Money and Morals: WBEZ Draws the Line Account executive Steve Adler massaged the flyer’s language, and here’s what he sent back to Hutchcraft: “Support for this WBEZ program is provided by the American Friends Service Committee, holding a community convention and forum exploring issues of morality and war. This Sunday at 7 PM. Information at grassrootsvoices.org.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Does Chicago’s public radio station value empty rhetoric above conviction?...

Qudratullah Syed, proprietor of Bhabi’s Kitchen, on Oakley near Devon, is on a mission. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unifying India and Pakistan is a pretty tall order for a humble 24-seat cafe. When Bhabi’s Kitchen opened for business in mid-February of 2002, artillery fire was raging in Kashmir and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was asking for U.S. mediation. But Syed had a focus that was closer to home: he wanted his restaurant to be a catalyst for unity in the local Indo-Pak community, which suffers from a division not always visible to outsiders....

In a live setting, Dave Pajo’s rotating-cast band, variously called M, Aerial M, and Papa M, has always been able to conjure shining moments of clarity: when the band played “Turn! Turn! Turn!” on a ’99 tour, they actually seemed to be levitating a few inches off the stage. Yet on records I’ve often detected an off-putting emotional distance, as if Pajo really wanted to commit to his playing but was just too shy to pop the question....

The Raveonettes–deadpan guitar nerd Sune Rose Wagner and his dreamy harmony accomplice Sharin Foo–enjoy a couple of crucial advantages over fellow Jesus & Mary Chain aficionados Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. First, they’re not called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Second, they don’t sulk behind their borrowed scrim of feedback, at least not anymore–the Copenhagen duo apparently worked both gloom and posturing out of their system on last year’s stiff Whip It On....

The “Bonifac . . . 1902” inscription on the cornerstone at Saint Boniface Church at Chestnut and Noble is all but weathered away. Chain-link fence cordons off the entire lot. The ground where a convent stood is strewn with bricks, and the school survives only as a boarded-up ruin. The tall arched windows on its top floor are open hollows, and the remains of the collapsed wood ceiling lean up against the back interior wall....

PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS 8/8, FIRESIDE BOWL This Denver outfit, which has been working the aggressive edge of emo for most of its five-year career and in its best moments has dashed the label to bloody bits, is at a crossroads. Bassist Jamie Drier is quitting after this tour (in support of a three-song release from last fall, Spearheading the Sin Movement, on No Idea), and the band plans to retire a good deal of material from past records before replacing him with Chuck French (late of Peralta) and moving on....

Survive This!, Bailiwick Repertory. It’s hard to get past the counterintuitive presumption of Survive This! creator Rusty Hernandez. The only knowledge you’d guess he’d expect of his audience based on the title–some acquaintance with TV’s Survivor!–isn’t actually required, as the show bears only a faint structural resemblance to “America’s cultural phenomenon,” as it’s called in the subtitle. (Host “Jason Provolone” and the “Kuchie” and “Ogakrap” teams do not a parody make....

In your column about handwriting analysis you wrote, “More than 200 objective scientific studies have demonstrated that graphology is worthless as a predictor of personality.” After I whined a bit, you conceded that you had misstated matters. It wasn’t that 200 studies had independently concluded graphology was worthless; rather, one researcher, Geoffrey Dean, made this judgment based on a “meta-analysis” of 200 previous studies. Even Dean’s study is seriously flawed and doesn’t support the conclusions drawn....

I know you probably don’t know yet, and aren’t too keen on finding out (I quote, “Just don’t ask me to explain ‘Stairway to Heaven’”), but just what is the song “Stairway to Heaven” about? My two favorite songs are “Hotel California” and “Stairway to Heaven.” You explained HC very well, but S2H remains a mystery. Help! –Charlie Kininmonth, Sussex, England Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been putting this off for 30 years....

The Taste of Puerto Rico Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Galarza and his ex-wife, Virginia, opened the place in 1989, more than four decades after leaving Puerto Rico. Eddie had been a laundry manager at Bethany Hospital in Lares, and in 1946 transferred to the same job at the Bethany branch in Chicago. Over the next 20 years he held a series of odd jobs: paint mixer, nightclub owner (remember El Cafe Ole in Lincoln Park?...

The folks at Broklyn Beats prefer the real crackle of a ragged needle on vinyl to some fancy computer effect that mimics it. Cofounder Crito Thornton (aka Criterion) started his music career in Minneapolis playing saxophone in the crusty-punk/no-wave band Dogfight. He also spent 13 years there publishing fanzines and almost a decade working for a politicized punk organization called the Profane Existence Collective. He moved to Brooklyn and started Broklyn Beats in 1998 as a CD-R label with fellow squatter and “free partier” Heather Leitner (aka Doily, a friend from Minneapolis); the label’s now in the midst of a series of seven-inches that includes a kick-ass release by 1-Speed Bike (Aidan Girt, the drummer in Godspeed You Black Emperor!...

Come See Uncle John’s Photos Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When I started there was not much interest in this kind of music,” says John Cohen, an aficionado of rural American sounds. Back in the 50s, after Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music became the bible for a handful of true believers, Cohen traipsed through the south making field recordings; amid the farms and coal mines of Kentucky he discovered remarkable artists like banjoist and guitarist Roscoe Holcomb, a construction worker from Daisy, Kentucky, who mixed folk, blues, and white gospel singing....

As the bassist in Mission of Burma, Clint Conley wrote and sang “Academy Fight Song” and “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” two of the Boston quartet’s best-loved tunes, but since the band called it quits in 1983 he’s kept a low profile. Drummer Peter Prescott kept rocking hard with Volcano Suns and Kustomized, while guitarist Roger Miller nursed his ringing ears, playing piano as well as his old ax in a handful of quieter combos (including Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, which featured Burma soundman and tape looper Martin Swope on guitar)....

When it comes to southern culture, Drive-By Truckers’ singer-guitarist Patterson Hood loves nothing more than to boot a sleeping dog square in the ass. On the Athens band’s last outing, Southern Rock Opera–a brilliant, lumbering survey of life below the Mason-Dixon line disguised as a celebration of Lynyrd Skynyrd–Hood exhumed Alabama governor George Wallace in order to analyze the demagogue’s popularity as well as his usefulness to northern snobs as a redneck bogeyman....

While I found much of Anne Smith’s letter regarding the sorry state of Ravenswood’s commercial options thoughtful and accurate [Letters, January 19], I have to point out some troubling points. Specifically, citing Lincoln Square’s amenities being eight blocks from her (too far to walk, not worth it to drive in her opinion), Smith doesn’t take into account that some of us walk similar distances regularly. Come on: Chicago is blessed with both wide sidewalks and nonexistent hills–just walk it....

For years the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists–the company’s talent incubator, founded in 1974–has been loaning out some of its most promising apprentices for concerts around town. Six current members, each of whom beat out nearly 500 other aspirants for one of the center’s dozen yearly slots, will perform this Sunday at the Art Institute in conjunction with the new exhibit “German Art and the Past: Prints and Drawings From Friedrich to Baselitz,” which covers developments from Romanticism to neo-expressionism....

For all his grace and precision as a director, Clint Eastwood (like Martin Scorsese) operates at the mercy of his scripts. But this time he’s got a terrific one, an unorthodox love story and religious parable adapted by Paul Haggis from stories in F.X. Toole’s Rope Burns. Eastwood plays a gym owner who reluctantly agrees to train and manage a 31-year-old hillbilly woman (Hilary Swank) who wants to box, while Morgan Freeman, as an ex-fighter who helps him out, supplies the voice-over narration....

On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning There actually were Victorian “lady explorers,” and a historical look at those pioneers might have made an excellent feminist play. But Overmyer and director Greg Kolack give these women a contemporary feeling from the start. Too modern and unrestrained for 1888, they’re nevertheless too conservative for 1985, with their ideas about a woman’s place in the world: Fanny and Mary are both appalled by the trousers idea....

Adapted by Ronald Harwood from his stage play, this dialectical drama has plenty of creaky moments, but Harvey Keitel compensates with a canny, surprising performance as an American major in postwar Germany who’s ordered to make an example of the great conductor Wilhelm FurtwŠngler (Stellan Skarsgard) as part of the denazification program. A former insurance salesman and a musical philistine, the major is appalled by the Holocaust and disgusted by the conductor’s arrogant conviction that his gifts make him “more than a citizen....

OK, so I’m trying to lose some weight. My current plan, eat less and exercise more, is working pretty well, but I want to take it up a notch. So I’m wondering: How many calories are in a pint of blood? How often can you donate without making yourself ill? This could be a great thing for both humanity and myself. –ubernina from Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now....