As rents rise in Ravenswood and Lincoln Square, a few Albany Park entrepreneurs are hoping the gentrification will spread their way. Cousins Arben Pema and Leke Brisku have opened their bar and restaurant, BRISKU’S BISTRO, a block south of Arun’s on Kedzie. The two rooms are enormous: one’s got just a long bar, a jukebox, and some dartboards; the other is full of tables and has a stage for live music....

For a few years in the 1980s, Ed Townley was one of the busiest people in Chicago theater. He worked at Wisdom Bridge, acted with the Practical Theater, and directed shows for Pegasus Players and Apple Tree. He wasn’t making a lot of money. “But I was comfortable,” he recalls. He moved to Manhattan in 1968, where he got a job with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Papp had just scored a big success, transferring the musical Hair to Broadway, and he purchased a building on Lafayette, where he opened the Public Theater....

We’re Just . . . Visiting Perez had already taken down the Medrano sign. “I don’t want any problems,” she explains. “I don’t want them to send the inspectors here just because of a sign.” –Linda Lutton Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is Minerva Orozco’s third attempt to unseat 37th Ward alderman Emma Mitts, and Orozco’s campaign manager, Mike Simmons, is taking a lesson from Rod Blagojevich’s gubernatorial race....

ANDY NARELL & SANDIP BURMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andy Narell’s journey started not in the West Indies or Africa or Brazil, but rather where they all meet–on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he first heard a steel-pan drum played by an Antiguan immigrant. In the Caribbean, pan bands can engage dozens of players, and Narell’s dad, a social worker, had hired this man to teach local street gangs a group activity that might prove safer than organized crime; his son joined in and quickly outpaced the pack....

If Paul Craig Baxendale didn’t have a girlfriend, it’d be easy to think he was trying to scare off women. His bedroom resembles what he calls a “1940s-era convalescent room.” A blood-pressure kit and stethoscope lie on a porcelain-coated steel instrument table that doubles as a nightstand. Eye and ear scopes are affixed to the wall within arm’s reach of his bed. An old-fashioned X-ray display illuminates a random set of ribs....

Why is it that no sooner do we escape the clutches of the past and begin living our own lives than we become nostalgic for the world we left behind? Or the world our parents left behind? This feeling must be especially strong among the children and grandchildren of recent immigrants, who long not just for another time but another place, another way of living, vaguely familiar but fading fast. Originally conceived by singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, who composed and performs the music in the show, By the Hand of the Father begins as yet another theatrical exploration of the past, specifically the journey Escovedo’s father made, physically and psychologically, from his childhood in Mexico in the early decades of the 20th century to adulthood raising a family in the United States....

Chocolate Diva, at Some Like It Black. Earth to Kelli Rich: when you’re singing to an audience of 20 in a space no bigger than a rich man’s bedroom, you don’t need Soldier Field’s amplification system. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rich’s one-woman tribute to five pioneering African-American singers–Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington–must be the loudest evening Chicago theater has ever seen....

Scofflaw prosecutor. A February 26 press release from the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform notes that the 2002 Republican candidate for state attorney general, Du Page County state’s attorney Joe Birkett, failed to report the employer and occupation for 31 percent of the donors to his unsuccessful campaign, though that’s what state law requires. The contributers included Raymond Fauber of Peoria, who gave $100,000, and Anthony McMahon of Park Ridge, who contributed $55,000....

By M.C. Thomas Loyola has been wrestling with financial problems since 1995, when it decided to turn its Maywood medical center into an independent subsidiary so that the center could form cost-saving partnerships with other hospitals and health-care organizations. As part of that restructuring, Loyola had to sacrifice $50 million of its $450 million endowment, and between 1998 and 2000 that endowment plummeted by another $100 million, even as most university endowments were growing in response to the booming stock market....

Writer-director Takashi Ishii, a horror specialist with a background in manga (Japanese comics), explicitly equates sweaty eroticism and gruesome violence in this 2000 revenge thriller. A young woman (Harumi Inoue) is terrorized in her Tokyo apartment by three men in succession, all of whom gang-raped her five years earlier and now want to use a video of the rape to blackmail her into sex. At first desperately, and then with calculating ease, she disposes of each intruder, reluctantly taking advantage of her sexual power over men (including, tragically, her fickle fiance)....

New partnerships happen all the time in jazz, born of a serendipitous affinity between musicians discovered during a jam session or cameo appearance. Pianist Jacky Terrasson first played with Stefon Harris as a guest during the vibist’s stint at New York’s Village Vanguard in November 1999, and their spontaneous chemistry convinced them to embark on a bigger project together. The resulting quartet album, Kindred (Blue Note), merits its title not just because their instruments operate on similar principles–where a vibraphone has mallets, a piano has hammers–but because Terrasson and Harris share a melodic aesthetic; despite their relatively brief mutual history, they complement, anticipate, or finish each other’s musical thoughts....

Luis Recoder’s name is often miswritten as “Recorder,” but the real spelling is the more auspicious of the two: his abstract films and performance pieces aim at a reinscription of the relationship between image and viewer far more fundamental than that achieved by most experimental films. Working without a camera, Recoder fogs the film in a variety of ways, producing subtly shifting light patterns whose soft edges subvert the standard geometries of most abstract imagery....

Intense and thoughtful, Mad Shak artistic director Molly Shanahan isn’t content to let things slide. Instead she worries ideas like a dog with an especially meaty bone. She says that her new The Poems of Replaceable Kings is part of a phase that began with The Waiting Room, which premiered almost a year and a half ago. The score, created by resident composer Kevin O’Donnell, is the same for both–she wanted it to “resonate” with her for a while....

After 20 years as a restaurant critic, Maurinette Meede planned her days to keep her appetite sharp: only amateurs judged things they didn’t desire. One clammy November Saturday, Maurinette planned to test an authentic-looking new trattoria with a late lunch. She stayed between her mint-colored sheets till noon, then took to the couch with a cup of cafe au lait, two cigarettes, and a catalog of Erte prints. “Er, no thank you,” said the receptionist....

I moved here from Montana about six months ago to maintain my art career as long as possible. I create three-dimensional compositions. One night I was here to see a rock show and the place was packed. I walked in and the next thing I knew a cue ball hit me in the back of the head and I fell to the ground. I was in shock on the floor; people were around me, looking to see if I was OK....

This is a ghost story I’ll be telling my customers over Halloween. About eight years ago I was living on the northwest side in my first apartment. I had a friend from the neighborhood over and he said, “Do you know about the guy that was killed here?” I said no, and he said all the kids used to party in my apartment and one night this guy got caught up in the confusion, got hurt and died....

A friend and I went to the Cubs game and we parked here. After the game we went to the bars, so we’d been drinkin’ like ten hours when we got back to the car at around midnight. The entrance was blocked with a chain, so I tried to drive over the curb, but it’s about four feet high. I got stuck, and the car was now like a teeter-totter. I stumbled into the police station across the street and asked the cop at the desk if he would help us push it....

On her 1990 album, Interiors, Rosanne Cash bid adieu to her early Nashville sound–it’s a decidedly dark and adult pop record–and to that city’s music-industry rat race. After moving to New York with her producer and husband, John Leventhal, she began writing prose as well as music, publishing a short-story collection and a children’s book; she’s currently working on a memoir of her Nashville days. But the seven-year gap between 1996’s Ten Song Demo and last year’s terrific Rules of Travel (Capitol) wasn’t entirely her choice....

There’s a deceptively diminutive quality to singer-songwriter Emma Louise Niblett, the Nottingham, England, native who makes such a strong debut with Sweet Heart Fever (Secretly Canadian). She navigates her fragile, folk-tinged melodies–some of which, like Kurt Cobain’s performance of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” draw on the primordial despair of the blues–with a beguiling hesitation, as if something dark and elusive were lurking just out of sight. Her deliciously dusky voice recalls Chan Marshall of Cat Power with its wonderfully parched edge, but it’s closer to Polly Jean Harvey’s in its melodic precision and confidence, tracing song contours with a gorgeous delicacy mirrored by her simple strummed guitar....

The terrible thing about most remakes is that they downgrade borrowed experience. I’ve never been a big fan of the 1966 Alfie, a precise, bittersweet portrait of a misogynistic cockney lady-killer in a sordidly downscale London. But it’s unequivocally a reflection of things that have been lived, above all by Bill Naughton (adapting his own play) and Michael Caine (whose cockney background helped make the title role indelibly his own). The special kind of music these two make together, under Lewis Gilbert’s efficient direction, matches the brashness of Sonny Rollins’s score and tenor sax solos....