In the early 90s, Caren Thomas started volunteering at the free festivals held every summer on Cricket Hill in Lincoln Park. “It was kind of my return to politics,” says Thomas, who’d been active in protests against the Vietnam war. The Glencoe resident joined the Illinois Marijuana Initiative, a nonprofit set up in the early 80s by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “I think the drug war is very unjust, especially the laws against marijuana, which hurt so many people,” she says....

Samhain Samhain Box Set (E-Magine Entertainment) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Samhain was the group Danzig led after disbanding–or disemboweling–the Misfits, in 1983, and before he began recording under his own name, in ’88, and not surprisingly the music represents a transition between the Misfits’ ghoulishly catchy punk and the urgent metal of the current incarnation of Danzig. As a result, critics and record buyers–who tend to align themselves with one camp or the other–have paid scant attention to the band’s work....

It’s 11 o’clock on a Friday night at Lee’s Unleaded Blues, an oasis of light and music on a desolate strip of South Chicago Avenue near the South Shore neighborhood. The featured band, Johnny Drummer & the Starlighters, has been onstage for more than an hour, but Drummer has sung only one or two songs. A singer and harmonica player called the Arkansas Belly Roller took the microphone shortly after the set began; he stormed through primal re-creations of “Driving Wheel” and “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” stopping occasionally in the middle of a verse to lift his shirt and perform a couple of his trademark midriff undulations....

When it comes to hip-hop, Chicago gets no respect. The speedy run-on vocal style that Cleveland’s Bone Thugs-n-Harmony rode to platinum in 1994 was invented at least three years earlier by Twista and Do or Die, Chicago acts who hover below the mainstream radar even today. Despite his underground rep, Common’s career didn’t blossom until he moved to Brooklyn. And the most humiliating development of all came with the success of Nelly’s Country Grammar in 2000, when Saint Louis, not Chicago, became the city to put midwestern hip-hop on the map....

“I’m not trying to posture Chunklet as this truly revolutionary thing,” says Henry Owings, editor and publisher of the Georgia-based zine. “There’s nothing in it that hasn’t been done before–it’s just that we’re in the vast depths of a time when rock journalism is run by humorless fucks.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You should see some of the stuff I occasionally edit out; sometimes it’s criminal,” says Owings....

In the front room of Mr. Imagin-ation’s supremely cluttered second-floor Wrigleyville apartment, piles of flea market bric-a-brac and stacks of newspapers and half-filled packing boxes fight for space with a dozen or so wooden sculptures. Mostly about three feet high, they’re similar to the works Mr. I has been exhibiting since the early 1980s: totemic human figures festooned with bottle caps, painted plaster, discarded paintbrushes, and other scavenged materials. Their dark-skinned faces are bearded and bright eyed, making them look like a procession of African princes....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April in Moncton, New Brunswick, 44-year-old George Pavlovsky, a tree cutter for the city, stalked through his office drunk, carrying a sawed-off shotgun and looking for two supervisors who’d passed him over for promotion; Pavlovsky was fired at once, and in November he was sent to jail for two years. Seven days after his dismissal, though, his union (Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 51) filed a wrongful-firing grievance on his behalf, and he’s said he wants his job back when he gets out....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kenneth Abraham, professor of torts at the University of Virginia, says he taps a random student on the shoulder as part of his lecture on assault and battery to illustrate the principle that even negligible unwanted contact can be costly if the victim is uniquely vulnerable. Last month Marta Sanchez, a student Abraham tapped, sued him for $35,000, charging that the tap–which she calls a “caress”–brought back memories of rape and constituted assault and battery....

They weren’t close friends. Back when they still had jobs with United Airlines, Joanne Sperekas and Deb Lang worked on the same floor of United’s headquarters in Elk Grove Village, but Joanne was a crew scheduler, Deb an aircraft router. They both lived in Des Plaines, though, so on nights when they were stuck with the 3-to-11 shift, Joanne often gave Deb a lift home. Deb tried to give Joanne gas money, but she never took it....

Surprise! Guess Who’s on the List Dutifully, perhaps maliciously, the Sun-Times broke out a media list from Fawell’s cast of characters. Sure enough, vanity plates were the penny-ante favor next to the names of most of these luminaries. While a heavy hitter like McPier board member Larry Warner went in Fawell’s book for “37 jobs, 28 contracts and 73 license plates,” all Fawell had on former WLS TV boss Joe Ahern was plate JA7....

The Four Feathers With Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, Kate Hudson, Djimon Hounsou, and Michael Sheen. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second-rate novels often make better movies than first-rate ones, and The Four Feathers is a good example: every filmed version I’ve seen takes great liberties with its rather convoluted story line, and more often than not they’re improvements. Yet the basic premise is timelessly romantic: Harry Feversham, scion of a military family, joins the army to please his hardened father, though like his late mother he’s a sensitive soul, ill equipped for the brutality of combat....

Guy Massey makes such a superb George W. Bush that the original could just stand aside and let Massey take over. In Theater Oobleck’s sprawling political satire, shaped by the Odyssey, the 1960 film Spartacus, and passion plays, Massey re-creates W’s slouch toward Washington. The piece–which is much smarter than its title–recounts how “five of the nine Supreme gods” favor Prince Dubius and help him fulfill his destiny. Half a dozen excellent performers play everyone our hero encounters....

I saw a bottle at the pharmacist’s today that said “Shark Cartilage” on it. My curiosity was piqued, so I asked if it really was shark cartilage. My pharmacist said it most certainly was and that a lot of people take it for its alleged immunity benefits. She told me that sharks don’t get cancer, parasites, infections, etc, because their internal organ setup consists almost exclusively of a liver, and that sharks only die from being eaten or from starvation after they lose their teeth....

Scrap Mettle Soul’s ensemble collage, made up of the personal stories of Uptown/Edgewater residents, asserts that a community’s health is sustained through shared experience–maybe not long-standing family experience (neighborhoods of multigenerational families are increasingly rare), but the experience of waiting for hours in the same emergency room or contributing holiday clothing to the local scarecrow turned mascot. Artistic director Richard Owen Geer gives this wise, joyous collection, compiled by playwright Jules Corriere and put to music and quirky lyrics by Lloyd Brodnax King, an energetic, well-structured staging enhanced by April Van Dam and Patricio Gabler’s fanciful mural, in which penguins and dragons mingle with citizens, and a police car has ballerina legs instead of wheels....

Rock, Pop, Etc. AMERICAN ENGLISH (BEATLES TRIBUTE) All-ages. Sat 11/15, 8 PM, Arcada Theater, 105 E. Main, Saint Charles. 630-845-8900. CATHERINE AVE. Free in-store performances. Fri 11/14, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 7100 Forest Preserve Dr., Norridge. 708-457-2111. Sat 11/22, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 1 N. La Grange Rd., La Grange. 708-579-9660. CRADLE OF FILTH, TYPE O NEGATIVE, MOONSPELL All-ages. Sat 11/22, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N....

One of Chicago’s most revered pianists, Willie Pickens often shows up at the clubs in the service of some other leader. Last summer, for instance, he pulled off back-to-back engagements at the Jazz Showcase, tempering George Coleman’s deep Memphis blues with a little Maxwell Street one week and jumping like a jackrabbit with bebopper Frank Morgan the next. Pickens has a crisp, forthright attack, and executes fast runs cleanly and evenly; his blues inflections are so pervasive he rarely needs to lean on them....

johnston.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This article was nostalgic reading for me. It was astounding to discover another/different perspective of Chicago’s south side in the 1950s. My parents immigrated to Chicago in the early 50s with my brother, sister, and me. My parents were Irish but met and married in London, where my sister, brother, and I were born during WWII. We lived a bit further south at 72nd and May....

What does the 1997 collapse of the Thai baht have to do with a street fair in Chicago? A lot, according to Arisa Narin, secretary to the consul general of the Royal Thai Consulate, which is hosting a festival celebrating Thai culture–its first–on August 15. “The festival was an idea that started several years ago, and we finally received the budget for it this year from the government,” she says. “We’re just starting to come back from our financial crisis in 1997....

Art House Rules Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet aside from the demise of the Fine Arts, the “art film” segment of the business seems to be bucking the trend. For the past two weeks the giant Imax Theatre at Navy Pier has been screening Ang Lee’s art-house hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This spring the Gene Siskel Film Center will open its new two-screen venue at State and Randolph....

“I wanted to do my own food,” says chef Rangsan Sutcharit when asked why he left the top-rated Thai restaurant Arun’s after working there for nine years. Last fall on far west North Avenue, Sutcharit opened Amarind, where doing his own food means less elaborate presentations, more affordable prices, and a hands-on approach that begins most mornings with a visit to Caputo’s, the vibrant, always crowded market in Elmwood Park. Caputo’s originally catered to an almost exclusively Italian clientele, but as the neighborhood has become more diverse its inventory has expanded....