Playwright and performance artist Pablo Helguera says that buildings have memories–a truth that Americans don’t understand, much to the distress of our national soul. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Helguera first arrived in Chicago from his native Mexico City in 1989. After a year at the School of the Art Institute he headed off to the University of Barcelona to study painting and philosophy....

WEI YANG AND BETTY XIANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This husband-and-wife duo–Wei Yang plays a four-stringed lute called the pipa, Betty Xiang the two-stringed, violinlike erhu–moved to Chicago four years ago, looking for a less regimented professional life than they’d known in their native Shanghai. Though both had been well-regarded virtuosos in China, touring as soloists with the National Shanghai Orchestra, they played as many as 500 concerts a year, often repeating the same dozen traditional songs....

From the pages of babysue ¥ Volume 6, Issue 4 (PO Box 8989, Atlanta, GA 31106-8989; $3) What is happening in our society? Have we completely lost our sense of dignity and responsibility? Whatever happened to ideas like common decency and individual responsibility? Why are more and more violent crimes being committed each year? And why are the perpetrators of these crimes getting younger and younger over time? A great many sociologists and anthropologists have spent their lives trying to find the answers to questions such as these....

By Ben Joravsky Anderson and his wife, Elisabeth, have been using the shop at Loyola Park for six years. He’s a graduate student in literature at Northwestern University; she’s a librarian at the University of Chicago. Both have a deep, almost reverent passion for woodworking. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paul says, “Every piece of lumber, like every great book, is unique. It combines an almost infinite variety of possibilities, and yet certain governing principles run through it....

Maureen Fleming and Loretta Livingston Butoh, a Japanese dance form, was first shown in America about 20 years ago. Created in the late 50s, this bleak, nihilistic genre is often considered to reflect the atmosphere of bitterness and exhaustion that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II. One of the first troupes to visit America, Sankai Juko, often created “installations” focused on extreme physical endurance: the performers might be hung upside down for hours several stories aboveground....

Friday 5/5 – Thursday 5/11 6 SATURDAY The Autonomous Zone’s weekend-long Matches & Mayhem festival includes an anarchist book fair, a variety show, a film festival featuring raw footage from the April 15 protests in D.C., and a soccer tournament (“Give Capitalism the Boot”). Admission to the book fair, which runs today from 11 to 6 at the Ruiz Belvis Center, 1632 N. Milwaukee, is $2; the variety show (karaoke, song, and dance) costs $5 and runs from 8 to 11....

Dear Peter Margasak: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet despite the changing popular tastes, the traditional son and mambo groups did not disappear. I have a stack of records purchased in Cuba in the early 1980s that feature Orquesta Aragon, Arsenio Rodriguez, Jorrin (the last band with which Ruben Gonzalez played until he retired), Beny More, and others. There was no attempt to eradicate this music by Fidel Castro or anyone else....

GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Grant Park Orchestra’s new principal conductor, Carlos Kalmar, is a 42-year-old Uruguayan of Austrian parentage who got much of his musical training in Vienna. He’s still very much an unknown, though he’s done a tour of duty with orchestras in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Dessau and in this country has risen from third-tier regional orchestras to Grant Park....

No matter how hard we work at anticipating or comprehending death, it’s always a surprise. And yet we continue our paltry, puny, pathetic attempts to deal with it, to understand it, to give it meaning. That brazen, doomed effort is what makes Redmoon Theater’s outdoor spectacle Long Live the King (the King Is Dead), first mounted last summer, so touching. To see a coffin laboriously transformed into a sailboat surrounded by hand-painted clouds on sticks or a papier-mache sun hoisted with much effort to shine with homemade splendor against real racing clouds is to understand the human experience of death....

PHIL WOODS QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alto saxist Phil Woods is as remarkable for the longevity of his band as for the breadth of his talent: since the quintet’s formation in 1973, bassist Steve Gilmore and drummer Bill Goodwin have never left, and only three brass players and four pianists have passed through its rarely revolving door. Blistering trumpeter Brian Lynch and Bill Charlap, a pianist highly regarded for his off-kilter humor as well as his technique, fill those chairs today; they’ve learned a good percentage of the couple hundred tunes in the group’s repertoire, and they maintain the same tension between high-powered solos and the rhythm section’s chamber-jazz restraint that their predecessors did....

RAVI SHANKAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For many Americans, Ravi Shankar is Indian music, and it’s easy to picture him woodshedding somewhere in his native land as a young prodigy. But the tireless promoter of North Indian classical performance is in fact a lifelong globe-trotter–at age nine he left India with brother Uday Shankar’s dance troupe, which based itself in Paris and toured Europe and the U....

Food and jazz being two of life’s three great sensory pleasures, it’s surprising how few places offer the right mix of both. Most jazz clubs that serve food, such as Andy’s on Hubbard, offer routine bar fare to accompany the local, middle-of-the-road jazz groups. The now-closed Jazz Buffet in Logan Square tried for a richer mix but never really got off the ground, despite some fine acts. Green Dolphin Street, on North Ashland, is a special case....

When the Second City cabaret theater was opened by Paul Sills, Bernie Sahlins, and Howard Alk on December 16, 1959, its name was its founders’ way of thumbing their noses at Chicago’s bicoastal image as a cultural also-ran. That image was soon laid to rest thanks in large part to Second City’s international influence, with its innovative comedy revues developed through improvisation by the performers. The legion of celebrities who got their start at Second City is legendary; but just as important is the troupe’s role in encouraging and defining what came to be known as off-Loop theater–a movement committed to ensemble-oriented, neighborhood-based, low-cost work that was youthful, unpretentious, and yet often smarter and hipper than the supposedly sophisticated product emanating from New York and LA....

ASYLUM STREET SPANKERS 4/9, the HIDEOUT So aggressively likable you want to hate them, these Austin-based acoustic swingers are more about songs and less about instrumental color than comparable outfits like the Hot Club of Cowtown–though the virtuosity’s there, just waiting to bust out in the breaks of tunes like “I Don’t Wanna,” from their new Hot Lunch (Cold Spring). But as personable as they try too hard to be, it’s only when multi-instrumentalist Christina Marrs takes the vocal mike from hucksterish multi-instrumentalist Pops Bayless that they show something akin to genuine soul....

I just read your column about Circus Peanuts [December 26]. In all seriousness, I happen to like Circus Peanuts. I really do. I’m not kidding. Just thought you should know that there was someone in the world who actually likes the things. I truly and honestly like Circus Peanuts. Circus Peanuts are yummy. Mmmm, Circus Peanuts. Good, good, good. I seem to be the only person willing to admit my enjoyment of the orange banana things (I know not what they are nor do I care), thus I must defend them when they are under such an attack as was waged in your column....

During this century we in the West have slowly begun to realize that there have been many other cultures that were on par, in many respects, with our own. It’s well known that Europeans were cave dwellers (more or less) when Arabs, under Islamic reign, were astounding philosophers and scientists. How is it, then, that western Europeans were able to dominate the globe? Naturally, technical breakthroughs played a leading role, but why all these breakthroughs among people from the Western Hemisphere?...

If you were trapped on Mir. last spring, you might have missed Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out as a lesbian on her eponymous TV show. It got some people all in a lather–especially the religious right, I and most especially Jerry Falwell. The Moral Majority leader moaned on Larry King Live, “I don’t know why we cannot, like 15 years ago, have television contributing to the task of raising good, healthy, and well-adjusted children, rather than destroying that enterprise....

TOSHIKO AKIYOSHI TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Toshiko Akiyoshi began to fuse jazz with “world music” in the early 70s–back before anyone even called it world music–when she applied the lessons she had learned as an American jazzwoman to themes inspired by her girlhood in China. Her compositions reached the listening public by way of the widely acclaimed big band she organized, led, and wrote for–and in which, not incidentally, she played piano....

Z.Z. HILL JR. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Z.Z. Hill Jr. isn’t actually related to Z.Z. Hill, and though his parched upper-register scream is clearly meant to evoke the late soul-blues belter’s gospel wail, he’s no mere imitator either. In fact, he lacks the taste for artifice he’d need to re-create anyone else’s musical persona. On his self-released debut CD, I’m a Soul Singer!...

BILLY BRAGG/AMY RIGBY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never been able to stomach Billy Bragg’s own music, a mix of the self-righteous and the prosaic that always comes off like agitprop Mad Libs. But I deeply enjoy Mermaid Avenue (Elektra), his collaboration with Wilco on original music for previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics. While “I Guess I Planted” is just the sort of labor anthem you’d expect, the bulk of the collection offers a more intimate side of Guthrie–and as a result Bragg now seems like somebody you might have a talk with over a beer instead of someone who talks at you....