PINETOP PERKINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even at the grand old age of 84, Pinetop Perkins sometimes sounds as if he’s discovering the glory of the blues for the first time. The pianist, who began his career in the jukes and barrelhouses of the Mississippi Delta in the late 20s and appeared for a time alongside Sonny Boy Williamson on the fabled King Biscuit radio show, is best known now for his years with Muddy Waters....

Fosse Created by a cadre of Fosse’s friends and colleagues–including dancers Ann Reinking (his lover and protege) and Gwen Verdon (his wife and lifelong muse)–Fosse is much more than a simple recap of its subject’s prolific career. The show delivers plenty of what most viewers might expect: the snappy, strutting, sexy routines familiar from stage, screen, and TV successes like Sweet Charity, Chicago, Cabaret, All That Jazz, and Liza With a Z....

THE BELLE OF AMHERST, Laboratory Theatre, at the Chopin Theatre. “Paradise is never a journey,” declared Emily Dickinson. And according to William Luce’s celebrated one-woman portrait of the poet, Dickinson found paradise in a lifelong retreat from people. (Too shy to admit she didn’t know how to tell time, she learned only when she was 15.) She saw just seven poems published in her lifetime and feared her verse would never travel through space, let alone time....

A little feng shui is a dangerous thing. That’s the message of Stanley Rutherford’s tragicomic one-character one-act, about a neurotic, socially inept middle-aged man who believes he’s found the answer to all his problems in this mystical art. Sparky Litman, played by Howard Shalwitz, stands alone onstage talking about his life while he arranges his worldly goods along an imaginary axis, trying to enhance the “qi,” or good energy, of his apartment....

What’s the deal with the abbreviation “b/w” on an old 45 record to indicate the B side? I was told a long time ago that it stood for beside/with, but I’ve also seen it as “c/w” (contained/with?). Can you shed any light on this burning issue? –Worth, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The term single actually is a misnomer–couple is more like it, since a 45 has two sides....

Geno Bahena, chef and owner of Ixcapuzalco, has expanded his holdings with Chilpancingo, an elegant yet lively River North restaurant that opened September 15. The room is rich with detail: dozens of brightly colored paper cutouts dangle from the ceiling beams; huge, vibrant oil paintings hang on the walls; and the floor-to-ceiling oak back bar with a sliding library ladder features dozens of papier-mache viejitos (statuettes of elderly Mexicans) set on the shelves....

BLOSSOM DEARIE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blossom Dearie sings grown-up songs in a little girl’s voice, but you never get confused about which persona’s in charge: every aspect of her performance, from the patient tempos to the immaculate phrasing, reveals the sophisticated tale-teller beneath the innocent sweetness. Her voice may conjure peaches and cream, but Dearie uses subtle inflections to play off that image, and to quietly subvert it when the lyrics demand....

Friday 12/10 – Thursday 12/16 All we can find out about Karen Finley’s performance tonight is that it’s about “distorted personality disorders based on real-life experiences” and that honey will be involved. The infamous member of the NEA Four will perform tonight at 10 at Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $15; Trailer Hitch opens. Call 773-489-3160. Finley may be basing her show on her latest book, Pooh Unplugged: An Unauthorized Memoir, in which Christopher Robin and friends are recast as bored, sexually excessive codependents....

Country and Eastern Now 69, Sekiguchi operates an independent design studio from his split-level home in Highland Park. A hardbound copy of Hank Williams: The Complete Lyrics lies on a coffee table. Near the fireplace is a modest CD collection (a Hank Williams box, Merle Haggard’s Chill Factor and Blue Jungle, The Best of Floyd Cramer). He fetches a caricature of Haggard drinking from a shot glass in front of an American flag, which he designed when the singer was a spokesman for George Dickel whiskey....

FAR EAST SIDE BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At one time, hybrids of jazz and Asian music consisted only of “Oriental” flourishes, used by jazzers to exoticize their compositions. But over the last decade an active group of Asian-Americans, including Fred Ho, Jon Jang, Glenn Horiuchi, and Jason Kao Hwang, has sparked an explosion of activity, exploring the indigenous musics of Asia through the expressive vehicle of jazz arrangement and improvisation....

Anthony Brown was an army grunt stationed in Germany when he first heard Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1966 composition The Far East Suite. Ellington and Strayhorn penned the suite after a State Department-sponsored goodwill tour of the Middle East and Asia in 1963 and a trip to Japan the following year. Their musical portraits of Turkey, Iran, India, and other lands they visited were big-band interpretations of the exotic Orient....

JOHN ACQUAVIVA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The Future Sound of Detroit” may have been the slogan of +8, the pioneering techno label cofounded by Italian-born, Ontario-based John Acquaviva, but his DJ sets have never been quite that narrowly focused. Acquaviva tends less toward hard, dark minimalism and more toward free-ranging eclecticism than his partner Richie Hawtin, emphasizing dark, funky house, airier techno, and wild cards....

LITTLE AL THOMAS & THE CRAZY HOUSE BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Little Al Thomas was a child of Maxwell Street in the 30s and 40s, but he favors the Memphis-Texas elegance of B.B. King over the unrefined Chicago street blues he grew up around. Though he started singing professionally in the early 60s–and though he’s been a south-side celebrity for decades–it wasn’t until last year that he recorded his debut album, South Side Story (Cannonball), tackling everything from moody after-hours laments (“You’re Breakin’ My Heart”) to jaunty, brass-burnished romps (“Stranded in St....

LOOPER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Looper’s Stuart David weren’t the bassist for Glasgow indie faves Belle and Sebastian, his new Up a Tree (Sub Pop) would probably be dismissed as little more than a nice oddity, but here he is on a U.S. tour that brings him to town for not one but two gigs. Certainly there’s something endearing about his conversational Glaswegian brogue on “A Space Boy Dream,” from B&S’s most recent album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, and his homespun, half-sung vocals fare pretty well over the length of an album....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Late one evening in December, Miami resident Edna Benson heard someone knocking on her door and grabbed her Taurus 85 handgun to see who it was. Her visitor was Mayor Xavier Suarez, who Benson said “looked mad, really, really mad” and was clutching the four-page letter she had written criticizing him for firing the police chief. After she shouted at him, Suarez finally walked away....

TAFELMUSIK BAROQUE ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baroque ensembles are a dime a dozen these days, and even the best of them can show signs of staleness. Not Tafelmusik. Having been around for almost two decades, this Toronto-based group of 19 core members plays commandingly well, whether treading the familiar terrain of Bach and Handel or introducing half-forgotten works by Stamitz and other lesser lights of the Baroque era....

What’s the deal with genetically engineered food? I read that vast quantities of food crops are being genetically engineered to withstand the effects of herbicides better so that farmers can dump more herbicides in their fields without worrying about crop loss. Jeez. Other crops manufacture their own pesticides so they kill bugs having the temerity to take a bite of them. Doesn’t exactly ring my come-to-dinner bell, ya know? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In cartoons bulls are always depicted with rings through their noses. Being a city kid whose idea of farm life mostly comes from watching Green Acres, I have never had the opportunity to inspect a bull up close. Do they really have nose rings? If so, why? I have a hard time believing it’s all due to teenage rebellion. –Phil Gemperl, Elk Grove Village Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Twenty years ago the River North area was a skid row. It was also home to the epicenter of the city’s punk scene–a bar called O’Banion’s at 661 N. Clark. “I go down there now and can’t believe it’s the old neighborhood,” says former O’Banion’s bartender Roseann Kuberski. “That whole area used to be old bum places and discos and on-the-edge places, like O’Banion’s. Now it’s full of places like Hard Rock Cafe and the rock ‘n’ roll McDonald’s....

DOMINIQUE HORWITZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The absorption of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera into modern pop culture (its antihero, Macheath, is the subject of the instantly familiar “Mack the Knife”) has diluted its bitter socialist critique, demonstrating the paradoxical gulf between the populist and the popular. But 70 years after its debut, German actor-chanteur Dominique Horwitz has rearranged the poor man’s operetta top to bottom, setting some of the songs as sly jazz tunes and some as rougher rock numbers, as if to rescue them from the syrupy, ingenuous renditions of Vegas lounge singers and take them back to the cabaret–or at least to a contemporary equivalent....