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By Terri Kapsalis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The el was different last Thursday. Things have been changing for a while now, of course: some stations have new paint and fancier signage, personnel have been eliminated, and some cars have been updated and renovated. Gradual, rather subtle changes. But Thursday there was a tectonic shift. As I entered the car, I heard an electronic two-tone chime followed by a recording of a man’s stiff voice: “The doors are closing....

You once wrote about the largest commercially available bra size. [The largest that could be found on store shelves was 48DD, while the largest found in a catalog was 52E.] If you were correct then, you need to update the answer now. I wear a 48H. It is off the rack and not the largest size that was available at the shop–that was a 52I, if I recall. The last Sears catalog I saw had a 52G, and I once bought a 46II from them....

Black and White and Wrong All Over Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately titled “The Gatekeeper,” the profile-and-article focuses on Raymond and her still powerful hold on the Housing Center, which she founded in 1972 to insure long-lasting racial diversity in Oak Park. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, 2000, defines “gatekeeper” this way: “1. One that is in charge of passage through a gate....

By S.L. Wisenberg One day Snake slithered around Eve’s neck and whispered, I have seen the best food of all. God saves it for himself and the angels. Just peek in that building. There are specifically religious diet programs (Diet, Discipline and Discipleship) and diet books (More of Jesus, Less of Me; Help Lord–the Devil Wants Me Fat!) that take on original sin, weakness, and the devil directly. I’m more interested in the debates and beliefs in secular bibles–best-sellers by lay healers....

From the Old Country Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By then Thompson was recording for Capitol Records, but unlike many of the musicians on the label’s young country roster he didn’t move to the west coast. He stayed in Texas–and went on to forge one of the most successful careers any country singer has ever had, racking up nearly 80 hits between the late 40s and the early 80s....

KENNY GARRETT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kenny Garrett’s latest release, Simply Said (Warner Brothers), features a tight, versatile quartet that complements Garrett’s alto and soprano saxes with piano or organ (and, on two tracks, Pat Metheny’s guitar), but to my ears it’s one of his least exciting efforts. Simply Said could infiltrate “contemporary jazz”–the domain of that other Kenny G–since for the most part it favors simple melodies and softened textures over Garrett’s usual fire-breathing angularity....

PAUL LOVENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Americans like Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, and Rashied Ali were key in freeing jazz drumming from the mundanities of timekeeping back in the 60s, but no one since–them included–has approached the kit as a pure sound generator with more glee and imagination than German percussionist Paul Lovens. For more than three decades now, he’s consistently found new ways to make instant music, applying a steely concentration to startling performances that project a childlike excitement....

PETER BLEGVAD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before the British trio Slapp Happy was absorbed by prog-rock behemoth Henry Cow in 1974, it made a few albums that could have turned pop inside out–if anyone had heard them. On the best (and easiest to find), 1973’s Acnalbasac Noom (ReR), singer Dagmar Krause, keyboardist Anthony Moore, guitarist Peter Blegvad, and the rhythm section from Faust braided compelling nonrock melodies and lyrics that were by turn poetic and comic into highly original, slightly off-kilter structures....

Movable Beast Dance Festival Curtis was virtually shouted down after this remark, but it seems to me that he had the most cogent point. I went to both nights of the festival’s concert performances and saw many of the performers at the summer solstice celebration at the MCA. And of the 14 concert performances I saw, the majority were failures: typically the choreographer followed an aesthetic principle right over a cliff....

By Neal Pollack Back on the street, Surratt waited for the Harrison bus. And waited. And waited. It was 1 AM, then 1:15. She began to panic, and when she panicked, she knew, her asthma could act up again. A “homeless man” approached, she says, and told her the Harrison bus didn’t run overnight. She needed to walk back up the street to Jackson and wait for the 126 bus, which would take her to State....

Around the Coyote Blood/Memory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pencil and Graphite (1992) is an “experimental narrative” that mixes black and white with color to depict an artist who can’t differentiate fantasy from reality. In Notes (1997) a woman whose lover has deserted her spends the night with a stranger to alleviate her loneliness. Recess tells the story of an 11-year-old boy who learns that his father has died....

ASSIF TSAHAR TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve often touted the strength and breadth of Chicago’s free-jazz and improvised-music scene, but it’s still dwarfed by what goes on in New York City. We have no one on par, for example, with brawny tenor players like Charles Gayle and David S. Ware, both of whom are well into middle age but started recording regularly only in the 90s....

BOBBY ZANKEL GROUP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While some jazz musicians isolate themselves in small corners of the music world, others, like Bobby Zankel, build bridges between different camps. What an accomplishment, for instance, to use as sidemen both swing-happy boppers like trumpeter Johnny Coles and drummer Ralph Peterson and open-sea adventurers like saxophonist Odean Pope and pianist Marilyn Crispell; but creating contexts to encompass such disparate personalities is just what the Philadelphia-based alto saxophonist did on his first couple of records, Seeking Spirit and Emerging From the Earth (both on the Cadence label)....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I told the writer in our prior phone interview, in the two hours (not entire “weekend”) that I spent working at the North Center (not “North Town”)/Lincoln Square Neighborhood Association festival booth, one woman (not “a lot of unhappy neighbors”) expressed discontent over the noise level of the festival. I did not say, “But the school hasn’t shown interest in preserving what was unique about the neighborhood before they moved in, the things that fostered a sense of community, the diversity....

By Ted Kleine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On other occasions over its 16-year history the picnic has drawn as many as 20 people, and games of Frisbee and softball have broken out. But at this picnic the five faithful lounging under the oak tree were most interested in talking about Haymarket. Not about the hangings, which historians now maintain were political executions of innocent men, but about a later outrage: a new National Park Service plaque naming the Haymarket Martyrs’ Memorial in Forest Home Cemetery a National Historic Landmark....

Certain moments stand out in Kathy Kelly’s mind from her eight trips to Iraq over the past three years. “Last year on one hospital visit I walked into a very crowded children’s ward and a mother was sobbing and calling for help,” says Kelly, cofounder of the Chicago-based group Voices in the Wilderness, which has deliberately violated UN sanctions against Iraq by taking medical supplies into the country. “The doctor who was our guide raced over to her side and gave resuscitation to her seven-month-old baby....

Dysfunctional Home Robert Wilson: The Theater of Drawing Messiness is at play in Jane Benson’s three witty dust pieces (one titled Under the Chair Dust). She’s painted dust bunnies with white enamel in some 50 layers, which partly preserves and partly obliterates the texture of the dust: the glossy, reflective enamel recalls those perfect TV-kitchen surfaces, but makes a witty joke on the impossibility of perfect cleanliness. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“My images are definitely tamer than what people would expect,” says Steve Diet Goedde, a photographer whose work is showcased in a new book, The Beauty of Fetish. “Most fetish photographers shoot either to titillate themselves and their peers or to shock the uninitiated. They forget that there’s a person wearing all that leather or latex gear in their photos.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goedde discovered the theatrical genre–typically associated with leather, latex, and an imaginative use of props–after dropping out of the School of the Art Institute in 1986....

Irma Vep Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this dark, brittle French comedy (1996), most of it in English, about a film company shooting a remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent Les vampires. An unexpected masterpiece, Irma Vep was assembled so quickly that it has an improvisational feel and a surrealist capacity to access its own unconscious–two sterling traits it shares with Feuillade’s 1916 serial....

A fever dream about how it feels not to fit in or want to fit in, this startling 1995 drama combines symbolism and realism with the impulsiveness of free association, yet its conceits are perfectly logical. Gabriel Mick is seamlessly convincing as Seth, a barely out of high school white kid in the Adirondacks who styles himself in accordance with elaborate fantasies about what it’s like to be black–something the movie explores in a literal way and as a metaphor for Seth’s outsider status....