CELIA CRUZ & THE JOHNNY PACHECO ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Celia Cruz still deserves to be called the “Queen of Salsa.” Even at 74 she reigns supreme, carrying herself with rare dignity and maintaining remarkable control despite mounting technical limitations. As heard on her latest album, Mi vida es cantar (RMM), her voice has deepened and darkened over the years–generously, a rich mahogany to the maple of yore–and compared to her work with the hot Cuban band Sonora Matancera in the 50s and 60s, collected on last year’s superb 100% Azucar (Rhino), her range and flexibility have decreased dramatically....

Microwave culture. The Field Museum’s description of its weekend afternoon story times in a recent press release: “Listen to a story, sing some songs, and make an art project, all in just 20 minutes!” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Biting commentary. The Chicago Dental Society reports in a recent press release that the new Congress will have four members who are also dentists (all Republicans)....

By Sergio Barreto Birutis, who lives three blocks from Graceland, often gets up early to search the cemetery for migratory birds. “Morning is the best time to catch them,” he says. “They’re up and running because they’re hungry, and during migration they’re especially hungry because they’ve just flown in.” Birutis’s bird tally after this late April visit to Graceland: 157, including migrants like a pied-billed grebe, a hermit thrush, and three ruby-crowned kinglets....

By Susan DeGrane But most of the people here are like Kenny Schneider, die-hard fishermen who refuse to lay down their poles for an entire winter. Schneider’s facing surgery for a torn rotator cuff. “It hurt so bad it got to where I couldn’t lift the pole anymore, so I figured I better do something about it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s a very small group of people who fish to begin with,” says Henry Palmisano, the owner of Henry’s....

LAETITIA SONAMI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Americans’ love affair with technology has veered into obsession over the past few decades, as we stake nearly all our cultural faith on the newest electronic this and computerized that. “Circuitry will save us,” we chant, pointing and clicking our way into a gimmicky, amoral, randomized universe offered up as utopia. Thank heaven the French-born performance musician Laetitia Sonami is in town to put technology in its proper place, if only for an evening....

With his newest solo performance, Antonio Sacre takes a huge artistic step forward–and in all likelihood commits professional suicide. My Penis–In and Out of Trouble began as nothing more than a marketing ploy. Sacre submitted the title to the New York International Fringe Festival, arguing that its provocative nature would draw press. “If they were foolish enough to accept it, I said I would write it,” he explains. Thank goodness fools still run that festival....

By Kari Lydersen In late June Pilsen residents were still wondering where this year’s fiesta would be held, or if there’d be one at all. Last year construction of a Mexican-themed plaza at Blue Island and 18th forced the fiesta to move from its usual location to Cermak Road between Throop and Morgan. This was a clearly inferior location, planners say, offering less visibility and less access to 18th Street businesses, and marred by debris from nearby construction and industry....

What we have here is a genuine political parable. In early October, James “Cookie” Cook, mayor of Milford, Illinois, beat a six month-old puppy to death with a shovel. Cook explained, “The dog just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The national outpouring of rage persuaded Cook to announce he would resign at a special city Council meeting. But once at the meeting, Cook announced he wouldn’t quit after all....

RANDY WESTON TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What with technology turning the world into a global village and all, we’ve started to take cross-cultural musical fusion for granted. But when pianist-composer Randy Weston was making his first waves in the jazz world, a guy still had to visit a place to absorb its zeitgeist. Weston, now 71, was a student of Thelonious Monk, whose influence can be heard most clearly on Weston’s terrific 50s bebop recordings....

Bentley Rhythm Ace The Future Sound of the United Kingdom Three (Ministry of Sound) As big beat becomes the techno subgenre most likely to succeed on mainstream American radio’s terms, a lot of people are growing wary of it–understandably, perhaps, but a mite disingenuously as well. For example, when Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby was released in October, a number of prominent critics felt obligated to point out that it was just, you know, a novelty record....

Strangulation…and other games we play, Wig Theatre, at the O Bar and Cafe. Like so many of Chicago’s non-Equity “companies,” Wig Theatre is a group of friends who decided to put up a show in one of the city’s low-rent basement venues. Though Wig is mostly made up of Annoyance Theatre members or actors who’ve performed at the Annoyance, here they’ve chosen to stage four contemporary one-acts with a range of humor and depth, in a vein quite different from the Annoyance’s usual....

Terror Train Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Every transportation system has occasional problems,” he says. “If you’re on the highway and a semi jackknifes, you’ll be stuck for an hour and there’s nothing you can do about it. But on the CTA it happens so regularly. Every time you get on a train something happens. Just these little problems. It could be a malfunctioning door, or a fare-card machine, or your train could go 30 miles an hour for no reason when it could be going 50 miles an hour....

After the operation, do transsexuals experience normal sexual function, including orgasm? If not, what’s the point? –Brooks Magruder, Singapore Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (2) One might suppose that sexual responsiveness would depend on the surgical technique used, but if there is a consensus on the best way, you can’t tell from the medical literature. The procedure used by Dr. Biber is called penile inversion: removing most of the penis’s innards and turning the skin inside out, like a sock, to create a vaginal pouch....

TO ROCOCO ROT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On To Rococo Rot’s Veiculo (Emperor Jones), the second album from this Berlin instrumental trio, the group keeps its music small, recalling Tortoise at its most restrained. Flimsy electronic beats saturate the album, but they never push the proceedings toward the dance floor. In fact, the beats seem to emanate from the outside walls of a disco, muffled and abstracted as they penetrate mortar and brick....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Human medical research relies heavily upon the good intentions and honesty of volunteers, who put themselves at some risk in return for monetary compensation and the knowledge that they have made a contribution to medicine. However, misrepresentation by a volunteer of his or her medical, drug, psychological, or behavioral history in order to be accepted into a study amounts to scientific fraud and undermines the whole process....

By Jonathan Rosenbaum I’d like to call attention to Mr. Zhao, but I couldn’t with a clear conscience include it on my ten-best list without playing a game of one-upmanship with readers. For the same reason, I won’t include movies that haven’t yet opened locally. Some of my colleagues in Chicago do, but they’re catering to the whims of distributors; looking for awards and ad copy, distributors screen these movies for reviewers near the end of the year and open them briefly in New York or Los Angeles to qualify for this year’s Oscars....

Sharon Ellis sees herself as a conqueror rather than a survivor–but she had to fight the battle alone. In 1980, fed up with her husband’s abuse, she went to her church for help. “It was there for me with the love but not necessarily with the knowledge of what to do with me,” she says. “The message I was getting was similar to the ones we receive as children. They were about self-worth, my place as a woman, my job as a woman, and that type of thing....

You Are Not Here By Carol Burbank Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Four Neo-Futurist women set out to map personal and cultural transformations in “You Are Not Here.” The interwoven stories of Anita Loomis, Diana Slickman, Stephanie Shaw, and Rachel Claff take us on an inspiring and convoluted journey, as tales of fire, falling, failing, and fantasy blend together with the logic of dreams, leaving haunting afterimages....

Buffalo Hunting: Images of Shame and Power By Mark Swartz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artist Jay Doering metaphorically overmatches Mr. James’s firepower with an untitled sculpture that takes the form of a small but workable cast-iron cannon. Pointed at the doorway of the gallery, his sculpture makes one of those dangerously playful gestures that grown-up little boys seem to enjoy. In effect Doering is saying, This is not a neighborhood where you casually play with guns....

You can see why local choreographer Harrison McEldowney (creator of “the Milly”) and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago are a good fit: Hubbard Street has always had a silly streak, often with a retro flavor. Consider its signature piece, artistic director Lou Conte’s The 40s, with its big-band music and playful dancers skittering across the stage, as well as David Parsons’s popular opera spoof The Envelope and Jiri Kylian’s whimsy set to Mozart, Sechs Tanze, with its flying powder and bewigged dancers....