Fifth-grader Antonio Reed stands at a blackboard at the Marcy Center, a settlement house in North Lawndale. Wearing a University of Michigan jersey and a do-rag, he puzzles over a math problem: “11/14 x 7/22 x 3 = .” Two afternoons a week Treadwell runs a tutoring program at the Marcy Center for third- through eighth-graders, most of them boys from nearby Penn School. It’s a volunteer effort for the 49-year-old Lawndale native, a paralegal for the U....

U.S.-born reedist Michael Moore has lived in Amsterdam since the early 1980s, hobnobbing with brainy Dutch improviser-composers like Misha Mengelberg, but he’s never lost his love for American rock and roots music, Bob Dylan’s in particular. Jazz musicians have covered Dylan tunes since the 60s, when everyone from Stanley Turrentine to Keith Jarrett to Duke Ellington took a shot. Makes sense: Dylan is more committed to vocal improvisation than many jazz singers....

The compositions bassist Mark Helias brings to his latest album, Verbs of Will (Radio Legs, 2003), sound deceptively simple; from the warm, low-down blues of “How ‘Bout It” to “Give Up the Ghost,” an appealing blend of fatback heft and west-coast cool, his melodies are never convoluted or busy. That’s plainly by careful design. Apparently taking the group’s name as a credo, Helias has constructed his minimalist material to withstand far-flung interpretation by himself and his collaborators, tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby and drummer Tom Rainey....

German sound artist Michael Vorfeld is primarily a percussionist, but rarely will he play a beat or fix a rhythm. On his recent recording with Reinhold Friedl, Au default du silence (Trente Oiseaux), Vorfeld’s sounds hover above the scrapes and strums that Friedl generates by manipulating the inside of a piano. Vorfeld often bows his percussive devices (usually cymbals or other metal objects) to get long, wavering tones and high-pitched whinnies....

Bridgeport may seem like an unlikely location, but Healthy Food Restaurant is the oldest Lithuanian restaurant in the world, claims its owner, Grazina Biciunas-Santoski (you can call her Gina). It’s been open since 1938, which makes it “older even than in Lithuania,” she says. “I put it on my card, and no one has challenged it.” In the 11 years since Lithuania claimed independence from Russia, she explains, most of the older restaurants there have gone out of business....

“I’m doing it all over again,” says Berta Navarro as she whirs around Havana Express, setting down knives and forks and speaking Spanish to two workers behind the front counter. Navarro and her son, Ricky Miranda, who together own Cafe 28 at the corner of Irving Park and Ravenswood, opened this spin-off next door in March. “I think we’re crazy,” she says. “We have enough work already.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November federal drug officials busted what one agent called “the world’s largest LSD lab,” run from an abandoned missile site near Wamego, Kansas. Indicted as the alleged principals were two establishmentarians: William L. Pickard Jr., 55, deputy director of a University of California drug policy analysis program, an expert on the illegal drug trade in Russia, and a vegetarian, nonsmoking marathon runner with a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard; and Clyde Apperson, 45, a Silicon Valley computer consultant....

There’s always something going on out front here. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was at the aquarium and I met this gentleman, very well dressed, who said to me, “Has anyone ever said you have beautiful feet?” He asked if I would take my sandals off and allow him to massage my feet and I said, “No thank you,” and moved away quickly. Later on I encountered him again, and he asked me if I would have dinner....

I have something to add to Barbara Blades’s letter regarding the closing of Artemisia Gallery [June 13]. I was a member for 12 years and president of Artemisia for ten years. To respond to Rhona Hoffman, Artemisia has always played with the big boys–Vito Acconci, Othello Anderson, Alan Artner, Roy Boyd, Bruce Guenther, Peter Frank, James Grigsby, Derek Guthrie, Klindt Houlberg, Mike Lash, Ian Licht, Robert Loescher, Richard Loving, Paul McCarthy, Thomas McEvilly, Franz Schultz, Paul Sierra, Victor Sorrell, Julius Tobias, Michael Tropea, Clarence S....

I’m a gay high school sophomore, and I’ve had no luck finding other guys. I turned to the Internet and met a really nice guy that wants to help me live out my dreams of being another dude’s sex slave. He offered to pick me up after school and take me to his house. The only problem is he’s 38 and I’m 15. All you know for sure about this 38-year-old man is that he’s willing to pick a 15-year-old boy up after school and take him home and “enslave” him....

The big question at the League of Chicago Theatres’ annual conference last Saturday went something like this: How come people like sports better than theater? It wasn’t the only thing on the communal mind at “Theater Town, USA Act II”–there were also worries about lack of money, lack of audiences, and lack of diversity–but it was major. In spite of League president Marj Halperin’s protest that more people attend arts events than sporting events in both Chicago and the nation, the perception that millions of Americans are streaming into ballparks and domes while most theaters struggle for every measly butt in a seat was a persistent theme....

At first glance Australian choreographer and former industrial machinist Dein Perry appears to be updating a stodgy form in Tap Dogs, first performed in 1995 and seen here last in 1999. Certainly six guys dressed in flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots seem about as far from Fred Astaire in top hat and tails as you can get. But the Dogs stamping out blunt yet intricate rhythms on a set that’s seemingly under construction actually recalls the origins of tap: Irish- and African-American stevedores working on the docks combined the percussive dances of their native lands to produce a new form....

When this 1963 mystery by Italian horror master Mario Bava first hit the U.S. it had been worked over pretty heavily by American International Pictures, which retitled it The Evil Eye and readied it for the drive-in crowd by dubbing over all the marijuana references, adding some comic scenes, and replacing Roberto Nicolosi’s eerie jazz score with a noisy one by Les Baxter. In its original form it’s a briskly paced Hitchcock spoof about an American cutie touring Rome (Leticia Roman), whose mania for pulp fiction seems to get the better of her when she wanders into a public square in the dead of night and thinks she sees a woman being stabbed to death....

It’s closing in on midnight, the candidate’s been up since dawn, and his staffers want him to go home. But Pete Dagher can’t stop talking. As appealing as this may sound, his tactics seem destined to fail. Unlike Emanuel or Kaszak, Dagher has no money for TV ads, slick brochures, or massive mailings. He has no major endorsements and rarely gets covered by the mainstream press. He spent most of the 90s working as an aide to President Clinton, but the former president wound up endorsing Emanuel, another former aide....

Various Artists RCA Country Legends: The Bristol Sessions Vol. 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Okeh label booked time in a furniture store in Richmond to see what central Virginia had to offer (the Carters, like Dock Boggs and Ernest and Hattie Stoneman, lived just north of Bristol, in Virginia’s mountainous southwest). The cattle call attracted gospel musicians, fledgling jazzbos, grown men and women in grass skirts, and all manner of musical comedians....

John Cooper was photographed by Antonio Perez in January 2000 as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. He’s shown in a section of Deep Tunnel near 134th and Torrence. I interviewed him last summer at my office downtown. Afterward I walked him out to his car, a deep green Cadillac DeVille. Right now I make $25.70 an hour. And there’s plenty of overtime. It’s a hard job, but it’s a good job....

Hailed by Sergei Eisenstein for its originality, this 1927 silent feature by Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko is both a folktale and a paean to industrialization, its multiple stories and meanings turning propaganda into poetry. Dovzhenko weaves together several different periods of Ukrainian history with a narrative involving an old man who wants to protect a fabulous treasure that’s buried in a mountain. The various stories suggest that machines are beneficent, workers should throw off their chains, and invaders should be repelled, yet the mystical, quasi-religious framing device celebrates the Ukrainian nation in a way that seems to contradict Soviet ideology....

Satirist Brian Gage–who once described himself as Luke Skywalker to Noam Chomsky’s Yoda–and illustrator Tom Ellsworth just released The Amazing Snox Box (Soft Skull), the second of their collaborative “children’s books for adults.” Like their first, Snark Inc.: A Corporate Fable, Snox seems written for overeducated and underpaid office, service, and media workers who lack the patience for Chomsky’s abstract analysis of the gloom they experience viscerally. Snark overcame the potential shrillness of its anticonsumerist message through Ellsworth’s graceful, cartoony illustrations and a fun verse style Gage skillfully swiped from Dr....

“I recently heard two priests, Joseph Fessio, S.J., and John McCloskey (spokesperson for Opus Dei), say that if the Church changes the teaching on contraception, it will cease to exist,” writes Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books (December 5). “Just think–all the original and saving truths of the Church (creation, incarnation, resurrection, the sacraments, last judgment, eternal life) are not worth a thing if condoms are allowed. Every other aspect of Catholic life and thought through the ages is held hostage to this one ‘truth....

For over a year Dr. Robert Griffin kept saying that Advocate Health Care was driving Ravenswood Hospital toward extinction. All that time Advocate kept saying that Griffin was wrong, that it was committed to maintaining the hospital. Yet by the mid-90s Ravenswood was struggling, a victim of local and national trends. The surrounding community was gentrifying, and the new residents–with fewer allegiances to local institutions–apparently didn’t mind driving across town for medical services....