Every six months or so the Recording Industry Association of America releases its latest figures about the state of the music business, and every time the numbers are misleading in exactly the same way. The RIAA’s October 3 press release declares that music shipments of “all physical formats” are down 5.8 percent for the first half of 2005–evidently compared to the first half of 2004, although that’s not clear. (CDs have dipped 6....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It occurred to me while watching Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto that if the indefatigable padre ever made a film of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, he’d give us shot after shot of Madame Defarge knitting as tumbrels roll and the guillotine falls: chop, chop, another name for the embroidery, our summary witness to massacre. So what’s the equivalent here, the iconic ur-cliche?...

Neil LaBute’s 2004 play offers a variation on the theme of lovers kept apart by societal intolerance of their passion. But here the lovers aren’t of different races, ethnicities, or religions–they’re different body types. He’s thin and she’s not, and in our fat-obsessed world that makes all the difference. Of course, since this is LaBute, the romance is doomed: in Bash and Lepers he’s very clear that “normal” people regularly resort to cruelty and violence to keep those who are “different”–gays, the disabled, racial minorities–in their place....

Like the horror-comedy genre it salutes, this post-Buffy vehicle is almost better when it’s bad than when it’s good. Based on the comic book published by local outfit Devil’s Due, this New Millennium Theatre Company production follows the adventures of slasher-hunting vigilantes Cassie Hack and her sidekick Vlad. Adapter-director Chad Wise tries to replicate onstage the quick crosscutting of the graphic novel, which proves more trouble than it’s worth. That said, the show is a high-energy riot, with exuberant stage combat, a savvy sound track featuring Rob Zombie and Jack Dangers, and enough spraying blood to warrant a tarped-over seating section....

Michael Graeve is both a painter and a sound artist, and he operates quite differently in each medium: as a painter he uses oils on canvas to render bright and geometrically precise color fields, while in performance he exploits the gritty noisemaking potential of secondhand record players. He doesn’t bother with LPs in the latter mode–instead he uses the sounds of amplified motors, speaker feedback, and cartridges striking turntables to generate grimy fuzz, coarse hums, and rhythmic thumps....

For its first concert of the season the Newberry Consort has put together an unusual program combining fascinating scholarship and outstanding musicianship. In the 17th century the emperor of China allowed Jesuit missionaries into the Forbidden City, where they gave concerts on harpsichords and other Western instruments, taught the emperor and a group of eunuchs to play them, and composed music. The missionaries and eunuchs’ orchestra regularly performed programs such as this one, titled “Crouching Dragon, Hidden Viol: Music for a Chinese Banquet,” which includes both Western and Chinese works....

talib kweli eardrum (blacksmith/warner broTHERS) price $41 Kweli’s never put up serious numbers–2004’s The Beautiful Struggle was his most successful release, peaking at number 14 on the Billboard Top 200–but he’s always been propped by the die-hard coffee-shop and backpacker crowds. So griping isn’t a good look for him: checking people for mouthing off about his sound’s evolution clashes with his anti-establishment, pro-freedom-of–expression proletariat image. We want to hear Kweli bitch about the man, not about fans....

The Box Theatre Group’s program of seven monologues is uneven, with performances ranging from the overwrought to the timid. But few pieces are painful, and many are humorous despite the show’s subject: bad dreams. Among the gems are Kelsie Huff’s touching, funny Troop 420, in which she relives a torturous Girl Scout experience, and Rachel Kuhn’s deliciously circuitous metamonologue How Are You?, in which she’s periodically distracted by tape-recorded questions while trying to tell a story and ends up with a wry, seemingly inadvertent essay on self-reflection....

As the paraplegic, vegetative Elvis impersonator in Lee Hall’s dark comedy Cooking With Elvis, Ben Byer spends most of the play confined to a wheelchair. But what would be a prop for most actors has unique resonance for Byer. The role, now featured in an encore production by Sang Froid Theatre Company at the Athenaeum, has become entwined in many ways with the degenerative illness that has transformed his life in the last few years....

Most of the media hubbub about the so-called Australian Invasion has focused on the Vines’ gormless man-child Craig Nicholls and Jet’s sunken-cheeked screamer Nic Cester, but Luke Steele of the Sleepy Jackson seems destined to outlast both of those preening garage-rock sluts. The Perth-based singer-guitarist and his rotating cast of collaborators make music with a wide-open sense of possibility that sometimes gives way to overweening ambition. The Sleepies established themselves with a trio of import EPs that began with 2002’s Let Your Love Be Love, but last year’s full-length Lovers (Astralwerks) really put the band’s gifts on display....

If you passed by the corner of Damen and Fulton last Saturday night, a chain-link fence proclaimed your loveliness. Styrofoam cups stuck in the fence spelled out YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL–cheesy as it may have been, it’s always nice to be reminded. It was part of an anonymous international project based in Chicago called, natch, You Are Beautiful, that covers ads with posters bearing that slogan, distributes stickers, dresses up dumpy spots in the city with site-specific warm fuzzies, and encourages one and all to spread its Aguileran message around the world....

Friday 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RAISE THE RED LANTERN Chicago’s Raise the Red Lantern released their debut full-length, Breathe Fire (Seventh Rule), this past fall. It’s an inventive fusion of up-tempo stoner rock, posthardcore, the avant-rock of Neurosis, and classic Brit metal. Tracks like “Daggers and Men’s Smiles” and “Brethren We Built This” surprise with electronic manipulations: they appear without warning yet still sound strangely fitting, carrying things naturalistically beyond the limits of what a live loud rock band can normally do....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Here’s how easy it is to be a media critic. Collect a stack of the Sun-Times from the past couple of weeks. Locate pencil, paper, and a ruler. Measure, add up, and write down the total number of column inches devoted to The Way Forward, the pivotal new report from the Iraq Study Group. Do the same with the debate on whether Rex Grossman should continue to start at quarterback for the Bears....

BEWARE OF GOD: STORIES | Shalom Auslander | Simon & Schuster These stories aren’t just witty–they’re written with the cynical glee that only someone controlled by religion for most of his life could produce. (Auslander was raised Orthodox.) He doesn’t parody religion for a cheap laugh; his stories have soul. –Jessa Crispin Frankly, after you’ve been led to fear the worst about the old man, his story, once dragged out, is a bit of a letdown....

For about a month before the inauguration I’d been fantasizing about throwing eggs at Bush’s car on his special day. But then I decided to save money and stay home. I could always commiserate locally–at the candlelight procession from Wicker Park to the Anti-Inaugural Ball at Acme Art Works, for instance. But I didn’t feel like walking that far in the snow, and truth be told I’m still in denial. So instead I went out for a night of drinking and dancing under the auspices of a certain corporate sponsorship that’s been chapping my hide for about a year now....

For someone who loves books and reading, Donna Seaman has a couple really sweet gigs. She’s an associate editor at Booklist, the review magazine published by the Chicago-based American Library Association, and since 1994 she’s hosted Open Books, an hour-long WLUW radio program whose mission, Seaman says, “is to bring as many literary writers to the attention of as many readers as possible.” In her new book, Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books (Paul Dry Books), Seaman has culled 32 interviews from the multitude she’s conducted over the years to present a diverse group of authors discussing inspiration, working methods, and art and life in general....

Shostakovich wrote one of the two most important string-quartet cycles of the 20th century (Bartok wrote the other), and in celebration of his 100th birthday the Emerson String Quartet will play the last three works. “These three together pack the greatest punch and present Shostakovich in a way that goes to the greatest depth,” says violinist Eugene Drucker. Written during the last years of the composer’s life, when he was acutely aware of his mortality, they’re predominantly heartbreaking and often eerie–yet at times they can be playful, as in the opening of the 14th and in a jazzy pizzicato section in the middle of the 13th....

Anytime you don’t know what to do but you know for a fact that you want to have fun, hop on the Ravey Train (a close relative of what my friend Jessica calls the Nonstop Party Wagon). The idea is, you attend as many events as possible in a given night, no questions asked. Nothing’s too big or too small, too weird or too boring, and it doesn’t matter if you’re into the politics or aesthetics of the event in question–if you’ve heard about it, you attend it, then move on to the next thing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lil Wayne: [Oscar de la Hoya], Tom from MySpace and Bill Gates, I just wanna smoke three blunts with them, just three, just three blunts, I bet you I’ll come back high, whoo, them niggas are beast. Lil Wayne: He’s a G for real, I saw him coming out of my condos one day with an iPod on him and two big niggas with him, ain’t no security....

These Canadian indie rockers are the latest to follow the Stephen Malkmus method for putting a college degree to good use musically. On their debut, Hind Hind Legs (Equator), they make pop tradition sound like a perversion; between the full-band harmonies, the multilayered melodies, and the one dude who won’t stop going “la la la,” the record climbs to the shiniest of extremes. But the core of this light and fluffy music is actually dense and gratifying....