About Face Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art team up for a showcase of new gay- and lesbian-themed works in various stages of development. Offerings range from workshop productions to readings and discussions, as shown in the schedule below. The festival runs through March 16 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Ticket prices for individual programs are given below; “all-access” passes cost $35. For more information and reservations, call 312-397-4010....

It was 1961, and architect Bertrand Goldberg was declaring his vision for Chicago’s downtown. He told a newspaper, “An error in thinking has led Americans to turn our downtown city areas into canyons of glass and steel, teeming with office workers during weekdays but deserted nights and weekends.” Government-backed suburbia, he said, was the rational outcome of America’s outmoded notions about what cities should be and do. Downtown Chicago is no longer the off-hours ghost town it once was; in parts of the Loop you could say that mixed-use has made strong inroads....

Hedwig Dances artistic director Jan Bartoszek has a sure feel for psychological truths, apparent in her two pieces on the company’s spring program, “In the Absence of Restraint.” The I Depend on Tango, first performed in 1989, uses large rag dolls as emotionally ambivalent representatives of the dependency produced by love, while the more recent duet After the Fall, Desire shows a man and woman at first totally involved in something outside themselves–the fruit that will give them knowledge–then in themselves, and finally in each other....

JOHN JACKSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One odd effect of the acoustic blues revival of the late 50s and early 60s was a kind of generational blurring–Pink Anderson was almost a quarter century older than John Jackson, but they hit the folk festival stages around the same time. Anderson, who had recorded blues and medicine-show songs with partner Blind Simmie Dooley as early as 1928, then went undocumented for more than 20 years, only enjoyed the newfound spotlight for a brief while; in 1964, after making a handful of recordings (including Carolina Blues Man, Medicine Show Man, Ballad & Folksinger, and a split LP with Reverend Gary Davis, Gospel, Blues and Street Songs, all reissued on CD in the 90s by Original Blues Classics), he was put out of commission by a stroke....

Jammin’ With Pops Shows featuring early-20th-century African-American music–blues, jazz, and swing–almost can’t help being great. They also can’t help reminding us of the continuing impact of racial divisions on our society. If not for “urban renewal” projects on the south side, audiences might still be going there to hear brand-new music in those traditions. But the clubs our hipster grandparents frequented are long gone. And though it’s easy to giggle at the idea of the North Shore as a repository of black culture, in fact the efforts of theaters like Apple Tree and Northlight help keep the music alive....

When this Vancouver sextet released its debut album, Mass Romantic (Mint), at the tail end of 2000 it was widely referred to as a supergroup–something of a stretch given that the members were culled from Canadian indie-rock outfits like Zumpano and Destroyer. (Singer Neko Case is probably the most famous of the lot, and one alt-country chanteuse does not a supergroup make.) But for all the frothy, hook-laden power of Daniel Bejar and Carl Newman’s songs, the album did in fact seem like the product of an ad hoc conglomeration of talent....

Nick Tosches’s Mysterious Minstrel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tosches calls his new book, Where Dead Voices Gather (published by Little, Brown), a “synthesis of all that I have written regarding Emmett Miller, and of all that I have learned regarding Emmett Miller.” But aside from positively ascertaining dates of birth and death for the singer, the 300-page book adds little of significance to the available biographical information....

“Angels come in here,” says Antoinette Alcazar, owner of the Edgewater coffee shop Last Kiss Cafe. “By angels, I mean people who are spiritual beings.” As if to illustrate her point, one of her regulars comes through the door holding a tiny plant she’s protecting from the cold. Another customer, an art therapist, donated the pastels that dot the cafe’s tables so patrons can sketch spontaneously. “For me, art is healing,” says Alcazar....

In the early 60s Scott LaFaro raised the bar for jazz bass with lines so nimble they seemed better suited to a horn, but most players who’ve aspired to match his speed have had to sacrifice tone to get it: the sheer size of the instrument makes it especially difficult to shape each note fully if you’re dusting the strings en route to the next one. Rufus Reid is one of those rare few who can have it both ways....

HISSYFITS 8/17, CONGRESS THEATER This playful New York trio once backed Ronnie Spector at Joey Ramone’s birthday party–they’re a girl group with guts, sorta like the Bangles when they were still just the Bangs. Their new full-length, Letters From Frank (Top Quality Rock and Roll), will rot your teeth before it kicks them in–wee girl voices trill sugary harmonies over distorted power chords even in tunes with titles like “Lock and Load....

Bill Gilmore sold his share of B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted in 1998, moved to Evanston, and started looking for a site there that would make a good club. It took longer than he anticipated to find one. “Evanston was dry until the mid-70s,” Gilmore says. “There weren’t any old bars to take over.” In the meantime, among other gigs, he sold wine at Binny’s Beverage Depot, learning more about what had been an avocation....

In January, South Asia scholar Steven Poulos and several colleagues were in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where they had an appointment to meet U.S. ambassador Mary Ann Peters. The Bush administration was at the time ramping up efforts to alter negative perceptions of America throughout the Muslim world. The government-funded Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language music-and-news station, had hit Middle Eastern airwaves in March 2002, positioned as a hipper version of the Voice of America, and the State Department had launched a $15 million ad campaign in Islamic countries depicting Muslim Americans leading contented, Westernized lives....

It’s not unusual for a DJ to walk into a club planning to play one sort of thing only to have some bigwig order him, midperformance, to play something else. That practice is unheard-of at Play, an experimental dance music series held every Monday at Danny’s Tavern, a low-key house-turned-bar on Dickens just east of Damen. Organizers Bob Davies (who performs electronic music under the name Pal:ndrom and DJs as simply Bob) and Ray Rodriguez (aka DJ Ray_Rod) give their guests the freedom to play whatever they want, even if it’s nothing like what they’re known for....

Rick Levine knows a good business idea when he hears it. Back in 1986, when Levine was box-office manager for Wisdom Bridge Theatre, coworker Emily Detmer asked him a question that set his entrepreneurial heartstrings a-twanging: “How come Chicago doesn’t have a theatrical bookstore?” Six months later, after surveying a slew of actors, writing a business plan, and learning that bankers will not “loan you money to sell things to people with no money,” Levine and Detmer opened Act I Bookstore at 2633 N....

Fundamentalists might balk at Lauren Weinstein’s depiction of Moses as a googly-eyed, bulbous-nosed being descending from the heavens in a swirl of multicolored crayon to deliver the Ten Commandments unto the Israelites with a cry of “Hey, buddies!” But such interpretative liberties are central to the mission of the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible. The year-old collaborative project, spearheaded by members of the Brooklyn-based band Flaming Fire, intends to illustrate all 36,665 verses of the King James Bible plus sundry Catholic Apocrypha....

In order to be cool in high school, according to BloodHag lead singer J.B. Stratton, “you had to ignore everything and not read.” That didn’t sit right with him, and in 1995 he and a friend, J.M. McNulty, formed BloodHag, a self-proclaimed “edu-core” band that mixes the cheesiest aspects of speed, grind, and death metal with Reading Rainbow-style advocacy. Wearing crisp white button-down shirts, black ties, thick glasses, and red Converse sneakers, the quartet of thirtysomethings throws books at the audience while ripping off Sepultura and Brujeria licks and growling like Dobermans....

Friday 5/16 – Thursday 5/22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the city’s weekend-long Great Chicago Places and Spaces architecture festival was launched five years ago it featured just under 50 tours. This time around there are 155, many of which will be led by architects and designers; they range from tomorrow’s tour of the new UBS Tower at One North Wacker with project designer and developer Drew Nieman (May 17 at 2 PM) to a look at the legacy of Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago (May 18 at 9:30 AM)....

The recently, lamentably deceased Allen Walker Read–etymologist, lexicographer, and author of an unexpurgated compendium of 1920s bathroom graffiti–once said: “That anyone should pass up the well-established colloquial words of the language and have recourse to the Latin ‘defecate,’ ‘urinate,’ and ‘have sexual intercourse,’ is indicative of grave mental health.” Listening to .wav files of the calls on the Lucky Pierre Web site (www.luckypierre.org) it’s apparent that some callers have stumbled onto the Swearline blind–“I don’t know what the fuck all this fuckin’ swear shit is,” said one, “but I just lost my job and I’m feeling shitty so I thought I’d give just give you a fuckin’ thing or two....

Fiddler on the Roof, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre. The 1965 Stein-Harnick-Bock musical offers a generous, Tony-laden, three-hour tribute to a lost world. But what stands out in this touring production, last here in December 2000, isn’t the folk wisdom of Tevye, a tradition-minded milkman and father of five. It isn’t even his comic confrontations with threatened change. It’s the way the dances mark every important turning point in the tale....

Jason Meyer’s captivating prints and sculptures at Unit B take a distanced, only faintly ironic approach to technology. To make the prints he transferred xeroxed photos of the moon and lunar astronauts to plywood panels, then covered them with wax–which adds a sensual, floating quality to the grid of photocopied pages. Astronaut 3 shows a lone spaceman and the reflection in his visor; Moon 1 is a large photomap with texts that identify seas and craters....