The Perez Family With Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Director Mira Nair begins The Perez Family promisingly, on a white beach where we see two nuns drifting across the frame in slow motion. A large family dressed in their Sunday best are picnicking in the blinding sun. The sound of crashing waves swells on the sound track, and with the next shot we’re out over the water looking back at the figures onshore....

Hiep Le’s left hand curls around the base of the spinning lump of wet clay. His right presses hard across the top, cords of muscle rising along his thin forearm. His hands wobble on the uneven clay, then steady as it centers on the wheel. He drives his thumbs into the middle of the mound, curling its sides outward, then, grasping them with his long fingers, deftly draws it up into a cylinder....

Captured at newsgroup alt.animals.dolphins I am trying to find information about dolphin and other aquatic mammal evolution. The question is how they got their blowholes where they are. I believe that the blowhole is actually a fusion of the two nostrils that has moved back over time. But, isn’t the hole behind the brain, and if so, how did it go around the brain? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Who are these guys talking to? It’s addressed to me. It falls through my mail slot. It gets carried into my kitchen by my dog in exchange for a cookie. But when I open it up, someone seems to be talking to somebody else. The mail carrier gets to read the best part of the letter before I do. Good thing they told me. I’d never have guessed. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Since its birth in the mid-60s, a key element in the innovative world of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has been percussion. Listen to early records by Muhal Richard Abrams (Levels and Degrees of Light) and Joseph Jarman (Song For) on Delmark, for instance, and you’ll hear the constant tinkling of bells and bopping of objects, and you can detect the ongoing influence of the AACM’s “little instruments” approach whenever a member of 8 Bold Souls injects a toy-trumpet toot or wood-block pop into another player’s solo....

A Golden Rule Book for Journalists In 1977 the Sun-Times opened a corner bar insouciantly called the Mirage and let the good times and hidden cameras roll. When the Mirage closed, the paper published a monthlong saga that chronicled in almost celebratory language a timeless local cost of doing business–paying off the inspectors. Locally, this peephole look at two-bit corruption was cheered as an ingenious new chapter in the annals of undercover journalism....

The old gray coach house ain’t what it used to be. It’s not even where it used to be. Built as a small farmhouse in the 1890s, it was dragged back to the alley to make room for a larger rental property in the 1930s, set in the soil on an uneven concrete foundation, and left pretty much untouched until this year. Crumbling, rat infested, tilted and on the verge of tumbling down, it was about to go on the move again....

For 15 years or so Howard Levy plied his uniquely multifaceted craft as one of Chicago’s best-kept secrets. But since 1990, when he brought his keyboard and harmonica work to the pop-jazz group Bela Fleck and the Fleck-Tones (and more recently to the world-music band Trio Globo), the populace outside Chicago has gotten a glimpse of what it had been missing. Levy is a musical polymath who masters instruments and idioms the way a thirsty plant absorbs water....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is amazing (and depressing) to see how effective the media’s constant Italian bashing has been in making these images palatable to mainstream America. Portrayals which are rightly deemed offensive to other Americans–Stepin Fetchit, the Frito Bandito, et al–are considered “fun” or “cute” when applied to Italians. Why the double standard? Bigotry is bigotry, regardless of who’s the target....

MCA’s Cash Reserves Run Low . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Early this summer the MCA was required to have a reserve of at least $25.4 million in cash and investments, but, Consey confided, “We scarcely met the June 30, 1995 test.” He went on to note that these minimum requirements will rise to $27.6 million by December 30, 1995, and $29....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April an Associated Press profile of North Carolina State University veterinarian Greg Lewbart reported that he is one of the few in the country who treat pet fish. Dr. Lewbart’s fees range from $100 for a checkup, including X rays, to $250 for surgery. He said business is good because it’s so difficult to keep tropical fish alive....

Lead Story In November Mayor Carty Finkbeiner of Toledo told reporters that the best solution for the increasing noise at the airport was to have deaf people buy the homes of the complainers. (Several days later he apologized.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An alleged drug courier was arrested near Rigaud, Quebec, in August after his car broke down and police found 700 pounds of hashish stuffed in the trunk....

On their first two albums, This Is the Story and Sunshine on Leith, the Proclaimers–Scottish twins Charlie and Craig Reid–essayed a nice blend of folk idealism, melodic smarts, strong voices, and a bit of not-quite-punkish but serviceably defiant small-C Christian attitudinizing. Fans–I was one–pointed to the often high-level political analysis (“Throw the “R’ Away,” for instance, was a pretty sophisticated analysis of linguistic racism) and to the group’s rather lusty take on love as an antidote to their sometimes overweening moralism....

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO at the Garage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pinocchio’s first independent action is to run amok through the village, upsetting vendors’ carts, mocking distressed ladies, and generally causing pandemonium (a stage parents call “the terrible twos”). He proceeds to lie, bully, throw tantrums, and discard without hesitation the gifts given him by his poor but selfless father, Geppetto–who, to be sure, had originally thought to put his offspring to work, a sinister motive both Collodi and Vitali abandon almost immediately....

THE BUG The Bug, also directed by Strand, is funny in a formulaic way. Dennis, an assembly line worker at Jericho, Inc., in Skokie, visits the executive floor because he’s afraid the company plans to transfer him to Saint Louis. His quest turns into an inquest, however, when he lets it slip that he’s never actually seen his supervisor–it seems the man collects $46,000 annually without setting foot in the building....

Last weekend my girlfriend and I spent the night in a mountaintop lodge at an elevation of 9,000 feet, about 6,000 feet above the town in which we live. The romantic intent of the evening was slightly stifled by the fact that we both had a serious gas problem. It was distracting to have to constantly fight to hold back a fart. It seemed odd that we both developed this problem at the same time....

John Coltrane Jazz musicians have frequently been a divisive group, forever arguing about what is and isn’t legitimate music. Perhaps today’s most vocal arbiter of taste is Wynton Marsalis, whose unyielding devotion to tradition has led him to dismiss dozens of more adventurous, forward-looking practitioners. The trumpeter’s emphasis on understanding jazz’s rich history inside and out as a prerequisite for progression is not without merit, but his uncompromising take also runs the risk of slowing progress by overlooking innovation....

Every August Rich Cotovsky–actor, director, off-Loop theater owner, and licensed pharmacist–dons a curly black wig and a shirt made from the American flag and presides over one of the city’s edgiest theater festivals as the living incarnation of Abbie Hoffman, circa 1969. For the duration of the two-and-a-half-day marathon of plays and performance art, founded six years ago to commemorate Woodstock and the recently departed Hoffman, Cotovsky disappears into his character....

Virtuoso mandolinist, father of bluegrass, a frigging musical Mount Rushmore–Bill Monroe is all that, but he’s also a notorious master of the undying feud. His bands have always consisted of the creme de la creme, but in 1945 he put together what many people consider the best bluegrass band that ever was and ever will be, with a lineup that included guitarist Lester Flatt and banjoist Earl Scruggs, the man who would revolutionize the genre with his three-finger picking style....

MAY “Hamlet, this is Dr. Carl.” If what you think the world needs now is a Jungian version of Hamlet, get thee to Northwestern for the school’s ongoing archetype-laden version of the tragedy. Hamlet’s struggle, says director Ann Woodworth, is deeper than to kill or not to kill Claudius; it is based on his need to integrate his masculine and feminine sides. Accordingly, a woman plays the lead. The play closes this weekend with final shows tonight and tomorrow night at 8 and Sunday at 2....