The mysterious East is a cliche, but mystery is undeniably a component of dancer-choreographer Yin Mei’s evening-length /Asunder, a piece for four accompanied by Robert Een’s score played live. Mei, based in New York, was born in China, performed as a principal dancer with the Hong Kong Dance Company, and came to this country in 1985. Much of the piece revolves around ways to conceal oneself–with fans, capes, even a French horn–and the effect that concealment has on a potential or actual lover....

Almost every laptop show is the same, says local electronic musician and performer Liz MacLean-Knight: some pasty white guy sitting at a machine pushing buttons and moving a mouse. “While that’s cool for the ears and cool for the mind,” she says, “it’s really boring to watch.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the kind of thing that makes electronic music fun–but rarely do artists take the same pains to frame their music in a live setting....

Yi Yi By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » N.J.–the middle-aged father, who’s working for a failing computer company that’s bankrolled by a mogul with the style of a gangster–doesn’t seem ever to have loved his wife, Min-min (Elaine Jin), who seems even more alienated than he is working in her own nondescript office. He’s the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist–though he can’t be fully understood without his wife and kids, and his usual lack of awareness of what they’re going through prevents him from being a hero....

Autechre It is one of those curious coincidences which create the impression that perhaps there is a master plan. On the night you came to Chicago in the sing-along version of The Sound of Music, Messrs. Sean Booth and Rob Brown (whom perhaps you know conjointly by the name Autechre) came from England with their decidedly unsingable version of the sound of music. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Increasingly, the field of cognitive science is settling on the notion that, like machines, we obey a predetermined set of imperatives hardwired into us by genetics....

Achieving diva status means trimming away anything that might get in the way of your showbiz destiny. For Beyonce, that includes not just her surname but also Destiny’s Child, the R & B vocal group she began her career in–though they’re allegedly still together, it wouldn’t be a bit surprising if they never recorded another note collectively. It’s a career-making move we’ve seen before: Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin, Bobby Brown, Kelly Rowland (also of Destiny’s Child), and even Michael Jackson have all at some point felt compelled to shed their teensploitation baggage to make it with an adult audience....

Perhaps following the lead of our timid national news media, which seems incapable of independent thought, American comedy has become increasingly toothless, ill informed, and politically irrelevant. With a few notable exceptions (The Daily Show and about 25 percent of SNL’s Weekend Update), most comedy these days leans heavily on the same old sex jokes, pop-cult references, and digs at whichever former ally the Bush administration has decided to scapegoat this week....

Carl Dreyer made this extraordinary 1943 drama, about the church’s persecution of women for witchcraft in the 17th century, during the German occupation of Denmark. He later claimed that he hadn’t sought to pursue any contemporary parallels while adapting the play Anne Petersdotter (which concerns adultery as well as witchcraft), but he was being disingenuous–Day of Wrath may be the greatest film ever made about living under totalitarian rule. Astonishing in its artistically informed period re-creation as well as its hypnotic mise en scene (with some exceptionally eerie camera movements), it challenges the viewer by suggesting at times that witchcraft isn’t so much an illusion as an activity produced by intolerance....

Erase Errata have taken a big leap forward on their forthcoming second album, At Crystal Palace (Troubleman). While the San Francisco quartet haven’t significantly changed their basic approach–controlled chaos built from postdisco throb, scratchy guitar, and whooping, shrieking vocals–they’ve gotten far more confident and flexible. A lot of the credit goes to the rhythm section of drummer Bianca Sparta and bassist Ellie Erickson, who’ve developed an assortment of grooves well beyond the neo-80s hi-hat and staccato bass combo that filled the band’s 2001 debut....

Defying Chicago’s ordinance against handgun ownership, Concealed Carry, Inc., an Oak Brook gun rights organization, announced in April a plan to give away one Kel-Tec .32-caliber semiautomatic a month to a Chicago citizen. And on May 6, Concealed Carry handed out the first gun. Residents interested in winning a gun were asked to E-mail Concealed Carry’s president, John Birch, a statement explaining why they needed a gun, and Birch said he’s so far received around 30 entries, most of which have seemed sincere....

Last year when I was in London, a North African cabbie asked where I was from. When I told him Chicago, he smiled, said “Al Capone,” and made a machine-gun motion with his fingers. Sure, it’s a cliche–it was either that or “Michael Jordan”–but organized crime is as essential to the city’s identity as the Columbian Exposition, the DNC, or the Daleys. In his exhaustively researched, fascinating book The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America, investigative reporter Gus Russo explores the post-Capone era controlled by the organized crime cartel known as “the Outfit....

On his group’s wonderful new album, Aan & Uit (ICP), jazz pianist Misha Mengelberg demonstrates there’s probably no one better at bringing out–and balancing–the push and pull between order and chaos in a large ensemble. His original “De Sprong, O Romantiek der Hazen” uses the ICP Orchestra’s lush palette to create gorgeous Ellingtonian colors, but over this beautiful arrangement Mengelberg sings indecipherably, in a cranky, monkeylike croak. He derails the song’s balladlike feel by hammering dissonant, jagged figures on his piano, and drummer Han Bennink helps out by dropping his trademark snare bombs....

Flipping through a stack of snapshots, Andrew Pietowski stops on one taken at a recent award ceremony in Warsaw. It captures him with his eyes closed, a little off balance, his arms wrapped around a large trophy shaped like an Easter Island monolith. “Look at this moment of reflection,” he jokes. “Twenty years ago they didn’t want me in Poland. Now I am back.” But it couldn’t last forever. Graduation would mean a government posting to a dreary factory, so Pietowski and nine of his comrades began planning a final adventure–on the Andean rivers of Argentina....

The raucous but rather generic ska punk of this New York rock-en-espanol band’s 1996 debut got a thorough rethinking–as did the lineup–on their most recent album, 2000’s The Return of El Santo (Luaka Bop). It blended roots reggae, dancehall, ska, funk, hip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass, and various Latin American styles with a slick pop sensibility that allowed the group to begin making headway in the Hispanic mainstream, while Venezuelan-born front man Andres Blanco flipped easily between English and Spanish....

M.O.P., SMUT PEDDLERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brooklyn’s M.O.P. (that’s Mosh Out Posse, y’all) open their latest album, Warriorz (Loud), by asserting that it’s not for “fake niggers”–a not-so-subtle spin on the duo’s longtime status as hip-hop fringe dwellers. Despite a lengthy association with Gang Starr’s DJ Premier, a spot on the 1998 Smokin’ Grooves tour, and stints on various high-profile record labels, they’ve failed to expand their audience much beyond die-hard hip-hop fans....

Lead Stories In February airport customs officials in Glasgow confiscated a woman’s snakeskin belt when they realized it was an actual snake (exotic and endangered, yet harmless)….Authorities in Orlando and here in Chicago recently confiscated shirts from Colombia and Thailand respectively that had been “starched” with heroin….And customs officials say that, because of the stricter security following the September 11 attacks, Mexican drug cartels have stepped up their efforts to tunnel beneath the U....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September 49-year-old Jackie Lee Shrader of Bluewell, West Virginia, and his 24-year-old son, Harley Lee Shrader, briefly exchanged pistol fire during a dispute over how to cook chicken for dinner. (Harley was wounded in the ear.) That same month in Wasilla, Alaska, Niccolo Rossodivita, 62, allegedly shot Billy Cordova, 40, twice in the chest; Cordova had been following Rossodivita around their house prolonging an argument over the correct name of Jesus....

A buttload of metal out there, no matter which camp it calls home, still involves a dude with bulging neck veins howling about death or injustice, so hooray for Pelican, who don’t have any singer at all. I’m not saying this local quartet have cast the shackles of genredom aside: their instrumental doom doesn’t drip with the same sludge as Isis or Electric Wizard, but it’s still sensory-deprivation metal (read: thinking man’s stoner rock)....

Founded by tuba player Philip Frazier while he was still in high school, the Rebirth Brass Band has been playing deep funk–minus the guitar and distressing slap bass–for 19 years. They started out busking on New Orleans street corners and have since taken dozens of trips to Europe, Japan, and Africa; later this month they’re touring Cuba, and they’ve invited their fans to party with them the whole week (provided anybody’s willing to come up with two grand for expenses)....

Last weekend I visited my second cousin. We’ve been close since childhood. We would spend two weeks a year together every year, and those days constitute some of my happiest memories. During my visit to her home we admitted that we had childhood crushes on each other. By the end of the night we were making love, and it was both emotionally and physically fulfilling. Although things were fine between us the next day, she doesn’t think she can handle telling our family that we are in love, although I could live with whatever judgment was passed on us....

I’m a 19-year-old girl dating a 21-year-old guy. We’ve been dating for a year and a half, love each other dearly, have a great time together. In bed the other night, my sweet boyfriend let me put a vibrator in his ass. He wanted to do it to me, so I told him (invoking some advice I remember you giving) that he could do it to me after I did it to him....