The Mayor’s Office of Special Events presents the city’s seventh annual Great Chicago Places and Spaces festival, a weekend celebration of local architecture and design, offering more than 150 free tours by foot, bus, el, trolley, or boat, all led by architects, docents, and other aficionados. Seats for Friday’s “Great Chicago Conversations” program are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Tours take place on Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22, rain or shine....

What little exposure Holy Fuck has gotten in the U.S. came during stints backing avant-rapper Beans, but at home in Toronto this dance cabal is an all-star team. You could call them a jam band, but it’d be more accurate to say they’re an electro group that uses real instruments and makes it up as they go along. The fluid lineup–as many as six dudes total–sometimes features two drummers, and everybody else has their hands full with synths, bass, guitars, samplers, tape machines, effects pedals, and even a couple noninstruments (the band imitates the sound of turntable scratching with a 35-millimeter film synchronizer)....

Nellie McKay, who just turned 20, is apparently one of those freakishly sheltered children, native mostly to Manhattan, who reach voting age with little awareness of and even less affinity for the mass culture of their generation. But while her influences may be unfashionable among her contemporaries, there are plenty of adults willing to pat the head of any self-consciously precocious musical-theater brat who combines the facile, satiric topicality of Tom Lehrer with the effete harmonies of Manhattan Transfer....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In an early-morning gun battle in June at Pittsburgh’s Ferris Court housing complex, two undercover officers and a shooting suspect fired at least 103 rounds at one another but missed every single time; no bystanders were hit either. And in March Regina Jones-Peoples of Youngstown, Ohio, was shot 18 times at close range in the neck, breast, abdomen, and legs (allegedly by her estranged husband), after which she drove herself to the hospital; she was later listed in stable condition....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week in the paper I wrote about Oriana Kruszewski a one-woman Johnny Asian-pear-seed who grows over 20 varieties of the fruit in her Skokie backyard. Unsurprisingly I wound up with quite a few pears that outlasted the research phase of the story. I was surprised to learn that the sweet and delicate Korean Giants I got from Oriana made good cooking pears....

The California big band known as the RABBINICAL SCHOOL DROPOUTS actually does seem to play at a lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs, which is hard to square with their sound. Recalling Zappa at his giddiest and least scatological, the Dropouts seem to have developed a klezmerist form of Sun Ra worship, decked out in kabbalah references and bad Yiddish puns. Vehicles Behind Comets (Ethnic Warrior), released last year, takes their irreverent Semitic space fusion well past the asteroid belt: it’s Exodus as Star Trek, with manna in the form of Guru Guru records....

People outside Chicago tend to have two misconceptions about our city and its rap music. One is that the only good Chicago hip-hop comes out of New York. Though Lupe and Rhymefest are still in the neighborhood, Kanye and Common–our chief representatives as far as the mainstream market’s concerned–are Chicagoans on disc alone. The other is that hip-hop in Chicago is all about conscious lyrics, the five elements, and floppy knit hats....

As David Kodeski–the host of Live Bait’s “Solo Sampler”–said last weekend, there was a time not long ago when you could swing a dead cat in Chicago and hit several monologuists. Those days are gone, but Live Bait artistic director Sharon Evans keeps the solo fires burning every summer with the Fillet of Solo Festival. The event is scaled back this year, running only three weeks (of which two remain) and featuring only one evening-length monologue, Edward Thomas-Herrera’s Fun While It Lasted....

In his introduction to the Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Greil Marcus famously asserted that “the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.” The New York band the Hold Steady presents a similar paradox: one of the smartest and most literate rock bands going writes almost nothing but songs about getting fucked up. On the 2004 debut Almost Killed Me front man Craig Finn (late of Lifter Puller) offered mordantly witty vignettes about the downwardly mobile; his songs were driven by MOR riff rock replete with unabashed guitar soloing, and he sang in a logorrheic, Springsteen-like drawl that managed to sound both jaded and impassioned....

This remount of Matt Larsen’s charming 40-minute kiddie musical remains a labor of love filled with lots of learning–and laughs. The Paper Spaceship puts the issue of personal size into a cosmic perspective as the undersized Wendy (a plucky Molly Hale) gets help from two engaging aliens; residents of a flat world, they arrive as a very special delivery, having mailed themselves to the post office where Wendy’s dad works. With help from a willing audience, Wendy protects her two-dimensional buddies from both neighborhood bullies and premature death by trash disposal....

Friday 7 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JANA HUNTER For better and worse, Texan Jana Hunter has been pegged as a freak-folk protege: her first solo release was a split 12-inch with Devendra Banhart, and she was the first artist signed to Gnomonsong, the imprint run by Banhart and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic. While the cracked, homemade feel of her full-length debut, Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom, its whispery tunes swimming in ambient noise and reverb, is enough to warrant the tag, in other ways the record defies expectations....

With its trees and drinking fountain the little triangle of land at the corner of Milwaukee and Augusta certainly looks like a park. The nearby residents who for years have sat in the shade of those trees assume it’s a park. And nobody’s paid any taxes on the land for years–the county lists it as tax-exempt, just as if it were a park. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McDonald repeatedly called the local alderman, the 27th Ward’s Walter Burnett....

This 1980 pastiche of period vaudeville routines, popular songs, and excerpts from speeches provides an entertaining history lesson on America between the Civil War and the Roaring 20s. Five characters represent the era’s archetypes: three are based on historical figures Teddy Roosevelt, socialist Emma Goldman, and Ziegfeld Follies star Anna Held while two are more generic, an immigrant who suggests Charlie Chaplin and an African-American domestic. The ensemble members blend superbly, accompanied by a lively quintet in a gazebo under a starry sky playing sentimental standards and Scott Joplin rags....

Rock, Pop, Etc. CRAIG CHAQUICO Sun 5/23, 7 PM, McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, Park & Fawell, Glen Ellyn. 630-942-4000. GAP BAND, ROSE ROYCE, MORRIS DAY & THE TIME, SOS BAND Fri 5/21, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-263-1138 or 312-902-1500. GINA KNIGHT ORCHESTRA FEATURING THE JETS Sun 5/30, 7:30 PM, Willowbrook Ballroom, 8900 S. Archer, Willow Springs. 708-839-1000. CATHY RICHARDSON BAND, UNDERWATER PEOPLE, COUNTRY SKY BAND perform at “Play the Field” (benefits the Field Museum)....

“Hey look!” said my friend Joe from the backseat of my car. “It’s 4:20.” The four of us had just lit a joint, and the Museum of Holography closed at five. Our hostess came into focus as we tramped up the stairs and into a small gallery and gift shop: a hobbitlike elderly woman with gray hair in a perfectly curled-under bowl cut, small, dark eyes, and tiny, smoke-colored rectangular frames perched at the end of her nose....

This festival of work by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 3, through Thursday, August 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Following is the schedule for August 3 through 9; a complete festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And Then Came Love Tailored for Vanessa Williams, this video has a contemporary subject (resolutely single mothers) but feels more like Doris Day’s farcical 60s comedies about independent career women who remain unfulfilled until they meet Mr....

On Tangled in the Pines (Dualtone), the first full-length from BR549 in three years, Chuck Mead sounds worn-out, snakebit, and altogether unlike the front man of what was once by reputation the most irrepressible good-time bar band in Nashville. Given the group’s history it’s hard to blame him. Having established themselves in Music City’s Lower Broadway scene in the mid-90s, the resolutely old-school five-piece signed with Arista/Nashville, which touted them as country’s saviors; they made a few well-reviewed albums before being dropped when the label was absorbed by RCA in 2000....

13 (Tzameti) An English-language remake of this French thriller is already in development. But the film recycles so much I’d be surprised if it doesn’t get recycled in turn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fight Club has been cited as one of the key models for Gela Babluani’s 13 (Tzameti), but Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) seems far more relevant, at least for its first half....

This past July 23-year-old Chu-Fang Huang, who’d already won numerous smaller prizes, was a finalist in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and in August she took first place in the Cleveland International. Huang, who was born in China but has lived in the U.S. since 1998, is a graduate of the Curtis Institute and a master’s candidate at the Juilliard School, and she’ll make her Chicago debut this week in a recital at Music in the Loft, which is dedicated to promoting young musicians and composers....

If Chicago is the citadel of modern architecture, Notre Dame’s School of Architecture must see itself as the government in exile, the rebel stronghold mustering its resources to assault any sign of modernism’s dominance. Since 2003 it’s been handing out the annual Richard H. Driehaus Prize, named for the Chicago investment manager who bankrolls the annual $100,000 award, to architects it considers major contributors to traditional and classical architecture. Best of Chicago voting is live now....