The opening track of the Perfect Strangers’ self-titled 2003 debut, “Sing Me a Song (That’ll Just Keep Me Lonesome),” grafts dolorous lyrics to a buoyant waltz cadence–a juxtaposition that shows just how well this quintet of veterans, led by violinist Chris Brashear, understands bluegrass. Even the most mournful bluegrass was intended as party music, and Brashear’s jubilant fiddle patterns sway and spin around Forrest Rose’s propulsive bass lines. The rest of the players–guitarist Peter McLaughlin, mandolinist Jody Stecher, and banjoist Bob Black–join in on vocal harmonies that favor a sweet, rich sound rather than the jagged, shrill tone that characterizes so much bluegrass singing....

Lots of punk rock kids leave the lifestyle behind when they hit their 20s and get real jobs, and if you were to run into Quinn Goodwillie or Jason Sprague or any other members of Mt. St. Helens out on the street, you might not guess they’d come up going to all-ages shows at the Fireside Bowl. Sprague works at a psychiatric facility in the north suburbs, Goodwillie works for a Chicago firm that makes custom learning software, and all the guys in the band are pretty clean-cut these days....

The Bulls are a team without a center–literally and metaphorically. They’ve lacked a true man in the middle since they dealt the recalcitrant Eddy Curry to the New York Knicks last fall, just before the start of the NBA season, and for a lot longer they’ve lacked a marquee star, a focal point for both the players on the floor and the fans in the stands. John Paxson has put together a terrific supporting cast with no one to support....

Presented by Kennedy-King College and the Chicago Local Organizing Committee for the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, this series of screenings, lectures, and panel discussions continues Friday through Sunday, January 13 through 15, at Kennedy-King College, 6800 S. Wentworth. For more information visit www.chiloc.com/events.html. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Columbia College graduates Carl Seaton and Kenny Young scripted this intense and intelligent drama about responsibility and relationships....

Wicker Park’s Buddy gallery has thrown its final party so many times that it’s started to seem like the live/work/play space that cried wolf. But last Friday’s farewell was, sadly enough, the real thing. By the time you read this, Buddy will be history. Its three-year lease ran out in June and its six or so inhabitants, plus a couple people with offices there, have to clear out ASAP. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

(2) You have to be able to say “Innovation comes from the top down” three times without breaking up. Next Tuesday, October 24, at IIT the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce will cosponsor the Chicagoland Innovation Summit, which CEO Jerry Roper expects “will likely go down in history as one of the most important meetings in shaping the future of our economy and our competitive standing in the 21st century global marketplace....

Matching wine to cuisines it isn’t traditionally drunk with is the focus of this periodic feature, in which we pick a BYO restaurant, sample a few dishes, and recommend some wines. Grilled shrimp appetizer 1 (Grilled marinated shrimp with mace, cardamom, lemon juice, ginger, and garlic) $10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tikka Ram Sharma, the chef and owner of Lincoln Park’s INDIAN GRILL, specializes in northern Indian cuisine, much of which is cooked quickly in the intense heat of a charcoal-fired clay oven, or tandoor....

500 Clown owes less to Bozo than to Chris Burden, the artist who had himself shot–with a gun, for a piece called Shoot–in 1971. The troupe puts risk first–even ahead of its audience, which often gets thrown into situations of, shall we say, physical uncertainty. Not that there’s any shooting in this holiday show directed by Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. But Molly Brennan, Adrian Danzig, and Chad Southard may climb on you, take your stuff, blind you with klieg lights, and swing planks over your head....

In the good old days, investigative reporting was the loss leader of quality American journalism. In these new hard times, it’s a tempting place to cut costs. Your next inside story can always be a little quicker and cheesier than your last one, less substance but a bigger headline. Or you can shut off the spigot entirely and tell your expose specialists to look for work. “Our initial operating plan calls for a newsroom of 24 working journalists, all of them dedicated to investigative reporting on stories with significant potential for major impact,” the Web site reads....

I’m not sure why BILL CALLAHAN decided to retire the Smog moniker and put out Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City) under his own name. There’s no sudden shift on the new album: Callahan just takes another step down the path he’s been on since his obscurantist lo-fi days, moving steadily toward clarity. His melodies have grown more direct and satisfying, and his lyrics have developed a clearer focus on the unstable ephemera that arise from human relationships–each time out Callahan renders his subjects with a bit more empathy and philosophical maturity....

Every January since 2002, local and out-of-town comedy groups have gathered in Chicago–birthplace of the pioneering Compass and Second City companies, and mecca to the world of sketch and improv–to showcase their work at the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival. The first SketchFest featured some 30 ensembles; this year, SketchFest, presented by Lukaba Productions, presents almost 100 groups from Toronto, New York, LA, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Des Moines, and elsewhere....

The understandable hoopla surrounding the 80th birthday of drummer Roy Haynes has obscured another milestone: this December Chicago-born drummer Ed Thigpen turns 75. Thigpen’s likely the better known of the two–at least if you consider sales of albums by the Oscar Peterson Trio, which Thigpen anchored from 1959 to 1965. He’s a strong composer and a surgeon of a percussionist, driving the music with perfectly placed strokes, an incisive touch, and a pulse-quickening range of dynamics; he’s one of the most tasteful drummer-leaders we have, and a truly exciting artist to watch as well as hear....

All the members of the Emerson String Quartet–Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer alternating as first and second violin, Lawrence Dutton on viola, and David Finckel on cello–play at the level of soloists, technically and musically. Together since 1976, they have a remarkable blended sound and play with exceptional precision and intensity. To date they’ve won six Grammys: two for their Shostakovich cycle, two for their Bartok cycle, one for works by Ives and Barber, and one for the complete quartets of Beethoven....

Wolfgang Tillmans Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One measure of Tillmans’s talent is his accomplished handling of multiple genres: formal and impromptu portraits, still lifes, cityscapes, landscapes, and experimental abstractions. In his hanging of the show (which lacks the customary curatorial apparatus of titles, dates, and commentary in wall texts), provocative pieces–frank depictions of private parts, homosexual acts, and wastes being voided–are juxtaposed with innocuous, even mundane offerings....

Why is it that, out of all the world’s peoples, Europeans were the ones who discovered and conquered so many others? Few historians deal with this question. It took an outsider, UCLA physiologist Jared Diamond, to put together an answer in the best-selling 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Drawing on fields from archaeology to crop genetics, Diamond concludes that Europeans dominated in part because of geography: they came from a continent with few barriers (allowing useful innovations to diffuse easily) and many plants and animals that could be usefully domesticated (the germs they harbored proved devastating to Native Americans)....

Jonathan Kozol is one of this country’s few true prophets, delivering unpleasant truths about race and class that are often ignored until, say, a natural disaster hits. For 40 years he has doggedly shed light on our disparities in housing, wealth, and, most of all, public education. In Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991) he laid out what everyone knew already–that well-off, suburban, white districts spent up to twice as much per student as those that were minority-heavy, poor, and urban: Niles Township High Schools, for example, spent $9,371 per student; the Chicago Public Schools’ average was $5,265....

In 1999 noise hall-of-famer John Wiese told Bananafish magazine that he once spent eight and a half hours editing a little over 100 minutes of raw material into 40 seconds of music: “In the first five seconds, there are about 75 cuts,” he said. On his new solo album, Magical Crystal Blah (Helicopter), this anal-retentive method produces long streams of skull-fuckingly loud noodling, with snatches of samples flying by so fast it’s hard to grab hold of anything....

“The human being is just stomach and sex,” declares an overwhelmed priest in this ribald Brazilian feature (2002, 100 min.), enunciating its equation of the carnal with the carnivorous. Set in a steamy coastal town, it takes place mostly at a popular bodega, whose beautiful spitfire owner is fed up with men, and at a nearby flophouse, whose flamboyant gay cook can’t get enough of them. Among the other offbeat characters are a drug dealer who likes to lick corpses and a slaughterhouse worker who reveres his pious wife but satisfies himself sexually with a local shop owner....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thika Road near Nairobi, Kenya, in February, villagers brawled over meat from a road-killed baby hippopotamus weighing about 1,700 pounds; amidst the kicking and punching, two people were stabbed. Also in February 6,000 shoppers stampeded, then rioted, at the opening of a new Ikea in a north London suburb. The event, scheduled to last 24 hours, was called off after 40 minutes of frenzied, often violent bargain hunting, and at least 20 participants were taken to the hospital....

Queen Lucia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The triumph of Benson’s novels is not that they amuse–which they do, relying on the well-worn device of deflating the pompous–but that he makes us fond of his frivolous creatures and their little stunts. Tirelessly energetic, insufferably snobbish Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas is at the top of the social hierarchy in the little town of Riseholme and fancies herself solely responsible for its cultural enlightenment....