By 1000 BC, Greece has already established a distinct cuisine, which even then was viewed as an art,” says culinary historian Evelyn Thompson. She’s speaking from the front of a bus headed down Halsted Street, detailing Greece’s climate and topography, as well as the impact of wars and trade. “The Middle Eastern invasion brought cinnamon and spices, while the Slavics introduced yogurt and cheese.” Her audience is participating in the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs’ first Neighborhood Sampling tour: a four-hour taste of Greektown, Little Italy, and Pilsen....

For Michele Mahoney, spring 2001 was “a really festive time.” A filmmaker and film professor originally from Saint Louis, she was playing with several ideas for future projects, including one about a scientist who sees jackalopes flying into Chicago. (“I like mythical creatures,” she says, “and I have a whole postcard collection of jackalopes.”) She’d also just begun performing as “Joe Chicago” with the newly formed Chicago Kings drag troupe, and the planning for Ladyfest Midwest–for which she was a film and video committee member and a panelist on feminist perspectives in pornography–had clicked into high gear....

Residents Video Anthology Two new releases–by legendary prog-rock weirdos the Residents and Gen-X flag bearers the Beastie Boys–take a stab at confronting the new format on its own highly interactive terms, and the results are both fascinating and a bit daunting. Icky Flix collects 16 of the Residents’ beautiful and disturbing animations, dating back to “The Third Reich ‘n’ Roll” (1976), which is enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection as one of the first music videos....

By the time he issued his debut album, Easy Go (Premonition), this past autumn, guitarist John McLean had appeared as a high-profile sideman on more than 20 discs by fellow Chicagoans–including Grazyna Auguscik, Patricia Barber, Terry Callier, and Jeff Stitely. So even though the local scene is already lousy with terrific guitarists (from Bobby Broom to Jeff Parker), McLean didn’t really need a record of his own to elbow his way into the public eye–but it sure hasn’t hurt....

By Jack Clark It wasn’t a boring place, of course, not when I lived there. It was my city. The place I loved. I was 21 before I would move to the north side and find another city going by the same name and get lost in all those peculiar angles that I’ve since grown to love. There were seven kids, so he’d usually rent a station wagon. We’d stop at a light and people in other cars would start counting us....

An Homage to Don Manuel on His 100th Birthday: Manuel Alvarez Bravo Born in Mexico City in 1902 (“in the place where the temples of the ancient Mexican gods must have been built,” he later wrote), Alvarez Bravo is still living and reportedly still working. He once told interviewer Frederick Kaufman that, in addition to pre-Columbian art, his influences include the Mexico City cathedral and the celebration of mass there; pioneering photographer Eugene Atget, who photographed things in Paris “no other photographer would have thought interesting”; Picasso, whose work “opened the door for me”; filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who was “seeing life, seeing what’s going on” when he advocated including the sound of an airplane overhead in one of his films; and Diego Rivera, who helped Alvarez Bravo recognize “photographable ....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April the supreme court of Connecticut heard arguments in a case that raises a sticky point in Miranda law: whether the police can use a suspect’s vomit (or at least the eight bags of heroin that came up with it) against him. Though the officers arresting Vincent Betances hadn’t yet read him his rights, they were alarmed at his condition–he was pale and sweating and having difficulty breathing–and asked him if he’d just swallowed heroin....

Our Shrinking World Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The truth is that the festival has always had to scramble for money, except in its inaugural year, when it was fully funded by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. “We wanted to help them showcase what a full World Music Festival could feel like so they could get sponsors interested,” says special events executive director Jim Law....

NER*D In 1999 Black and partner Kyle Gass made six Tenacious D mini-movies for HBO. The movies are face-hurtingly funny and made the D the stars they imagined they were. That summer they sold out the House of Blues as quickly as a charting rock band, though they had no releases to chart. In 2001 Black and Gass made an actual album for Epic, backed by Dave Grohl and members of Redd Kross and Phish....

I would like to remove the hair from my butt, but it’s hard to fit the razor in my cleavage. Which depilatories are safe for the area? All righty then, on the off chance the above didn’t shake your resolve to be rid of those ass whiskers, HBB, I contacted Scott Hughes at Laser’s Edge in Lake Oswego, Oregon, just outside Portland. According to Scott, laser hair removal and electrolysis are the only permanent FDA-approved hair-removal procedures on the market....

Praised by the pioneering French critic Andre Bazin as “one of the most intelligent westerns I know but also the least intellectual,” this 1956 feature by the underrated Budd Boetticher stresses action over dialogue while constructing a subtle moral allegory. Randolph Scott plays an ex-sheriff trailing the seven men who murdered his wife in a robbery; along the way he picks up a bumbling couple en route to California and an outlaw (Lee Marvin, whose appealing swagger contrasts with Scott’s laconic certitude)....

The cleverest thing about Stephen Malkmus’s 2001 solo debut, a set of 12 dutifully crafted indie-rock exercises, was its title: Stephen Malkmus. Only a real smart-ass would name his least personal work in years after himself. Prior to that, with each succeeding Pavement album, Malkmus’s lyrics had drifted closer to expressing thoughts and feelings that might actually have been some facsimile of the singer’s own. Solo, however, he all but discarded his preferred mode, the allusive reverie, in favor of the carefully observed short story....

The Bumblinni Brothers Show, Circus Tortellini in association with the Actors Gymnasium, Noyes Cultural Arts Center. Paul Kalina and Chuck Stubbings are Tony and Tony Bumblinni, last in the family line of eccentric circus performers, in this delightful new show featuring “acts of underrehearsed proportions.” Cowriter Kevin Theis’s taut direction keeps the antics on track without damaging the engagingly loosey-goosey improvisational quality of the duo’s interactions with each other and the audience....

I feel terrible. Everybody at Improv Kitchen was so nice and the food was good, but the business with the televisions has to be the worst idea ever. The dining area here features webcams on the ceiling and big plasma TV screens at every table, a setup that allows three improvisers to see and be seen from a studio next door. The trio puts on skits, games, and general participatory tummel while patrons eat....

The upstart Chicago Wolves openly challenged their big-league hockey brothers this year by adopting the slogan “Losing Bites,” in reference to how the Blackhawks hadn’t made the playoffs in two years and had but one playoff appearance in the last seven, while the Wolves were winning three championship cups. The Hawks responded by writing off the season, leading the National Hockey League’s lockout of its players as the owners pursued a salary cap....

Fiddler Vassar Clements grew up in Kissimmee, Florida, listening to big-band jazz at local dance halls and to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. In the mid-40s he was captivated by Chubby Wise, whose mercurial violin provided much of the harmonic complexity and emotional intensity in Bill Monroe’s fabled “high lonesome” bluegrass sound, and in 1949, at age 14, Clements sat in with Monroe’s band, the Blue Grass Boys. Within a few years he’d replaced his idol, and he went on to accompany country stalwarts such as Mother Maybelle Carter and Hank Williams, as well as more forward-looking artists like Waylon Jennings....

ATMOSPHERE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Plenty of hip-hoppers know how to write about male-female relationships, but few cut as close to the bone as Minneapolis native Sean Daley, aka Slug, half of the duo Atmosphere. Sometimes he’s tender: on “The Abusing of the Rib,” from 1999’s cassette-only Se7en–essentially an Atmosphere album released under the name of the group’s crew, Headshots–he tries to understand his lover by putting himself in her shoes, providing a sort of hip-hop analogue to Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” (“I know she’s been put through hell / I can feel it / And I know she’s touched heaven as well / Trying to steal it”)....

Friday 2/15 – Thursday 2/21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 16 SATURDAY Why, during World War II, was the brilliant German scientist Werner Heisenberg, a student of famed nuclear physicist Niels Bohr and a Nobel Prize winner, unable to unlock the secrets of the atom? Did he intentionally hold back Nazi research, as some argue, hoping to save the world from a nuclear Hitler?...

Nearly seven months have passed since Mel Stewart, a cabdriver, encountered a knife-wielding city inspector at O’Hare, but he won’t give up the case. “I’ve got to stay on this, even if the city won’t,” he says. “We can’t tolerate behavior like this from a city employee, not if we plan to live in a civilized society.” Stewart says it wasn’t the first time he’d been in a touchy situation. After all, he grew up in a rough south-side neighborhood, spent several years in the army, and has been driving a cab since 1973....

JULY 19 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We have no funding,” says Colette Cooper of the nonprofit Wilmette Arts Guild–not to mention no employees, no gallery, and no office. In spite of its membership roster of 273, the 15-year-old volunteer-run organization still lacks a storefront where the arts can be “practiced, taught, and exhibited” and is constantly looking for ways to make money to keep going....