There’s surely no more famous lost film than Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, a silent film made in 1923 and ’24 and released by MGM in mutilated form in late 1924. If you believe the hype of Turner Classic Movies, what’s been lost has now been found–even though the studio burned the footage it cut almost 75 years ago, in order, according to Stroheim, to extract the few cents’ worth of silver contained in the nitrate....

steinber.qxd First, the jukebox book. Do you think I wanted to show this guy around? I had never met him before. I never saw him again–he didn’t even send me the book when it came out. I certainly didn’t hold myself up to him or anybody else as Mr. Jukebox. We both had the same agent, so when he came to town, my agent asked me if I wouldn’t take him around....

JORMA KAUKONEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen’s hot licks propelled the Jefferson Airplane from 1965 until 1972, when he and bassist Jack Casady split to concentrate on Hot Tuna. Backing away from the larger group’s excesses–musical and otherwise–they mixed up metallic country blues, pristine re-creations of acoustic blues standards, and even an occasional hazy twin-engine flight of surrealism like “New Song for the Morning....

By Bill Mahin A lot of the staff looked exhausted, especially Regier and Mark Bernal, one of the artists. “There was a point near the end of summer, early fall,” said Bernal, “where it was just very difficult–the point where you basically can’t get away from it, where you dream of it.” When he would come to work in the morning, he’d look up at the sky “knowing that those few minutes would be all I’d see that day....

In this action comedy based on Bob Burden’s comic books, Ben Stiller nearly steals the show as a low-profile superhero whose greatest weapon is his temper–which occasionally gives him the power to do minor property damage or slightly hurt bad guys but usually just prevents him from getting dates. But he has stiff competition from his cohorts, including Hank Azaria, who’s armed with pounds of flatware and a heavy accent; William H....

By Ben Joravsky As befits her style, Brown says of her latest expansion plan that the stakes are high. “This is not just about building a building or staging a play,” she says. “This is about economic development. This is about developing South Shore and Grand Crossing and other south-side communities. We have set a goal and we are determined. By the year 2001 we will have expanded. We will get it done....

Play Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Samuel Beckett was surprisingly inflexible when it came to creative interpretations of his plays. He once sued to stop a production of Endgame because director JoAnne Akalaitis had changed the setting from a nondescript home to a subway station. God knows how he would have reacted to Joanna Settle’s idea for Play, his short one-act about three characters who relive again and again a triangle gone awry: she’s set it in a store window....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s soothe Victoria Kuohung and Raymond Nomizu’s concerns that mayoral candidate Bobby Rush is racist toward Asian-Americans (Letters, February 12). Yes, in his “Rush Job” (February 5) Neal Pollack regaled readers with an anecdote in which Rush visited an unnamed Asian restaurant (or in Pollack’s affectionate terms, a “chop suey parlor”) on Sheridan Road in Uptown where he repeatedly called the owner “Ms....

Salvatore Giuliano Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title character of Francesco Rosi’s 1962 feature, a notorious real-life bandit who galvanized Sicily’s poor after World War II, is seen only as a corpse, an object to be venerated and investigated. How his bullet-riddled body ended up in Palermo’s town square, and who was responsible for the crime, isn’t clear. Rosi’s scrupulously researched journalistic expose, scripted with Franco Solinas (The Battle of Algiers), suggests there was a conspiracy between the state (local and national) and the Mafia, an alliance of convenience that safeguarded landowners and their interests....

I am a 43-year-old female who has always identified as bisexual. I’ve enjoyed plenty of healthy uninhibited sex in my time as well as good relationships on both sides of the fence. I recently met a woman who is 110 percent wonderful, and she seems to feel the same about me. The problem? I am coming to the realization that I prefer men for sex and women for relationships. At the same time I believe strongly in monogamy, and if I make a commitment with this woman I want to honor it....

JACK BLACK 4/17, EMPTY BOTTLE The self-titled debut LP from Jack Black–produced by former Clash manager Kosmo Vinyl–isn’t quite the straightforward “greaser punk” the packaging would have you believe. The cover may be hot pink and the hair may be full of goop, but Ted Nugent looms at least as large as Johnny Thunders, and “Drive Them Wheels” is a dead ringer for Golden Earring’s “Radar Love.” A few songs are too slow or too tinny, and on occasion front man David Quick lapses into a hot-and-bothered AOR whine....

What is the deal with the millennium? I understand that people think years ending in zeros are significant, so it follows that a year ending in three zeros is really significant. But for years I have heard people talking about the “arrival of the millennium,” meaning either that we’re going to have heaven on earth or that civilization will collapse. Either people are envisioning one heckuva New Year’s Eve party or there’s something else going on....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra But if the program sounded respectable, the concert proved freaky and tense. Segerstam likes taking chances, and his results were all over the map. Some things were brilliantly imaginative, some were hysterically overblown. And one performance was so bad it almost started a fight in the lower balcony. I’ve seen some odd concerts at Orchestra Hall over the years, but I can’t remember any that have been quite so nerve-racking....

A Queer Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A middle-aged marriage counselor (George Lam) and his twentysomething hairdresser lover (Jordan Chan) try to cope with their closeted relationship in this trailblazing 1997 feature by Hong Kong writer-director Shu Kei (Hu Du Men). While Shu flirts with preachiness and melodrama, the film mostly avoids bathos; its muted, bittersweet tone effectively underscores a realistic, sometimes humorous portrait of compassion and hypocrisy in a society that criminalized homosexual acts until the early 90s....

Jo-Jo, who does hair at the Lakeview salon Milio’s, has worked as a professional club kid for much of the decade, entertaining patrons at Karma, Red Dog, and Shelter. He has an amazing talent for transforming himself with costumes, wigs, and makeup, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he’s still playing with dolls. It’s something he’s been doing since childhood, when he used to disassemble and rebuild his Barbies to make their movements more natural, he says....

FENGSHI YANG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since she got her PhD in composition from the University of Chicago in ’92–the first woman from China to do so–Fengshi Yang has been lying low. Instead of embarking on a high-powered academic career, as some had expected her to, she settled in a western suburb with her husband, Cheyo Wang, a part-time composer. Yang says she’s happy with the routine of teaching piano privately and managing a chamber orchestra, East Meets West Music Arts, which consists mainly of emigres who’ve graduated from topflight conservatories here and in China....

Legend has it that Chicago’s downtown would have evolved on the southeast side if it hadn’t been for an army engineer’s love for a fur trader’s daughter. When it was time to designate a site for Fort Dearborn, the engineer chose the mouth of the Chicago River over that of the more accessible and navigable Calumet so he could be near his beloved. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Every neighborhood has its myths,” says historian Dominic Pacyga, a professor at Columbia College....

Jekyll and Hyde’s But how important are the critics? With $2 million in advance ticket sales and a plot familiar to the many tourists attending Broadway shows this summer, Jekyll and Hyde may be unstoppable. It already has a cult audience, dubbed “Jekkies,” developed over the musical’s long and tortuous march to Manhattan. First produced in 1990 at Houston’s Alley Theatre, Jekyll and Hyde seemed designed to capitalize on the success of British musicals based on 19th-century melodramas like Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables....

KENNY BURRELL & ERNIE ANDREWS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kenny Burrell came out of the fertile crescent of Detroit jazz in the 1950s and promptly established himself as the guitar voice of the hard-bop movement–the next link in a chain of fret men that descended from protobopper Charlie Christian through bebop players like Tal Farlow and Jimmy Raney. And he soon came to define the idiom’s sound across the board, not just for other guitarists: he made a ton of records that decade, as both sideman and leader, and from the start he displayed an authoritative talent for distilling bebop’s complex patterns into the more straightforward melodies, often tinged with the blues, that distinguished hard bop....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » AYSO is not a highly competitive soccer league–that is its whole point. The principles of AYSO are open registration, balanced teams, and everyone plays. No matter how inexperienced or ineffective a soccer player is, she or he will play the majority of the game–usually at least three out of the four quarters. In this way players of all levels have a chance to participate in a wonderful team sport, feel that they are contributing to their team, have a fun time, get a lot of rigorous physical exercise, and develop their soccer skills....