Go to the video-sharing site YouTube, type in a search for “I’m Too Sexy,” and after a little digging you’ll find a grainy copy of Right Said Fred’s original 1991 music video, taped by somebody off MTV2. You’ll also find dozens of homemade videos for the song, variously assembled by fans from footage of Mortal Kombat, the Beatles, The Dark Crystal, My Little Pony, and especially themselves: a shirtless guy wearing a mask and jumping around his bedroom, a young woman wearing an eye patch whose dance partner rocks sunglasses and a sombrero, two teenage girls pretending a blanket on the floor of their parents’ kitchen is a catwalk, and many more....

The new album from these locals, Future Women (Polyvinyl), reinforces the lush, perfectionist home-recorded retro rock of their 2004 debut with the added maturity you’d expect from a band that’s since hit the road for real. Their playing is more assured, from the loose-limbed, confident drumming of Steve Versaw to the almost psychedelic guitar interplay of Josh Chicoine and Robert Hicks–a dazzling but unflashy blend of carefully manipulated feedback, terse fuzzed-out riffs, and squealing single-string lines....

Plenty of current rock bands borrow sounds from the glory days of CBGB or from the slightly gothier British scene of the years that followed, but few seem like they’re investing themselves wholeheartedly–which is completely wrongheaded, because if there’s anything inspiring to take away from the tragic stories of Johnny Thunders and Ian Curtis, it’s a sense of the total commitment that made them helpless to follow any other path. Neither slapdash thrashers nor costumed revivalists, the Ponys sound so nakedly and innocently devoted to that sad street goddess rock ‘n’ roll that you almost worry for them....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In regards to Tony Adler’s recent review of the Artistic Home’s production of The Madwoman of Chaillot [Section 2, October 28]–as a theatergoer, I found it misleading and, as a Jew, offensive. While Mr. Giraudoux may have held anti-Semitic beliefs, in no way are they expressed within the text of this play. One of the many reasons that I have been a continued supporter of the Artistic Home Theater is precisely because they choose material that is socially responsible and morally engaging....

Are friends electric? Salvo Beta’s computer wrangler, Sean Wolfe, has already answered Gary Numan’s question for himself, but his attitude seems to be: With friends like these, who needs enemies? “The machines that enable his creative process have also failed him the most,” says the duo’s bio from Someoddpilot Records, the label that released 2001’s Abrasive Stuttering–Salvo Beta’s debut and only proper full-length so far. “He was influenced by loud rock and a tendency toward eroding his possessions, which makes mechanical abuse and misuse natural....

Frida Hyvonen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until Death Comes, Hyvonen’s first record, came out last year in Sweden and a couple weeks ago here in the States. It could be the Swedish equivalent of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, full of clear-eyed tales of a hard-thinking girl who hops in and out of bed, drinks some, enjoys herself or doesn’t, believes in romance — and clearly knows the price of all her choices....

Instead of standard kitschy winter vistas, Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz’s 18 snow globes at Rhona Hoffman present scenes fraught with peril. Sometimes the threat comes from winter itself. Snow has nearly buried the house in Traveler 86, and a man reaches out of an attic window to try to retrieve a woman who’s fallen out. Traveler 100 shows a woman gingerly stepping from one ice floe to another as icebergs tower above her....

For a band from Indianapolis whose sole original LP was less than 23 minutes long and only available sporadically in the years after its authors blipped across the early-80s hardcore radar like vodka-mad porcupines, the Zero Boys were amazingly influential. By the time 1982’s Vicious Circle was rereleased by Panic Button in 2000, I’d already heard about half its 14 terse tracks via cover versions and punk oldies comps. The Zero Boys were among the first groups to dare sticking pop melodies into piss-filled hardcore songs, and though Jello Biafra talked the band into cutting two tunes from their debut LP that he thought were too pop (“Slam and Worm” and “She Said Goodbye”), there’s still plenty of melody to savor in cuts like “Civilization’s Dying” and “Living in the 80s....

Art Brut’s debut, Bang Bang Rock & Roll (Fierce Panda), is a ripe send-up of the Next Big Thing Outta the UK–but it’s hard to tell if they’re in on the joke. In the tradition of Pulp, they mock the scene around them without acting like they’re somehow above it. Cheeky and preening singer Eddie Argos lays on the laddish pomp with his lyrics: “I’m gonna write a song as universal as ‘Happy Birthday’ / That’s gonna make sure that everybody knows that everything is going to be OK / Formed a band / We formed a band / Look at us, we formed a band....

Friday 3/26 – Thursday 4/1 So many literary events, so little time. Today local publications Bridge magazine and Another Chicago Magazine host two readings and a party in conjunction with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. At 4:30 there’s a free reading with Robert Dana, Amina Cain, Antonia Logue, and others at the Bridge space, 119 N. Peoria, 3D. At 8 Bookslut editor Jessa Crispin emcees another with Shelley Jackson, whose latest project, “Skin,” is a short story “published” by tattooing one word of the piece on each of 2,095 volunteers, poet Joe Wenderoth, and others....

Set in a Joliet nightspot, this one-act takes the form of a cabaret revue by vocalist Frankie Beans (Kelly Bailey), accompanied by unimpressed pianist Benji (played perfectly by Benjamin Nelson), and stand-up comedian Chuck Knoll (Jeremy Kruse). Bailey is magnificent as the jaded but engaging singer–in her mellifluous, unpredictably cadenced voice even “Cool Ranch Doritos” sounds lovely. “You Can Have the TV” is positively moving. Kruse is convincing as Chuck and Gary, a blank-faced groupie flaunting his salmon jacket....

Luigi Russolo’s 1913 futurist manifesto “The Art of Noises” celebrated “the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks” and envisioned a future in which “every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noises.” At first blush the work of Montreal-based composer and instrument builder Jean-Francois Laporte seems like Russolo’s prophecy fulfilled. He’s a former engineering student who has built instruments with names like the Tu-Yo and the Siren Organ out of air compressors, pneumatic valves, and boat horns....

Toward the end of an event at Quimby’s on Monday Dave Eggers did a little math. In a survey, police and prosecutors reported they get it right 99.5 percent of the time. If that’s true, he argued, the 0.5 percent of cases they get wrong works out to approximately 11,000 innocent people in prison today. Up on the platform with him, James Newsome, who’d been one of that number for more than 15 years, jumped in....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jeffrey “Roofman” Manchester, 33, was finally recaptured in January after six inspired months on the lam in Charlotte, North Carolina. Described by police as intelligent, athletic, and unfailingly polite, Manchester, who got his nickname from a cross-country series of ceiling-entry burglaries, escaped from a nearby prison and took up residence in a cubbyhole in a Toys “R” Us bike display....

The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, making its Orchestra Hall debut this Sunday, has been a permanent ensemble since 1977, when Terje Tonnesen, first violinist with the Oslo Philharmonic, became its artistic director. It has performed around the world with soloists such as Mstislav Rostropovich, James Galway, and Joshua Bell, and its ongoing collaboration with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has led to a 2000 Gramophone Award-winning CD of Haydn concerti and, in 2004, a CD of Mozart concerti–performances that display an exquisite balance between piano and orchestra and a striking chamber-music sensibility, with all the players listening carefully to each other and getting out of each other’s way....

Nostalgia seems to run in ten-year cycles, so it’s no surprise that old-school jungle, the breakbeat-driven dance genre also known as drum ‘n’ bass, is undergoing something of a hipster revival now. Violent Turd, a subdivision of Kid606’s Tigerbeat6 label, led the charge last spring with Wired for Sound, a DJ-mix CD by Detroit’s Todd Osborn, aka Soundmurderer. Featuring three mixes containing a total of 60 tracks, Wired for Sound plays like a highlight reel of the genre–all action all the time....

Chosen to represent the Czech Republic at the Oscars, this Altman-esque fresco by Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall) offers a provocative and entertaining satirical account of intersecting lives, classes, and subcultures in contemporary Prague. At first it seems to be about immigration, but eventually it becomes a wry commentary on racism and xenophobia as manifested in every reach of society, from the violence of soccer hooligans to the more genteel prejudice of intellectuals....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today Brooklyn Vegan points to an article on Slate about how every band/solo artist/”dude in a dorm room with a webcam” is covering Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I’m conflicted about the song. On one hand I don’t like Gnarls Barkley–I don’t like their wacky image, I’m bored to tears by simply hearing the words “Danger Mouse,” and I’m mad that Cee-Lo had to remove all but a lingering whiff of his personality in order to get the fame he’s deserved for years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Robin O’Sullivan reviews American Wilderness: A New History at History News Network. Plenty of juice here, including editor Michael Lewis’s swipe at “citizens who passionately oppose oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, yet brashly drive hundreds of miles in gas-chugging vehicles to hike in national parks,” but I was especially struck by this passage in the review:...

The real-life romance of philosopher Peter Abelard and his young student Heloise is a 12th-century Romeo and Juliet story. Only this couple’s problem was not a family feud: the outspoken Abelard had many enemies in the church, including the uncle of brainy beauty Heloise. The couple were secretly married, then forced to separate, but their letters proved they remained deeply in love. Their emotional connection fails to come through, however, in this flat production of Ronald Millar’s 1970 play by Lincoln Square Theatre of Chicago....