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In several Chicago-area appearances this week, Cyrus Chestnut will play Santa Claus–a role that fits the portly pianist partly because of his shape but mostly because of this season’s reissue of his 2000 album, A Charlie Brown Christmas (Atlantic), which updates Vince Guaraldi’s music from the perennial Peanuts holiday TV show. Every year plenty of folks seem to find religion just in time to cash in on Christmas, but no one could accuse Chestnut of such crassness: he first played publicly in his Baltimore church at age seven, and his previous albums, most notably the gospel-flavored Blessed Quietness (1996), have made it clear that his art remains rooted in a deeply felt spirituality....

Said to be the most important work of the Japanese new wave, this beautiful and provocative 1969 feature by Yoshishige Yoshida intertwines two narratives for a dialectical examination of love and politics, the individual and society. One, set in the early 20th century, is based on the life of anarchist Sakae Osugi, who advocated free love as part of his philosophy of personal liberation; the other, set in the 60s, concerns a journalist who emulates Osugi with two lovers, one a voyeur....

Though each of these five silent films by Ernie Gehr focuses on a specific subject–cars on a highway, an apartment still life–his real theme is the paradoxes of the film-viewing process. In the black-and-white Field (1970, 10 min.) diagonal lines continually rush by, the result of the camera rapidly panning across a field. While the continuing streaks become meditative, the fineness of the lines recalls the granular structure of celluloid, almost as if the viewer is being relocated to the film’s surface....

If folks didn’t stand up from time to time to declare the pursuit of fun a valid reason to be creative we’d have never seen things like bendy straws, tandem bikes, stiletto heels, or Fischerspooner. Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner met in Chicago in the early 90s, where Spooner was a core member of experimental theater troupe Doorika and Fischer, who often collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, was in the math-rock band Table....

None of the three premieres on this venerable company’s upcoming program is what you’d call dark, but they do run the gamut from dramatic to abstract. Company member Jon Lehrer’s Bridge and Tunnel, which has a musical theater feel, comes across as a kind of West Side Story Lite. Set to several songs by Paul Simon and based on Lehrer’s memories of his high school years in Queens (where Simon also grew up), it features boys and girls cavorting, bickering, and occasionally supporting one another....

Nora Herting took the stage at the Hideout last month wearing nothing but a red wig, a pink feather boa, two pink fur pasties, and a dozen pairs of white cotton briefs, each embroidered in red with a confessional slogan like “When I get bored I fantasize tragedies for my loved ones” or “I make my life unnecessarily complex.” Herting–an artist who first displayed the undies in a show at Artemisia gallery last September, stuffed with newspaper and strung from the ceiling–proceeded to take them off, one at a time, to musical accompaniment....

Born in Lexington, Mississippi, in 1945, vocalist L.T. McGee moved to Chicago when he was seven. As a young man he sang in his church choir, but his ears were primed by secular artists like Barry White and Tyrone Davis. In the 80s he began to appear locally on the west and south sides, sometimes fronting an R & B band called Blaze. In 1999 Johnnie Mae Dunson, who had written songs for Jimmy Reed and more recently had rejuvenated her own career as a singer, discovered McGee performing on Maxwell Street....

Last summer Olympia, Washington, hosted the first Ladyfest; inspired by the success of the northwest extravaganza, sister festivals have sprung up everywhere from Bloomington, Indiana, to Glasgow, Scotland. The Chicago version–running for four days, primarily in the Wicker Park, Humboldt Park, and Logan Square neighborhoods–brings together a delicious array of talent from home and away. Saturday at 10:30 PM, Julia Rhoads and Holly Quinn, of cleverly lunatic Lucky Plush Productions, reunite with fellow veteran of Xsight!...

In Overland Park, Kansas, in the 1970s, there weren’t many Asian-Americans around. But Abraham Lim, whose parents immigrated from Korea in the 50s, didn’t feel threatened by racism until 1984, when he got a summer job with a local road crew in order to “figure out what it was like to work for a living–really work.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was one African-American man on the job, Daryl, and Lim was assigned to his crew....

Another Valentine’s Day, another program of love songs. But this is Patricia Barber, she of the icy-hot vocals and frosted stage presence, a woman whose musicianship is rivaled only by her iconoclasm–you can bet that she’ll take a left turn or two. Listeners can get a hint of what to expect from her most recent and most ambitious album, Verse (Premonition), for which she wrote all the music and the lyrics to all but one tune....

Solomon Burke’s 19-hit run on Atlantic in the 60s helped define modern soul music. An ordained minister for most of his life, Burke brought gospel intensity to his love ballads (“The Price,” “You’re Good for Me”), but on seductions like “Tonight’s the Night,” this man of the cloth embodied the satin-sheet lothario later adopted by soul crooners like Isaac Hayes and Barry White. By the 70s his star had faded, but he continued to hit sporadically on various labels–Soul Alive!...

LES BATON ROUGE 4/18, PRODIGAL SON Les Baton Rouge originally formed in Portugal and has since relocated to Berlin, which I’m glad to hear is still a welcoming place for punks even with all the post-Wall gentrification. The band’s buzz and shriek suggests a world in which the 90s never happened–except for Bikini Kill. On their second album, Chloe Yurtz (Elevator Music), produced by Tim Kerr, the quartet (two men, two women) rips through six tunes with a fiendish Au Pairs meets Babes in Toyland ferocity, and singer Suspiria Franklyn can tear into a mean Nina Hagen when she likes....

This Texas-bred trio, who began as street entertainers in Austin 18 years ago, offer an ingenious and hilarious blend of clowning, juggling, acrobatics, and magic show. Rob Williams, Jon O’Connor, and Kevin Hunt–aka Gyro, Pyro, and Walter–toss off their virtuosic routines with comic flair and crafty showmanship, juggling torches, tenpins, knives, balls, and other objects with hip insouciance. Adding to the fun are unusual twists on audience participation: viewers are invited to pelt the guys with tennis balls, kick them in the shins if they drop a knife, and eat sandwiches served by foot....

Journalist Anne Nelson’s first play, The Guys, a problematic docudrama that’s been running off-Broadway since December, chronicles the emotional impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks on two New Yorkers: a fire department captain who’s lost 14 men, and Nelson herself, thinly disguised as a journalist named Joan. While Nelson does an adequate job articulating her grief, giving her fictional alter ego long asides in which to detail her ongoing bewilderment and despair, her decision to depict herself as the captain’s idealized bereavement counselor feels like the height of self-aggrandizement....

Raw red circles line J Scott’s left cheek. A pus-filled welt marks the center of each palm. They’re from cigarettes, he explains, that were snuffed out on his skin two nights ago. “I have a taste for dominatrices,” he says. “Most people would never burn you with cigarettes. They just lie about your dreams, or your goals, or you. Belittle and put you down whenever possible. But people in the S-M world get to hurt you, so they don’t have to lie to you and fuck you emotionally....

This Ain’t Your Father’s Klezmer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Davis, who grew up in Deerfield, earned a BA in theater from the University of Cincinnati in 1994; after moving back to Chicago he started performing in off-Loop musicals, often working temp jobs at marketing firms to pay the bills. He met “other young Jewish artsy folk” in the theater scene, and it looked to him that there was a community just waiting for something to bring it together....

Rock, Pop, etc. TREY ANASTASIO Thu 6/6, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion, 1150 W. Harrison. 312-413-5740 or 312-559-1212. OSCAR BROWN JR. & MAGGIE BROWN, REGIE GIBSON, TED JONES and others perform as part of “Bridging the Gap Between Poetry and Rap: Part 2”; free admission. Sun 6/2, 1 PM, Woodson Regional Library, 9525 S. Halsted. 312-745-2080. EVAN DANDO 18 & over show. Fri 6/7, 9 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212....

At 4:30 AM, as the evening’s most tenacious partyers stagger home, waitresses and bartenders at the Ukrainian Village bar Darkroom wipe down the counters and close up. On their way out the door they nod weary hellos to Kevin Ritter and Brian Jacobsen, whose day is just getting started. Ritter and Jacobsen will spend the next seven or eight hours making quiche, turnovers, coffee, and other breakfast standbys in the bar’s kitchen and delivering them to homes in Lincoln Park, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square, Ukrainian Village, and the West Loop....

Curious George Goes to War, Second City E.T.C. Call it “The Return of the First Amendment.” Continuing the screw-the-tourists dynamic that fuels Second City’s main-stage Thank Heaven It Wasn’t 7/11, this 24th E.T.C. revue abandons hip irony for a slaughter of sacred cows. Refusing to dumb down cultural references to talk-show levels, director Ron West and his crack ensemble reward knowledge of the news. Targets are hit that wouldn’t have shown up on the Second City radar a year ago: the uglification of Soldier Field, Wrigleyville blacks who erase the south side from their memory banks, a suicide-bomber coach who teaches the doom squad to ape Americans by massacring English, a self-appointed king of the road who fights terrorists by driving his gas guzzler up the Amoco building, FBI agents whose enemies change by the minute....

As the year ground to a dismal end we dialed up a few of the folks featured on this page over the last 12 months, looking for a bright spot of news to ride out on. The Acme Artists’ Community seemed like a decent prospect. The subsidized condo development at 2418 W. Bloomingdale, touted as a model for artists’ housing, had been plagued by floods and leaks since it opened in 2003, but last time we checked the city had ordered the developer, the Near Northwest Arts Council, to correct construction problems by August 1....