Here’s what happens when a brainy guitarist with a predilection for abstract composition and dry free improv forms a rock band. Nathaniel Braddock started Ancient Greeks in 1998; this winter they finally released an album that hints at a workable balance between self-consciously cerebral and melodically hedonistic. The songs on the quartet’s Flameshovel debut, The Song Is You, boast multistylistic ambitions: jazzy chords, African pop voicings, electronic burbles, and prog-rock rhythms all jostle for position....

Atalee Judy’s Logotype vs2.1 is a big, big dance. Seeing it in its entirety the way I did at a rehearsal last weekend–as opposed to catching one or two of its seven sections on this or that occasion–makes this fact abundantly clear. It’s big because it’s got so much in it: live music, recorded music, projected videos throughout the 70-minute piece, and Judy’s trademark “bodyslam” movement–dancing so violent and raw it raises the hairs on your neck....

Jennifer Reeder, who burst onto the art scene in the mid-90s playing White Trash Girl in her aggressive video series of that name, has taken a contemplative turn in her work, even while preserving the sense of displacement that marked her debut. In the best of these four pieces, The Ex-Boyfriend and Other Impossible Pleasures (2002), austere images that evoke solitude–a view of a highway through a windshield, a zoom away from an out-of-focus male head–are interspersed with rolling titles recounting a wistful fantasy about an ex-boyfriend having great sex with someone else....

We’re authentic, buy our stuff. Sociologist David Grazian in his new book, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs: “Like many of the city’s blues bars, B.L.U.E.S. offers the strange atmospherics of a dingy, down-home tavern colonized by an airport gift shop.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Labor markets in New York and Los Angeles recovered from 9/11 by late Spring of 2002, while Chicago has yet to recover,” according to a March 26 press release describing a new report by urbanologist Pierre deVise....

In today’s climate, it seems odd that there isn’t a trace of political or social commentary in Compagnie Kafig’s Dix Versions. After all, this nine-member French hip-hop troupe draws on Arabic culture and reportedly infuses its dances “with themes of street life and social protest.” But this 70-minute work is–well, a little silly. On the other hand, as artistic director Mourad Merzouki puts it, we might need “a world of beauty…that eludes racial, political, and social cliches....

JP Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marc Bortz and Jason Paskewitz have just opened JP CHICAGO, a cozy bistro next door to their first joint venture, Sangria Restaurant and Tapas Bar. The space, once a motorcycle repair shop, has a huge, weathered Citroen sign over the bar, red leather banquettes, sandblasted ceilings, old New York subway tiles lining the walls, and a pleasant worn-in feeling....

Live Bait Theater’s eighth annual showcase of one-person performances features old and new work by a slew of fringe artists. The fest runs through August 30 at Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark; performances take place in the theater’s Bucket space. Tickets are $10 per show; a festival pass to all shows costs $30. Call 773-871-1212 for reservations (tickets are also available online at www.ticketweb.com); check www.livebaittheater.org for more information....

From Page to Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The five-day festival includes 20 acts–many of whom have played the Bottle before, some of whom are making their Chicago premieres. United only by its performers’ collective history of avoiding orthodoxy and pushing boundaries, the roster shows off the ambitious range of genres both the magazine and the club have promoted: the vanguard electronica and techno of Adult....

Through December the Gene Siskel Film Center celebrates peace on earth and goodwill toward men with a series of occult horror films. Religious people may find this perverse, but look at it this way: they’re the only nonsecular holiday movies you’re likely to see all month. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The series kicks off with a pair of little-known but seriously creepy British features from Tigon Films, a pretender to the Hammer Films throne in the late 60s and early 70s....

The Hodja is Turkey’s variation on the archetypal trickster–and in this Tireswing Theatre children’s show, he “borrows” donkeys, sweet-talks his way out of debt, and wins the sultan’s approval by besting a French visitor in a contest of wits. Adapter-director Andrew Lines also depicts the Hodja as a father shamed by his daughter’s decision to venture out on her own rather than marry: the play imparts an Americanized feminist message but never strays far from the traditional idea that family is what makes us strong....

A few music writers, terminally sick of boy bands and underage dance-pop juggernauts, have leapt to declare Pink the first sign of a changing of the guard in the teen-pop regime. I’m not so sure, if only because Pink (aka 22-year-old Philadephian Alecia Moore) has never seemed all that teen-pop to me: despite her youth and her way with a hook, her debut, 2000’s Can’t Take Me Home, is closer to straight-up R & B than to Britney and ‘N Sync’s made-in-Sweden fluff....

Quick Takes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ina Pinkney is back after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, and she’s landed in the Randolph Street market district with the sprightly and eponymous ina’s. Brick walls are brightened with salmon trim and aqua wainscoting, and each table is topped with white butcher paper and a pair of wacky salt and pepper shakers from her eclectic collection. Plenty of windows bring in natural light....

In a recent column you mentioned that three lesbian friends had run off with men. “One…is married to a man,” you wrote, “another is living with a man, and the third is a man.” You observed that none of your gay male friends had run off with women, and asked, “What is it about being a dyke that’s so easily shrugged off?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think the same phenomenon is at work among female human primates....

Flawlessly inaugurating the 29-year-old Black Ensemble Theater’s new “season of women,” Jackie Taylor’s musical tribute to four sisters, two granddaughters, and the Chicago matriarch who keeps them all together is a superb saga of survival. This sweet show–which includes gorgeous gospel classics as well as six new rousers written by Taylor–makes a splendid showcase for its seven powerhouse talents. Jimmy Tillman’s musical direction, buttressed by a sterling seven-person combo, is no less heavenly than the material....

MARK KOZELEK 12/5, SCHUBAS Much of Mark Kozelek’s work outside the Red House Painters has taken the form of homage, whether to AC/DC (whose songs he’s rendered melodic on two solo releases) or to John Denver (a tribute album to whom he compiled and played on). This tendency is in full force on Ghosts of the Great Highway (Jetset), the debut from his new band, Sun Kil Moon: “Glenn Tipton” works a discussion of the Judas Priest guitarist (and his bandmate K....

The four writer-performers in BoyGirlBoyGirl, Susan McLaughlin Karp, David Kodeski, Stephanie Shaw, and Edward Thomas-Herrera, do what nearly every monologuist does these days: they tell personal stories with loads of ironic humor and occasional emotional poignance. Though this is the last event in the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, these aren’t the convention-defying artists who tend to populate it. But their unadorned performances somehow elucidate myriad nuances in the writing. The four create their pieces by riffing off some published text, and for this, their second show, it’s a definitive cookbook, The Fine Art of Italian Cooking....

William Wyler turns Henry James’s Washington Square into a visually concise chamber drama (1949) that starkly renders the characters’ cruelty and ambiguous motives. Adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from their stage play, it follows the battle of wills between a homely spinster (Olivia de Havilland); her selfish and condescending father, who can’t forgive her lack of grace (Ralph Richardson); and the dandyish suitor who might be after her fortune (Montgomery Clift)....

The day after Thanksgiving, some young progressive types whiled away the hours in Wal-Marts across America, slowly pushing empty carts through the aisles. The idea was to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, an antiholiday invented by the Vancouver-based Media Foundation in the early 90s that takes place on what’s traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year. “As an action of resistance,” notes the Northeastern Pennsylvania Whirl-Mart Web site, meandering through a superstore “utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle....

Winning Isn’t Anything But then Southtown news columnist Phil Kadner and sports columnist Phil Arvia told their editor, Mike Waters, it was a bad idea. The ad would be read as prowar. It would compromise the objectivity of any reporters who signed it, make it harder for them to cover antiwar activities. If some reporters signed, readers might question the patriotism of the ones who didn’t. Waters decided he agreed with them....

Yoshihide Otomo is adventurous even by the standards of Japan’s experimental music scene, of which he’s been a leading light for more than two decades. Inspired by British free-improv pioneer Derek Bailey, he studied guitar in the late 70s with Masayuki Takayanagi, who improvised with the volume and power of the most brutal heavy metal. In the mid-80s two influences from New York further altered the trajectory of his experimentation: one was saxophonist-composer John Zorn, then spending time in Japan; the other was hip-hop....