Yareli Arizmendi was walking down the street in New York City on A Day Without Art two years ago when she had an idea–what if there were A Day Without Mexicans? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Los Angeles-based actress and her husband, filmmaker Sergio Arau, discussed making a video based on the concept. But the project didn’t come together until this spring, when the Mexican Fine Art Center Museum in Chicago, where the two had appeared separately in the annual performing arts festival, gave them a deadline and funding for a camera and an editor....

Dear Ms. Levine: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The anonymous article on the May 21, 1999, cover of the Chicago Reader entitled “History of Abuse” and written by “William K.” has perhaps forged a new standard (or substandard) in journalism to which the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights takes exception. In addition to the offensive, blasphemous illustration on the newspaper’s cover–that of a blindfolded priest held out as the sacred Eucharist–even the most detached observer would question a newspaper’s judgment in choosing to print (highlight, actually) an anonymously written article on a sensitive, potentially damaging subject, pedophilia, that is premised entirely upon repressed memory....

Who the Hell Is Juliette? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gleefully mixing fact and fiction, this 1998 mockumentary fabricates the story of Yuliet, a 16-year-old Havana hooker who may or may not be the Yuliet Ortega playing the role. Mexican director Carlos Marcovich met Ortega on a trip to Cuba and cast her in a music video as the younger sister of Fabiola (Fabiola Quiroz), a Mexican model....

By Carl Kozlowski Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hansen, who’s 89, sports an upturned mustache and meets me wearing a tie patterned with extravagantly colorful birds, one of his workers perched on his head. He received his first bird after performing a wedding in Minneapolis in 1946. The bride’s mother gave Hansen’s first wife a canary from the brood she was raising, and soon the Hansens were training it to climb a ladder (dubbed “Jacob’s ladder” in the shows) and ride a bicycle to the joyous strains of church hymns....

Two modern girls The first comes of age in a time of political upheaval and violence. The second travels to the capital of the only superpower left on earth and pleasures the leader of the free world–but she is not a concubine. “The irony is that I had the first orgasm of the relationship,” she says later. Riposte? The only strength Monica drew from her religion was from the story of Hannah Senesh, a Jewish woman born in Hungary who became a martyr during World War II....

Chicago Alt.film Fest “Films with an independent point of view” is this festival’s catchphrase, though I can’t imagine what differentiates this competently made teenage sex movie from other competently made teenage sex movies, apart from the absence of a studio logo at the beginning. Maybe it’s the independent sense of humor expressed in writer-director Adrian Fulle’s dialogue: “Women are like Democrats, man. You can’t live with them, but you can sure get fucked by them....

To the editor– Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Virtually all coverage of the World Church of the Creator has taken great pains to portray its members as extremist kooks far removed from mainstream white American thinking. But the thing that has struck me most about their beliefs is how un-“radical” they really are, when stripped of their more apocalyptic excesses, in terms of the everyday conversation and opinions of much of white America....

Lead Stories O.R. Surprises Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Orthopedic surgeon Nicholas Cappello had his license revoked in April by the Arkansas Medical Board for as many as 20 botched surgeries that featured such errors as metal plates screwed to the wrong bones or screws missing the bone altogether. And patient Robert Banks sued the Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in March, complaining that he went in for a heart bypass in 1995 but came out merely circumcised, which doctors said was a necessary antecedent to the surgery because he required kidney-monitoring equipment....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kriss Worthington, a member of the city council of Berkeley, California, announced in April that he would propose a reparations package to heal wounds from social and political unrest dating back to the 1960s. Included were proposals for official apologies to Vietnam war protesters and to Patricia Hearst Shaw. Worthington also suggested that the city erect a statue of Shaw carrying a gun and declare the house in Worthington’s district from which she was abducted a historic site....

By Ted Kleine A few feet from Seven is the “Kool Gent,” V103 radio personality Herb Kent. Kent’s standing in the DJ crow’s nest, looking sharp in a salmon sport coat, black cowboy hat, and gold chains. He’s spinning dusties, the 70s R & B hits the senator and her friends love. “She got game,” he says. “Just the way she carries herself. She ain’t bragging or anything. She’s just mellow....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, DFF: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your letter arrived yesterday afternoon, and some hours later, while I was sitting in a darkened movie theater, my thoughts returned to you. The film my boyfriend and I were enjoying was a hundred-million-dollar metaphor for your struggle: just as you did not let those bugs–HPV and herpes–get you down, the brave young men and women of Starship Troopers weren’t letting bugs get them down either....

KILL HANNAH 1/9, METRO; 1/16, DOME ROOM On its new EP, Sleeping Like Electric Eels, this local quartet featuring ex-Certain Distant Suns guitarist Kerry Finerty offers up edgy dream pop that ought to be very palatable to those who found the Psychedelic Furs too masculine and now find Stereolab too intellectual. PEGBOY 1/9, HOUSE OF BLUES This veteran Chicago quartet doesn’t break new ground on its recent Steve Albini-produced Cha-Cha Damore (Quarterstick)–and if it did, its fans would be sorely disappointed....

Next Dance Festival Cerulean Dance Theatre, Amy Crandall, Cynthia Reid, Eduardo Vilaro, and Zephyr Dance The hard part is giving the dance a definite shape; this is the place where many choreographers fail. Gimmicks, props, and music can provide an instant identity; the Joffrey Ballet’s Billboards is much better known for using the music of Prince than it is for any of its dancing. An instant identity can be limiting, however, as any son who’s taken over his father’s business knows....

The 160-acre parcel of land that Leland Sarmont and Jeanne Faulkner bought in northern Wisconsin in 1992 lies in the middle of 200-to-300-foot hills eight miles from Lake Superior. The land is covered with maples, basswoods, yellow birches, blueberries, and Juneberries. The west fork of the Montreal River cuts through a corner of the property, carving a gorge with a stair-step falls, Rock Cut Falls, that drops 60 feet. A 1995 survey by the Iron County Development Zone Council, a nongovernmental group focused on encouraging the local economy, reported that snowmobiling was pumping $15 million a year into gas stations, repair shops, motels, restaurants–and bars....

By Michael Miner “Abner Louima trembled in his hospital bed yesterday as his wife, Micheline, touched his cheek and wept. A plastic tube ran from his torn bladder into a plastic bag. His urine was red. In the view of the Daily News, the Louima story belonged to its man and no other. McAlary won the Pulitzer, his paper reported, “for exposing the Abner Louima police torture scandal….McAlary introduced New Yorkers to a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant whose allegations of police brutality rocked the city…....

The variety in Bob Eisen’s improvisational dancing is astounding. He can fold his lofty, loose-jointed frame into a tiny area on the floor so that he looks more like an embryo than a man, and he can stretch to the ceiling, as dignified and urbane as the hero in a classical ballet. He can turn gracefully across the floor and end in an awkward knot. He can make us laugh with a staggering twirl or a funny circling walk, wrists and ankles flexed....

Friday 2/5 – Thursday 2/11 In 1959 Film Quarterly called Ed Bland’s 35-minute experimental film The Cry of Jazz “the first anti-white film”; another critic dubbed it “Negro chauvinism,” partly because it argues that “the Negro is the only human American.” Bland, who assailed white liberals’ sentimentalization of a musical form created under racism, juxtaposes shots of performers like Sun Ra with images of a black baby in a tenement and affluent white folks in Highland Park....

FRIDAY 4/28 – Thursday 5/4 The TIBETcenter library in Rogers Park has 407 books, 88 of which were donated by the Dalai Lama. But they need more. They’ve lined up over a dozen authors for a book signing and fund-raiser; the writers’ subject matter ranges from children’s stories to literary criticism and spirituality, and proceeds will go to help build the library’s collection. It’s today from 2 to 4:30 in the Galvin Auditorium lobby at Loyola University’s Sullivan Center, 6339 N....

EOMOT RaSUN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mississippi-born blues harpist Eomot RaSun, who grew up on Chicago’s south side in the 50s, claims he knew he wanted to play as a kid, when he saw Carey Bell blowing his harmonica on a balcony. But he didn’t break into the city’s blues circuit until the 80s, when he started sitting in around town with artists like John Embry, Jimmy Rogers, and Pinetop Perkins....

By Patrick Z. McGavin Cook prepared a grant proposal, and funding–about $7,500–was secured that summer. On November 26, 1972, Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel wrote a story applauding her efforts: “This article is dedicated to the hundreds of persons who have stopped me in movie theaters, dinner parties, baseball games, and lecture halls and complained that Chicago is a cinematic hick town, that they can never find any good art films…....