Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although Alderman Schulter’s lawsuit attempts to silence community criticism about his leadership, the facts still speak loud and clear. Over the last ten years, the pace and direction of development in the ward has had a devastating impact on the community’s diversity and accessibility. As our satirical paper, “Alderpuppet Schulter Purports,” points out–it’s time for the alderpuppet to stop letting developers pull his strings and start listening to his constituents....

Plenty of New York jazzers are out there seriously investigating Eastern European music these days–and in their midst Slavic Soul Party! have distinguished themselves in part by not taking themselves too seriously (hence the exclamation point). Still, as the quintet’s recent debut album, In Makedonija (Knitting Factory), proves, in the past five years the musicians have learned to play Balkan party music with striking facility. A couple years ago the group–leader and percussionist Matt Moran, accordionist Ted Reichman, clarinetist Chris Speed, trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, and cornetist Rossen Zahariev, all fixtures on the downtown scene–received a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding to travel to Macedonia, where the album was recorded....

TERELL STAFFORD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like any trumpeter in his mid-30s plying the jazz mainstream, Terell Stafford invites comparison with the usual suspects–high-powered players like Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Payton, and Wallace Roney, all of whom have arrived in the wake of Wynton Marsalis. But unlike those three, Stafford came to jazz late; he studied classical music full-time from his middle school years in Elk Grove Village until his graduation from Rutgers....

Lunacy Lunacy supposedly shows “the other side of The Right Stuff.” Weaver-Francisco describes her Women’s Theatre Project commission as “a full-length play based on the 13 women who trained for the space program in the 1960s and were abruptly dropped before having a chance to go into space.” Only it isn’t about the so-called Mercury 13. The women themselves appear in only one fleeting and absurd hallucinatory sequence: wearing black gowns and “Miss NASA” sashes, they merely introduce themselves and announce their readiness for space flight....

On page 176 of Triumph of the Straight Dope, which by now all of us should have purchased, Eddie DiLao of Los Angeles asked, “Why do broadcasting call letters start with certain letters depending on what part of the world the station is in, e.g., K in the U.S. west of the Mississippi, W east of the Mississippi?” And you badly let him down with a poorly researched, often erroneous answer....

The title–Surfer at the River Styx–kinda says it all: Twyla Tharp’s often startling sextet intertwines mythic seriousness with pop-culture lightness. Donald Knaack’s score begins with the melancholy sound of gongs struck randomly, but midway through he starts using traditional Asian instruments in rock arrangements. The choreography includes iconic, very formal stances that recall statuary, yoga, and the martial arts and movements that suggest hip-hop and roller-blading. The dramatis personae are two muscular heroes–one of them a surfer dude, the epitome of blond invulnerability to people of a certain age–and four subsidiary characters, two women and two men, who on one occasion stop to chat in what’s obviously a gay confab....

Response to the response [Letters, January 17] of Brian Goeken (deputy commissioner for landmarks, city of Chicago Department of Planning and Development) to the Ben Joravsky article “Talk, Talk, Talk” [December 13]. Mr. Goeken mentions the Landmark Commission’s Chicago Historic Resources Survey, but apparently he doesn’t get around to reading it very often. If he did he would find a short biography of the architect A.L. Himmelblau, who in 1923 designed the Gothic Revival terra-cotta building at 5306 W....

Antonio Sacre is the best kind of storyteller, drawing you into his world with such subtlety that you hardly notice what he’s doing–until the story ends and you find yourself longing for just one more anecdote, one more voice. In this show, which played the 2001 Rhinoceros Theater Festival, he makes his Irish-American/Cuban relatives utterly familiar in Si la Gente Quiere Comer Carne, Le Damos Carne (“If the People Want to Eat Meat, Let Them Eat Meat,” a rallying cry during the Cuban revolution)....

Lots of folks believe Indiana high school basketball died in 1997, when the state’s high school athletics board decided to scrap the winner-take-all playoff format romanticized in the movie Hoosiers in favor of a system that divided schools into classes by size. But at least one guy still thinks Hoosier Hysteria is an affliction worth bearing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s planned this particular trip since the season’s first tip-off....

Friday 9/13 – Thursday 9/22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If (or when) the U.S. attacks Iraq, the Chicago Coalition Against War and Racism is poised to hold two rallies at Federal Plaza–at 5 PM on the first day of the offensive and at the same time the day after. In the meantime the group is holding biweekly planning sessions and events like tonight’s free panel discussion, Countdown to War in Iraq: Why We Must Stop It, with local activists Jose Lopez, Emma Lozano, Lionel Baptiste, Dan Dale, and Mahmud Ahmad....

In a departure from past Chicago Jazz Ensemble concerts, conductor and composer William Russo has programmed only two pieces; both are extended works representing an inventive and potent fusion of jazz and symphonic writing. In 1959, Miles Davis and Gil Evans collaborated on a jazz-influenced arrangement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, then made it the foundation of the album-length suite Sketches of Spain; although the composers never intended the entire suite for public performance, CJE and trumpeter Orbert Davis presented this demanding work at several locales in 1995....

While the shock and grief of his son’s suicide were still fresh, Bob Bashaw read back through their decades-long correspondence, looking in particular for references to Scientology. “I wanted to see what there was here I missed,” he says. His son Greg had been a member of the Church of Scientology for more than 20 years. During that time other relatives, fearing he belonged to a cult, had voiced concerns. But Bob supported his son’s choice, because he believed people should be free to practice their religion without getting hassled about it–and because he couldn’t find a good enough reason not to....

High school basketball in the west-suburban DuPage Valley Conference is all about solid screens and midrange jumpers, so when an underclassman dunks during a varsity game, the fans still go nuts. Especially when that underclassman is an underclasswoman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Hey, where’s Candace?” she calls, pointing to a basketball that’s wedged between the rim and backboard. “We need some help.”...

Thirty years ago, Vince Duren was working as a mail carrier in the tiny Wisconsin village of Cazenovia when he happened upon the wreckage of a head-on collision a half mile south of town. The driver of one car had been killed, and the other car carried a mother and her young daughter, who had a compound fracture. At 76, Duren has retired from the program as well as his job as village postmaster, but Cazenovia, a hamlet of 300 people, now has an 11-member EMT team living within a three-mile radius....

The mesmerizing vibraphonist Gary Burton has a well-earned reputation for introducing young musicians to the jazz audience–saxist Donny McCaslin, pianist Makoto Ozone, guitarists Larry Coryell and Pat Metheny–but even in such company guitarist Julian Lage stands out. Barely 15 when he played on Burton’s current release, Generations (Concord), Lage could already boast a mature and inventive solo concept to match his unquestionable technique; his command of improvisatory form and narrative arc was practically Mozartean at the time of those sessions, and I can’t wait to hear how he’s grown in the year since....

By Michael Miner A lovely notion. But the Knicks players had something else in mind. Ward said, “Jews are stubborn, E. But tell me, why did they persecute Jesus unless he knew something they didn’t want to accept?” That Sunday afternoon, Ward was booed when he took the court in Madison Square Garden. The Anti-Defamation League accused him and Houston of “anti-Semitism and religious bigotry.” NBA commissioner David Stern said Ward’s remarks “demonstrate zealotry of all types is intolerant and divisive....

“There are two kinds of women,” Gina Lombardi’s dissolute mother tells her. “Those who know how to make an entrance–and those who don’t.” Gina’s mother is Kansas Winters, a wannabe Hollywood actress from Kansas City turned alcoholic porn star. Having a mother like Kansas, who matches her drinks to her dresses–pink chiffon means a pink lady–dooms Gina from the get-go. At 15 she starts having sex with her mother’s boyfriends: “They weren’t the ethical elite,” she says....

By Cheryl Ross That is the essential question of Ramirez’s poetic fable Israel in Exile, a film premiering Friday, May 4, at the Chicago Theatre as part of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum’s Del Corazón Festival. It also might be the essential question of Ramirez’s own life. The son of Mexican immigrants, he ran with a Latino gang, became a teenage parent, and dropped out of college before making his way up the ranks of the local theater scene to become artistic director of the Latino Chicago Theater Company and an actor in movies and network TV....

Tuesday, May 21, 12:40 PM, 200 block of West Monroe. Assault. 27-year-old male Burger King employee hurled uniform and box of condiments at 47-year-old manager, who’d just fired him. Offender fled. Victim refused medical attention. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sunday, June 2, 6:45 PM, 600 block of West Harrison. Unlawful possession of a lance. Police observed 34-year-old female walking down the street carrying a six-foot lance tipped with an 18-inch blade....

When the announcement was made last month that Piotr Anderszewski had won the Gilmore Artist Award–the keyboard world’s equivalent of a MacArthur grant–many people probably said, Who? Now 33, the Polish-Hungarian pianist trained in France, the U.S., and Warsaw, then spent much of the 1990s in Europe; his American debut was just two years ago. He’s made several recordings, and Virgin Classics is trying to turn him into a star people under 40 can identify with by emphasizing his lanky build and brooding demeanor....