IF YOU LIKE GEOMETRY, you’ll love Chicago. The grid is straight out of math class, except Lake Michigan ate the right half of your homework. Everything starts at State and Madison, whose coordinates on the numeric plan that describes the whole city are 0 and 0. Addresses move out from there, with each 800 representing about a mile: 800 N. State is about a mile north, 800 W. Madison a mile west, 800 S....

After years of toiling in relative obscurity, this Denver ethnic-folk/indie-rock quartet is enjoying some buzz, thanks in part to their appearance on the Little Miss Sunshine sound track. Their raucous but mellifluous take on vintage cabaret music and Gypsy jams, combined with their wanderings through Latin traditions, makes them allies of Gogol Bordello, the Dresden Dolls, and Calexico–all of whom they’ve shared stages with–and their playful devotion to classic underground rock makes them a natural club act (a slot at this year’s Bonnaroo notwithstanding)....

On a blistering Sunday in mid-July, as the athletes at the Gay Games entered their first full day of competition, several hundred people gathered at the Chicago Cultural Center for Faith and Fairness, a program celebrating gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equality in the eyes of God. Sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, it began with a panel comprising a Christian minister, a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, who decried the religious right’s assertion that gay people have chosen fallen lifestyles....

Heritage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fate of these two plays says a lot about the American taste for fake serious theater, the kind that renders a social problem marketable–and inconsequential–by dividing it into entertaining rights and wrongs. Neveu, a well-respected young playwright who wrote Heritage after receiving the Goodman’s Ofner Prize in 2003, does the opposite, whirling thorny issues into such ethical messes it becomes impossible to know where one’s sympathies should lie....

Two years ago Paula Henderson came across a quote from a 1938 Federal Housing Administration manual: “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” She started looking for redlining maps after talking to her daughter, who was writing a dissertation on the history of race relations in a Chicago suburb. When she found one from the 1930s that divided Chicago into color-coded areas, the white neighborhoods were white, and the black ones–where the FHA wouldn’t insure mortgages, according to the map–were filled with black and red....

These symbiotic pranksters–progenitors of a thousand laptop-owning sample freaks, mash-up artists, and pomo manifesteers–just celebrated their 25th anniversary. They’ve remained cunningly below the radar during that time–their infamous early-90s legal battle with U2 and Island Records demonstrated the risk of flying above it without stealth technology–but have never had much of a lapse in productivity. Their latest, It’s All in Your Head FM, is a double-disc collection of live recordings from their current stage show, which they’re bringing to town as part of Chicago Public Radio’s Third Coast International Audio Festival....

Trampin’ (Columbia) is Patti Smith’s first album in four years, and it’s also the best and most consistently powerful one since her 1996 comeback, Gone Again. Whereas Gone Again was a grueling but soaring study–up close and from the inside–of death, loss, and the flight of the individual soul, and a deeply personal statement catalyzed by Smith’s sudden losses of her brother and husband, the centerpiece of Trampin’, the 12-minute “Radio Baghdad,” invokes the protean chaos of her earlier “Radio Ethiopia” to depict an ancient, nearly Atlantean civilization pillaged by a younger and much more recklessly ignorant one for the sake of a petty grudge....

Bill Harris’s piece about bluesman Robert Johnson’s final day is more opera than play: a series of songs, tales, and spoken arias about art, religion, and race relations with little narrative momentum. Harris wants to debunk the myth that Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become an accomplished musician. But the playwright buries his own interesting theory–that a white man devised the story to avoid acknowledging an African-American’s genius–in an overwrought plot that rambles into the subjects of adultery and the slave trade....

By now Ingmar Bergman has concocted many a postscript to his illustrious career. What makes this masterful if sprawling 2003 sequel to Scenes From a Marriage (1973) remarkable is that at the director’s insistence it was shot and is being shown on digital video. This matters because, in spite of Bergman’s consummate skill with his actors (chiefly Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson), he makes no attempt whatever to hide his contempt for the medium apart from its usefulness as a recording device....

Count on Barrel of Monkeys to be clever, funny, and energetic no matter what. For the past four years a rotating cast of its actors has reimagined often bizarre, always hilarious stories they get from young Chicago Public Schools students–simple tales about birthday parties, sibling rivalries, and dance contests and more whimsical ones about adventures in space, on motorcycles, and with dolphins–each joyously presented as if it made perfect sense. For its appearance in the Theatre on the Lake series this inventive company has gathered its strongest members and ratcheted the stage effects up a notch, performing recent favorites (look for Laura Grey’s standout performance on a My First Sony kids’ keyboard) and some classics (the troupe is adding Kraftwerk lighting to “The Dog Was Dead,” a favorite with fans)....

Last week the Pixies kicked off their latest tour with a four-show, two-night stand in Portland, playing sets loaded with B sides, rarities, and deep album cuts they hadn’t performed live in more than a decade. It was a bootlegger’s dream, and Jake Walker and Eric Welsh were there to record every minute. In December the two men teamed up with Chicago multimedia firm Coudal Partners to form a concert-CD company called the Show, and the first client they landed was the Pixies....

Holy holograms! Broadway composer Alan Menken and sci-fi writer Alan Brennert (mis)treat alternative realities in two wacko make-believe tales with questionable resolutions. The Girl Who Was Plugged In celebrates love’s power to triumph over dystopic cybernetic mind swapping. In Her Pilgrim Soul, a literal ghost in the machine defies death by delivering a final message to its spiritual successor. As always, Menken delivers supple songs that trigger love at first hearing....

Bury the Chans: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves Bury the Chains traces the rise and fall and finally the success of the abolitionists in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its primary focus is a handful of players whom Hochschild considers either emblematic or important in the campaign to convince the public of the evils of slavery. We meet lawyer James Stephen, converted to the cause in Barbados after witnessing a trial where four slaves were sentenced to be burned alive; Olaudah Equiano, one of the few Africans to write an account of the Middle Passage; and the best known of the British abolitionists, William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian do-gooder and member of parliament who introduced antislavery legislation almost every year of the 1790s without success....

During the decade she’s lived in East Village, Denise Doppke has seen scores of historic houses come down only to be replaced by massive, aesthetically vapid concrete condo buildings. Doppke owns three rehabbed historic buildings on a block near Division and Damen. She’d like to see the neighborhood retain its picturesque charm, but her worry that it may lose its character is well-founded: According to statistics from Preservation Chicago, over the last eight years more than 217 buildings have been demolished in the one-square-mile area that stretches from Chicago to Division and Damen to Ashland....

I never wanted to like these guys, since they seemed so faux funky: songs that groove but don’t go anywhere, karayzee frat-boy antics, and slap bass galore. But then every DJ and his mom started spinning “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story),” and I caved. Its wobbly disco beat builds to peak after peak, each one different, before the holy-shit tension breaks–more than four minutes in–with an interlude of sentimental ersatz emo that’s like the sun bursting through the clouds....

The nine men and women of the only independent professional choral group in Chicago sing with impeccable intonation and style. Their repertoire is an eclectic mix–ranging from the 16th century to the 21st, from classical works to African-American spirituals–and their final concert of the season, “Eighteen Lips,” pulls together a typical array of pieces, all on the subject of love. They’ll sing Palestrina’s “Pulchra es, amica mea” (“You Are Beautiful, My Love”), an exquisite, serene work by this Renaissance master of intricate counterpoint–one of his rare nearly secular pieces, set to text from the Song of Songs....

The 20th annual Chicago Latino Film Festival, presented by the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, continues Friday through Thursday, April 23 through 29. Film and video screenings will be at the Biograph; Chicago State Univ., 9501 S. King Dr.; Dominican Univ., 7900 W. Division, River Forest; Facets Cinema-theque; Morton College, 3801 S. Central, Cicero; North Park Univ., 3225 W. Foster; Pulaski Park, 1419 W. Blackhawk; Richard J. Daley College, 7500 S....

In September 1939, the month Germany invaded Poland, Sir Michael Tippett began composing A Child of Our Time, his best-known work. This large-scale oratorio was inspired by the horrors of Kristallnacht, when Nazi mobs broke windows of Jewish shops and burned synagogues in retaliation for the murder of a Nazi official by a 17-year-old boy whose family had been forced from their home. That boy is the child of the work’s title, and Tippett’s libretto portrays him as pushed to the edge by the violence and depravity around him....

APRIL Writer and monologuist Jonathan Ames has made a career out of his almost stream-of-consciousness meanderings through the minutiae of life: he’s got several books under his belt, he’s a frequent contributor to Public Radio International’s The Next Big Thing, and his hilarious stories have made him a favorite guest on the Late Show With David Letterman. He’ll appear for the first time in Chicago tonight at 9 for a free reading at Burkhart Studios, 2845 N....

Within two years of earning an MFA from Yale’s drama school in 1981, David Alan Grier had nabbed a Tony nomination and a Venice Film Festival best actor prize for his performance in Robert Altman’s Streamers. After In Living Color unearthed his comic gifts in the early 90s, however, he turned almost exclusively to movie comedies, sitcoms, and stand-up. And like John Leguizamo, he routinely displays the forms’ theatrical potential. His face is a stage in itself, featuring Jim Carrey-like contortions and a supreme command of physical cliches: cocked eyebrows, stop-on-a-dime deadpans, fabricated guffaws....