Back in the 80s, when Jonathan Richman used to play the old Holsteins in Lincoln Park, some friends of mine spotted him on the street and pulled over to say hello. He was walking to a comic book shop that was some distance away, and when they offered him a ride he hopped right in—then looked at them warily and asked, “Hey, you guys aren’t gonna do nothin’ weird, are you?...

I’ve known Gary Page for 20 years. The foreman of a moving crew, he’s helped me move my furniture and belongings on four different occasions. At five-eight and 220 pounds he looks like an outside linebacker for the XFL, and he has all the attributes you’d expect of a great mover: he never drops anything, he knows how to get my jukebox down a winding flight of stairs, and he doesn’t talk all the time....

Silos mainstay Walter Salas-Humara has been at it now for more than 15 years–and he seems to have packed everything he’s learned in that time onto his current trio’s most recent album, Laser Beam Next Door (Checkered Past). The 11 songs were distilled over a couple years of touring, during which bassist Drew Glackin and drummer Konrad Meissner seem to have removed every single extraneous note. Glackin is the primary melodic voice, his nimble, rollicking lines serving as sturdy girders for the leader’s scrappy minimalist guitar parts....

Whether they like it or not, Soviet will forever bear the brand of electroclash, the New York neo-Eurotrash scene showcased at promoter Larry Tee’s ballyhooed festival last fall. Electronic musicians who’ve been so tagged, most prominently Fischerspooner, have been both lauded and criticized for being overly accessible and, like, retro to the max–everything from the vapid melodies of 80s synth pop to turquoise eyeliner is getting a second chance. Soviet singer Keith Ruggiero sounds bored and British (he’s from Connecticut); the glowing synths and contrived romantic pop arrangements are faggy in a scarf-and-ankle-boots way, but the beats are pure oiled-up beefcake....

On a Friday evening on the 6400 block of South Peoria in Englewood, jump ropes snap against the pavement. A girl, riding a bike without training wheels for the first time, pedals a fly’s path down the sidewalk, past graystone three-flats, under giant oaks. An old man, just home from work and still wearing a shirt with his name stitched on the breast, inspects his yard. The teenagers from Lake Forest crowd around one bed of dirt, the children of Englewood around another....

If one day you found nothing but vast weed-strewn lots in their place, which of Chicago’s skyscrapers would you miss most? The Sears Tower? The Wrigley Building? The Rookery? The Hancock? How many tall buildings, if they disappeared, would you call a major loss to the city? A dozen? Several dozen? Close to a hundred? In Chicago, architecture of consequence–Rem Koolhaas’s student center and Helmut Jahn’s massive dorm complex at the Illinois Institute of Technology, or Rafael Vinoly’s Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago–has been relegated to the cloisters of academia, and the city center has become a tepid pot where all the ingredients appear to come from the generics aisle....

Rock, Pop, etc. JACK BRUCE & THE CUICOLAND EXPRESS WITH VERNON REID & BERNIE WORRELL See Spot Check. Fri 12/14, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. DEL SOULS Free in-store performances. Sat 12/15, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 101 Rice Lake Square at Danada, Wheaton. 630-871-9595. Fri 12/21, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 336 S. Rte. 59, Naperville. 630-637-9700. HIP NOZ Free in-store performance. Fri 12/14, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 336 S....

When you say Nighties at the Bottle Top, the first thing I think is “I can’t afford that kind of dominatrix,” but the phrase is really just the name given to a new series of art exhibits in the space above the Empty Bottle. Organized by an as yet unnamed collective of artists, “Nighties” will run the first Saturday of every month, for one night only. This month’s show, a “free-for-all” curated by Thea Liberty, includes photography, prints, drawings, paintings, and 3-D paper dolls by a dozen or so contributors....

Art based on the refugee experience has become a grim growth industry in recent years. David Edgar in his 1994 epic play Pentecost put a ragtag multinational group of displaced persons in a bombed-out eastern European church in order to compare the impulses to preserve art and to preserve people. In 1993 Polish troupe Teatr Biuro Podrozy addressed the plight of refugees through ritual and outdoor spectacle in Carmen Funebre (“Funeral Song”), premiering here under the auspices of Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago....

Chicago’s annual literary festival, formerly known as Chicago Book Week, is now a monthlong event. This year’s edition runs through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, tours, and children’s activities at locations throughout the city. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. See separate listing in Readings & Lectures for “One Book, One Chicago” discussions of Willa Cather’s My Antonia....

“Chicago doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel” as it revises its creaky old zoning code, writes Peter Skosey of the Metropolitan Planning Council in its newsletter “Regional Connection” (Winter). “Several cities, from distant San Diego to nearby Elmhurst, have encouraged walkable neighborhoods using special zoning districts around transit/train stations. Other cities have ‘legalized’ the way people live today by zoning for buildings that combine residential and business uses, corner groceries and live/work lofts....

Good news: The Harold Washington Library Center is on a list of world-class buildings in the world. Bad news: The list is Forbes magazine’s ten ugliest (forbes.com/2002/05/03/ 0503home.html). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hype: “Transit Grows Faster Than Driving,” according to a Surface Transportation Policy Project press release issued April 17. The facts: “In 2000, transit provided about 46.6 billion miles of movement while passenger miles traveled in the same year on highways totaled about 4 trillion,” writes veteran urban analyst Anthony Downs in Governing (March), responding to a similar grossly misleading press release from the year before....

“I never looked at any of my relatives as compulsive gamblers,” writes Mike Morsch in Illinois Issues (November), “and I’m pretty sure I know what the answer would be if I suggested to any of them that they enroll in the state’s Self-Exclusion Program,” which lets gamblers ask to be kept off riverboats. “They would immediately lay odds on the over-under number of people who actually would enroll in the program....

“Freedom to bank” is just another way of saying you already have money. Banking offices per 10,000 people in McHenry County, according to “Where Banks Aren’t,” published by the Woodstock Institute in June: 3.85. In suburban Cook County: 2.91. In Chicago: 1.69. In low-income areas, where the median family income is less than half the metropolitan average: 0.79. In Humboldt Park and Austin: 0.13. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“‘Anti-Arabian’ hate crimes soared from four in 2000 to 60 in 2001,” according to police data reported by Mary Abowd in the Chicago Reporter (December). “So far this year, 124 hate crimes have been reported.” Presumably these numbers don’t include the FBI agent who barged into Mamoun Alrifai’s southwest-side home in November without a warrant. Alrifai is quoted: “I told him, ‘I know my rights. You have to leave.’…He told me, ‘As of right now, you have no rights....

Too many modern blues guitarists try to make up for their lack of innovation by memorizing the postwar canon, revving everything up to hyperspeed, and swamping it in distortion–as if to convince listeners that being bludgeoned is a transcendent experience. Mississippi-born David “Chainsaw” Dupont takes a different approach. There’s a craftsman’s logic to even his most abandoned moments that makes clear he’s playing ideas, not just “feelings” or notes. Dupont’s solos seem to arise fully formed from their harmonic contexts: he’ll play a chord, spin a note or two out of it, extend these notes in promising directions, return to the same chord, pick another idea, and repeat the pattern....

Halfway House Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Noble Fool had expected to be using its new theater in the former Old Heidelberg restaurant by spring. But by February it was clear that wasn’t going to happen: the Art Institute, which owns the building at 16 W. Randolph, was still waiting for its contractor to finish work on the outer shell before the tenant’s construction could begin....

Showing as part of Columbia College’s conference “Dignity Without Borders: Arts, Media and Human Rights,” this series of screenings and discussions runs Monday through Wednesday, May 5 through 7. Screenings will be at Columbia College Dance Center, 1306 S. Michigan, and Columbia College Ludington Bldg. Admission is free; for more information call 312-344-6725. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Filmmakers Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn will take part in a discussion on immigration at this screening of a selected episode from their PBS series The New Americans, broadcast in 2002....

Hey, d’ya feel rushed for time? Better make some money, cuz before you know it your pension’ll be as obsolete as the government–or so predicts Jim Munroe’s new novel, Everyone in Silico. It’s Vancouver, 2036, and assuming you’ve survived the Harmless Crank rebellion and the 2023 takeover of the world by the United Corporate Interests Council (formerly the IMF), you’ll be keen to escape the unpalatable air and rabid, ubiquitous marketers of the analog city for Frisco, a digital paradise owned by Self Technologies....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January, News of the Weird reported that a legally blind man had qualified under North Dakota law for a concealed-weapon permit by satisfying the state’s reasonable shooting test, hitting a human-sized target ten times out of ten from a distance of 21 feet (after taking practice shots to get his bearings). According to a February report in the Louisville Courier-Journal at least two legally blind people have obtained licenses in Kentucky after hitting the target only 11 times out of 20....