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Friday 3/19 – Thursday 3/25 20 SATURDAY Legend has it the Mongol called Temujin was born clutching a blood clot, a sign of auspicious fortune. Dubbed Genghis Khan by his quivering minions, the man with a mesmerizing fire in his eyes and an uncanny ability to inspire intense loyalty united the perpetually feuding Mongol clans and created an empire stretching from the Adriatic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Yet popular opinion still characterizes him as an anomalous barbaric scourge instead of the political and strategic genius he was....

NERVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By now we all know what heroin sounds like. But judging from the frantic set I caught at the Fireside a few weeks ago, if this local trio has a drug of choice it must be speed. On their debut LP, Nerves (Thrill Jockey), recorded by Mark Schwarz, guitarist Rob Datum, bassist Seth Skundrick, and drummer Elliot Dicks tear through 13 wiry, bluesy rave-ups mostly live, with few overdubs....

I have practiced patent law in Chicago for 26 years (the last ten in the western suburbs) and there are two aspects of your article about Jaime Aramburo [“Pipe Dreams,” September 15] that jumped out at me (as they would to any competent patent lawyer). First, the story says Jaime used his invention in the early 1990s. This would make it impossible for him to apply for patent protection because U....

PAUL WERTICO’S WICKED SICS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hyperkineticism of drummer Paul Wertico isn’t confined to his aggressively inventive rhythms and fills: it extends to the gamut of configurations he runs whenever he gets time off from his regular gig with the Pat Metheny Group. Wertico’s Sybil act has come to a head in the Wicked Sics, in which two of his multiple musical personalities will finally communicate with each other–to what end, we can only guess....

ROBBIE FULKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Robbie Fulks’s misleadingly titled new album, The Very Best of Robbie Fulks (due in January on Bloodshot), is in fact a decade-spanning collection of oddities and rarities meant to tide fans over as Chicago’s best singer-songwriter-satirist–who parted ways with Geffen this year–works out new material and decides how to release it. But like most of his output, it’s a masterful mix of sincerity and withering humor, of genre hopping and genre-transcending hooks, and it beats most proper albums by his “peers” by a country mile....

Confidential to Wasted in West Oak Lane: Confidential to Mute Pussy: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unsurprisingly, after your letter ran I got a lot of offers from men interested in tying you up, no sex expected or required. One was even a med student like you. If you want me to forward these letters to you, send an SASE. If that was her “period” you swallowed, you can certainly “get sick off it....

Using deceptively simple editing strategies to combine footage shot in the 70s with interviews staged in the 90s, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford craft a suspenseful unfolding of the events that culminated in the world-championship heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. The movie sets the contrasting personalities of the boxers against an eleborate musical, political, and social backdrop. James Brown and B.B. King were in Kinshasa to enhance the event; Norman Mailer and George Plimpton were there to cover it....

WILBUS AMADEUS CROAKLEY, Giants in the Sky Productions, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio, and MY UNCLE’S FAVORITE DISH IS CASHEW CHICKEN…NO NUTS, Stir-Friday Night!, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. I do believe Jason Flowers is insane. I mean that in the best possible sense. A student at Second City’s Training Center (as I am), he’s not content to do what earlier improvisers have done. Following his own eccentric comic muse, he sometimes looks so out of sync with his fellow players that it seems he’s been digitally pasted into a scene....

Cleaning Up the Image of Chinese Cuisine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zhou knows how to prepare dishes to please China’s elite. Indeed, that was what he did for almost two years in the mid-1980s, as an apprentice in the kitchen of a Shanghai guest house where Communist Party leaders and foreign dignitaries stayed. “Some of the finest chefs worked there,” he recalls, “and since there was a lot of downtime between VIP visits we sampled food and drank a lot of beer....

By Ben Joravsky The ticket in question was issued on September 28, 1997, when Pincham was attending a service at the Trinity United Church of Christ, at 94th and Eggleston. The church, one of the south side’s most popular, draws as many as 12,000 people to its three Sunday services. As a result, there’s usually a great demand for parking on Eggleston. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Indeed, Pincham made his objections known to the cop who ticketed his car....

Chick Willis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Georgia-born Chick Willis is known best for bawdy up-tempo numbers like “Stoop Down Baby,” “Mother Fuyer,” and “I Want a Big Fat Woman,” but lurking behind that R-rated mouth is a first-rate bluesman. Willis’s guitar style is sparse and somewhat elemental, but the intensity of his keening tone and the precision of his attack pack every punch with fire....

“Despite four decades of job suburbanization, Chicago still has 11% more jobs than employed labor force (ELF), or workers living in the city, and the suburbs combined had 2% fewer jobs than ELF,” reports Roosevelt University’s Pierre deVise in a recent press release. “Economic interdependence between Chicago and its suburbs is undiminished…. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Living near a major airport is like having an oil refinery as a neighbor,” writes Paula Cowan in the newsletter of the Alliance of Residents Concerning O’Hare, quoting the Natural Resources Defense Council, “except that refineries are subject to stronger pollution control and disclosure requirements....

By Harold Henderson Ironically, Angelic Organics is now in danger because eight years ago the organic movement won a great victory: its leaders persuaded Congress to pass Title XVI of the 1990 farm bill, now better known as the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA). That law says that anybody who sells more than $5,000 of farm products a year can call them organic only if the USDA agrees. Violators can be fined up to $10,000....

The Lament of the Onion Cutter Theresa Sofianos’s visceral 45-minute piece is one of those beautiful, difficult experiments that give the Chicago performance-art scene its distinctive energy. Loyal audiences of other artists and interested friends, a variety of spaces in which to develop work, and a seemingly endless supply of performers from local schools all contribute to an environment that supports innovation for those willing to take the step. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

GERSHWIN-BERNSTEIN ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leonard Bernstein would have turned 80 in August, and the latest round of critical assessments confirms his status as an American original, a protean talent who bridged traditions and broke barriers. But to fix him in memory, no amount of fulsome posthumous praise can rival the sheer pleasure of his music. The Cultural Center’s Bernstein birthday salute pays homage to the brash quintessential New Yorker who borrowed from jazz and Tin Pan Alley to come up with sparkling portraits of the metropolis he loved....

Luminous Motion Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bette Gordon’s strange and singular American independent feature (the follow-up to her 1983 debut, Variety) premiered at the Locarno film festival in 1998–so why have we had to wait two years to see it in Chicago? The Locarno crowd can’t be any stranger or smarter than we are, so perhaps the director of the festival simply trusts and respects his patrons more than American distributors trust and respect us....

Lead Stories Compelling Explanations Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Police in Duluth, Minnesota, arrested Randall Dean Adams, 27, in the early morning hours of June 6 inside a basement after a neighbor called 911. When an officer found Adams and asked what he was doing, Adams allegedly said that he had been hired for a remodeling job and had come to look things over....

Lead Stories Tom Wesson, an Anglo running for constable in Dallas, lost even after trying to give himself an edge by adopting the name “Tomas Eduardo Wesson.” To comply with residency requirements, a school board candidate in Miami claimed that he lived in a 9-by-11-foot storage shed on his father’s property, but a judge dropped him from the ballot. And “psychic” Jacqueline Stallone, interviewed before election day, said her dogs had told her telepathically that Bush would win the presidency by 200 votes....

By John Conroy “I remember getting calls from police saying Aaron was gangbanging or Aaron was among several people standing in front of a grocery store and the owner asked them to move and he was the only one that caused a problem. And to show you how I was, I would not allow police officers to bother him. I went so far as to tell them that they had no reason to mess with my son....

Rhinoceros Theater Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Rhinoceros Theater Festival runs through October 2 at the Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln, 773-327-6666; admission is $10 or “pay what you can,” unless otherwise noted. Following is the schedule for September 16 through 23, based on information available Monday. Cows SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 Playwright-director Matthew Wilson, known for his live monologues Friday nights on WZRD, teams up with fellow former Thunder Road Ensemble members Amy Eaton, Deborah King, and Daniel Taube to premiere Wilson’s new play....