When you’re hot you’re hot. And when you’re not–well, if you’re the West Indian Folk Dance Company, you’re still pretty entertaining. A recent rehearsal of the first half of the troupe’s upcoming program, “I Am My Mother’s Child: African Roots of the Caribbean,” was truly thrilling, with live percussion, singing, and vibrant traditional African and Afro-Caribbean dancing. One of the pieces, Bongo Man, celebrates religious figures who communicate with ancient African and Jamaican ghosts through animal sacrifice....

Dominic Pacyga hired on as a livestock handler at the Union Stockyards in 1969. His mother and both his grandfathers had worked at the “Wall Street of meat”–which covered the square mile between 39th and 47th streets and Ashland and Halsted–and although Chicago’s meatpacking industry was slowing down, Pacyga, who was a UIC student at the time, was enthralled. “I remember being in a hog house with five or six thousand head of hogs,” he says....

A signature sound can be a comfort and a curse–just ask the Dirty Three. There’s no mistaking the blend of Warren Ellis’s extravagantly emotive violin, Jim White’s loose yet forceful drumming, and Mick Turner’s churning, understated guitar. Their unusual instrumentation and their penchant for surging, open-ended instrumentals instantly set them apart from the rest of the performers on the Melbourne, Australia, pub circuit when they started out in 1992. But with each album it’s gotten harder for the Dirty Three to stay interested in themselves....

Britain’s Flaming Stars have been pumping out elegant raunch-rock since 1995, when their debut seven-inch, Hospital, Heaven or Hell, landed them a recording session with Radio One’s John Peel; since then they’ve released five albums of surf-lounge-psychobilly with a twist of early Jesus and Mary Chain and made five more appearances on the Peel show (collected on last year’s Vinyl Japan double album The Six John Peel Sessions). But this month’s weeklong swing through New York, Boston, Providence, and Chicago will be the band’s first U....

I had to go all the way to Berlin to see pianist Jason Moran play with his regular trio, but when I finally did, it was like getting hit by a truck. I hesitate to write that they harness the power of rock because that suggests their most exhilarating moments are scripted, and they’re not–they can collapse and rebuild songs as easily as opening and closing a pop-up book–but there’s no question that they play with volatile urgency....

Rekindled interest in the Hammond B-3 organ, a staple of soul jazz in the 50s and 60s, has given us a slew of virtuosos who model themselves on the extroverted father of the jazz organ trio, Jimmy Smith–among them Joey DeFrancesco, Tony Monaco, and Chicago’s own Chris Foreman. But other modern organists still take a more reflective approach to the instrument, including Larry Goldings, Sam Yahel, and Dr. Lonnie Smith, and for them we can thank Melvin Rhyne....

John Darnielle, the grimly funny acoustic balladeer who performs as the Mountain Goats, started out making cassette tapes in his bedroom, and he tends like a Stradivarius the 1989 Panasonic RX-FT500 boom box he used to record his latest CD, All Hail West Texas (Emperor Jones). Darnielle swears by its harsh, clattery sound, which seems to accent his primal guitar thrashing and nasal talking blues: “It sounds better than a studio,” he enthuses on his Web site....

I don’t know why it’s taken three years for Samira Makhmalbaf’s second feature to reach Chicago. It was finished in 1999 and won the jury prize at Cannes the following year. The Iranian director was only 17 when she finished her remarkable first feature, The Apple, which also screened in competition at Cannes and made her one of the youngest directors ever to gain an international reputation. Since then, she has made the 11-minute “God, Construction and Destruction,” about the responses of Afghan refugee children in Iran to the attacks on the World Trade Center, which is part of the 2002 international episodic feature 11/09/01 (still unscreened in the U....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August an Illinois school district comprising parts of Cook, Kane, and Du Page counties decided that it could not afford to operate four new schools it had just built; though the buildings (which cost a total of $40 million) are ready for students, they’ll stay locked up for the entire school year, if not longer. And a September report by the federal government’s General Accounting Office described how undercover agents in seven states acquired driver’s licenses using fake birth certificates or forged out-of-state licenses; most clerks didn’t recognize the forgeries, and when they did, they sometimes returned them, helpfully instructing applicants on how to correct the “errors....

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 champ Justin Wong is on the ropes. Shoulder to shoulder with his opponent, the muscle-bound Bryheem Keys, he’s playing as Cable, a second-tier X-Men character, and he’s fighting for his life. Around them, packed tight as a mosh pit, sweaty gamers strain to catch a glimpse of what’s happening on the arcade machine. They’re sitting on shoulders and standing on stools, piled over each other’s backs, their faces silently cursing anyone sporting a hat or an Afro....

Shakira is half-Lebanese and half-Colombian, and her frizzy, unbrushed hair has bad roots. Her clothes look like they’ve been gnawed by wild animals and her belly-dance hip-shake gyration thing is so alarming it bypasses sexy and goes straight to primal. But unlike most half-naked diva skanks, she actually rocks a stage, stomping and kicking like a pony, nearly headbanging when she whips her hair, and forgoing a headset for a mike stand tied with scarves, which she flings around a la Steven Tyler....

Cannibal! The Musical! Great Beast Theater at ImprovOlympic Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cannibal! The Musical! bursts with love for the musical form. Parker pays homage to Rodgers and Hammerstein with “This Side of Me,” a tender solo delivered by Polly Pry, the hard-nosed reporter who falls for Packer’s soft-spoken charm and fights for his release. The staccato delivery of “The Trapper Song” (sung by Packer’s archnemesis Frenchy Cabazon) is straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan: “I wake up muddy / And go to bed bloody / ‘Cause I’m a trappin’ man....

As a young man in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Terry Evans sang in a church choir, but his love for secular music like blues and R & B–he secretly listened to the likes of Elmore James and John Lee Hooker–would set the course for the rest of his career. He moved to Los Angeles in 1962, where he recorded with a doo-wop group called the Turnarounds and in the early 70s teamed up with another lapsed gospel singer, Bobby King....

THE BLUE ROOM, Katharsis Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Just in case you didn’t realize that sex can leave people feeling embarrassed, frustrated, elated, angry, disappointed, guilty, bored, or saddened, David Hare is prepared to enlighten you. When his loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s century-old classic La Ronde opened on Broadway in 1998, critics must have been deceived by Nicole Kidman’s naked body into thinking this was important theater. But in the cold light of morning, it’s difficult to find much depth in Hare’s leisurely orchestration of “ten intimate acts” between talkative, only marginally interesting heterosexuals....

EVEN AS A CHILD I WAS DIFFERENT. “I tried to work up the nerve to ask Michele Slung to dance with me. As I stood there trying to get my courage up, a tall, good-looking camper from Cincinnati, a fellow named Jim, strode right over to Michele Slung and led her onto the dance floor. They spent the rest of the evening dancing together.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Rock, Pop, Etc. BABY WANTS CANDY, MUSICAL IMPROV COMPANY Free “cabaret improv” concert. Tue 5/13, 7 PM, Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. 312-744-6630. CONCRETE BLONDE, TWINEMEN 18 & over. Sat 5/10, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. EDGEWATER SINGERS perform “Harmony & Discord: Relationships in Song”; free admission. Sat 5/10, 7:30 PM, Immanuel Lutheran Church, 1500 W. Elmdale. 773-561-4766. KIMI HAYES Free in-store performance....

Trendy market-district Cuban restaurant MARYSOL blends right in with its existing upscale-ethnic neighbors Marche, Vivo, Red Light, and Sushi Wabi. Cafe Bolero owner Barbara Gonzales gave her new place a name that’s a play on the sea (mar) and sun (sol) and a decor that exemplifies the two. The front bar is painted in rich shades of blue and green and outfitted with low-backed leather couches and a long, curvy bar; the main dining room is splashed with sunny yellows and oranges and colorful glass tiles fronting the large semiexposed kitchen....

Brantfest!, Zeppo Theater Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Since the 1993 debut of Lovely Letters, Chicago playwright George Brant has forged a tidy little reputation for comedy. He began with parodies of popular entertainments but in 1997 turned to biographies and adaptations of literary classics, most of them clocking in at a comfortable 90 minutes or less. “BrantFest!” includes four of his works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Headlining is the world premiere of The Royal Historian of Oz, a biodrama; Brant plays L....

Super Sucker Super Sucker, the second indie comedy feature written and directed by actor Jeff Daniels, is a terrible movie. But that doesn’t prevent it from being interesting and even admirable as a grassroots phenomenon. I haven’t seen its predecessor, Escanaba in da Moonlight (2001)–based on Daniels’s play, which he produced at his own 160-seat theater in Chelsea, Michigan, the Purple Rose (named after the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo, which Daniels has cited as a turning point in his career)....

On the day Deep Roots was entered in a turf race at Arlington Park, Omar Razvi had the flu. But some horses are worth getting out of bed for. He’s been into the horses since he was a student at Rolling Meadows High School. One afternoon his mother gave him $150 to pay the air-conditioning repairman. The repairman decided to spend the money at Arlington, and invited Razvi along. They bet together and split the winnings....