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By Kari Lydersen Forty-sixth Ward alderman Helen Shiller is firmly in the affordable-housing camp, though she does think community-based retail should be part of the project. When speculation started that the CTA might sell Wilson Yard, the Uptown Community Development Corporation set up a meeting between Shiller, CTA president David Mosena, and representatives from the city and Truman College. Shiller wanted to be sure that the community would be involved in the process of deciding what would be done with the land....

Making History Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s a breakthrough for the field as a whole,” says Chauncey of the new program, “because the University of Chicago is regarded as anything but a trendy school. This sends a message that gay and lesbian studies is a serious discipline.” According to Chauncey, he’s only the second person in the U.S. to get a tenure-track job in a history department after writing a dissertation in gay history, but that situation might change with the program, which awards grants to worthy students....

Can there be anything more audacious in this day and age than proudly pronouncing oneself a bohemian? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact the vast majority of bohemians–artists, activists, and DIY philosophers who live unconventionally for their times–do not wind up with their brains splattered on a wall like Levy, or shot and dumped in a river like Rosa Luxemburg, or raped and murdered like Teena Brandon, or fill in your own favorite tragic and brutal bohemian death–maybe the one you’ve envisioned for yourself in your most paranoid moments (paranoia being historically endemic to the bohemian state)....

Blue (Note) in Green (Mill)–A Screenplay Cut to still of Green Mill Jazz Club, with poster showing it to be the regular weekly showcase for both artists–Elling on Wednesdays, Barber on Sundays and Mondays. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scene 3: A seedy hot dog stand in Bucktown. Enter MIKE FRIEDMAN, founder and president of Premonition Records–Barber’s Chicago-based recording label–to rendezvous with a local journalist, M....

I’m in dire need of help. Me and my friend are both 15, girls, and bi. We’re bored with “traditional” masturbating. We’ve tried porno (which is great, but it only took me so far), random objects, even each other! Then we stumbled on her mom’s vibrator. It was a big blue jelly dildo that vibrated. Needless to say, we had lots of fun with that. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s a half hour to curtain at Writers’ Theatre Chicago, and Michael Halberstam, the Glencoe company’s 30-ish artistic director, is greeting his patrons. Standing near the cash register that doubles as a box office, he smiles and bows slightly at everyone who passes, dapper in his vest and black velvet coat but also comic, slightly officious. He looks like the eager ambassador of a small country or a maitre d’ greeting a high-tipping regular....

Thanks to Tori Marlan and the Reader for “The Path of Lease Resistance” [March 14]. I can’t say I enjoyed the article because it stirred up feelings of discouragement and disgust recently brought on by certain property owners who take the term landLORD all too literally. Still, the rights and responsibilities that underlie the landlord-tenant relationship are very important–and very easily overlooked. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even after the inane and illegal treatment that I endured, I am resistant to the idea that tenants should assume landlords are out to get them....

Dead of Night: The Execution of Fred Hampton Pegasus Players Julius Caesar ChicSpeare Production Company at TinFish Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Already a seasoned activist when he was killed at the age of 21, Hampton was a teenage NAACP organizer from Maywood who became chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party when it was chartered in 1968. Under Hampton’s guidance, the group sought to improve both the material and intellectual lives of the residents of Chicago’s impoverished west- and south-side ghettos: the Panthers ran a health clinic and free-breakfast programs for kids, while Hampton preached a Marxist gospel of proletarian revolution....

The Grotesqueness of Desire at InsideArt, through May 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the works in this exhibit by 14 Irish and American artists, curated by Clodagh Kenny and Marjorie Vecchio, address the issues of looking and being looked at; most of the artists are aware that the very act of making an artwork involves some distortion of the subject matter....

Excerpted from Used to be that men didn’t need magazines. We got all our information from newspapers and our drunken, misinformed friends. The rest we either didn’t really need to know or gleaned from canny observation and imagination. This, of course, was back in the good old days when all a man had to do was live past the age of thirty to be considered a success of sorts. This was before we came into this sad modern age, where men are asked to dress well, appreciate literature, understand computer code, and not only know how to knock up some chick but how to make her enjoy it as well....

Bailiwick Directors’ Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bailiwick Repertory’s annual showcase of generally unknown pro, semipro, and student directors concludes this weekend with “Festival in Review,” featuring encore performances of three productions seen during the fest. Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-883-1090. Through August 24: Thursday and Saturday, 7:30 PM; Sunday, 2:30 PM. $10 per night. This dance/theater piece, scripted by Marta Garcia and Nancy Gomez and directed by Garcia, is adapted from Donna Williams’s autobiography about her experiences as an autistic adolescent and from Peter Handke’s dramatization of the story of Kaspar Hauser, who spent his youth imprisoned in a small cell until he escaped at age 16....

When it became clear, sometime in December, that Titanic was going to be an enormous success, critical opinion of the movie and of producer, director, and writer James Cameron underwent a curious mass conversion. Having spent weeks deriding Cameron for blowing an unprecedented amount of money on the production, the nation’s tastemakers turned on their heels and stampeded to hail his genius. Clever aphorisms comparing doomed ship to doomed film quickly gave way to reverent declarations of What This Says About Us....

JACK McDUFF with the CHICAGO JAZZ ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Putting a Hammond B-3 organ in front of a jazz orchestra has always struck me as overkill; with its multiple tone colors and capacity to play as many as three independent lines at once, the B-3 is practically a big band all by itself. Only a few arrangers have ever successfully written for this combination, producing charts that vary enough in density and texture to complement the organ but still match its flamboyance: Oliver Nelson and Lalo Schifrin, both arranging for Jimmy Smith in the 60s, come to mind; and so does the impeccable Benny Golson, who in ’64 masterminded an organ-and-orchestra record called Prelude, with Jack McDuff on the Hammond....

“The arrival of a new doll at Murrow [Indian Orphanage] was disturbingly like a fresh kill on the Serengeti. Predators gathered, waited for their moment, and moved in….It wasn’t that they were tougher–I was Apache, after all–but they were bigger. And when it came to me, they always struck in packs. However careful I was, they would find a way to corner me out on the grounds, away from whatever protection Mrs....

S.M. storms around lower Manhattan remembering the trees at dusk, how they once looked caramel-dipped, during those months of light and merry, and how brightly the taffy clouds of morning glowed after he and his friends determined that nothing like parents or family mattered anymore; nothing; just candy. From that, what–frenzy? addiction? liberation? a decade earlier, he and Spiral Stairs, this guy, a friend from school, had begun the rock group Pavement....

SELBY TIGERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Selby Tigers, who rose from the ashes of another Minneapolis band you’ve probably never heard of, Lefty Lucy, play vintage Olympia-style pop that sounds like a riot at a McDonald’s birthday party: they don’t thrash so much as thrash about. Though the current players–guitarists Nathan Grumdahl and Arzu Gokcen, bassist Dave Gardner, and drummer Dave Gatchell–aren’t as outlandishly theatrical as Lefty Lucy, who used to dress up as superheroes or angels and devils, they do make a visual impression live, and Gokcen still occasionally breaks out her old Halloween costumes....

Mission: Impossible 2 Shanghai Noon Memorial Day is an all-American holiday, but lovers of Hong Kong movies had special reason to celebrate this year. The box-office champion that weekend was Mission: Impossible 2, directed by John Woo, and the second runner-up was Shanghai Noon, starring Jackie Chan. Woo, the world’s preeminent director of action cinema, was working with a $100 million budget, and Chan was following up his previous multiplex hit, Rush Hour (1998)....

Cock E.S.P. 5/9, Fireside Bowl There are folks spending a lot of money to convince us that the logical endpoint of indie rock is a market glut of plodding, vaguely tormented riff rockers. But in small dumpy rooms everywhere, the idiom is getting a real Viking funeral from noise artists, many taking their cues from the Japanese masters, chewing up the music and joyfully spitting back the debris. Minneapolis’s Cock E....

Papas Fritas Throughout the history of pop music, youth (or a reasonable simulacrum thereof) has been one of the few constants: it never seems to get old. Even in the 90s, decades after the death of innocence, the idea of youth can be played with and pulled apart or, if necessary, bludgeoned into newness. Girl punk bands toy with images of childish vulnerability to bust up the absurdity of prescribed feminine identity....

COMPAY SEGUNDO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cuba’s Compay Segundo, born Francisco Repilado, turns 93 in November–he’s got a right to take it easy. A charter member of the band Ry Cooder assembled for his Buena Vista Social Club project (he wrote its de facto theme song, “Chan Chan,” in addition to hundreds more early son compositions), Segundo began performing in the 20s, when Cuban music embraced a European stateliness....