SEPTEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before singer and drummer Li’l Wally slowed down the beat and stripped down the music, polka was usually played at a fast clip by a large band that didn’t interact much with the audience. Wally’s emotional, horn-heavy approach spearheaded the rise of the “Chicago style” polka that was popular in the 1950s. “To me it connects with punk rock,” says musician Don Hedeker, “which I love because it’s a DIY thing and more about having a good time than whether you play the right notes....

Monologuists tend to get obsessed with incorporating the banalities of performance into their performances–think Spalding Gray, pausing to sip from his omnipresent half-empty glass. But human beatbox/raconteur Yuri Lane doesn’t want you to consider his pauses; he wants to camouflage them: whenever he takes a swig of water during this hip-hop overview of Palestinian-Israeli relations, he integrates the gulping noises into the piece’s rhythmic pulse. Writer-director Rachel Havrelock (Lane’s wife) draws parallels between the lives of the two main characters, an Israeli club DJ and a Palestinian Internet-cafe owner, as they interact with friends and associates....

In the early 60s Anthony Taylor, a successful broker with seats on the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as well as an aspiring film producer, was introduced by a friend to director Leslie Stevens. Though Taylor’s experience was limited to some training films for air force pilots, he seized the opportunity to ask Stevens–who was famous for the TV series The Outer Limits and a string of Broadway hits such as The Marriage-Go-Round–if he’d be interested in collaborating with him on a low-budget movie....

It’s difficult to have an emotional response to Ms. Understood Productions’ “almost love story” since just following it demands such effort. Writer-director Summer Neville and her codirector and fellow performer, Christopher Alvarado, begin with a girl-meets-boy dumb show dully performed to rap, folk, and pop music samples. Once Neville and Alvarado begin speaking, they behave as if we know their characters’ history. Since we don’t, caring is a challenge. Then we’re left to puzzle out their relationship as the action jumps around in time....

Remember how one time (or maybe two) you warned a guy (while remaining masturbation-positive) not to condition his body to come only in response to a particular kind of stimulation? I believe (’cause I looked ’em up) your exact words were, “…if you hold your cock in a death grip every time, you may find it difficult to climax as the result of other, more subtle sensations.” You’ll have to swear off the death grip forever, ABF, if you want your dick to respond to more subtle sensations....

D4 3/28, EMPTY BOTTLE The Flying Nun label, New Zealand’s premier purveyor of rock for two decades now, has been cultivating these four loud and good-looking kids for the world market, shipping ’em out for successful tours of Japan and Australia. Now signed to Hollywood Records, which just released the band’s debut full-length, 6Twenty, in the U.S., the D4 are setting their sights on the western hemisphere. There are worse contenders out there, but it’s hard to imagine Radio Birdman, whom this group obviously strives to emulate, lobbying fans to vote their video onto MTV, or getting all prissy and preachy about the superiority of vinyl over CD....

I attended a national Native American health conference recently and heard a startling statistic. A speaker showed a slide that read something like, “40 percent of Native American women accessing care through the U.S. Indian Health Service in the 1970s were sterilized against their will.” I looked this up on the Web and found this statement on a lot of sites: “In 1975 alone, some 25,000 Native American women were permanently sterilized–many after being coerced, misinformed, or threatened....

The Talented Mr. Koetke Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he started high school he got his first job in a real restaurant, as a kitchen hand at Strongbow Inn, a family-run American restaurant in Valparaiso. Before long the chef and owner Russ Adams recognized his abilities and gave him free rein over planning and preparing the Sunday brunch. Soon, whole poached salmon and aspic-coated turkey were appearing on the menu....

In 1996 32-year-old Virginia Rodrigues had a small role in a local theater production in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. After hearing her sing at rehearsal none other than Caetano Veloso approached her, invited her to perform at one of his concerts, and eventually arranged for her first recording sessions. So it’s not really surprising that her albums seem somewhat producer-driven–but if there’s no real sense of a single vision behind her work, her glorious voice provides more than enough continuity....

Before CAFE LE COQ opened in June, chef Steve Chiapetti was better known for the Mediterranean and contemporary American food he served at his restaurants Grapes and Mango, respectively, than for French cooking–but he’s also headed the kitchens at Mossant Bistro and Rhapsody. He reemerged after a one-year hiatus to join owner Jim August, general manager of Carlucci on Halsted in the late 80s, who also only recently jumped back in the game....

No one who has seen both men with their shirts off would ever mistake Bubba Sparxxx for Eminem, and anyone who’s listened to their music knows the dissimilarities don’t stop there. The manic pop-cultural sniping of “The Real Slim Shady” was so engrossing that few people ever stopped to point out that Eminem hasn’t launched an army of white hip-hop clones, which puts the few white rappers working today in the difficult position of constantly having to compare themselves with him....

Erin Noel Grennan takes a walk in her Oak Park neighborhood every morning, no matter what the weather. On a series of cold days last winter she noticed the same dog, a boxer mix, left out in its yard. In fact, the dog was always out, any time she passed the house, and when the weather turned truly bitter the dog’s plight began to nag at her. Then she saw a man–apparently its owner–hitting it, and knew she had to do something....

Dancer-choreographer Emio Greco and director-playwright Pieter C. Scholten are into mind-body dualism with a vengeance. They describe the duet Extra Dry–the only part of the trilogy “Fra Cervello e Movimento” (“Between Brain and Movement”) being performed here–as having a recurring motif, “the longing for a synchronised, unisono [sic] manifestation of mind and body, in defiance of the knowledge that this desire can never be fulfilled.” An Italian now based in Amsterdam, Greco dances Extra Dry with Barbara Gutierrez–and fortunately there’s nothing intellectual about what goes on onstage....

Watching DryLand is a bit like looking at a friend’s vacation snapshots–and for good reason: Hi! Performance artistic directors Sheldon B. Smith and Lisa Wymore based their evening-length piece on a trip they took out west. At times our interest in the work has more to do with our affection for the travelers than with the beautiful vistas pictured. But more important, DryLand says tender, true things about human relationships, especially about how they’re built and maintained....

Known only as A//, the founder of the Toulouse-based purist electro label Invasion Planete insists that the third-wave electroclash trend is just piggybacking off a scene he personally started years ago. He also claims that Stalin, Gandhi, and Hitler “are not complete enough for me. A melting of the three of them would perhaps be perfect.” One of those guys who’d rather cut off his left one than trade his crewcut and black military duds for a fauxhawk and denim, A// takes his music as seriously as his politics; he directs his business with an iron hand and lists as a pet peeve people who confuse making music with making friends: “Familiarity is a fatal error of the new generation,” he says....

Perhaps you’ve heard the old saw about how a great drummer can make any band better. Janet Bean, who grew up in Florida and Kentucky but has lived in Chicago for 20 years, is no slouch behind the kit, but she manages to pull off the same trick with her voice. Her soprano is the spoonful of sugar that’s made the rougher voices of her singing partners Catherine Irwin and Rick Rizzo go down easily; Bean uses deft phrasing and her exquisite vibrato to underscore the cruel and poignant plot twists in Freakwater’s doom-laden country and the desperate yearning that drives the incendiary rock of Eleventh Dream Day....

For most of her life, Carlos Clarke Drazen has had to navigate her wheelchair over, through, and around obstacles. But nothing has proved so confusing or treacherous as RTA and CTA rules and regulations, which soon may leave her stuck on a street corner without a way to get to work. “In many ways it’s painfully ironic,” says Drazen, a 46-year-old native Chicagoan. “I may have to give up my job–not because of any condition, but because I can’t get there....

It’s astonishing how few Hollywood movies tell us anything about the way we spend a third or more of our lives—at work. Maybe this is because the standard industry perception is that people don’t like to think about that part of their existence when they go to movies, that people want to keep their professions and pleasures separate and mutually alienated. The assumption seems to be that work isn’t supposed to be fun but movies are....

For much of the 1950s and ’60s Donald Goines prowled the streets of Detroit as just another lowlife. He had seven children but never married. He used heroin, stole, gambled, pimped, and made bootleg whiskey. But his game wasn’t smooth enough, and he served several prison terms. Then, inspired by a novel by a Chicago hustler, Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, Goines began writing fiction. According to a 1975 Detroit Free Press article, while serving in Japan and Korea in the early 50s, Goines acquired what eventually became a $100-a-day heroin habit....

Like a bunch of current New York bands, the Rogers Sisters combine influences so baldly as to dare you to reduce them to an equation–maybe something like (Gang of Four – the Fall) x (B-52’s + Bush Tetras) divided by Talking Heads. But their Purely Evil (Troubleman Unlimited) is so much more than the sum of its parts that postpunk trendiness is not only excusable but beside the point. I mean, if someone mixed gin, milk, and apple juice into a drink you could not only swallow but enjoy, you’d be too amazed to complain how sick of milk you are....