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NOVEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’s early-1960s “Danger Music” series of performance pieces consists of 43 unconventional instructions for artists that address notions of risk taking: grab on to a hoist hook and be lifted three stories in the air, says one; volunteer to have your spine removed, says another. “They’re not saying to have your spine removed but to volunteer to have it done and think about what it would be like if that happened....

By Ben Joravsky “I’m not sure how we do it, but we’re hanging in there,” says Arlene Zielke, legislative coordinator for the Chicago Region PTA. “Maybe it’s because we’re so persistent. We’re not going down without a fight.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the last few years PTAs have become fund-raising tools at many schools, and I’m not comfortable with that,” says Zielke....

Akhnaten By Lee Sandlin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be fair, Akhnaten is in some ways more extreme than the average Glass product. For one thing, the mood is a little odder. Usually when he sets out to create atmosphere the results are interchangeable: his score for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, which is about Tibet, sounds exactly like his score for Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which is about Texas....

Hometown Team Loses an MVP “Whatever the Tribune says is fine with me,” Bernie Lincicome told me. But it wasn’t. After 29 years with Tribune Company newspapers, the last 16 of them writing a sports column in Chicago, Lincicome resigned last month. News of his departure was buried in Jim Kirk’s media column, where sports editor John Cherwa said only this: “We’re sorry to see him go. He was a very important voice of this section for 16 years....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Saint Petersburg, Florida, the Reverend Henry Lyons, head of the National Baptist Convention, was convicted in February of defrauding two firms that thought they were purchasing a mailing list of the convention’s purported 8.5 million members. Prosecutors insist the number was wildly inflated, and Lyons’s former assistant testified that Lyons instructed her to use a telephone-book software program to create a membership list....

Lead Stories According to a January Associated Press report, China has a government-sanctioned UFO research organization with 50,000 members, processing 500 alleged sightings a year; the director said he was not surprised at the number, since extraterrestrials are interested in the country’s rapidly developing markets. Last year in Shanghai, Professor Liu Dalin opened a sex museum with 1,000 exhibits, including a stamp used to mark the derrieres of virgin girls. And according to an April Wall Street Journal story, there has been an “explosion” of successful litigation in China by elderly parents suing their children for failing to care for them....

Same Old Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I really was disappointed to read the sad story of the anonymous man who as an anonymous boy was molested by an anonymous priest (now dead). I really have to ask, what’s the point of this? If this were a new and unique story it would be one thing, but we have heard and read this so many times....

Magnetic Fields Too Much Fun! By Josh Goldfein Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mostly, though, Merritt’s lilting melodies plunder the disposable good cheer of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building; the sweeping, romantic chamber pop of Petula Clark or Burt Bacharach; even Jimmy Van Heusen’s flighty songs for Frank Sinatra. But his production values, while elegant, are inexorably dinky: a tin-pot Prince, he synthesizes most of the music himself, with occasional intrusions from bandmates Claudia Gonson (piano, drums), John Woo (banjo, guitar), and Sam Davol (cello)....

Aged to Perfection: Gene & Georgetti’s Tony Durpetti Sticks With Tradition Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1967, an adult Tony moved in with his brother, who happened to live directly across the street from Gene Michelotti and his wife, Ida, in Elmwood Park. “I met Marion [Gene’s daughter], and we started dating. One night when I went to pick her up, Gene says to me, ‘You’re the guy who used to hang out in front of my restaurant, aren’t you?...

The Lovers of Pont-Neuf Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1992 French feature by Leos Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood) could be the great urban expressionist fantasy of the 90s: like Sunrise and Lonesome in the 20s and Playtime and Alphaville in the 60s, it uses a city’s physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters. Carax daringly and disconcertingly begins the film as a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, but it becomes a delirious love story between two people (Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche) who live on one of Paris’s most famous bridges and experience the whole city as a kind of enchanted playground, a vision that reaches an explosive apotheosis during a bicentennial fireworks display over the Seine....

Yuba City Something similar seems to have happened at National Pastime Theater–though on a much smaller scale. In June the company found itself facing insurmountable odds. Artistic director Laurence Bryan was planning a stage adaptation of the classic Hollywood western High Noon as the opening show of the company’s new season. Rehearsals were to begin in two weeks. But with the cast assembled and hundreds of feet of film in the can–the company had shot cowboys on horses galloping through deserts on location in Arizona–Bryan discovered he couldn’t get the rights to the story: Aaron Spelling’s company had recently acquired them....

FRIDAY 6/2 – THURSDAY 6/8 3 SATURDAY The penalty for revealing the secrets of second-degree Masons is to “have your breast torn open and left prey to the vultures of the air.” That didn’t stop John Wayne, Voltaire, John Glenn, 14 presidents, nine signers of the Declaration of Independence, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas, and millions of others from becoming members of the ritualistic, semisecret fraternity. The worldwide organization is looking for new blood; today the local Paul Revere Masonic Temple hosts a free open house, with refreshments and music by the Horner Jazz Band....

“The availability of a casino within 50 miles (versus 50 to 250 miles) is associated with about double the prevalence of problem and pathological gamblers,” according to a recently released report on gambling by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (www.norc.uchicago.edu/new/gambling.htm). Overall, the nation’s 5.5 million pathological and problem gamblers are estimated to cost society approximately $5 billion a year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Even if Amtrak suddenly acquired a fleet of high-speed trains for service out of Chicago, there is nowhere we could run them safely for any distance,” according to a March 17 press release from the Midwest High Speed Rail Association....

HUGH MASEKELA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela’s late-60s chart topper “Grazin’ in the Grass,” based on the laid-back rhythms and high-life lilt of a folk melody from his homeland, gave baby boomers their second big dose of world music–back before the phrase was even a gleam in a record executive’s eye. Since then Masekela’s expanded, but not abandoned, the approach that first made him famous, incorporating elements from central and west African musics, blasts of Jamaican dancehall, and whiffs of Brazilian tropicalia, in addition to the classic American soul music that provided him with such a hospitable climate when he came to the States in the early 60s....

Little Shop of Shit He currently runs a resale emporium on Division just west of Damen that he calls the Shit Shop. He spray painted the words SHI SHOP on the building’s side, so as not to attract the wrath of the city. He wasn’t entirely successful. “A police asked me one time, when I was across the street, what does SHI stand for. I told him, ‘Shit.’ He said, ‘I beg your pardon?...

By Zak Mucha This is the main event in the Ramada Rumble, a fight card put together by boxing promoter Bobby Hitz, who’s sitting at a ringside table just outside the spotlight. “Look at you under that umbrella,” says Rick Larson, harassing his childhood friend. “Legs crossed, drinking your coffee…” The two men are seated on the open patio of Nana’s, Bobby Hitz’s restaurant at the corner of State and Kinzie....

In the “Blaxploitation” films of the 1970s, a certain kind of woman ruled the screen–a righteous, merciless woman who stopped at nothing in her drive for vengeance. A castrating bitch–often literally. Stylish and deadly, with names like Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones, and Coffy, these characters lent big-screen visibility to African-American women. But the price for that visibility was high, notes video artist Ayanna U’Dongo. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Hey, Faggot: Now I just found out that I’m pregnant by him. After you stop laughing, tell me what to do. He says he wants to be in my child’s life, but I don’t really want him there. What do I do (legally) to get him to leave me alone, and what rights does he have as a father? I really don’t want him around my child. He hasn’t signed any legal documents yet....

SUSIE IBARRA & ASSIF TSAHAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Susie Ibarra has become the free-jazz drummer of choice in New York these days, and it’s not hard to hear why. Only 28, she has developed a powerful free attack–meterless, tonally rich, melodic, and muscular–and she has a deep natural swing. Much has been made of her knowledge of Indonesian gamelan and Philippine kulintang music (her parents hail from the Philippines) and her three years of study under master percussionist Milford Graves, who along with Sunny Murray practically invented free-jazz drumming in the 60s....

My wife recently had a fiberglass cast removed and was given a metal brace that is strapped on with Velcro. Walking was painful until she put a couple of magnets against the afflicted area under an Ace bandage. Now she is pursuing the optional roller skate attachment to mount on the brace. She claims the magnets have some kind of magical properties that “cancel out” the pain. Do the magnets actually do something, or is the peroxide seeping through her scalp?...