The Chicago Cantonese Amateur Musical Association occupies a somewhat ramshackle but acoustically sound apartment above a nondescript Asian gift store on Cermak Avenue. On any Sunday or Monday, the sounds of Chinese opera and folk songs drift down to the street. The musicians play banjo, guitar, zither, violin, and various percussion instruments, and there’s always singing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The association was officially formed as a nonprofit in 1993 after several members walked away from other Chinese music clubs....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nicaragua’s first escalators, installed in a shopping mall in Managua in December, have terrorized many shoppers, according to a February Miami Herald report. One middle-aged woman who was afraid to step off leaped from the escalator onto the floor, lost her balance, and stumbled through the food court, knocking over tables and slamming into a wall....

SHIVAREE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Bossa Nova,” the second song on Shivaree’s debut, I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump (Capitol/Odeon), is a real attention getter: “Well I think I hate you / Isn’t this fun,” sings Ambrosia Parsley–apparently her real name–with a laconic, sexy drawl that recalls early Rickie Lee Jones and Sheryl Crow....

Early on a Saturday morning, Ted Thomas is in his storefront campaign office in West Englewood handing out city-service request sheets to volunteers. “We have no alderman in the 15th Ward,” Thomas says several times as the volunteers look over the pink sheets, on which they can check off just about anything a resident might need, from rat abatement to removal of an abandoned car. Their alderman of eight years, Virgil Jones, was convicted in January of taking bribes....

Bought a pipe wrench the other day. The wife was going to call the plumber. “I’m calling the plumber,” she said. But I said no. It wasn’t just the money. I knew what the problem was–screws, tossed down the bathroom sink drain by our three-year-old. I knew where the screws were–the U-trap, that curved pipe under the sink. All I had to do was remove it and take out those screws before they–did something bad....

What Comes Down Must Go Up Chicago has long been defined by its willingness to tear down the old to make way for the new, earning the city a reputation for both creating and destroying masterpieces of architecture. The idea that aesthetic considerations alone could prevent a building’s demolition didn’t even enter the public consciousness until 1960. That’s when photographer Richard Nickel began his crusade to save Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Garrick Theater Building, on Randolph just west of Dearborn....

Writing’s the Easy Part Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Brown stuck to it. He worked as a computer consultant by day and continued to write at night and on weekends. Lacking an agent, he stayed away from the big New York publishers. Instead he sent out nearly 300 query letters to small presses all over the country. Eventually he heard from Bill Meyers, who owns III Publishing, a tiny operation in Gualala, California, that puts out two or three titles a year....

As much as it warms my heart to hear of Roberta Rubin’s fight against the superhuge mega-giant book chains [January 29], more and more it seems a lost cause. Maybe I humor myself, but it seems there was a time when Chicagoans actually treasured that which most defines our city–neighborhoods with individual character and charm. The independent versus giant chain battle is being waged across the board, but bookstores are the perfect metaphor for the entire retail industry....

Tartuffe By Adam Langer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet today Tartuffe–written more than 320 years ago–seems more relevant and insightful than the 1939 Philadelphia Story, because it critiques class immobility while The Philadelphia Story is just a symptom of it. Though Tartuffe is clearly a liar, a creep, and a hypocrite, Moliere manages to suggest that these are the very qualities that allow him to rise in this society; though the audience may be heartened by his defeat, at the same time that defeat is rather sad, just as Malvolio’s is....

I was knocked flat by Bronislava Nijinska’s Les noces when I saw its reconstruction by the Joffrey a few years ago: driven by Stravinsky’s whining, pounding oriental score, it captured with horrifying accuracy the biological and social imperatives of marriage. Now French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has tackled the same subject using the same music and done a bang-up job: his Noces is just as formal, just as austerely beautiful, just as unballetic, as Nijinska’s dance–and he manages to pull this 74-year-old piece based on primitive ritual into the present....

You don’t have to be Jewish to like the Yiddish Arts Ensemble’s musical version of Eric Kimmel’s children’s story. Even a second-generation lapsed Irish-Catholic boy like me can appreciate the wit, craft, and wisdom that goes into this troupe’s productions: the energetic, playful acting, Lynn Shapiro’s fine adaptations of Yiddish folk classics, and best of all the music, provided by the always excellent Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, directed by Lori Lippitz....

Minna Bromberg started dieting when she was eight. “It was self-initiated,” she says. “I didn’t like my body. I think it had a lot to do with the feeling that other people would like me better if I were smaller. Although it’s interesting when I look at pictures of myself now. I was chubby, but I wasn’t a particularly large kid.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four years ago, as a student at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Massachusetts, she traveled to Connecticut to attend a Fat Feminist Caucus meeting....

By Michael Miner Other papers reacted much more enthusiastically. For example, the Times Herald of Port Huron, Michigan, which had carried the strip only on Sundays, began running the daily strip as well. “Breast cancer–and prevention of it–needs to be discussed,” editor Patrick Rice explained in a letter to his paper’s readers. “I have seen advance copies of the strip, and believe it deftly handles the subject with thoughtfulness and, yes, good humor....

20 Dates Humiliation is one of the ugly little motors that drive Hollywood, a karmic sump pump that drains the egos of stars and fans alike. We elevate actors into icons so we can savor their make-believe beauty and mythic lives and negate ourselves. We cheer the backstory of their rise to fame as much as their on-screen adventures. Yet we also trash them, eating up their box-office defeats, marital crises, and cosmetic surgeries; this phenomenon surfaces every year at the Oscars, where the stars expose themselves, their escorts, their hairdos, and their outfits to a shower of kudos and scorn from their constituencies in the press and public....

Tyego Dance Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » August Tye may not be the first choreographer to put a new spin on the classical vocabulary, but she’s one of the most insouciant, transforming the taut shapes of ballet into something pert rather than uptight. Yet she’s no lightweight, no mere popularizer of venerable moves. In Spirit Trail, a 1989 piece being revived for this concert, she uses ancient Russian choral music and a large cast, including children, to portray humanity’s labor and sorrow, offsetting the heaviness with a warriorlike solo by her sister Aimee (Tyego’s assistant artistic director), a tiny woman with the force of a virago....

BARITONE NATION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Modern music seems to encourage unconventional combinations of instruments, but the lineup of Baritone Nation–four baritone saxists, one percussionist, and nothing else–will still probably catch a few people by surprise. A basic 17-piece jazz orchestra never uses more than one bari; to see four lined up in a row you’d usually have to go to an instrument repair shop....

MELVIN SPARKS & LEON SPENCER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the salutary side effects of acid jazz has been the unearthing of forgotten funk. Take Lou Donaldson’s The Scorpion, an exquisitely hip live session the alto saxist recorded more than a quarter century ago; it languished in the vault until 1995, when Blue Note issued it as part of the Rare Groove series....

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Ed Paschke Sr. had to drop out of school and go to work during the Depression. He got a job driving a truck for a Chicago bakery, met his bride there, and was launched on a lifelong blue-collar and small-business career that included construction work, farming, and demolition. In the evenings and on weekends he would come home to his workshop and turn clumps of wood and clay into whimsical, brightly painted sculptures–birds, animals, human heads–while his two young sons looked on....

RUSSELL MALONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the linchpin of Diana Krall’s trio, guitarist Russell Malone reaches a hundred times as many ears as most straight-ahead jazz musicians can–so when I say he could be the most underappreciated guitarist in jazz, people raise their eyebrows. True, his work with the phenomenally successful Canadian gets him plenty of exposure, but that doesn’t always translate to recognition: though he’s the most musically astute member of Krall’s band (and one of the most exciting improvisers in any band), he naturally plays a supporting role when in her company....

Hey, Faggot: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He bitches about the diaphragm nearly every time we get intimate. He says all his previous lovers have been on the pill and doesn’t understand why I’m not. He grimaces and pulls away when I put the ‘phragm in. Sometimes he decides he doesn’t want to screw after all. We have discussed this ad nauseam and I am at my wit’s end....