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“The claim made by a national association of black social workers that interracial adoption is cultural genocide is out of step with the vast majority of African Americans and Whites,” says Garth Taylor of the Metro Chicago Information Center in a recent press release on a center survey. That six-county poll found 81 percent of blacks and 94 percent of whites favor interracial adoption. “Most people believe that new born babies should not be held accountable to standards of cultural homogeneity....

DEFARI/XZIBIT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With gangsta rap haven Death Row Records pretty much out of the picture, real LA hip-hop has finally emerged from the shadows. And I’m not just talking about the underground–which is crawling with whizzes like Jurassic 5, Rasco, Peanut Butter Wolf, the Beat Junkies, Aceyalone, and Dilated Peoples–but also some formidable mainstream talent. Some of the best of the latter hit town this week on a tour headlined by Phife from Tribe Called Quest....

“People have given us all sorts of names–avant-garde, free jazz, new jazz,” pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams says, pretty much right off the bat. “We don’t accept those names, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use them in connection with my work.” By “us” Abrams–who’s in town this weekend to perform a solo piano concert and receive a proclamation from the city announcing this Sunday as Muhal Richard Abrams Day–means himself and his cohorts in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the hugely influential south-side organization that produced forward-thinking jazz players like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, and George Lewis....

ROBBIE WILLIAMS 5/14, METRO Turns out former teen idol Robbie Williams–whose animated working-class mug you’ve almost certainly seen if you read glossy magazines or watch TV–was hiding an honest-to-goodness light under the bushel he must’ve made with the British boy group Take That. On his American debut, The Ego Has Landed (Capitol), he demonstrates a loopy but accessible sense of wordplay and manages to meld enough familiar Britrock signifiers (a Stonesy guitar bit here, a mild lift from Bowie’s “Heroes” there) with enough generic 90s club rhythms to suck in just about anyone....

By Mike Sula Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The local brewing industry doesn’t exist even as a memory for most people, and for years Skilnik, a 49-year-old former postal carrier, ignored his own recollections of its last gasps. But beer in general has always preoccupied him. In his early 20s, long before the home-brewing fad began, he’d discovered the raw materials for garbage-can brew in a Taylor Street hardware store....

Why aren’t seat belts mandatory in all school buses? –Kesti16, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several factors account for the good record. School buses are taller and heavier than most other traffic and generally travel at moderate speeds. In a collision, high seat backs prevent kids from being thrown great distances, and impact-absorbing materials soften the blow. The question remains controversial, however....

El Valley Centro El Valley Centro, James Benning’s latest feature, is a fairly minimalist effort consisting of 35 shots, each of them two and a half minutes long, filmed in direct sound with a stationary camera in California’s Central Valley. About halfway through I found myself, to my surprise, thinking about Joseph Cornell’s boxes, those surrealist constructions teeming with fantasy and magic–dreamlike enclosures that make it seem appropriate that Cornell lived most of his life on a street in Queens called Utopia Parkway....

By David Moberg Reynolds and Ostendorf didn’t get to be buddies by sharing an interest in sports or poker or bird-watching–they’re allies in a vastly ambitious project to transform the public life of greater Chicago. As part of a disparate coalition of 85 people–blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians drawn from both the city and suburbs, from virtually every major religious faith and secular groups as well–they’re among the early leaders of a new metropolitan citizens’ organization....

Friday 4/10 – Thursday 4/16 the musical plays tonight at 7:30 at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, and runs through May 17. Tickets are $18. Call 773-883-1090 for reservations. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 11 SATURDAY Published writers are often more than willing to endure those wide-eyed, “What kind of chair do you sit on when you’re working?”-type queries if it’ll unload a few more units at the local Bookopolis....

In the Heart of America Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wallace winds the three skeins of her nonlinear story more and more tightly together as the play progresses. The core is the love affair between Remzi Saboura and Craver Perry, a Palestinian-American soldier and his redneck best friend from Kentucky, an affair set off by high-adrenaline violence. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Boxler, teaches them to hone the anger from their pasts to killing intensity; he also adds his own associations to the play’s death spiral....

In 1890 more than 40 percent of Chicagoans were foreign-born, and another 36.9 percent were children of immigrants. Many tried to retain their ethnic traditions, favoring their own music, theater, and religion. When Northeastern Illinois University history professor Steven Riess set out to study the leisure activities of this period in urban America, he found the saloon was second only to the church as the most important social institution in ethnic neighborhoods....

By Grant Pick Ronnie Greer came to God while a marine in 1976. He’d been court-martialed for assaulting a credit union officer and was serving an 18-month sentence in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was 20, an angry and committed Black Muslim from Milwaukee, when a Christian crusade showed up at the stockade. “A young white man preached at me,” Greer recalls. “He was nervous and sweating, and I talked to him so I wouldn’t have to go back to my cell....

He was the sixth greatest American mayor of the century, at least according to a poll of experts done by Melvin Holli, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year brought us no nearer to Daley’s records. But we did get more audiotapes secretly recorded by presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom dealt often with Daley....

Irene Zabytko grew up in Ukrainian Village in the 60s. But she and her neighbors didn’t call it that. “We called it a slum,” she says. “I lived across the street from a factory. There were gangs and there was a lot of violence.” When she returned home she quit school and “meandered” for a while, “falling in love with a guy and moving to Vermont.” That move made her realize she should “go to school and do something more worthwhile than living with a guy and chopping wood....

IVAN LINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hesitate to call Ivan Lins a forgotten man–after all, he does rank among the most prolific and popular Brazilian singer-songwriters of the last quarter century. But in the most recent editions of The Rough Guide to World Music and The All Music Guide Lins merits not a mention, and Tower Records lists but three Lins albums in its database....

PJ Harvey at the Vic, October 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Als, who is black, goes on to note that white artists like Beck, the Beastie Boys, and the Backstreet Boys have “borrowed extensively from black music,” by which he obviously means they have “stolen from black music.” But anyone who’s paying attention to hip-hop will tell you that the most egregious (and extensive) borrowing these days is being done by a black artist, Puff Daddy, who has “borrowed extensively” from white artists Sting and Led Zeppelin, and by “borrowed extensively” I mean “taken songs in their entirety and rapped some lame shit over top of them....

Psst–. Wanna Buy a Theater? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The decision to sell constitutes quite a turnaround for the OTC: after the merger, Marlowe toyed with the idea of moving the whole operation from 2851 N. Halsted (the old Steppenwolf space) to a renovated and downsized Organic facility; in fact, rising rent on the Halsted address was part of what prompted Touchstone to join forces with the Organic in the first place....

The film segment of the second annual Russian Arts Festival runs Friday through Sunday, November 28 through 30, at First Chicago Center Theater, First National Bank of Chicago, 2 N. Dearborn. Tickets for all programs are $6, students and seniors $2. For more information call 773-734-2619. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Another Russian gangster film,” you may groan at first, as I did at the onset of this feature by writer-director Alexei Balabanov (who made the remarkable 1995 short Trofilm)....

Slight Returns Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March Loosegroove was folded into the Seattle label Will (original home of Grandaddy), pushing back the release of Debutante by a week, but from the sound of the album you’d think it’d been on the cutting-room floor for five years. It’s a heaping dose of retro rock so dumb it makes Urge’s thin line between smug and sincere look like the Berlin Wall....

CIBO MATTO 2/21, METRO This unconventional duo’s new Super Relax EP (Warner Brothers) includes a bootleg-quality live version of “BBQ” that captures its manic means of working a crowd. But the disc’s show stealer is a sedate, charmingly straightforward take on Tom Jobim and Elis Regina’s bossa nova classic “Aguas de Marco.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BRICKBATS 2/23, METRO If Halloween were any closer, guitarist Corey Gorey’s Nash Kato-ish singing and his New York-based trio’s characteristic poses on the cover of Sing You Dead (Dismal Abysmal) would have me wondering if this were really Urge Overkill in goth drag....