Meditative Math Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ben Butler’s two large sculptures and seven drawings at Zg are deeply meditative, relying on the mindful, quiet repetition and symmetry of a mandala–an aid to contemplation that frees the mind from everyday concerns. Nest, occupying much of the floor in Zg’s main gallery, is composed of 11 labyrinthine frames in unfinished poplar. The wooden bars that form each frame are fastened together with glue and nails to create an openwork shape like an elongated turtle shell or seedpod....

Shortly after reading a piece on the mix-tape scavenger hunt [“Never Mind LimeWire,” August 12], I was walking down Leavitt, and my boyfriend noticed a faint stencil on a metal shelf attached to an abandoned building. Upon closer inspection, we saw a blue mix tape peeking out of the shelf. We were with my younger sister and had decided to walk to our destination rather than drive. She got very excited, and my boyfriend told her, “See, if we hadn’t been walking, we would never have found this!...

Armed Forces Franklin Bruno Continuum Bruno and Niimi both have entries in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series, each volume of which is devoted to a short but obsessive treatment of a much-loved album, from James Brown’s Live at the Apollo to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. They’ll appear together next Saturday at Quimby’s, where Bruno will read from his book on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces and Niimi will read from his on R....

Anyone who’s heard Paquito D’Rivera even once knows about his explosive virtuosity: on both clarinet and alto sax the Cuban emigre boasts consummate technique, infused with the jumpy, mercurial fervor that defines so much Cuban jazz. Folks who’ve heard him a few times know about his lively and endearing sense of humor–a trait that also marked his 1998 autobiography, My Sax Life, which finally appeared in an English translation last year....

My problem may not be as kinky as most you get, but it’s currently terrorizing my thoughts. While in high school and early college, I was fairly sexually repressed (right-wing, Bible Belt upbringing and all that), so I used online chat rooms to explore my sexual curiosity. I would find random pictures of people on the Internet, normal and nude, and send them to others, pretending to be the people in the photos....

Redmoon Theater’s late-summer spectacle, set this year on the Jackson Park lagoon, is beautiful, ambitious, and well-intentioned. At least I think it’s well-intentioned–it’s hard to say. There’s a lot of motoring and paddling on- and offstage with little clear sense of why. True, the production had to be rethought because of the horrors wrought by Katrina: reportedly the show’s flooded houses and floating set pieces were made less humorous, more direful....

Two months before she turned 39, Patsy Desmond got her first tattoo–the name of her cat, Cecil, in small capital letters just above her navel. She’d taken in Cecil, a stray, in 1988, when he was a kitten. To commemorate the event, Patsy decided to throw Cecil a Sweet 16 party at Gallery Augusta, the Humboldt Park space she’d opened a few months before. At her request, artists she knew and admired paid homage to Cecil in paint, steel, comics, photography, and even found fabrics....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m out of town at the moment, covering the Toronto International Film Festival, and this morning I snuck away from the film buffs for a couple hours to catch the world premiere of Murray Lerner and Paul Crowder’s Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who at the Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM’s screening room is pretty uncomfortable, but apparently the festival wanted to take advantage of the digital-projection and high-decibel sound system....

The last time the CSO performed Bach’s Magnificat was in June 1968, and the time before that was in 1930. It’s hard to see why, because this is a wonderfully moving, architecturally balanced masterwork: it begins and ends with the same joyful music, and the opening text is “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” the closing “As it was in the beginning.” It has 12 short movements that often display Bach’s soulful, melancholic side, as in the wistful aria for soprano “Quia Repexit,” which is really a duet for soprano and oboe, and the trio for two sopranos and contralto “Susceptit Israel” is gorgeous....

Inga McCaslin Frick’s startling, seductive mixed-media works at Flatfile make you ask: is that a real object or an image of one? Her mix of actual objects with digital prints never completely blends the two visually, enhancing the sense of uncertainty. These six pieces and the three digital prints in the show have their roots in Frick’s upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness, her subsequent rebellion, and an intense depression three years ago....

I don’t care what your band sounds like–if you make a mockery out of something sacred in the music biz, I’m going to love you. So yay to Les Georges Leningrad for being such assholes at CMJ last year and literally dancing on banana peels. This Montreal “quartet” claims among its members a married couple and a ghost they met through a Ouija board; they routinely attack one another onstage and barely bother to play their instruments, even though it’s obvious they can–they almost out-Resident the Residents on a cover of “Constantinople....

So this guy says to give him ten bucks to invest, and he’ll give you back $15 in 45 days. Guaranteed. Or give him $100, or $1,000. Don’t worry, he says. It’s legit, has something to do with buying and selling coupons for postage stamps, and besides, you’ve seen the line of lawyers and tailors, policemen and grocers waiting outside the Securities Exchange Company in Boston to give their hard-earned money to his boss, Charles Ponzi, to invest....

The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen Earlier this month I caught a rebroadcast of a radio interview with writer Frederick Kaufman in which he discussed his now notorious 2005 Harper’s essay “Debbie Does Salad.” In the magazine Kaufman and erotic photographer Barbara Nitke compared the conventions of Food Network shows–wet, steamy close-ups, rhythmic, repetitive editing, the “money shot” of the host slicing into the perfect pie–to those of the adult film industry....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 1960s, Old Town was the subject and the Chicago Seed was the observer. In the 1970s, Lincoln Park was the subject and this paper was the observer. Through the 1990s we saw a number of very weak newspapers attempt to conquer West Town without success. Names like West Town Crier, West Town Free Press, the Voice, Sandpaper, and finally Citylink came and went with little fanfare....

These New England boys are a little too smart to be playing dumb rock, but no other description fits. It’s sometimes hard to tell if they’re doing it out of pure love or if their lobotomized, lowest-common-denominator riffage is actually a form of smart-assery, but on their eighth release, the brand-new Jaggernaut (Tortuga), they’re balls deep in Leslie West’s corpse–never mind that the dude isn’t dead yet. The thick, sinuous unison lines, chunky chugga-chugga, and occasional guitar solo poke at the same pleasure centers metal does, but Scissorfight disdains show-offy virtuosity in favor of a no-surprises pummel that’s hard to say no to....

Gunner Palace At the very least, it’s more honest and involved in its portraiture of American soldiers in Iraq than anything TV news of any political persuasion has given us. “I’m trying to make something that’s honest,” Tucker told an interviewer on the Web site Green Cine. “And soldiers have a huge hang-up about it. All they want is for someone to tell the truth. Not embellish it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Mundial Cocina Mestiza Between the three of them, Garcia and her partners have enough fine-dining experience to blanket Pilsen in white tablecloths. She and her husband, Eusebio, met in the kitchen at Gordon in the 80s, where Eusebio had made a name for himself as one of the few dishwashers to ever move up from the sink to pantry chef and line cook. (“You should go out with Eusebio,” Katie remembers chef Ron Blazek telling her at the time–“he’s going to be famous....

Artistic director Christopher M. McCray says that in his two-act dance drama, Ghost Play, he wanted all the performers to correspond to chess pieces. Later that premise developed into a story with Shakespearean overtones about a kingdom in turmoil. But this trippy piece might be most reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: its tagline is “death is passe,” and the byzantine plot defies logic. The tale is set in a futuristic society–which opens the door to all kinds of crazy costumes, as in Chicago Dance Crash’s Tribulation and the Demolition Squad last summer–whose wealth and insularity might reflect our own culture....

The Chicago International Documentary Festival (which debuted last year as the Chicago International Doc Film Festival) continues Friday, April 2, through Sunday, April 11. Screenings are at the Beverly Arts Center; the Copernicus Center; Facets Cinematheque; Northwestern Univ. Thorne Auditorium; the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee; and Univ. of Chicago Doc Films. Tickets are $8.50, $7 for seniors and students, and $6.50 for shows before noon or after 10 pm....

This year on the Chicago Tap All-Stars program you got your Vegas act, your basic rhythm tappers, and your upstart who wants to tell stories through tap. The Vegas act–Chicago natives Jay and Connie Fagan, a brother and sister who appeared at the Suncoast Hotel & Casino earlier this year–specializes in good-natured rivalrous patter. When his little sister outdoes him at Irish step dancing, Jay appeals to the audience–“I say one thing, she says another”–aiming to win our sympathy but also capturing the way tap dancers (and siblings) sometimes seem to speak a private language....