By Frederick H. Lowe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his office at the Tiffany Kim Institute, a beauty salon on Superior, Mallet sits behind a desk where he occasionally fields phone calls. When taking an appointment from Clinton’s secretary, he says, he can never be sure of the exact day or time. “The secretary asks me if I’ll be in Chicago between this date and that date....

Lead Stories Man-Car Relationships in Tennessee Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In separate incidents over a 48-hour period in March, a man in Spring Hill, Tennessee, fired about 90 rounds from an AK-47 point-blank into his car after it died on him on a major highway, and a man in Knoxville applied for a marriage license for himself and his 1996 Mustang following a split with his girlfriend....

PAT METHENY TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel a little foolish arguing that guitarist Pat Metheny deserves a place among the great mainstream jazz soloists–not because he doesn’t, but because I thought he’d made it clear himself. Metheny has proved his case every few years for the last two decades: on 80/81, with frontline tenor men Michael Brecker and Dewey Redman; on the 1984 trio album Rejoicing, with bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins; on 1990’s splendid Question and Answer, featuring Dave Holland and Roy Haynes; and as a sideman on albums by Brecker, McCoy Tyner, and Dave Liebman as well as Gary Burton’s recent Grammy winner, Like Minds (Concord), where his lapidary solos all but steal the show from Burton and Chick Corea....

By Ben Joravsky Her lament’s another chapter in the age-old saga of car wars, in which the city tries to wring every dime it can out of motorists whose hopeless dependency on their cars exposes them to all sorts of arcane laws and exorbitant fines. The simple fact is that there are too many cars in the city and most people would be far better off taking public transportation. On Wednesday, January 27, she parked her car in the 700 block of North Hudson, and soon discovered the ultimate irony: her effort to stop getting tickets had resulted in yet another....

Wicked Wit of the South by Southwest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the people who make the schlepp to Texas each year are there to check out new bands, meet their peers, and drink, and not necessarily in that order. The erratically attended panels are meant to educate neophytes (“Generating the Right Publicity”) and to prompt dutiful discussion of hot issues, which this year included media consolidation and the future of electronica....

Ten days after Pablo and Elvia Mendoza ran across the Mexico-Arizona border with their three small children, they found themselves in Pilsen. This place has sabor. Flavor. Character. The sign above the entryway to the supermercado El GŸero #6 on 19th and Blue Island says it all: Somos Mexicanos, Igual Que Usted. We’re Mexicans, Just Like You. Pilsen and the nearby Little Village make up the largest, most concentrated Mexican community in the midwest....

By Jeffrey Felshman “Oh, I’ve been bouncing around here and there.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “They never found out that I wasn’t the guy from Time Bandits,” Pidgeon says. He still doesn’t know who the guy thought he was or what name rolled on the credits. “They made the check out to Eugene Pidgeon.” Somehow he kept working, turning out columns and stories for the Santa Barbara Independent, traveling to Bosnia in 1994, managing punk bands in LA....

Someone once said that a boat owner’s two best days are the day he buys the boat and the day he sells it. For my brother Jim, accompanied by my son and me, those were almost the same day. Putting the Titanic in the water was easier. Heck, raising the Titanic would have been easier than surviving that first day with my brother’s new bass boat. I had a better time when a bumblebee stung me inside my mouth....

In a 1997 interview with Reader critic Fred Camper, photographer Camilo Jose Vergara recalled Chicago in the mid-60s as “much more built-up than now.” Gradually he noticed places with derelict buildings were becoming “huge empty lots.” Soon he was photographing neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other urban areas, returning to the same spots several times over years to record the changing landscape. He called his 1995 collection, The New American Ghetto, “the story of a country that was throwing away its cities....

CHILD’S PLAY, Lucid Theatre Productions, at Preston Bradley Center for the Arts. The 1972 film based on Robert Marasco’s drama conveyed some chills, but this Child’s Play is much less convincing: Clyde Simon’s static 90-minute revival never achieves the momentum terror feeds on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Catholic boys’ school is haunted by more than the usual guilt: like refugees from Lord of the Flies, the students continually attack one another....

Friday 3/12 – Thursday 3/18 Previews for the Next Theatre Company’s production begin tonight at 8 at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes in Evanston (847-475-6763). Tickets are $14; admission to the regular run is $18 to $22. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 14 SUNDAY A father’s Chinatown storefront, a candid shot of a smiling child hanging off of a broken phone booth–these are a couple of the images chosen by students in the Marwen Foun-dation’s documentary photography course to represent their neighborhoods....

JOSEPH BOWIE’S DEFUNKT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 70s, fusion was embraced by certain denizens of free jazz, most prominently James “Blood” Ulmer, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, and Joseph Bowie’s Defunkt. Trombonist Bowie–younger brother of Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester–started out as a 17-year-old prodigy in Saint Louis’s Black Artists Group, playing in outfits led by restructuralists like Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill....

MONO MEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Near the beginning of Hype!, the recent documentary on the Seattle scene, Mono Men guitarist John Mortenson appears onstage wearing a crown of beer cans over his balding pate and omnipresent shades. Given the power of video, this may turn out to be the enduring image of the Bellingham garage rockers–and it’s a fitting one. For a decade the Mono Men have been kingpins of the drinking-class empire that includes guitarist Dave Crider’s internationally known Estrus label and the annual Garage Shock festival, not to mention its younger Chicago incarnation, Bottle Shock....

Citizen Ruth Inventing the Abbotts By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Contemporary pop culture reveals symptoms of this shame and panic everywhere: what else were the most recent Oscar awards about? I’m thinking not only of the impulse to reward movies that spoke up for social rejects, thereby deflecting attention from the Academy’s own rejections–a brand of Oscarthink that in 1955 deemed Marty the best picture of the year–but also of the ap-...

QUASI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quasi, a duo from Portland, Oregon, embraces hoary pop-music cliches–and squeezes them so hard they burst. When guitarist-keyboardist Sam Coomes asks “Why did you hurt me?” on “Repetition,” from the duo’s new Featuring “Birds” (Up), and drummer Janet Weiss answers “You asked for it,” it’s a relief to hear the familiar pop thought balloon deflated. Of course, Weiss (who also pounds the skins for Sleater-Kinney) probably means it–she and Coomes used to be married....

RICK RIZZO & TARA KEY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarists Rick Rizzo and Tara Key formed a mutual admiration society back in the mid-80s, when their bands–Eleventh Dream Day and Antietam, respectively–ranked among the most incendiary live acts in the land. Key has augmented countless Eleventh Dream Day encores, as well as a track on the band’s 1993 album, El Moodio (Atlantic), with her demolishing feedback; on EDD’s last tour, in 1997, she filled in on second guitar....

Cornelia Parker Leah Oates: Secret Selves The show’s largest and earliest piece, Thirty Pieces of Silver (1989), is a grid of 30 circular arrangements of several dozen silver-plated household objects–tableware, trays, goblets, pitchers, a candelabra, each hanging by one or more thin filaments from the ceiling. But something is wrong here: the objects have all been flattened. Nearby is hung a darkly humorous photograph showing how this was done: a steamroller is moving down a rural road, the objects laid in a band before it....

CIRQUE INGENIEUX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cirque du Soleil raised the stakes for everyone in the biz–even the tradition-bound Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. But few circuses have risen to Cirque du Soleil’s challenge as strongly as the folks at Cirque Ingenieux, based in the United States. Like its Montreal-based competitor, Cirque Ingenieux provides an evening of circus fun packaged in a respectable arts wrapper....

“I had a slight America obsession,” says Arjun Appadurai, who grew up in Bombay and now teaches at the University of Chicago. “I was in the first wave of people in India for whom the mystique of the U.S. was pushing aside the mystique of England.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Appadurai, whose father was a Reuters correspondent and minister of publicity and propaganda for an Indian government in exile during World War II, got his sense of America from Humphrey Bogart movies, Life and Time magazines, novels by Harold Robbins, John Steinbeck, and John Updike....

JON LANGFORD & THE PINE VALLEY COSMONAUTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jon Langford plays around town so often–with the Waco Brothers, Skull Orchard, and even the bicontinental Mekons–that it’s easy to get lax about checking out yet another one of the Welsh-born Chicago resident’s bands. But to truly understand what makes those other outfits tick, it helps to see the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, with whom the veteran punk singer and guitarist stares long and hard into the repertoires of his favorite country-and-western artists and finds his own reflection....