Even before Judi Kinch’s rent went from $600 to $950 she knew she’d have to take drastic action if she wanted to stay in Chicago. She’s a 29-year-old geologist employed by an environmental consulting firm, so she’s not poor. But she’s far enough from being rich that she sees Chicago’s real estate boom not as a way to make money but as an obstacle to finding a place to live....

Most mornings around 8 at Little Miss Muffin headquarters on North Rockwell, the ovens fire up and a staff of some 38 bakers goes to work. “We bake for about 12 hours a day,” says Staci Munic Mintz, who runs the operation with her brother Kenny. As the sun goes down, the company’s seven muffinmobiles hit the streets, making overnight deliveries of muffins, doughnuts, scones, brownies, croissants, cookies, and bars to coffeehouses, restaurants, and hotels throughout Chicago and beyond....

Into Uncharted Waters Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Every night on the five-week tour, McCombs and Kupersmith would play their set, and the Duo–cornetist Rob Mazurek and percussionist Chad Taylor–would play theirs. Then, as a sort of grand finale, all four musicians would take the stage and wing their way through loosely structured material, usually something Mazurek had worked out with sections that were totally free....

Writer-director Bernard Rose updates Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” transposing the action from a stiflingly conventional enclave of Russian civil servants to glitzy, decadent Hollywood. This Ivan (Danny Huston) is a young, drug-addicted talent agent who ruthlessly steals a promising director (James Merendino) and an A-list actor (Peter Weller, in a devastating parody of Jack Nicholson) from rivals. When he’s told he has a tumor in his lung he begins a long suicidal descent....

LIGHTNING BOLT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to believe just two guys can make this much noise. Bassist Brian Gibson stands in front of a precarious wall of amps, playing like he’s got ten extra fingers, while drummer Brian Chippendale tries to hammer his drums into the floor and emits occasional melodic nonsense through a microphone hidden inside his raggedy mask. (Sometimes when he squawks, Gibson imitates his noises, temporarily warping the composition at hand into a nervous, comical call-and-response routine....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mariotti is upset because Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey called him on the carpet for not being there in person to hear Wood’s comments. Does anybody who reads Mariotti with any regularity really believe that if the shoe were on the other foot–if, say, a Tribune columnist had, in absentia, leapt to a similar interpretation of a player’s remarks that the player himself later dismissed as inaccurate (and that other sportswriters didn’t exactly support)–that Mariotti wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to malign that columnist’s credibility?...

You don’t have to drive an automobile to know that Chicago has the highest gas prices in the nation. President Bush thinks he has a solution for that, but it may leave us with the same sort of smog that hangs over Houston. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there’s a catch: gasoline that’s treated with ethanol evaporates more quickly than gas treated with MTBE, and therefore it releases into the atmosphere more volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which in turn produce ozone–one of the main components of smog....

In the summer of 1998, Angela Dahl came up with an idea that she thought might help both her brother and her cause. Dahl had been a volunteer on the junior board of Ronald McDonald House in Hyde Park for two years, and she was helping plan the organization’s fall benefit. When she suggested at a meeting that a collage by her younger brother Adam would make a good silent auction item, she got an enthusiastic response....

STARS OF LYRIC OPERA AT GRANT PARK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Lyric Opera of Chicago doesn’t have to give anything away: its productions perenially sell out, even at ticket prices that range up to $145. But fortunately the organization also remembers the populism of 19th-century opera, and for two years running it’s presented a free concert in Grant Park at the end of summer....

As a boy he loved to lick his own fingers. He stirred sugar into glasses of water and poured the mixture over his hands. It didn’t take him long to discover a simple rule: the faster he moved his hand under the water, the sweeter his fingers tasted. As he poured, he experimented with new forms, flapping his hand like a pigeon’s wing, trembling like the floor of his mother’s station wagon, lapping his fingers like tongues over the heart of his palm....

I engage in some modest activism on behalf of the environment and a few other causes and I am sensitive about having my facts straight. I keep coming across the following provocative statement: “Today we added 265,000 babies, lost 7,500 acres of rain forest, added 46,000 acres of desert, lost 71 million tons of topsoil, added 15 million tons of carbon dioxide to the air, lost about 70 species–and we get to do it again tomorrow....

Japan’s musical underground has long been a hotbed of extremism; whether performing pure noise, black magic rituals, or convoluted prog, artists like Merzbow, Keiji Haino, and the Ruins practice sensory overload as a matter of course. Now a new generation is heading in the opposite direction. Collectively known as Onkyo, or “reverberation of sound,” this movement emphasizes stillness; at its most drastic, as on guitarist Taku Sugimoto’s solo CD Italia (A Bruit Secret), the musician’s ultraminimalist gestures are tiny punctuation marks dotting broad blank pages of silence....

The Chicago Cubs have been called all kinds of names over the years, but “blockheads” is the one Thom Lessner has taken to heart. A self-taught artist, Lessner paints portraits of Cubs players on wooden blocks. His style is bold, cartoonish; sometimes his pictures look like the players, while other times they bear only a mild resemblance. Is that Willie Hernandez or Jose Cardenal? Only in Lessner’s world does Don Kessinger look like Don Zimmer–that’s part of the charm....

Composer John Adams, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music, started out as something of a copycat minimalist. But eventually he arrived at a confident style of his own, integrating an expansive sense of harmony reminiscent of late Romanticism and the simple lyricism of American folk songs with minimalism’s driven rhythmic patterns. He’s as comfortable with medieval polyphony as he is with ragtime, and his music is easier on the ear than most modernist works; it’s provided a model for the pop-inflected eclecticism favored by many of today’s younger composers....

Johann Strauss II wrote Die Fledermaus in the early 1870s for the musical theater, and when it was co-opted by the great opera houses of Europe 20 years later, he wasn’t entirely pleased–he feared they’d spoil his lilting Viennese confection with a heavy hand. Adapted from a French comedy too risque at the time to play anyplace but Paris, the operetta’s plot hangs on the confusion that ensues when a husband and wife just want to have a little fun–preferably not with each other–and on the revenge of one practical joker on another....

Experimental films usually attempt to rearrange our reflexes along with our expectations. James Benning’s 270-minute, 16-millimeter “California Trilogy” does that in part by obliging us to rethink the way we interpret “directed by” and “written by.” If “directing” refers to the placement of camera and microphone, then Benning—who works alone, recording image and sound by himself—directed these three films. And if “writing” means the choice and identification of subjects—including the way they’re represented in the credits—then Benning is also the trilogy’s writer....

JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When aikido teacher Fumio Toyoda arrived in Chicago in 1974, there already were a number of martial arts schools around town. But he soon came to feel that most of the teachers were sorely unqualified–“I was surprised at the general lack of awareness about what makes someone eligible to be a martial arts instructor,” the sensei and Zen master said in a 1996 interview in Aikido Journal....

Angie Stone and Anthony Hamilton Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neo-soul–the inheritor of Drifters soul, 70s Stax soul, and Betty Wright soul–aspires to precisely this sort of normalcy. It’s grown folks music, as BET puts it, and Angie Stone’s 1999 solo debut, Black Diamond, helped pave the way for its resurgence. Stone and Hamilton embrace traditional values as well as old-fashioned music. Their themes predate the now-era of one-dimensional people collecting material things and dead-end encounters....

Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde As a struggling New York theater artist in the mid-60s, Charles Ludlam regularly attended low-priced Wednesday-matinee performances of Broadway shows–gathering material for future evisceration. One day a friend offered to buy him a front-row seat if he would show up at the theater in drag. Ludlam arrived at the appointed hour in a tasteful frock and pearls, his beard neatly trimmed, and sauntered gracefully down the aisle, a ludicrous parody of the typical matinee audience member....

“We’re hairy, we’re smelly, we’re really really hot! You’re fake, you’re plastic, you’re really really not!” Six women in bras and panties cavorted around a couple of half-mannequins in thongs. They were at Victoria’s Secret on Michigan Avenue at lunchtime protesting the company’s excessive use of unrecycled paper, and I was in Rodan a few days later, watching all this happen on a three-by-five digital video camera screen. I’d gone out for a glass of wine and met a handful of folks from ForestEthics, a grassroots activist group based in San Francisco, D....