Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March security guards at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, along with local police and a helpful eyewitness, apprehended a man who’d grabbed a $1,400 gold chain from the neck of another man. Police arrested the suspect, then arrested the witness when a computer check revealed that he had several outstanding warrants, then arrested the victim when they found crack cocaine in his pocket....

By Michael Miner The Sun-Times was already on board. “It should be a park, as Mayor Daley is urging,” said a ’93 editorial. “That’s how it was meant to be when it was conceived as part of Daniel H. Burnham’s 1909 great plan for Chicago. By journalism’s normal lights the contest could mean only one thing: not mere support for the idea of replacing Meigs but the kind of wholehearted identification with it required for civic grandstanding....

I notice magnetic strips have been placed in bills denominated $10 and up, 1990 series and later. I have been told this is part of an anticounterfeiting scheme, but I wonder. Can airports or other places with metal detectors pick up the dollar amounts when you pass through the gates? Is this another attempt by Big Brother to keep tabs on us? –P.R., Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now....

HELEN LEVITT That Levitt came of age during the Depression may help account for the fact that her images are entirely of working-class and poor people, but there’s no simple explanation for the mysterious and ultimately liberating vision she brings to her subjects. Like all great artists who aspire to create some direct relationship between their art and the external world, she understands (with critic Andre Bazin) that “realism” can be achieved only through “artifice....

Jackson Browne If the early 80s will be remembered for the advent of the Material Girl, that decade’s latter half will surely be known for the opposite: after 1985’s Live Aid and the rash of relief records that followed, social work had never looked so glamorous. Suddenly, artists who never before fashioned their music around grand themes were now recording albums that invoked at least one terrible global disease and came wrapped in social-justice address books instead of liner notes....

Darrel Morris heard about the horrible fate of three-legged chicks–pecked to death by their own mothers–long before he turned it into embroidery. It was back when he was a kid, growing up on the hardscrabble remains of a family farm in rural Kentucky, trying desperately to fit in well enough to survive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The third of four children, Morris was the regular target of his father’s wrath....

Friday 10 The Mayor’s Office of Special Events estimates that 200,000 people will soak up the soul-stirring, leg-shaking, mind-melting singing offered up by more than a dozen groups from Chicago and around the world in the city’s annual Gospel Fest. The shows take place today and tomorrow. The first sets, from noon to 4:30, are on the so-called “early stage” at Jackson and Lake Shore Drive in Grant Park. The evening shows, from 5 to 10:45, are in the Petrillo Music Shell, at Jackson and Columbus....

By Cara Jepsen The nation’s Pacifica affiliates were once the model of community radio, broadcasting shows by and for local people and providing a voice for the voiceless. In recent years, though, Pacifica has become more centralized and audience driven, and local shows have been dumped in favor of music and national programming. Indeed, more and more radio stations–even a certain public station here in Chicago–are producing less and less diverse local programming....

“Welcome, welcome!” says Truong Anh-Tuan as customers enter New Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant he owns at Argyle and Broadway. “Please!” Anh-Tuan gestures for them to sit down. Then he moves from table to table, making sure everyone is happy. Today he’s even more animated than usual, as his thoughts are focused on the upcoming celebration of Tet, the first day of the Vietnamese New Year. It’s weeks before the February 19 date, but Anh-Tuan is already making plans....

Condemned With Faint Praise McCarron followed his anonymous editorial with a signed op-ed piece the next day. Here his views were less preposterous. He conceded in passing that Kamin had given the McGraw-Hill an “A-minus,” but argued that continued development is more important to Chicago’s economy than the preservation of A-minus buildings to its soul. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And he sounded less preposterous yet when he talked to me....

In the crowded field of local choirs the 17-year-old James Chorale has emerged as one of the few that can be counted on to deliver consistently excellent performances despite its semipro status. Last summer I heard the 35-voice chorale–whose name is a mystery even to its veterans–at the Woodstock Mozart Festival and was struck by the ardor and grace of its singing. Both qualities ought to come in handy in this weekend’s characteristically thoughtful program....

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY With Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Charles Durning, John Mahoney, Jim True, and William Cobbs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The only other lowly Hudsucker employee who shares some of Moses’ metaphysical nature is a bald, white, cadaverous figure named Aloysius. Clearly signifying Death, he paints the names on the doors of the executive offices whenever someone moves up or down the corporate ladder....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his pedestrian biography of Beau O’Reilly et al, Tony Adler fails to discuss the essential economic reasons for the characteristically long and twisted route Beau and Co. have taken to their present state of existence. This is not a request for a dissertation on how typically hardworking struggling artists cannot support themselves in a Capitalist society but how can you write about this group of independent artists without putting their experience in a larger (i....

NICHOLAS PAYTON QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his first CD, the splendid young trumpeter Nicholas Payton offered up a pleasant case of musical schizophrenia. On the one hand, he played some of the tunes associated with the classic jazz of his hometown New Orleans, and he played them in the classic New Orleans style handed down by Louis Armstrong in the 20s....

NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY It’s easy to shrug off the tittering as mere stupidity, but Stage Actoring Studio must share the blame. Despite some absolutely riveting performances, a killer script, and top-notch barebones set design, the production fails to convey the weight of Gordone’s drama. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no difficulty figuring out what’s right about this production. Rarely, performed these days, Gordone’s 1969 No Place to Be Somebody is an exciting mixture of sublime poetry, rough urban dialogue, and a wickedly engrossing plot....

Wesley Kimler Picks Four I told Kimler I had trouble seeing anything of his work in Kunz. His replies, on this day and later, revealed two perspectives on the subject of artistic influence that couldn’t be farther apart. He first denied having anything to do with the development of these artists, but on another day he claimed that the three painters–Mary Livoni, John Santoro, and Kunz–had all benefited from his “sensibility of how paint should be handled,” and emphasized the extent of his discussions with them about the meaning of painting....

Jim Gallios is as Chicago as the Wabash el, in whose shadows he’s been feeding much of the city for the past 46 years. Feeding it real food: steaks, prime rib, multiethnic specials, and some of the best barbecued ribs this side of 39th Street. Harry Truman once drank bourbon after hours at his joint; HUD secretary Henry Cisneros just flew back to Washington with a batch of his Canadian back ribs; Bill Veeck spent so much time eating and drinking at the end of the bar that they enshrined the seat....

About five miles north of Sauk City along Route 12 is a historical marker. It’s easy to pass up, but don’t: it commemorates a 16-acre patch of prairie that’s the work in progress of Dr. Donald Kindschi, a retired anesthesiologist. It will be in progress for 1,000 years, he says, because that’s how long it will take for the ecosystem of the original prairie to redevelop. The atmosphere of the two blocks of Route 113 that is Lodi’s downtown is so authentically small-town it’s almost too real, like a Hollywood facade....

Hey, Faggot: So, it goes like this: “Last night I masturbated to Jeff Stryker’s latest, at home, on my boyfriend, but I was thinking of you the whole time–it was you I was masturbating about.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m a 27-year-old straight girl with an orgasm problem. Orgasms are great, and I can definitely have them with myself, and sometimes with others, but I had a bad experience with an old boyfriend....

At age 83, pianist Shura Cherkassky qualifies as a legend by default: almost all of his near contemporaries–from Vladimir Horowitz to Claudio Arrau–are gone, leaving the Odessa-born virtuoso as the last link to the grand 19th-century romantic tradition. His greatest influences were his mother, a piano teacher who had played for Tchaikovsky, and Josef Hofmann, a pupil of Anton Rubinstein and one of the renowned interpreters of Chopin’s music. A child prodigy, Cherkassky started his hectic concert career more than 70 years ago, after his family emigrated to New York; he once performed in the White House for Warren Harding....