across the street–ditched most of the Scandinavian-American kitsch for the stylish housewares they admired on their twice-yearly visits to the northern countries....

Vosges Haut-Chocolat Rasta isn’t exactly the vibe you get at the recently expanded Vosges boutique in the heart of Lincoln Park. For sale alongside the chocolate bars and truffles are Tibetan prayer wheels, Hindu statuettes, and Indian oil lamps. The walls are a modish bright white, accented by pedestal display cases and heavy curtains in shades of purple. (“I was studying the symbolism of colors and found purple to be the most spiritual color,” Markoff says....

The fringe-festival circuit is littered with this type of prefab musical, long on promise and short on execution, a model of misdirected energy and effort. The story in Warfield, USA–a war-torn town dabbles in diplomacy with disastrous results–is fine, but Jazz Hands Across America’s first scripted effort is monochromatic and punchless. Director Michael Descoteaux and the company milk the three or four obvious jokes about America’s bloodlust and unilateral foreign policy for all they’re worth, but the songs and incidental music that should hold the story together never really jell....

The man in the tan jail uniform at the defense table in Courtroom 404 is short–five-foot-one from his cornrows to his white sneakers. But for years Jettie “Bo Diddley” Williams has cast a long shadow on the west side. He’s been a brutal lieutenant for a notorious gang, though he says he’s through with all that, a notion that makes police and prosecutors roll their eyes. Bo Diddley was charged with the shooting a month after it occurred, and in 1989, after 34 court appearances, he pled guilty to attempted murder....

Brothers Alex, Anthony, and Adrian Basich teamed up with Anthony’s wife, designer Laura Basich, to open VINTAGE WINE BAR, an unpretentious Wicker Park spot with loungy armchairs, a cozy fireplace, and canvases of graffitilike modern art. The Basiches reject the snobbishness of typical wine bars. “We want people to drink what works for their palate, not what the rules tell you,” says Alex. Descriptions of grape varietals are printed above each category on the mostly domestic wine list, which includes about 85 bottles (all except 3 under $50, and 27 costing less than $25) and 22 by-the-glass options....

Since September 2003, Rich Seng’s Cherry Bomb production company has released 14 free compilations of local music, music videos, and short films, 6 on DVD and 8 on CD. Seng’s seventh DVD, a new feature-length film called Rhyme Spitters, documents a freestyle battle-rap tournament held in Wicker Park last July–and though the 31-year-old former seminary student admits that 18 months ago he’d never seen battle rapping in real life, he not only directed the film but organized the tournament himself....

The brilliant video put-on artist Sacha Baron Cohen (Da Ali G Show) mounts his first big-screen assault in the guise of Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh TV personality who arrives in Manhattan to shoot a documentary on the U.S., falls in love with Pamela Anderson while watching a Baywatch rerun, and sets off for the west coast to fulfill his dream of “making romance explosion on her stomach.” Most of the early laughs come at the expense of the developing world, as the uncouth Borat defecates in a city street planter, treats women like cattle, and cheerily flaunts his anti-Semitism....

Piccola Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Piccola means “small” in Italian, and although proprietor Lisa Williams means it to refer to the little luxuries in her store–shoes, bags, jewelry, and other accessories–it could also refer to her selection. One of my pet peeves in a shop is too much white space between the goods, but I’m giving Piccola a pass because (a) Williams promises she’s getting more stuff in and (b) the shoes are adorable and reasonably priced....

Like Howard Brookner’s 1985 film about William Burroughs, this documentary profile of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski exploits the writer’s counterculture persona but also works to dispel it, revealing a gifted and extremely complicated man. Beaten routinely as a child and scarred by acne as a teenager, Bukowski spent much of his early adulthood as an alcoholic postal worker; only in the 70s did his laserlike commitment to his writing bring him fame and material comfort....

Gorillas in Our Midst The great ape was invoked more conventionally back in August 2002 by cartoonist “Tom Tomorrow” on his blog at thismodernworld.com: “As we gear up for a war with a country with, to date, no provable link to Al Qaeda, the Washington Post reports that the administration–or at least its brain trust–is beginning to acknowledge the 900 pound gorilla in the middle of the room–Saudi Arabia’s ties to terrorism....

Last Thursday around 2 AM, folding up batik banners with gold-printed tantric diagrams in a hallway leading to the Oak Brook Marriott’s Grand Ballroom, it occurred to me that I could steal them all and no one would know. I’d volunteered to help clean up after an appearance by the revered Indian holy woman Mata Amritanandamayi–better known as Amma, Sanskrit for mother–who tours the world granting divine blessings in the form of hugs....

Dutch vocalist Jaap Blonk has few peers when it comes to raw musical imagination. His bewilderingly huge arsenal of sounds includes only a few even remotely related to conventional singing, and ranges from abstract whispering to mechanical popping, horrific roaring, and grotesque flapping and gurgling. Whether he’s improvising, fronting his dadaist noise-prog band, Braaxtaal, or performing sound poetry like Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, he tempers his bizarre contortions and mischievous sense of humor with the compositional logic of the best jazzers....

Oakland-based blues harpist Mark Hummel can get down and dirty with the funkiest of them, but his real forte is the breezy, jazz-influenced west-coast style, which was sparked by T-Bone Walker’s postwar innovations and whose most crucial figure on harp was George “Harmonica” Smith. Hummel’s annual harmonica showcase, which he launched in the Bay Area in 1991, is on the road this summer; the lineup changes from city to city, and here Hummel will be joined by Lee Oskar and Billy Boy Arnold....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The best policy: At his February sentencing hearing in Bradenton, Florida, Kenneth Holmes, a 26-year-old restaurant manager, explained why he’d installed police-style flashers on the dash of his black Crown Victoria (in which he’d been caught running red lights and passing other cars at 90 miles per hour): “It looked really cool and it was a drastic time-saver,” allowing him to travel “at a high rate of speed....

Jack Hawk fantasized about having sex with Queen Elizabeth II when he was a teenager. Andy Dill says the wildest sex he ever had was in Liberace’s bed with the pianist’s groundskeeper. Jacob Scott confides that he’s topped with a large dog on several occasions. Tag Adam admits to having lost his anal virginity to a plastic banana, part of a fake-fruit arrangement still decorating his mother’s dining room. Best of Chicago voting is live now....