She shimmies her delicate shoulders like she’s shaking off fairy dust. Her ass is at the top end of juicy, just short of fat. She walks like a lioness stalking her prey, which on this night includes me. She’s Michelle L’amour, Miss Exotic World 2005, and I can’t take my eyes off her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A recent show got off to a slow start, with the Sugarbabies doing some sort of noirish thing in red sequin bras and trench coats....

HOYLE BROTHERS 6/25 & 6/27, EMPTY BOTTLE There’s nothing “alt” about this Chicago country band except its choice of venues: in 2002 these guys started playing a regular Friday happy-hour gig at the Hideout, and since last year they’ve been doing the same thing at the Empty Bottle (where they recently added a Sunday-afternoon set). Their forthcoming full-length debut, Back to the Door (Loose Booty), has a clean, unfussy honky-tonk sound that would’ve been right at home in Nashville four decades ago; the music is resigned but proud, like a battered old pair of boots with a fresh shine....

CELEBRATION THE MODERN TRIBE (4AD) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Modern Tribe, the second full-length from the Baltimore trio Celebration, is clearly the work of a band camped out at the base of Cookie Mountain. Guitarless on the new disc, save for a couple cameos from Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Celebration are fundamentally different from TVOTR in instrumental makeup—it’s mostly Sean Antanaitas playing keys (including a guitorgan, a guitar modified to produce analog organ sounds) and bass through Moog foot pedals, Katrina Ford singing, and David Bergander on drums....

Said to be the earliest extant feature directed by an African-American, this 1920 made-in-Chicago film is of more than historical interest. Though the narrative structure is somewhat choppy, director Oscar Micheaux otherwise demonstrates mastery of the silent form, using supple compositions and careful editing to amplify the characters’ emotions in a manner that makes sound seem superfluous. The story, about an African-American woman trying to raise money in Boston to support a black school in the south, is sociologically fascinating, with its broad canvas of characters, from virtuous whites and blacks to white racists and a black preacher who toadies to them; most moving is the way the film argues that black people’s real quest was simply to be treated as human....

Set in apartheid South Africa, Athol Fugard’s drama reveals the coming-of-age of both a privileged white teenager and his nation. When Master Harold sacrifices his surrogate father, the black servant who raised him, for the biological father who’s abused him, you see how racism severs its victims not only from others’ humanity but from their own. In Blue Heron Theatre’s promising debut, director Dejan Avramovich misses the accents but drives home the decency, both lost and found, in Fugard’s immensely rich 90-minute play....

In his interviews and recordings alike, pianist Bill Charlap has demonstrated an unflagging if unfashionable enthusiasm for the standards. After attracting attention as a sideman with Gerry Mulligan and Phil Woods, Charlap signed to Blue Note five years ago, and he and his excellent trio have since explored a mix of familiar and forgotten compositions on a series of songbook albums–there’ve been tributes to Hoagy Carmichael and Leonard Bernstein so far, with a Gershwin set in the works....

Bob Merrill and Michael Stewart’s 1961 musical comedy is well worth reviving–especially when the director trusts the text as much as Michael Ehrman does in this sentimental but never cloying Light Opera Works/Actors Gymnasium production. Lili runs away to join a carnival, then must decide between an illusionist (whose specialty is infidelity) and a puppeteer whose war wound soured him on second chances. Rekha Rangarajan’s Lili is radiant and touching in her naivete, especially in “Love Makes the World Go Round....

My top ten choices acknowledge some exciting trends in Chicago art. One is the new emphasis on Afro-Futurism, which synthesizes traditional designs and media, psychedelic mysticism, current technology, and utopian politics. Then there are the new breeds of artists and curators exploring unusual media, staging “interventions” (often socially committed work created or displayed in public places, not galleries), and exhibiting in individuals’ apartments and yards, introducing a welcome spontaneity and vulnerability....

This Massachusetts band is a stumbling, mush-mouthed, amoeboid creature out of a childhood nightmare, devouring everything in the fridge. And once it’s full, it carefully barfs it all up, one thoughtful convulsion at a time: baby animal growls, boingy guitar chatter, seasick feedback, zizzing bass, tongue-choked hyperventilation, and janky clanking percussion that sounds more like an upended kitchen drawer than a drumbeat. Acidic squirts and sharp clicks add unidentifiable blots of color to the noisy bellyaching, which seems to be a sort of tribal language the five members have evolved to communicate among themselves....

Rene Cudal was the last to quit. The Friday after Labor Day 2005 was the day he’d marked in his calendar, but he procrastinated all morning and afternoon, dreading the moment his boss would put two and two together. Finally the boss went home. Cudal called him that evening and gave him two weeks’ notice. In an act of bravado Carey apparently hadn’t noticed, in August, before any of them had quit their old jobs, the 4 Star couriers sent out a press release explaining that they were striking out on their own because they were “fed up with the exploitative nature of most courier companies in Chicago....

As a child in Memphis, Carl Ratner liked to to sing along with records, but not the Elvis Presley discs that were the rage among his peers. Belting out arias and lieder, he dreamed of growing up to be a classical performer. This Sunday he’ll give his professional solo recital debut at the age of 46. It’s a late start, but he’s not complaining: there was a time he doubted he’d live to see middle age....

Albert Zahn: I’ll Fly Away Michael Nakoneczny: Paintings From the Icebox Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this case as in other Zahn works, greater realism–carved and painted feathers, for example–would have distracted the viewer from the implied movement. The legs of the two elongated animals in Pair of Running Dogs are almost parallel to the ground, extended fore and aft to heighten the sense of horizontal motion; their extended tails contribute to the illusion of speed....

Both these choreographers avoid the well-worn grooves of modern dance–their movement is refreshingly off the map. Janet Schmid’s quartet Pilotless, set to a soundscape of swings aimlessly creaking and a lounge-act version of “Happy Birthday to You,” is matter-of-fact but evocative because the movement seems so instinctual, whether one dancer is inchworming across the floor or many are falling onto one shoulder from all fours, then joining hands to pull themselves into a tangled pile....

Language Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After working in finance for eight years, Natalie Barber says she realized that “the one thing I loved every morning was getting dressed.” Last fall, toying with the idea of opening a boutique, she went to New York Fashion Week on what was supposed to be a recon mission. But the trip was so inspiring she started placing orders before she even had a space to sell them in....

Lead Story The Entrepreneurial Spirit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Calling Nowhere: TalkToAliens.com went on the air in February, charging customers $3.99 a minute to call a 900 number and have their voice beamed live into space via a parabolic dish antenna. And in December Agence France-Presse reported on German inventor Juergen Broether and his $2,000 system for talking to the dead: it consists of a one-way mobile phone and a battery-powered receiver/speaker to be buried near the coffin of the addressee....

It’s been four years since the last dispatch from this brilliant Gypsy ensemble from the remote Romanian village of Clejani. Their live album, Band of Gypsies (Nonesuch, 2001), captured them in excellent form: they played high-velocity grooves that reeled like a bum loopy from slivovitz mixed with strings played by virtuosos who didn’t consider knockout precision and ragged wildness incompatible. Their eponymous U.S. debut album in 1999 drew its tracks from three studio discs the band recorded for the Belgian label Crammed Discs, but studio recordings are secondary for a band whose music is so steeped in oral tradition and so closely associated with public gatherings–their go-for-broke style was designed for village festivities like weddings and naming ceremonies....

In the alley next to the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library is a red door that opens onto a small enclosed garden, where another red door and a flight of creaky stairs lead to a tai chi school. On Fridays and Sundays it’s also a flamenco dance school, with classes taught by 76-year-old Edo Sie, a wisp of a man who’s almost always dressed head to toe in black when he teaches....

The Inside Man Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fortino says it was in a couple of classes at Columbia College, where he wound up in his mid-20s, that his affinity for photography clicked. But his feel for the medium goes back earlier than that, to his teenage years, when his brother was fighting in Vietnam. Instead of writing letters, John Fortino sent home images he took with two 35-millimeter cameras he’d purchased at the PX....

Those familiar only with the Disney version of Carlo Collodi’s picaresque fantasy might think they’ve stumbled into the wrong place. But the opening spectacle of planets orbiting in darkness, accompanied by a vibrant hymn in Latin, is enough to win anyone over. Andrew Park’s innovative 75-minute adaptation for the Quest Theatre Ensemble offers a variety of exotic adventures, among them encounters with a seductive spider and an 18-foot soothsaying serpent as well as a revival meeting conducted by cheerful Brother Sun, who advises the wooden hero to “stay in the light....

Friday 26 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CHARLIE SCHMIDT In the Meter a few weeks back Bob Mehr told the story of a prank that Skokie fingerstyle guitarist Charlie Schmidt pulled with his longtime friend and mentor, John Fahey. In 1993 Shanachie Records asked Fahey to recut his classic 1963 album, Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes, but Schmidt made the actual recording, adding four tunes of his own as “previously unreleased bonus tracks....