Having a Blast “It’s 7 AM,” I grumbled. “Why are we up at 7 AM?” “I remember,” I said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thought about hanging up and going back to sleep. But I knew Erik would just keep calling until it was too late for him to go, and then he’d blame me for making him miss it. Besides, I’d never seen a building demolished before, and since I was already sort of awake–and still a little drunk–why not go?...

By Michael Miner Fine. It’s her right. She’s an American. But Grimm didn’t stop there. She took the dangerous step of burnishing her argument by twice quoting from the pages of the Herald-News. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A newspaper article is generally assumed to be truthful not only in its broad sweep but in the particulars, paragraph by paragraph. When a paragraph is lifted from a story and set into a new context new truths may or may not be revealed, but the paragraph is not supposed to become false....

AtsomepointduringtheMiddleAgesscribeschangedthestandardpractice Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ofrunningwordstogether and began separating them with spaces–with unforeseeable consequences. That’s the thesis of a new book, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, by Paul Saenger, curator of rare books at the Newberry Library. “I was fascinated with the late medieval world and why it was so different from the early medieval world,” says Saenger, who has a PhD in Renaissance history from the University of Chicago....

KALMAN BALOGH & THE GYPSY CIMBALOM BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spanish flamenco and the “hot jazz” French guitarist Django Reinhardt forged in the 40s and 50s remain the most widely acknowledged musical contributions of the Rom people, better known as the Gypsies. But groups as diverse as Hungary’s Muzsikas, Romania’s Taraf de Haidouks, and India’s Musafir are slowly revealing to the world a more complete picture....

MIKE JONES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For sheer technique, Mike Jones is the best jazz pianist you’ve never heard of. Over the course of three solo albums, he has quietly established himself as the successor to the stupefyingly virtuosic Oscar Peterson, in much the same way Peterson took the baton from the previously peerless Art Tatum in the 1950s. Most pianists would try to duck such comparisons, but Jones relishes them....

No Class Kareemah had transferred to Urban Youth Alternative High School on the recommendation of a counselor at Dunbar High. Kareemah had been falling behind at Dunbar and at one point stopped going. “You get with the wrong people, the wrong crowd, you take that about-face and don’t know how to turn yourself back around,” says Robin Wilson, Kareemah’s mother. “That’s more or less what happened.” Run for decades as a “Double E” school–for education and employment–Urban Youth offered a work-study program to dropouts who wanted to finish school....

bacani.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am the president of the social club at Saint Michael’s Church in Old Town. Our group had purchased lawn admissions to the show for 85 people (approximately ten percent of our membership). Our plan was to rendezvous at the Metra Clybourn platform and to take the 4:43 PM train to Ravinia. When I arrived at the station at 4:15 there were already hundreds of people gathered, and the crowd probably doubled by the time the train arrived....

Hey, Faggot: Your surgical options are pretty limited. Provided you live in a state where the procedure is not illegal, you could have your suspensory ligament snipped (the ligament that anchors your penis to your pelvic bone). An inch of your penile root will drop, giving you the appearance of a slightly larger penis. But when erect, your penis will flop around like a dislocated arm. Another option: you can have fat sucked from one part of your body–say, from between your ears–and injected into the shaft of your penis....

Beatrice Socoloff: Shopworn Angel Movie Art Museum By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A great painter Beatrice Socoloff was not. If these were not pictures of movie stars produced in quantity, most would hardly command a second glance at a neighborhood art fair. Her usual style is a watered-down postimpressionist cross between Cezanne and numerous anonymous bad painters, with an emphasis on the latter....

SLAID CLEAVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although Slaid Cleaves only got a record deal after moving to Austin, Texas, six years ago, his songs are clearly born of his first few decades, when he lived near quieter Portland, Maine. On his recent No Angel Knows (Philo), he paints an all too vivid picture of suffocating small-town life and the struggle to escape it with a series of bleak vignettes about individuals alternately hopeful and downtrodden....

DAVID BOYKIN OUTET 4/2, HEARTLAND CAFE In his book Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest, jazz writer Eric Nisenson takes some retrospective potshots at white lefty critics who tried to graft their own notions of what “revolutionary” black music ought to be onto the free jazz movement of the mid- and late 60s–particularly Frank Kofsky, a Marxist who notoriously tried to put his own ideals into the mouths of Coltrane and his peers....

Lee “Scratch” Perry Perry’s importance in musical history is indisputable. One of reggae’s most skilled producers and talent scouts in the 60s and 70s, he shaped some of Marley and the Wailers’ best music and ushered lesser talents like Max Romeo and Junior Byles to stardom. He revolutionized the art of dub and prompted a seismic shift in the way reggae was made. But Perry’s as well-known for being a nut as anything else....

Scotch Tape Flaming Creatures You’d never imagine this from the mainstream press, but experimental film is on the rise again, as a taste as well as an undertaking–even if it’s often returning in mutated forms like video or in areas of filmmaking where we least expect it. At the Rotterdam International Film Festival three weeks ago, hundreds of Dutch viewers, most of them in their 20s, stormed the largest multiplex in Holland–one of the best-designed facilities I know of, suggesting an unlikely cross between a Borders and a Beaubourg, a mall and an airport–to see work that’s thought to have little or no drawing power in this country....

In 1924 we moved around the corner to Sacramento Boulevard, to a bigger, nicer apartment, right on the corner of Lexington. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The middle window didn’t open. The side windows did. So in order to wash the big middle window, my father got a plank and put it out a side window. He had my mother and us four kids sit on the end of the plank, and then he stood out on the other end of the plank and washed the window....

Tom Friedman Like most myths, this one has some truth to it–though it was sharply belied on one of my visits to the wonderful Tom Friedman exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A four-year-old girl, Cat, attending the show with her mother, stood at one side and then another of Small World (1995-’97) performing the most basic act of art criticism: naming the objects she saw. Enclosed in a rectangular glass case on the floor were a few hundred tiny, brightly colored Play-Doh sculptures of ordinary things: a telephone, an airplane, a sock, headphones, a palette, a match, a watermelon, a hairbrush, a rainbow, a hot dog with relish....

By Grant Pick “People have these preconceptions about the homeless–that they’re largely bums–but we’ve found that they want to work and stand on their own two feet,” says Arloa Sutter, Breakthrough’s executive director. “It’s good for the community to see that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The street cleaners’ day begins with an 8:30 AM devotional session at Breakthrough. The half-hour Bible study isn’t mandatory, says supervisor Eddie Sturgis, “but we encourage individuals to seek the Lord....

Friday 5/1 – Thursday 5/7 2 SATURDAY The brightest stars in the universe aren’t hanging in the Hollywood galaxy. Rather, it’s the bustling Indian movie industry that’s populated by the world’s most idolized busty babes and muscle-bound hunks. Non-Indians rarely notice this pop-cultural juggernaut, but tonight’s touring Mega Stars concert offers a rare opportunity to observe the phenomenon in person. Three of Bollywood’s biggest names–Kapoor acting dynasty heiress Karisma Kapoor, the brooding Sanjay Dutt, and the colossal Salman Khan–will dance and lip-synch to Hindi movie hits with an ensemble of minor celestial bodies....

Down on Uptown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Uptown has a negative connotation,” admits Scott Kruger, a real estate agent with Koenig & Strey. Like most real estate brokers, Koenig & Strey advertises its Uptown properties under a number of pseudonyms, including Buena Park, Sheridan Park, East Ravenswood, and Lakeview (for a building at 4102 N. Kenmore, a block into Uptown). Until about 20 years ago Uptown was Uptown; in fact it was more than Uptown....

Farewell to a Grande Dame? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mordine did not return repeated phone calls to her office, and Duff would not comment on her status except to say, “We have not asked her to leave the college.” Yet the trustees seem determined to name a new chair for the dance department. Duff has the power to remove Mordine from the position, and clearly he’d prefer to have a new person in place for the coming academic year....

Fuck Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This quartet plays a low-key, shambling variety of pop music that’s less about carnality than about screwing with expectations. Whether it manifests itself as strange packaging (last year’s terrific Baby Loves a Funny Bunny looked like an oversize matchbook) or goofy stage props (bassist Ted Ellison festoons the stage with stuffed animals and windup toys), there’s a chronic element of put-on to Fuck that brings to mind other San Francisco combos like Caroliner and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282....