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EDDIE PALMIERI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The worst news I’ve had all year: the scintillating salsa pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri will not lead his full-scale jazz orchestra in Chicago as originally announced, but will instead appear at the helm of a seven-piece band, as small a group as he’s led in years. But though we lost the opportunity to see the big band in what would have been its first Chicago appearance this decade, we can still sink our teeth into the smorgasbord of sounds that Palmieri can draw from the keyboard in any format: he might set up dramatically placed colors and tension-building tone clusters, or slice through his own intricate textures with double-octave lines....

Last Saturday about 175 people gathered at Oakton Community College to learn about nature in the Chicago area. All of us who were there are part of the Volunteer Stewardship Network, a group started a little more than a decade ago by the Illinois Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. The network now operates all over the state, but most of the people in it live and work in the six counties of the Chicago metropolitan area....

Nathalie, who occupies nearly every frame of Noemie Lvovsky’s 1994 first feature, is a sexual drifter in her mid-20s, angry, clueless, and obsessively fearful of loneliness; she feels stifled by her live-in lover, harasses another man who’s dumped her, and puts the make on her best friend’s boyfriend. Lvovksy uses tight close-ups to convey emotional claustrophobia, and the jittery handheld camera adds to the nervous energy and sense of unpredictability. Her young, disenfranchised characters spend their time drinking, arguing, and chatting aimlessly, yet Lvovsky (who coscripted with Emmanuel Salinger, Marc Cholodenko, and Sophie Fillieres) has a keen ear for the kind of small talk that betrays deep frustration; these are desperate, capricious, unromantic people, but we come to respect their brutal honesty and sympathize with their search for emotional refuge....

KARLHEINZ ESSL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The music of Viennese composer Karlheinz Essl is a case study in the disintegration of boundaries between improvisation and composition. On the 1995 compilation Rudiments (TONOS), which includes several examples of his imaginative abstract writing (“Met Him Pike Trousers,” “Helix 1.0”), Essl travels easily between the two modes, particularly on “Close the Gap,” a composition for three tenor saxophones....

When I was a kid living in Taipei, my father used to take me to the Chinese variety show, a potpourri of comedy routines, folk arias, operatic highlights, and acrobatic maneuvers. I was particularly drawn to the daredevil gymnastics, but my father scoffed at them, telling me they were not equal to the mainland tradition, which incorporated tumbling, juggling, and contortion into stories. Years later, when I saw the famed acrobats of Shanghai, I understood: a narrative puts all the dazzling physical stunts in context, giving each movement a rationale and suspense....

Pepe Vargas grew up in a small town outside Bogota, Colombia, studied law in Argentina, and worked as a university professor of economics and international law in Mexico before immigrating to the United States in 1979, ready for something new and eager to learn English. What he found was a country that differed greatly from what he’d expected. “I saw poverty, misery, starvation, violence. Not the image I had had from films and magazines....

Hey, Faggot: I consulted my girlfriend, and she thinks he’s an idiot and a freak. I even asked my gynecologist if it was normal for a man to masturbate when he is in a satisfying relationship, and if so, how often and why. After my cave doctor got over the embarrassment of the question, he told me that some men prefer their own hand no matter how experienced or skilled the woman’s....

Hey, Faggot: Thanks for the encouragement to move on to a new topic–which we’ll do by the end of this column. By the end of this column, we’ll be talking about pussy farts, I promise. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But how can you say preventing HIV infection is simply a matter of taking commonsense precautions and then say getting infected isn’t anyone’s fault?...

8 BOLD SOULS 1/29, HOTHOUSE On some nights HotHouse’s new location in the South Loop suffers a few more chirping crickets than the club’s old high-profile Wicker Park spot, but last Friday when 8 Bold Souls played, every table was surrounded by people who looked pleased to be there. It’s heartening that this veteran jazz group can still pack ’em in after nearly a decade of frequent local gigging and sporadic recording–only three albums in all those years....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks for the thought-provoking article “Building a Better Baby” [October 22]. I sincerely wish that anyone trying to conceive a child would read Dan Savage’s book The Kid. It seems to me that with all the technological options available, people don’t consider adoption very seriously, and I think this is a mistake. Aren’t compassion and love two of the greatest human values?...

A Feast for the Eyes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Suhail’s big break comes after nearly a decade struggling to establish himself in Chicago. He earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Birmingham School of Architecture in England. On a lark he came to Chicago in 1990 with a group of students; when the group visited the offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, executives there saw some of Suhail’s sketches and hired him....

BLEK INK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1989, Boston-bred multi-instrumentalist Paul Lydon abandoned San Francisco for Reykjavik, Iceland–and whether he was looking for it or not, he’s found his artistic voice in exile. He wasn’t new to music when he made the move: he’d been self-releasing cassettes since the mid-80s, many of them collaborations with Laura Valentino, who went with him to Iceland....

Bullheaded At least McGinnis Slough has been spared this fate. I like to think the descendants of those first bullheads of mine are swimming there now, free and unmolested. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bullhead is a creature to be reckoned with. Like all members of the catfish family, it comes with three vicious spines. Some people believe it’s the mouth barbels that do the damage–they’re the people most quickly injured....

During the heyday of the comic strip Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in the 1930s and ’40s, many people who appeared in the illustrated feature–which began in 1918 as a collection of sports feats–“would leave word they wanted that mentioned in their obituary,” says Mark Sloan, curator of the exhibit “Dear Mr. Ripley: Treasures From the Believe It or Not! Archive,” now at the Harold Washington Library Center. “It’s hard to imagine today what a big deal this was....

DEMARRE AND ANTHONY MCGILL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fredda Hyman started the “Music in the Loft” series four years ago at her spacious home on West Washington intending to revive the 19th-century salon, where chamber music was born. A former dance instructor, she believes in nurturing young talent, so she tends to book musicians in their 20s and 30s; given the chance to play music of their choice, they charge her dirt-cheap rates....

Juice Money Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With its gray skies and soggy weather, Chicago wouldn’t seem as welcoming a locale for juice bars as sunny California. But Kirk Perron, founder of Jamba Juice, hopes the city will fall hard for what he incessantly refers to as the “healthful alternative.” In just ten years this west-coast chain of juice and smoothie bars has become the industry leader, with 270 outlets and combined annual revenue of about $100 million, but until now it’s never opened a store any farther east than Denver....

richards.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although I wasn’t quite sure what point Ben Joravsky was trying to make with his article on the 77-year-old freelance illustrator, Ralph Creasman, in “No Job Too Small,” November 28, whether 1) City Hall is picking on the little guy or 2) enforcement of business-license laws is arbitrary, he should have mentioned how lucky Mr. Creasman was that he didn’t have to pay for all those years he didn’t have a proper license and that his office had the right zoning for running a business....

Displaying a dreamy logic typically found in smiley Hollywood musicals, Hodson Nell figures publishing a free journal of film essays might raise the capital he seeks to make his own movies. Last week the cerebral 24-year-old Bucktown resident hauled around 8,000 debut copies of his Chicago Film Review to over a hundred locations, ranging from Chicago State University on 95th Street to the Adelphi Theater at 7074 N. Clark. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

LOUIS ARMSTRONG: LEGACY FOR THE MILLENNIUM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like just about everybody else, people in jazz have spent 1999 looking back over the 20th century–and in jazz, of course, that’s about all the looking back you can do. Naturally, this has focused a lot of attention on Louis Armstrong: the first black superstar, he stepped into the spotlight in the early 20s and never left, enduring as an icon even after his death in 1971....

MIXMASTER MORRIS/AMON TOBIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To that nebulous network of techno and electronica fans called “the rave community,” Mixmaster Morris is a legend. He’s been an influential DJ for well over a decade, spinning at all-night parties as well as opening for bands like Stereolab and Jamiroquai; he’s organized major DJ events and run regular clubs in his native England; and recording under the name Irresistible Force he’s released several albums that have been huge underground hits....