Yo La Tengo maintain such a steady calm on their 12th album, Summer Sun (Matador), that to unforgiving ears they might sound comatose. Ballads are whispered and float by like leaves on a lazy river. But to me this seems like the flip side of Ira Kaplan’s notorious onstage freak-outs on guitar (he bobs like a Dippy Bird toy) or cheap Ace Tone organ. There he loses himself in a deafening drone, here in quiet tranquility, but in both cases the music seems to take him outside of himself....

Passionate about their instruments and musical ideas from many cultures and genres, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Brazilian guitarists Sergio and Odair Assad were destined to work together. They first did so in the late 90s on the best-selling Grammy winner Soul of the Tango, a compilation of works by Astor Piazzolla. The Assad brothers were students of a disciple of Andres Segovia before they started roaming the musical map; Piazzolla wrote Tango Suite for them, and Terry Riley and others have added to their repertoire, which is thick with their own arrangements of everything from Baroque harpsichord pieces to Gershwin....

Brainy and surreal, the evening-length September September has a homemade look and sound. No one seems to care if unison movement is truly in unison, and the dancers often seem to be flung around by outside forces. A recording of clippity-clop noises at first synchronizes with the four performers’ steps–but when they shift into a soft-shoe routine, the clippity-clopping continues. What makes this project by the Seattle-based 33 Fainting Spells so arch is its goofy, almost conspiratorial self-conscious artificiality....

Chicago’s annual literary festival continues through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, tours, and children’s activities at bookstores, public libraries, and other venues. Some events feature the city’s “One Book, One Chicago” selection, Tim O’Brien’s National Book Award-winning novel The Things They Carried. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www....

Let’s see–they have fundamentalists, but they need rubble. Roosevelt University political science professor Paul Green, reflecting on the difficulties of selling regional governance in the Chicago suburbs, at a meeting of the Campaign for Sensible Growth on December 7: “It’s a mini-Afghanistan out there, with tribal leaders.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you sick....

The body count in Teatro Bastardo’s improvised show is high, but the performers are more focused on getting laughs than on giving us chills. Using a title suggested by the audience, they spoof the mayhem and melodrama of 1930s monster movies by fictional director Brunst. On the night I attended, “The Claw” was the evening’s inspiration, and a fez-wearing musicologist feverish about his work began a ruthless rampage in Ohio. His motives were muddy, but director Joe Janes’s cast wasn’t much concerned with straightforward storytelling anyway....

“I’m going to teach you how to dance,” a short black man in baggy pants and braids snarled in a manner that he clearly thought I’d interpret as sexy. In fact this was beyond normal niceness–it was special treatment. When my friends and I hijacked some people’s VIP lounge seats and chugged almost a whole bottle of champagne they’d bought, no one said anything to us. It seems that in any sort of civil company these days, being overly kind to the minority is prioritized....

Singer and guitarist David Kilgour has been zigzagging between spontaneity and polish at least since 1981, when his band the Clean–an on-again, off-again group that then consisted of his drummer brother, Hamish, and bassist Robert Scott–broke into the top 20 in their native New Zealand with their debut single, “Tally Ho!” The Clean spent 50 dollars recording that jittery shotgun marriage of Beach Boys effervescence and Velvet Underground grit, cramming everything onto eight tracks in a single day, and on their 2001 album, Getaway (Merge), Kilgour and company are still cleaving to the principle summed up by the title of one of their first songs, “Anything Could Happen”–the disc veers from lighthearted off-the-cuff pop and woozy psychedelia to lazy, written-in-their-sleep instrumentals....

Under the leadership of guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, the Super Rail Band revolutionized Malian music in the 70s, incorporating electric instruments and nurturing future stars such as Salif Keita and Mory Kante, but by the mid-90s its pioneering fusions had grown stale, and younger Malians considered it a nostalgia act. So Tounkara began to strip away the slick horns and generic keyboards that bogged down the arrangements, creating a tauter sound that emphasized strong singing, circular grooves, and, most important, his own guitar....

HAKIM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even if you’ve never heard of Egyptian singer Hakim, you only need to glance at his latest CD, Yaho (Mondo Melodia/Ark 21), to realize he’s a pop star to his core: in one of the booklet photos he raises his fist triumphantly in front of a jubilant throng, and in another he handles a mike with Tom Jones flair....

James C. Petrillo’s moniker has been on the Grant Park bandshell since 1976, when Mayor Richard J. Daley put it there, and the Petrillo family has been lobbying to get it transferred to the Frank Gehry confection that’s slated to go up in Millennium Park. Two years ago Petrillo’s granddaughter Donna De Rosa told the Reader her grandfather had earned the honor as a Park District commissioner, the originator of the Grant Park concerts, and one of the nation’s most prominent labor leaders....

Now in its 64th year, Cuba’s mighty Orquesta Aragon is possibly the world’s oldest dance band. Throughout its career the group has kept itself vital by tweaking but never fully abandoning its traditional sound. Formed in 1939, it took more than a decade–and the addition of violinist Rafael Lay, who replaced group founder Orestes Aragon Cantero in 1948–to make its name as the island’s premier practitioner of charanga, a stately dance style distinguished by a front line of violins and flute....

Garry Winogrand American art tends to celebrate movement over stasis, the spontaneous over the preconceived. The soaring verses of Walt Whitman, the wildly energetic scores of Charles Ives, the expansive lines of Jackson Pollock, the unpredictable rhythms of Stan Brakhage’s films–all evidence a culture freeing itself from the traditions of European art, fueled by the energy that also undergirded American expansion. These artists’ photographic counterpart is Garry Winogrand. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The most provocative works in this 25-person group show are by LA screenwriter and conceptual artist Sean Sorensen. He’s fashioned what looks like a response to the post-9/11 question “Why do they hate us?”: a line of burkas made of fabric covered with, among other things, U.S. currency, the American flag, and the logos of Shell, Starbucks, and the Chicago Cubs. Acknowledging the ambivalent reception American pop culture gets abroad–and of how much the export of irony is resisted by foreign fundamentalists–Sorensen flouts Muslim propriety by covering one burka with voluptuous Marilyn Monroes....

A couple of months ago you invited women to send in cunnilingus tips for straight guys. We’re still waiting for that column, Dan. What gives? Didn’t any women send in tips? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t get me wrong, ladies. I am all for cunnilingus. Women deserve it, and straight men, in my opinion, are obligated to provide it. But still. I’m as pro cunnilingus as a gay man can get....

Forty miles south of the Loop, in the small town of Manteno, sit the remnants of one of the largest state mental facilities in the nation. Most of the redbrick cottages are crumbling, their windows blocked with plywood, and the sprawling hospital wards are surrounded by weeds. The large front windows of the Singer Building, which once housed the pharmacy and other medical services, were smashed long ago. All that’s left of the three-story power station is a pile of bricks topped by a huge yellow crane....

Two abortions are depicted onstage in this send-up of evangelical Christian haunted houses that use scenes of sinners in hell to scare visitors into “piety.” One abortion is performed by a rabid stem-cell addict who bites into a pregnant woman’s abdomen in order to devour her fetus. In the other a woman aborts the Christ child, accidentally screwing up the timing of the Rapture and causing a Super Soaker full of stage blood to shoot from her crotch....

I wanted to respond to your column about the worst Catholic saint, an oxymoron if there ever was one. In this column you depart from your high standards and trot out that threadbare, tendentious canard that charges Pope Pius XI and Pius XII with anti-Semitism. To bolster your argument, you refer to John Cornwell’s 1999 book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Many Jewish leaders who were contemporaries of Pius XII expressed their gratitude for Pius’s help in saving many Jews in Italy and other countries....

On a cool, sunny day last July, Audrey Wright and Sharon White arrived in Englewood to tour the building that would house the business of their dreams. They envisioned a garment factory that would teach industrial trades and provide up to 100 jobs for residents of this high-unemployment neighborhood. They had government and civilian contracts. They had the support of 15th Ward alderman Theodore Thomas. They’d found a city-owned building that was perfect for their needs, and the city was eager to sell it to them at a good price....

The sad tale of Traci Lords includes rape at ten, porno work at 15, domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, a decade’s worth of trouble with the FBI, a slightly embarrassing (save for her work with John Waters) mainstream acting career, and a totally embarrassing stint in techno. Yet critics of her recently published memoir, Underneath It All, can barely stifle their yawns, declaring her story nothing special by today’s standards....