The sculptures of Eric Dietz look like machinery. He calls them “failed prototypes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In art school at Northern Illinois University, Dietz started reading about the work of Mark Pauline and his San Francisco-based Survival Research Laboratories. “They just take machines and subvert what they’re made for,” he says. “Their machines spit fire. In a half-hour show they wage a battle and destroy themselves....

The press release heralding the opening of the Shark Bar, apparently written by some white-bread tyro who’s never dined south of Chinatown, begins, “Soul food and southern hospitality have found their way to the City of Big Shoulders.” Really. Tell that to Leon or Gladys or Army and Lou–some of the classic soul restaurateurs who have been feeding Chicago for most of the century. Fortunately, the guys who cloned Manhattan’s Shark Bar, one of several upscale soul eateries that draw a cosmopolitan racial mix, are better cooks and restaurateurs than they are fact checkers–and they are genuinely hospitable....

THE HERBALISER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As exemplified by Branford Marsalis’s ham-fisted Buckshot LeFonque project, fusions of hip-hop and jazz often end up pitting the two elements against each other, with flashy solos turning tough rhythms flaccid or canned beats boxing live players into tight corners. But on 1997’s Blow Your Headphones–their second album as the Herbaliser–Jake Wherry and Ollie Teeba hit on a workable ratio, keeping a tight rein on both the turntable trickery and the jazz doodles....

CECIL: HEAD IN THE CLOUDS? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nobody appreciates what I go through on this job. The biggest problem your average columnist deals with is having ticked off some politician. I have to fend off the freaking theoretical physicists. Dave and I had a lengthy exchange via E-mail, which I paraphrase below: Dave: Nonsense. Weight has a precise scientific meaning....

What’s the story with the mysterious hum in Taos, New Mexico? I remember it was a popular subject among screwballs and scientists with nothing better to do in the early 90s, but I haven’t heard much about it since. Is it a seismic phenomenon? Alien signals? Why can only certain people hear it and not others? –Tokamak, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neither Ian nor Jill had heard the hum, but Ian thought his mother had....

Does lipstick contain fish scales? I saw this in a list of fun facts making the rounds by E-mail. What was interesting to me–I got numerous inquiries about this–was that people are still alarmed to discover that consumer products contain (oh, ick!) animal body parts. Gang, one hates to harp on this, but get a grip. Most of you eat hunks of dead animal every day! You wallow in the flesh of critters that once gamboled in the gardenias!...

My grandfather, Philip Ryan, died in November 1924, when I was ten. He was 89. I remember going to visit him when he was sick. He was wrapped in a blanket sitting in his chair. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » People were in the kitchen smoking and eating and drinking. An Irish wake. When we got to the Sag, the Ryans from the farm were there–Philip’s nieces and nephews who lived out that way....

whiteis.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I lived in Chicago for 13 years, and your article on Lakeview’s resistance to a women’s shelter in the community [Neighborhood News, February 20] illustrates all too well what’s happened to the city over the last decade or so. As one of the neighborhood “activists” puts it, this isn’t just about “evil little yuppies concerned about…property values.” No, it’s about intolerance, stereotypes, and prejudice–and, in a very real sense, about conquest....

DAY & TAXI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stateside it remains obscure, but the creative-music scene in Switzerland is very rich–musically and fiscally. With an impressive funding infrastructure, new jazz and experimental and improvised music have flourished for several decades in Bern, Basel, even the ski resort of Lucerne. Saxophonist Christoph Gallio is from the most active metropole, Zurich, where he runs his own label, Percaso Production....

Music Tapes When I was a teenager, my friends and I worshiped Cream–or as they arrogantly liked to call themselves, the Cream, meaning the royalty of England’s blues-rock musicians. We were all learning to play instruments back then, and we honed our chops on endless, shapeless jams of “White Room” and “Sunshine of Your Love.” We played rock ‘n’ roll for the same reasons teenage boys have always played it: to expend our limitless aggression, to burnish our fragile egos, and most of all, to get girls....

Life in the Fest Lane Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Jansen, who owned the now-defunct nightclub Avalon, M.O.B.fest actually grew out of meetings he and George Sarikos, an entertainment attorney, had last fall with Leo Lastre, executive director of CNMF. He says Lastre approached them hoping they could help him find more support from the Chicago music community, particularly its clubs. Lounge Ax, one of the best-respected alternative venues in town, has never participated in Lastre’s event, while some participating clubs have been less than enthusiastic about risking a weekend’s income on bands they might not have chosen to book on their own....

Local Release Roundup Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JEREMY BOYLE Songs From the Guitar Solos (Southern) On his solo debut, Joan of Arc keyboardist Boyle manipulates hard-rock guitar wanking by Kiss, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix–a great idea, but the resulting ambient soundscapes are so amorphous the source material might as easily have been chirping crickets or humming refrigerators....

Lead Stories In October in Fort Worth, Jimmy Watkins, 34, got only four months in jail for killing his wife, whom he caught flagrante delicto with her lover; the jury accepted his defense of “sudden passion” even though he fired one shot, then went out for a few minutes before returning to finish her off. Also in October Ontario’s court of appeals sentenced Michael Nikkanen to probation for rape, in part so he could keep attending his son’s hockey games....

For 36 years, civil war raged in Guatemala, killing as many as 200,000 men, women, and children. Over the last decade, mass unmarked graves have been discovered, laying bare the atrocities of the 1980s. While the government claimed armed rebels were responsible, crimes committed by military and paramilitary groups had long gone unreported. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Daniel Hernandez, an artist and photojournalist who’s worked for Reuters and the Associated Press, volunteered to help identify the remains of thousands now being exhumed....

“While you might say of some people in America today that they are their jobs, with the people that I met in mobile homes, they are their homes,” Frimmel Smith says, describing the subjects of her documentary project on mobile homes and their owners. “Kingston Blemiss, a stockbroker in Mississippi, has the most beautiful white double-wide house flying the American flag–he looks like Mr. Solid Citizen. I first noticed the home of David Reed in Colorado because it had seven antique cars out in front....

Sabine Fabie brought a bright flash to Chicago in the five years she performed here, through her partnership with Mark Schulze and with Loop Troop. But the frantic pace and the relentless search for new ideas that are part of a performer’s life became too much and she burned out. After a divorce, Fabie moved to New York and became a Starbucks barista. But she didn’t find a place in the dance world there and started traveling–through the United States, Mexico, and Europe–ending up at her parents’ home in Vienna....

I am a 38-year-old male who loves to have relationships and hot sex with women over 50–way over 50. I had the best sex of my life with a 71-year-old widow several years ago, so the older the better is my motto! Are there any organizations or clubs I can join that would assist me in my search for the ultimate older woman of my dreams? I am a former bodybuilder, and I still have a “hot and tight” body....

“Losing it is as good as having it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Looking back on the full arc of Jordan’s basketball life (let’s dismiss any thoughts of a possible comeback, shall we?–they’ll only be an aggravation), what strikes me again is the pure mythos of it. Not that Jordan is a deity deserving of worship and adoration–the sports world, thank goodness, has matured beyond that childish level, even if it does remain tied to the related idea that athletes must be role models–but when one steps back from his story for a moment, there is a mythical aspect to it that even a Joseph Campbell might gawk at....

BIO RITMO 11/7, DOUBLE DOOR This unusual amalgam is based in Richmond, Virginia–hardly a mecca for Afro-Caribbean music, but a good meeting place for its members, who hail from as far north as Jersey City and as far south as Cuba. The light but lively merengues, bombas, and charangas on its new Salsa Galactica (Permanent) are mostly the work of Cuban Symphony veteran Rene Herrera, who also manages to maintain discipline in a small army of musicians that includes a former boxer and a former member of Gwar....

N-I-G-G-E-R. I’ll never forget the first time I accidentally used that word in mixed company. It was 20 years ago at the University of Missouri, and I was engaged in lighthearted chitchat with Kent, my white roommate, when I casually called him a “nigger.” “But you just called me a nigger,” he replied. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There have been times in my life when I’ve felt very comfortable using the word, but I’ve also struggled with its usage....