ALEX CHILTON 1/20 & 21, SCHUBAS Over the course of a career that stretches from the Box Tops to Big Star and beyond, Alex Chilton has written many of the greatest pop songs in history–the communicative, vulnerable side of indie rock in the 80s and 90s would have been unthinkable without him. He’s also written some of the worst pop songs ever, but I’ll take wild inconsistency over stale predictability any day....

Friday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO. Critics were already comparing Jason Molina to Will Oldham before Molina started playing under a bunch of different names. In March 2003 his group Songs: Ohia put out an excellent and atypically rocking album called Magnolia Electric Co. (Secretly Canadian), and he’s since appropriated its title as the name of his full-blown rock band....

Omar Rodriguez spent close to a decade cooking for the Carlucci restaurant group–Carlucci, Vinni’s, Strega Nona–before opening his own place. His first effort was a Loop sandwich shop; his second is the charming Bucktown storefront THINK CAFE, where he seems to have hit his stride. The room is simple but welcoming, with blond wood floors and chairs, white linen tablecloths topped with butcher paper, and attractive silk flower arrangements for a splash of color....

New at the southern edge of Lincoln Square is the stylish 70-seat bistro Tournesol. Owners Julie Palmer and Michael Smith collaborated with third partner Eric Aubriot on the menu, then brought aboard former North Pond sous chef Bob Zrenner to cook. The place is a labor of love; Palmer not only painted the chocolate brown walls and sewed the mesh-and-taupe window treatments but built the mirror frames and wine racks, rehabbed the bar, and refurbished the bathroom while Smith did the drywalling....

Alice Even after decades of relentless pawing, however, this exuberant, illogical tale retains its primal innocence. The author may have been a shy, stammering professor of mathematics (many students thought him the most boring teacher they’d ever had), but when he took boat rides on the Thames with the three Liddell girls clamoring for nonsensical stories, he could tap into a vein of unfiltered whimsy yet also remain open to the girls’ suggestions....

Everyone in the music industry knows George Daniels, the 55-year-old owner of George’s Music Room. Puffy calls him Uncle George, R. Kelly claims him as a godfather, and he’s Ron Isley’s right-hand man. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After 32 years of steady growth, his comfy neighborhood music shop at 3915 W. Roosevelt has become the largest independent music retail store in the midwest, with a recently opened second location in Midway Airport....

ATARI STAR The Beloved Enemy | Undertow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The middle album of Jay Bennett’s post-Wilco solo CD trilogy, this nine-song effort is a breakup album firmly in the tradition of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear. While the often ramshackle record can’t touch those masterpieces, it is a significant improvement over Bennett’s disappointing spring release, Bigger Than Blue....

The unwieldy tuba’s usually associated with oompah music, where its massive fartlike blasts have all the grace of a 450-pound ballerina. But the tuba actually delivered the agile bass lines in early jazz, and over the years a number of tubaists–Ray Draper, Bob Stewart, and Howard Johnson among them–have made blowing through 15 feet or so of tubing sound easy. In the past decade, Melvyn Poore has done more than anyone else to find new means of expression for the instrument, employing a liquid lyricism and a huge array of multiphonics....

“I saw in this camp sometimes dying per day 10,000 people,” says Sebastiao Salgado in Paul Carlin’s 2000 documentary The Spectre of Hope. “And it’s difficult to see 10,000 people die. It’s very hard. They were dying because we had not any way to save them.” As he speaks, the Brazilian economist turned award-winning photographer holds a 1994 print depicting a Rwandan refugee dying of cholera at a camp in Zaire....

PHI-PHENOMENA ON WHEELS, PANICSVILLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bands filed under “experimental” have a tendency to wear out their welcome pretty quick; Phi-Phenomena admits this and celebrates it, presenting ten bands in one hour, with no set running longer than five minutes. Begun in 1996 in New York and staged annually in some major U.S. city or another, it’s morphed this year into a traveling circus....

Kyle Bruckmann always felt he had a choice to make, and when he enrolled in the graduate music program at the University of Michigan in 1994 as a classical oboist he thought he was making it. “I actually thought I was going to grad school to finally settle down and behave myself,” he says. “I was going to get all the rock and illegitimate stuff out of my system, and then I was going to buckle down and get an orchestra job....

This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists this year include John Starrs, Julie Caffey, Michael K. Meyers, Michael Martin, and many other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 13th annual Rhino Fest runs through October 13....

The Columbia College fiction writing department’s festival, “Crossing Borders/Pushing Boundaries,” features readings, panel discussions, book signings, and conversations with local and national authors. The festival runs Monday, March 26, through Friday, March 30. Most events will be held at or near Columbia College, except for Thursday night’s activities at Metro. All events are free. For more information call 312-344-7611. Columbia College Alumni Reading Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Columbia fiction writing teacher Don De Grazia (American Skin), Geling Yan (The Lost Daughter of Happiness and the film Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl), and Sam Weller (Secret Chicago: The Unique Guidebook to Chicago’s Hidden Sites, Sounds, and Tastes) are featured....

The Making of an Anti-Scenester Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It caused a minor stir on the British and German underground scenes, but Hodge didn’t capitalize on it like he could’ve: since then he’s released several more singles for the label, produced a handful of remixes for artists like DJ Vadim and Spacetime Continuum, and released two albums under the name Conjoint, a collaboration with German producer David Moufang, jazz vibraphonist Karl Berger, and guitarist Gunther Ruit Kraus....

WHO INVENTED PARADISE? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enjoyed your commentary on the Islamic concept of paradise as it is described in the Koran [December 14]. Your generalizations are acceptable except for the statement that “Christianity, after all, invented the idea of paradise in the first place.” Paradise is a Zoroastrian concept. It was borrowed by Jews from the Persians beginning about 500 BCE, when Yehud was a Persian province....

While Skokie may not be considered a dining destination, it does have two culinary graces–kosher restaurants and a lineup of excellent Mediterranean places. Avraham Zaguri’s five-month-old Marrakesh combines the two, serving kosher Moroccan food. The style is popular in Israel, where there’s a sizable Moroccan population. “I didn’t open it just to be a kosher restaurant,” says the 37-year-old observant Jew. “But I have to taste the food to keep up the quality and make sure it’s right....

It’s not often that dance audiences are treated to live music throughout a performance. Not surprisingly, many of the spicy newer pieces by this music and dance troupe, headed by composer-musician Joe Cerqua and dancer-choreographer Wilfredo Rivera, are Latin flavored. Brujos deseos is tinged with the tango, while the elaborate Day of the Dead, a suite of four dances, is inspired by indigenous Mexican dance forms, Aztec mythology, and more recent Mexican folktales....

“Chicago’s teacher salary schedule makes the city a great place to start teaching but a much less attractive place to stay,” reports Catalyst Chicago (February). “In the six-county metropolitan region, beginning elementary teachers have few better-paying alternatives to Chicago, and the city offers fairly competitive pay for beginning high school teachers. But for seasoned veterans, most teaching jobs in the six-county region pay more than Chicago…. Only 3 percent of the region’s high school teaching jobs have a lower top salary than Chicago....

In a scene where an outsize personality has become just as important as technical ability, it’s surprising what a low profile Ellen Allien keeps–especially since she’s earned the right to toot her own horn. A DJ and recording artist, in 1999 she founded BPitch Control, a Berlin-based label known for frosty, dark, and rhythmically complicated techno and electro releases from artists like Tok Tok and Soffy O (who collaborated on last year’s dance floor hit “Missy Queen’s Gonna Die”)....

You’ve seen the ad on the el. The boys’ lips meet, forming a bridge to their tongues. They kiss deep and passionately for minutes, until Josh pulls away dizzy, his heart racing at a frantic rate.”I’ve never made love with a man before,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So Levin published the book himself. “I felt like when I finished the story I had a golden egg, and I had to get it out for people to read,” he says....