woodward.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While hearing for weeks about how Poshard was out to destroy us, I had been wondering exactly what Ryan would do for the gay community. When I reached the booth, I was directed to someone who looked an awful lot like Mr. Sprehe. When I then posed my question in a thoughtful and nonthreatening way, he started yelling at the top of his lungs repeatedly to all passersby (and ignoring me) that “GEORGE RYAN WILL SIGN THE ILLINOIS GAY-RIGHTS BILL!...

Let’s get one thing straight before we go further: Love is not finite. As any parent knows, a new offspring comes along and the family grows to embrace the child (more often than not, anyway). Money and time may be limited, but not the ability to care about someone or something new. The same goes for the sports teams we say we “love,” so it’s not quite right to suggest that the American Basketball League’s Condors have a better chance of making it because the National Basketball Association owners are locking out their players....

The Thomas Crown Affair With Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary, Frankie R. Faison, and Faye Dunaway. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both are about a classy investigator for an insurance company (Faye Dunaway in 1968, Rene Russo in 1999) going after a debonair zillionaire (Steve McQueen then, Pierce Brosnan now) who pulls off elaborately planned, outrageous robberies with hired helpers just for the fun of it....

By Nadia Oehlsen Mai Khader and Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, the film’s chief researchers, are both Palestinians and recent graduates of North Park University. Khader had helped one of her professors gather stories about 1948 from Palestinians who’d spent 50 years in refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. “In a refugee camp, let’s say the Dheisheh camp around the Bethlehem area, people would just grab us from the streets if they knew that we were doing a project on ’48,” Khader says in the documentary....

Alan Klasky Never Loved Me Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some slick performers throw a lot of glitz and technique at you and hope you won’t notice the lack of content. I prefer more rough-hewn artists, like Karen Finley, with something to say and just enough technique to say it. Even better are attitude-free performers with real stories to tell, like San Francisco-based Nena St....

Feeding the New World a Taste of the Old Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “At that time, there was a bakery on every block,” says Helga. “All the immigrants from Germany, Yugoslavia, and Austria were coming over, and my mother realized they were used to light cakes, not the sweet ones the Americans liked.” Back then, Lutz Cafe was a tiny retail bakery with a handful of authentic tortes and pastries....

African American Art in Chicago, 1900-1950 Willie Robert Middlebrook: Black Angels Needham anticipated later developments in African-American art. By the 30s and 40s, black artists began to look to African art for inspiration and started to differentiate their images from those in the Western tradition: the viewer through a window appreciates the qualities of light and air from a position of security and even privilege–a transcendent eye being possible mainly to those who have food, clothing, housing, and the freedom to traverse the landscape unharassed....

ARTS CENTER JAZZ ENSEMBLE WITH CHARLIE HADEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Out at the College of DuPage, the decade-old Arts Center Jazz Ensemble gives the suburbs their very own jazz repertory company. Led by trumpeter and faculty member Tom Tallman, the band consists of lesser-known area jazz musicians fully capable of interpreting a wide range of historical styles, but this concert could almost stand on the strength of its program alone....

BLACK CROWES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Black Crowes have been a wildly unoriginal band from the get-go, but on their last two albums, Amorica and Three Snakes and One Charm, they turned into something far worse. They got boring, sluggish, each new meandering jam ending as directionlessly as it started. The subsequent departure of bassist Johnny Colt and guitarist Marc Ford seemed to seal their underwhelming fate....

Bloodshot Eyes the Future Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We were living hand-to-mouth for the first two or three years,” says Miller. “We didn’t put out a new record until that last one had paid for itself. We had to stick by our guns and establish with media, radio, and booking agents that this punk-and-country thing could exist and develop a critical language around it....

Captured at huizen.dds.nl/ -ramsay/intro.htm Harding was asking himself the question Who am I? He realised that what he appeared to be to others depended on their range from him. His observations and thinking included the following: at several feet he appeared human, but closer to he was just an eye, cells, molecules, atoms, electrons and so on, down to practically nothing. Moving away but still looking at him, the external observer lost sight of his individual form which became absorbed into humanity, life, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy....

Case #97L015744: Shaw v. Zahn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hell hath no fury like Kindra Shaw, scorned when fiance Werner Zahn broke off their engagement and nine-year relationship last August. Shaw claims Zahn promised to marry her and provide “$2,000.00 per month for rent, an $800.00 per week allowance, the use of credit cards held in his name and written commitments for the purchase of real estate....

CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 19th century had its Liszts and Mendelssohns, but of the notable conductors of this century, almost none has dared to pursue a parallel career as a soloist. Toscanini, FurtwŠngler, and Bruno Walter confined their time and energy entirely to the podium; while Szell, Bernstein, and Solti were ace pianists, they performed infrequently in public, and even then mostly in chamber settings....

African-American English “should not be compared to Standard English,” University of Chicago linguistics chairman Salikoko Mufwene tells the University of Chicago Chronicle (April 2). “It should be compared with other non-standard varieties of English spoken in North America–Appalachian English or Ozark English, for example….It shares so many features with white non-standard forms of English that we should try to understand the connection between these varieties of English, especially because they all developed concurrently....

Friday 2/20 – Thursday 2/26 21 SATURDAY Seven months ago Luis Eduardo Sanchez was born in Guadalajara with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID) and was given five months to live. His relatives, including family in Oak Park, are trying to raise $200,000 for a bone marrow transplant, but first they must find a donor with a similar ethnic background–no easy task, since the Latino community is sorely underrepresented in donor programs....

Friday 11/20 – Thursday 11/26 21sATurday Every time heavy rains fill suburban cellars knee-deep with water but leave the city relatively unscathed, a public official goes on TV to invoke and praise the Deep Tunnel. Indeed, since the first phase of the multibillion-dollar underground storm water drainage system was implemented in 1985, reports of fecal grease balls washing up on city beaches–once a regular summer occurrence–have practically come to a halt....

FAIYAZ WASIFUDDIN DAGAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Here in the U.S. we’re willing to call a parent and a kid or two a “musical family,” but the Carters, the Judds, and even (cough) the Dylans have nothing on India’s Dagars. They’ve been the greatest practitioners of dhrupad, the purest and most austere form of northern Indian classical music, for 20 generations. And Zahiruddin and Faiyazuddin Dagar–the uncle and father, respectively, of Faiyaz Wasifuddin Dagar, who gives an extremely rare concert in Chicago this weekend–are considered to have been the best dhrupad singers of the modern era....

By Ted Shen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James bought an iMac and learned to use its Web-design software. It took him about six months to get his site up and running. “I was trying to build a car and drive it at the same time,” he says. “I spent two months just to get the kinks out. But keep in mind that I had a day job, and this is really a private passion....

By Michael Miner “I saw them on-line,” said his father. “You’re going to be happy.” The accounting firm of Friedman Eisenstein Raemer and Schwartz had added up the votes. The only two members of the Jeff Committee who knew the winners before the ceremony were Joan Kaloustian, who prepared the cards inside the presenters’ envelopes, and Jerry Proffit, the chair of the committee’s Equity wing who produced the awards show. On Monday before the show Kaloustian faxed the names to the Sun-Times....

For eight years Buffalo Grove mayor Sidney Mathias sat through the orations of Rob Sherman, his town’s outspoken atheist. Week after week Sherman showed up at village board meetings to complain, among other things, that allowing the Jewish Community Center to use a public park violated the separation of church and state. Mathias always listened patiently. On April 19 the genial mayor presided over his last meeting. He was stepping down after being elected to the state legislature....