In one corner of a computer room at a certain prestigious business school stands a lone laser printer, a laser printer apart from the rest. Although it is maintained in immaculate working order, local custom dictates that it be used only on extraordinary occasions. A plaque affixed to its clean gray surface gives the reason: this laser printer, a gift of the class of 1986, is exclusively for printing resumes. It is a sacred device, a machine for communicating with the gods, and it is treated with a reverence appropriate to its exalted status....

This question has been keeping me up all night. What is the difference between jam, jelly, marmalade, preserves, and butter as in apple and peanut? Why don’t we see any peanut jam or orange jelly? –Claudia Cipriani, Hackensack, New Jersey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jelly is made from fruit juice and so has no fruit bits. Jam is made by boiling fruit and does have fruit bits....

The Glass Shield Smoke My dozen favorite films at Cannes this year? Terence Davies’s ecstatic wide-screen The Neon Bible, set in a perfectly imagined Georgia of the early 40s, with Gena Rowlands; Emir Kusturica’s Yugoslav black-comedy epic Underground; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s beautiful if difficult Good Men, Good Women; Jim Jarmusch’s transgressive western Dead Man; Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, an Iranian urban comedy about children that unfolds in real time; Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, a cross between Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman–with Gong Li taking the place of Marlene Dietrich–and Billy Bathgate; and Manoel de Oliveira’s The Convent (Ruizian metaphysics and theology with John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve)....

Born into a family of Mexican immigrants and raised in south Texas, Tish Hinojosa was exposed to a wide variety of sounds as a kid, and her organic absorption offers a stirring testimonial to America’s hybrid tradition. Nominally a country artist, she aimed for Nashville in 1983, only to leave dejected and frustrated a few years later. After that Hinojosa pursued her own path, ignoring mainstream country’s strict formulas and retreating to rural New Mexico before settling in Austin, notorious home to multidirectional musical misfits....

Like It Is One such artist is Johnathan McClain. American theater needs him the way constipated old men need high colonics. Hell, the entire nation needs him. A country that confuses USA Today with a newspaper, and talk-show hysteria with informed debate, desperately needs a mainline infusion of Truth–which is exactly what McClain delivers in his devastatingly accurate, wildly entertaining one-man show Like It Is. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

BINGO British playwright Edward Bond is a rigid, humorless ideologue. Though William Shakespeare wrote plays more powerful than life, Bond naively expects the man to be as complete as his creations–as compassionate as Prospero, as furious at hypocrisy as Hamlet, as enraged at poverty as broken Lear. Woe to him for being merely human. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 1973 Bingo, cryptically subtitled Scenes of Money & Death, Bond imagines, without relying on fact, the bard six months before his death, in 1616....

Vincent Williams dates his love of show business back to the 1968 Oscars. “That was the year Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn tied for best actress,” says the 36-year-old Williams. “They showed clips of the nominees, and I remember sitting there in front of the TV–just a little kid–watching Streisand sing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade.’ She was pretty–strange-looking, but pretty. I thought to myself: ‘Who’s this lady singing on this boat?...

Heroes and Villians There’s a new guy in a white hat in the local papers. His name is Forrest Claypool, and he’s cleaning up Chicago’s parks. But as Manzi told us, “For whatever reason, the media has focused on CID.” The reasons aren’t hard to surmise. CID is where the blood is. Claypool fired about 250 CID tradesmen. And when the Sun-Times’s Adrienne Drell pointed out that both of CID’s underqualified but politically connected top administrators had survived, Claypool immediately demoted them....

Room for Many More! Liberalism can still make sense, however. One of its roots has always been a feeling for the importance of all people to history. The tides of migration following historical events–of a black family moving from Natchez to Chicago, or a gay man from Des Moines to San Francisco–are as important to history as the power relations between Washington and Moscow. It’s fitting, then, that the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange–which has long championed the liberal value of diversity by including elderly dancers and people of color–should put on a performance, in collaboration with Mordine & Company Dance Theatre, at the Chicago Historical Society....

Lisa Alvarado grew up in Albany Park in the 60s. “We were the only people who weren’t German or Polish. Our neighbors stood in their yards and stared when we had our housewarming in the yard. It was definite culture shock. I had to defend my little sisters all the time.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a senior at the all-girls Alvernia High School, Alvarado became a feminist, reading books such as Sisterhood Is Powerful and The Feminine Mystique and changing her last name to her mother’s maiden name....

This is a funny time for performance. On one hand the field is flooded with burned-out actors and stand-ups trying to copy Spalding Gray or Marga Gomez and turn their private pain into financial gain. On the other hand there are still plenty of hothouse avant-gardists creating utterly unwatchable work and calling it art. And then there are performers like Amy Ludwig, Rennie Sparks, and Julie Laffin. While each has a distinctive performance style, they share a gift for keeping the audience engaged....

Back when he went to Senn High School, Lar Lubovitch was plain old Larry. Now not only is he artistic director of a New York-based troupe celebrating its 25th anniversary, but he has choreographed for the likes of New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, the White Oak Dance Project, and ice dancers–the last curiously suited to his creamy, dreamy musicality. But that musicality can take spicier forms too....

RAFAEL TORAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite widespread indifference in his native land, Lisbon-based Rafael Toral has released a series of CDs that push the boundaries of musical genres as well as the limits of his instrument, establishing him as one of the most gifted and innovative guitarists of the decade. Played at low volume, Wave Field (Moneyland) is a beautiful record whose liquid flow is reminiscent of Brian Eno’s experiments with ambient music....

Against the backdrop of Japan’s bizarrely extreme rock underground the bass ‘n’ drums duo Ruins stand out in striking relief. Covering all the stops between hardcore’s frenzied energy and the overblown drama of prog rock and fusion, drummer Tatsuya Yoshida and bassist Ryuichi Masuda meticulously craft a melange of unprecedented originality. Masuda’s adept playing not only gives the music its thick bottom but provides its main melodic voice, while Yoshida alternately propels, discombobulates, and shadows Masuda’s zigzagging....

Twenty-five years ago U.S. District Judge Richard Austin struck what seemed like a mighty blow against segregation. Ruling in the case Dorothy Gautreaux et al. v. the Chicago Housing Authority, he ordered the CHA to build 700 public-housing apartments on scattered sites in predominantly white neighborhoods. They do have a point. After a generation of stalling, new public housing is being built, and Chicago is sometimes even talked of as a national model....

Tree lovers beware: salt kills! According to Arbor Topics (Fall/Winter), published by the suburban Wheeling tree-care firm Hendricksen, salt from winter de-icing can draw water away from plants the same way salt draws moisture out of meat when it’s salt cured: “When salt spray or runoff gets on foliage or into the root zone…water is pulled out of the foliage or root and into the strong salt solution. Affected foliage will dry out and turn brown....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What was . . . a somewhat artificial parliament in 1893 is today the reality of Chicago,” writes Harvard religion professor Diana Eck in her contribution to the new anthology Religion and American Culture. “The metropolitan yellow pages list dozens of entries under the headings ‘Churches: Buddhist’ or ‘Churches: Islamic.’ There are said to be seventy mosques in Chicago today and almost half a million Muslims....

David Alanis is touching up his car in front of his house on 27th Street, talking to a few friends. As he slowly maneuvers a piece of cardboard and a spray can, there is a sudden burst of loud, booming sounds, and the entire street begins to shake and rumble. Moments later, a torrent of small gravel pellets and a cloud of chalky dust blow across the pavement, and everybody ducks to shield their faces....

This is the closing weekend of the sixth annual Rhino Fest, a showcase of experimental theater and performance that started as a component of the Bucktown Arts Fest but has since taken on a life of its own. The event’s name is inspired by surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big); the three-week agenda includes work by the Neo-Futurists, the Curious Theatre Branch, Theater Oobleck, Frank Melcori, Warren Leming, and other local fringe familiars....

Two Reasons to Ignore Bob Dole People who create art dealing with taboo subjects shouldn’t complain when society lashes back. Over the last 15 years–years filled with heaping hills of pious moralism from our political leaders and increasing cries of repression from their opponents–we’ve seen art grow more explicit in its particulars and more extreme in its themes, from the unlikely commercial success of Blue Velvet and Pulp Fiction in film to the unprecedented commercial hegemony of rock’s most artistically extreme subcultures: rap, grunge, and industrial....