Don Selle decided to close his coffeehouse last month. He held a quiet funeral, not even bothering to notify his regular customers, and offered a reduced menu, since he hadn’t been shopping for a week. The final night’s fare at Don’s Coffee Club was coffee, tea, cocoa, ginger ale, milk, lemonade, limeade, pie with ice cream, various store-bought confections, sundaes, and one slice of ice cream cake roll. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread was not available....

dawson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Peter Margasak’s article in the 3/13 Reader [Post No Bills] was very well written, as his pieces always are, I feel compelled to comment on a couple of things. In my dealings with Zoo Records A and R man (now Minty Fresh guy) Jim Powers, I’ve always found him to be honest, genuine, and a true music lover–not at all the typical music industry stereotype....

McCOY TYNER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When it comes to showcasing his influential aesthetic–in which pointillistic rhythms encounter a grand, sweeping romanticism–McCoy Tyner clearly prefers that classic three-piece ensemble, the piano trio. But the outfit has begun to wear, and besides, the pianist’s closet houses plenty of others. He leads a vibrant and vigorous big band in New York, and he shares the stage with a string orchestra for most of his latest album, What the World Needs Now (which finds him playing the compositions of Burt Bacharach, who was penning such iconic pop tunes as the title track right around the time Tyner was pummeling his way through John Coltrane’s long, dark, careening improvisations on “Afro-Blue”)....

PAN-AMERICAN/SHUTTEL358/TOM STEINLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This three-act showcase for new directions in electronic ambient drift suggests that a chill-out room doesn’t have to feel like an isolation tank. Pan-American is Labradford cofounder Mark Nelson, whose Kranky debut last year boxed fat, writhing bass lines into a suffocating little cage in the midst of a dubby ether of reverb-laden percussion, airy keyboard figures, and the occasional ping-ponging guitar filigree....

By Michael Miner The first public display of the project’s pictures will hang just a few days in the gallery at CITY 2000’s headquarters, at 312 N. May. But in March the project takes over the city’s gallery in the old Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, where you’ll be able to see a constantly changing sampling of the thousands of photos that will be taken of Chicago throughout the year....

Three’s a Crowd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then last month, with the opening of Rent at the Shubert, New York’s Playbill made its first foray into Chicago as the program supplier for all Shubert productions. The granddaddy of the theater program business, Playbill has been Broadway’s primary program for more than a century, and it services a number of off-Broadway theaters as well....

In 1936 I got $50 from Sears as a bonus for their 50th year in business. I wanted to buy a used dining-room set for the family, but my mother wouldn’t let me. She said I had to spend it on myself, and I wanted something that would last. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But now we were living in Austin, so in 1937 I went to Austin High....

Wiggle Room Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The four-story, 43,000-square-foot art deco building at 4544 N. Lincoln has been vacant since 1987, when the Hild was supplanted by the Conrad Sulzer Regional Library, just down the street. When the city’s Cultural Affairs Department offered it to the Old Town School, in early 1994, the school had already been searching for a new home for more than a year....

The Chicago World Music Festival was a rather stunning success in its inaugural year: attendance surpassed the organizers’ expectations, and the logistical difficulties of bringing performers from around the globe in to play a ten-day event with 12 different venues were largely invisible to the public. Most important, the quality and diversity of the music immediately established the fest as one of the premiere musical events in the country. One more thing: for those interested in talking as well as listening, there’s a free panel discussion about the tension between traditionalism and fusion in world music....

Friday 9/10 – Thursday 9/16 No, Mummenschanz is not High German for “will mime for toilet paper” but actually means something like “mask luck.” The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade perennials will mime tonight at 8 and through Sunday at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport. Tickets are $28 to $45, half price for kids under 12; call 312-902-1500. See the Critic’s Choice in Section Two for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

ELVIS COSTELLO & BURT BACHARACH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glass-half-full types might listen to last year’s Extreme Honey, the best-of collection covering Elvis Costello’s years at Warner Brothers, and think, gee, this guy can do it all: he’s composed chamber pop, covered old R & B gems, written with Paul McCartney, recorded with the Brodsky Quartet. But broad as Costello’s range is, it just can’t make up for the relative paucity of good songs he’s come up with since 1989–the kind of songs he wrote while he was on Columbia....

GENESIS, Pegasus Players. Whether you believe Genesis was written by Moses with divine guidance or think it belongs on the mythology bookshelf along with Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, there’s no question that the Bible’s first book is compelling literature–poetic, morally complex, and rich in incident. But east-coast actor Max McLean’s evening of theatrical storytelling drains the text’s dramatic potential rather than enhancing it. Alternating between affected narration and sometimes kitschy impersonations of various biblical figures (birthright-bartering Esau comes off like Bobcat Goldthwait), McLean displays impressive memory and articulation but not an ounce of honest emotion....

Jan Erkert & Dancers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To make a dance about dreams and time is to make a dance about everything and nothing at once. Yet that was the evanescent task choreographer Jan Erkert set for herself in 4:14 A.M., a dance whose primary motif, repeated both in floor patterns and within the dancers’ bodies, is the spiral. It’s a good choice, expressing the way our imagination circles away from itself and back, recycling images and feelings....

By Neil Tesser CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it has done for the last three years, the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington; 744-6630) plugs the gaps in the festival lineup. Think the fest could use a little more international flavor? On Tuesday, August 29, at 12:15 PM in the Randolph Cafe, saxist Ernest Dawkins leads a quartet representing his Chicago-South Africa Jazz Initiative, which draws on his experiences on tour in Johannesburg and Cape Town....

The uphill battle against chemical lawn treatments is about to get a boost from an unexpected source: dog lovers. If a full-scale investigation is ever launched it will probably stem from grassroots efforts by the Safer Pest Control Project, a group of environmentalists best known for doing what most skeptics predicted would prove impossible: convincing the Chicago Housing Authority to employ a low-toxic approach to killing cockroaches in the Henry Horner housing complex....

MARK EITZEL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Eitzel’s dictatorial control over American Music Club was one reason the group imploded a few years ago: as much as his able band mates contributed, he never let them forget whose vision they were to adhere to. But the lack of tension proved deadly on Eitzel’s 1996 solo album, 60 Watt Silver Lining; unchecked, his proclivity for schmaltz and moroseness grew suffocating....

While recording her latest album, Modern Cool, last January, jazz singer and pianist Patricia Barber just wasn’t satisfied with Dave Douglas’s trumpet solo on her tune “Silent Partner.” Undeterred, Barber explained to him how the girl in this song felt “waiting in a hotel room” for her secret lover. Douglas hit it on the next try. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barber, 43, decided some years ago that she needs to run the show–and it’s starting to look like she’s right....

After watching a campy mid-1950s science fiction movie recently, I was left wondering: how radioactive must something be to begin glowing? And could a living creature become that radioactive and still survive, even briefly? –Ranchoth, via AOL Not exactly–nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, c. However, in translucent media, notably water, light travels much slower, at maybe 75 percent of c. A beta particle traveling through air, say, moves considerably faster than light traveling through water....