When Jane O’Mahoney decided the school and medical facility she helped found in the Nepalese village of Kharpa should stick to using local resources, she wasn’t thinking “slow food” or “international economic politics.” She simply found it a bit horrible when the complex’s head porter nearly got his feet sheared off by a sheet of roofing tin he was trucking in. “There are no motorable roads to the village,” O’Mahoney says; the tin had been imported most of the way on foot, but near the village the road got a little better and the porter hired a truck driver....

R.E.M. In his new book, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (Free Press), music journalist Mark Kemp chronicles the complicated relationship that the generation before mine has had with the south and its signature sounds–this is the generation with memories of jim crow and desegregation, of Martin Luther King and the first wave of Stax soul out of Memphis, of white southern boys stealing the blues back from Clapton and Page and bringing it all back home, mutated once again....

There are six gigantic televisions and thirty wall monitors at Sluggers. The air is dense with smoke, and you have to shout over classic rock to be heard. Gary Arnold wouldn’t find this Wrigleyville sports bar a hospitable environment even on an unremarkable Saturday, but tonight he finds it particularly hostile. Tonight, people have come to gawk at midgets. Around 10 PM, Arnold leads us toward the back room, where the boxing ring is set up....

Kasra Medhat, chef-owner of the Magnolia Cafe, which opened on a nondescript stretch of Wilson just ten days before Christmas, has spent the last six months learning that running a kitchen and running a whole restaurant are two completely different animals. “Everything went wrong not once, but three times,” laments Lisa Karam, Medhat’s girlfriend and the restaurant’s manager/server/hostess. “I broke my foot, we had to rewire all of the electrical, we had six floods…....

Albee Festival One-Acts In The Death of Bessie Smith, by contrast, Albee takes on race relations. An all-white medical establishment in Memphis in 1937 leaves the eponymous blues legend to die after a car crash. In a series of clunky, poorly structured scenes, Albee generously informs us that racism is really bad for black folks. It even turns one lonely admissions nurse into a cranky, self-loathing cuss. Chuck Smith’s production, with its haphazard staging, broad and unconvincing performances, and onslaught of bad southern accents, does the play no favors....

Highly entertaining and deceptively simple, this comic road movie (2001, 105 min.) by Iranian-born writer-director Babak Payami traces the prickly relationship between an idealistic woman collecting votes during the Iranian national election and the suspicious rube of a Turkish-Iranian soldier assigned to chauffeur her. The setting is Kish Island in the Persian Gulf (where The Day I Became a Woman was also shot), and the comic clash of personalities sometimes recalls The African Queen....

Christopher Munch, one of America’s most gifted independent filmmakers, follows his features The Hours and Times (1991) and Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day (1996) with this lovely and moving 2001 drama, a speculative account of his late mother’s early life in which a woman (Jacqueline Bisset) and her long-lost illegitimate daughter (Martha Plimpton) pursue each other without ever meeting. By all rights it should have put Munch on the map, yet it wound up premiering only on the Sundance Channel last spring (when I wrote about it in Section One) and consequently hasn’t attracted the buzz it deserves....

[snip] In Cook County during 2001 businesses filed 137,890 lawsuits, while individuals filed just 26,938–and guess who’s whining about tort reform? The figures come from an October 4 Public Citizen press release. The disparity is even greater in areas where lawsuit abuse is most often alleged. “Claiming that it is inundated with class action lawsuits, the insurance industry has led the charge for federal legislation that would restrict the rights of consumers to bring such cases....

The McDonald’s of Comedy? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clark sees his dismissal as one of many changes at the training center in the year since de Maat’s death. He and three staffers from the center’s improv division–the center offers separate programs in writing and improv–had been appointed to fill the vacuum de Maat had left. Anne Libera (Leonard’s wife), Norm Holly, Michael Gellman, and Clark were to have equal authority and rotate as artistic director, with Libera assuming the title for the first year....

Finishing the Picture Miller’s Timebends offers an eloquent and moving–if highly subjective–account of the episode. Now the 89-year-old playwright has turned the Misfits meshuggaas into an existential comedy that could just as easily be titled “Waiting for Marilyn.” In this uneven, ultimately enigmatic world premiere–impressively staged and populated with a fine ensemble of Hollywood and Broadway heavyweights–seven people await the appearance of the Godot-like Kitty, a drug-addled starlet sequestered in her Nevada hotel suite....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This review is not really a review of the purported subject, but rather a disturbing look at what is tolerated when nonwhite people and nonmain-stream art forms are at issue. To begin with, the title of this review, “Foreign Bodies,” sets a flip tone of adolescent xenophobia that is carried throughout the essay. The bharatanatyam con-ference and performances that Kelly Kleiman refers to were not organized by the Dance Center of Columbia College as is stated, but by the most prestigious Indian dance company in North America, Chicago’s own Natya Dance Theatre....

Five months ago, novelist and installation artist Matthew Jewell spent the first edition of Telophase–a periodic exhibition mounted by a loose collective of artists and writers–in bed in the far corner of an uninhabited apartment above the Inner Town Pub in Ukrainian Village. Smoking and reading aloud, he enacted scenes from Scale, his novel in progress about a man who never leaves his room and meticulously documents the rotation of his bed around a fan....

For the last 30 years or so modern jazz hasn’t had much of a presence in New Orleans; the prevailing voices of Dixieland, zydeco, and the Marsalises have drowned out what little progressive music there was. But Astral Project, a quartet (originally a quintet) of the Crescent City’s best modern jazz players, bucks the trend. Even before they formed the band in 1978, these guys were showing up in the rhythm section or as guest soloists on virtually every progressive date down in the bayou, and the Project’s front men, saxist Tony Dagradi and guitarist Steve Masakowski, put out several strong albums under their own names....

When I listen to saxophonist Billy Harper, I often recall the title of his mid-70s album Black Saint–a powerful image of strength and spiritualism in a music world too often ruled by false gods. (Not coincidentally, the record was the first release from the now famous Italian label of the same name.) Harper’s tenor thunders and sings, often at length and occasionally to excess, but it’s never merely loud or garrulous; even when he writes a swingy waltz melody (a holdover from his childhood in the Methodist church), it doesn’t sound trivial–his music smiles without smirking, and lifts the spirit while keeping its feet on the ground....

Friday 7/4 – Thursday 7/10 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....

Sigur Ros Agaetis Byrjun (Fat Cat) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Listening to Agaetis Byrjun (“A Good Start”), while talking, thinking, writing, watching TV, or serving raclette and merlot is akin to sleeping by the ocean–it’s a subtle distraction, easily overcome. Paying close attention to it is a bit more difficult. In Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, the title character stands at the seaside trying to observe a single incoming wave....

The last time one of John Dal Santo’s parties made it into the Reader was in April 2003, when the party he threw for his 20th birthday was busted and he spent the night in jail on three misdemeanor charges. (Two of them were dropped, but he ended up paying the city $250 in fines.) “From now on,” he said back then, “I’ll make sure everything I’m involved in is legal....

The end of the year is packed with religious observances: Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza. But the winter solstice (which falls on December 21 this year) is the oldest of them all–humanity has celebrated this celestial occurrence since it first learned to read the stars. Drummers Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang planned their first solstice concert 12 years ago as a celebration for friends who didn’t observe other seasonal holidays, but the show has become a popular local tradition....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Their collective assumption that every person’s value to their nation is measured solely and completely by their salary–when in fact, that only measures one’s direct value to one’s employer. And even that is determined by an imperfect economic system that is great at measuring direct, immediate financial returns–which I’m not pooh-poohing–but not so good at determining the value of a patient nurse, a thoughtful teacher, a scrappy journalist, or a talented artist....

This is my first time here. They won’t let me smoke! We tried to crash the BMW party because they had really great gift bags. You want bar stories, huh? I started out at a place called Kronies, which became a western place and then it was Liquid and now it’s Kustom. Bars change names like Pamela Anderson changes breast sizes. I bartended and managed. My husband also worked there as a bartender....