To Kelly Kleiman, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After just reading your review of Landmarks [September 1], I really felt it important to respond, however briefly. (Please note: I have responded to one reviewer in my life and now you.) I don’t think in all of my years of being reviewed (and there have been a few) have I EVER experienced such a hateful, mean-spirited, and clueless review....

Devolution Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Mayor Daley began burbling about the downtown theater district, it was obvious that City Hall had forgotten–or chosen to ignore–the real source of Chicago’s national reputation for theater: the off-Loop troupes. Partly this was politics: run-down storefronts aren’t very sexy compared to multimillion-dollar construction or rehab projects. But the city also suffered a failure of imagination: it was hard to conceive how a neighborhood theater movement could be transplanted downtown....

Fresh Goods From Perishable Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What happened is that Loftus’s album (also called Loftus) turned a profit. In the meantime members had begun experimenting with other collaborations. Rex drummer Doug Scharin had moved to Chicago in October 1997, which made things that much easier. Red Red Meat guitarist Tim Rutili and percussionist Ben Massarella, who’ve played together since the pre-RRM combo Friends of Betty, decided to put the Loftus money–and then some–back into Perishable so that these various projects would have a home....

MALACHI THOMPSON FREEBOP BAND with BILLY HARPER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the three major tenor-saxophone stylists to emerge in the 70s, Billy Harper is the most active and the least recorded–go figure. (George Adams, who died five years ago, made a slew of albums with the group led by Don Pullen and himself; Jan Garbarek, with a couple dozen albums currently available, performs only occasionally....

MOSE ALLISON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Loitering at the corner of New York jazz, southern blues, and cowboy poetry, Mose Allison has resisted categorization throughout his four-decade career. How do you pigeonhole a pianist who made some of his first recordings with Stan Getz, scored perhaps his biggest hit singing a tune by Willie Dixon, and writes songs like the postapocalyptic “Ever Since the World Ended (I Don’t Go Out As Much)”?...

NOMADS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 1984 hit movie The Gods Must Be Crazy a Coke bottle tossed out of an airplane is found by an African tribe and venerated as a holy object. If this sort of thing happens in real life, someone flying over Stockholm in the early 80s must have jettisoned a copy of the Nuggets anthology, because in 1983 the Nomads emerged from suburban Solna with Where the Wolf Bane Blooms, a mini album of dynamic, full-blown garage rock, and since then they’ve cranked out another 50 or 60 records, mostly seven-inch singles....

[Re: “A Scene of His Own,” October 8] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is there such a thing as a cheap, reasonably safe neighborhood in our cities any longer? I’ve pioneered at least five neighborhoods in this town. The first ones were reasonably safe and cheap. They progressively got more dangerous and more expensive as time progressed. Fortunately I will be able to cash in on my present situation and get out of this cow town (quite literally, these days)....

PALOALTO 11/24, PARK WEST Don’t be fooled by the cover of Paloalto, the American Recordings debut of the Los Angeles quintet of the same name. Though it not so subtly apes the look of various releases on Jade Tree and Thrill Jockey, it’s actually a big commercial-sounding rock record, produced explicitly for radio by Rick Rubin himself. But for what it is it’s not bad: the catchy passion pop of “Throw the Brick” and “Monolith” would keep my tuner on Q101 for a few seconds longer than normal....

MATT WILSON 7/31, SCHUBAS Wilson’s talents have been scattered over a broad spectrum since the baroquely unremarkable Trip Shakespeare went out with the all-too-common major-label whimper in 1994. Of late he’s played producer to indie-rock B-listers like the Wonsers, Smattering, and Velma and surprised the few people paying attention by drumming for Polara. His solo debut, Burnt, White and Blue (Planetmaker), is a solid effort, lyrically oblique but full of instantly recognizable music, a veritable history of the last 15 years of “clever” and “heartfelt” college pop....

The 13th annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, runs from Friday, April 4, through Monday, April 14. Film and video screenings will be at Chestnut Station, 850 N. Clark; Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; Art Institute Rubloff Auditorium, Columbus Drive at Monroe; First Chicago Center, 1 S. Dearborn; Spanish Coalition for Jobs, 2011 W. Pershing; Calles y Suenos, 1900 S....

Taxes were a big deal in this election season. “The other guy wants to raise them while I want to lower them,” the ads said. No matter what their convictions, nobody’s saying that taxes are at the right level, and I’d like to catch a glimpse of the politician who’s suicidally courageous enough to say that they’re too low. Aren’t taxes in the United States some of the lowest in the industrialized world?...

Our building is having a blood drive, and I noticed the following on the promotional materials left in our office: “Donating blood is a health benefit for all men, and women over 50, by removing excess iron from the blood. Studies show that excess iron can damage cells in the arteries which can cause the growth of plaque and cause harm to the heart.” I know women under 50 are premenopausal and lose some blood naturally....

By Josh Noel “He drops his hands,” says Freedman. “Bad habit he’s got. Doesn’t care about gettin’ hit. Some guys feel rewarded when they get hit, they like it. He’s one of ’em. Unfortunately.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Feldman lived out of a hotel, where he “met some guys and some girls and partied with them.” But really he was there to see how far he could take his boxing, and the answer was not very far....

Ralph Lopez sits in the living room of his Roscoe Village apartment watching a video about the old Riverview amusement park that he and his partner Derek Gee produced five years ago. The 35-minute video, Laugh Your Troubles Away: The Complete History of Riverview Park, includes footage Lopez shot with a Super-8 camera while riding in the front car of the Bobs, the park’s wooden roller coaster. The film was shot in 1967, the year Riverview closed....

Chicago Latino Film Festival Short 35-millimeter films from Spain, Brazil, and the U.S. (Water Tower, 6:30) Do–a Barbara Widely regarded as the first major film by Glauber Rocha, one of the key figures of the cinema nuovo, this exciting 1964 Brazilian feature draws on myth and folklore in exploring the sertao in 1940. Both this and the other Rocha film showing at the festival, Land in Anguish, are strongly recommended. (JR) (Facets Multimedia Center, 9:00)...

Friday 12/4 – Thursday 12/10 5 SATURDAY A recent Reader cover story focused on the controversy surrounding plans to erect a fountain in honor of Nelson Algren in Wicker Park’s Polish Triangle. The story had a happy ending, and the fountain will be dedicated today at 11:30 AM at the intersection of Division, Milwaukee, and Ashland. Mayor Daley and Studs Terkel will preside. It’s free, of course. Call 773-252-0371 for more....

Destructive Attitudes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I fear that some of the rhetoric in your article (not to mention the monstrous cover drawing) will have the (I hope unintended) effect of circulating yet again a familiar story about gay men: that we’re a separate species characterized by an unwitting but inescapable tendency toward self-destruction. How else to describe phrases like “the depth of the obsession [with the body beautiful] in gay culture” or “the infatuation in gay culture with muscle mass” (an infatuation understood as prior to its marketing)?...

A flock of evening grosbeaks has been seen at a feeder in Highland Park. The first snow buntings have arrived from the tundra, juncos have joined the house sparrows feeding in our backyard, and the leaves on the huge old cottonwood across the alley are turning from green to gold. You don’t need to be Tom Skilling to notice that fall is here and winter is just behind it. The reproductive strategy of the eastern cottonwood fits its way of life....

FRANZ JACKSON QUINTET/EDDIE JOHNSON QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Living history” perfectly describes the pairing of Chicago tenor-sax legends Franz Jackson and Eddie Johnson, who between them have logged more than a century of professional music-making, including stints with such mist-shrouded masters as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Louis Jordan, and Fats Waller. But if the phrase brings to mind something dusty, fusty, or musty, forget I mentioned it, because these are two still-vital and utterly beguiling stylists....

Lilly Abby Schachner at Live Bait Theater, through August 2 Schachner’s appearances at the Voltaire fund-raisers in May and June also illustrated the sheer fecundity of her mind. Even when she’s performing her own tried-and-true material, such as the killing bit in which she paints a Hitler mustache on an anorexic supermodel and proceeds to skewer the fat-obsessed fashion industry, she can’t help but interrupt her routine to make new comments....