Under most circumstances, independents would be supporting Cook County judiciary candidates Andrea Malka Schleifer and A.C. Cunningham in the March 15 Democratic primary. Schleifer specializes in family law, and Cunningham, a former prosecutor and defense lawyer, is a well-regarded associate judge. Both have long ties to independent activists. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m not sure why they did it this way, but they did,” says Schleifer....

The first arrivals push through the door of the Davis Speed Wash on Roosevelt Road just past five o’clock on a frigid February morning. They walk to the rear counter, where owner Hughzell Davis is dispensing cups of thin coffee for 50 cents. “Lousy coffee,” remarks Dupree, as he sips Hughzell Davis’s brew. Dupree dropped his wife off at work and now he’s at the Speed Wash. There’s a $5 bill tucked into his hatband in case he needs it....

His Majestie’s Clerkes and Chicago a Cappella Nothing is more formidable for choral singers than performing a cappella, but few things are more basic to their art. The essence of singing in a chorus is to listen to one’s colleagues and perform in a way that complements them and blends with them. An unleashed ego is a luxury a soloist can sometimes afford (or get away with), but the chorister must consciously work for the good of the whole group and the group’s sound, holding back even when it would be so much more fun to blast away....

By Adam Langer “I’m kind of worried, man,” Sikora says. We’re sitting in Parrots, a bar at Halsted and Wellington. After more than a decade of cranking out low-budget films in Super-8, Sikora’s now completing Bullet on a Wire, his first full-length feature and the first movie he’s made on 16-millimeter. At the same time he’s in preproduction for a film that he’ll shoot this summer on digital video called Rock ‘n’ Roll Punk....

By Linda Lutton She also said the AA meetings at MTECS had been suspended. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Servant says that not only was there no security, residents weren’t even given keys to their apartments, and construction staff meandered freely in and out of them while rehabbing the building. He says that shortly after he moved in, $400 cash, a TV, and a VCR were stolen from his room....

CONFERENCE ON THE FUTURE OF HAPPINESS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leo Buscaglia fans may rage, but it’s time the con game was exposed–Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley, with his 12-step “Daily Affirmation,” can’t do it alone. Leave it to the Upright Citizens Brigade (creators of Virtual Reality) to concoct a fictitious “comedy experiment,” The Conference on the Future of Happiness, a spoof playing at five different theaters in January....

In one respect, not much has changed about this guitar-percussion duo since I wrote about them a couple years back: it’s still about one guy banging sticks in time and another guy shortening and plucking strings in tune. But since then they’ve enhanced their finely focused interplay; they’ve slowly but steadily begun to gain a committed audience in their occasional appearances; and they’ve produced a quietly spectacular album (Loose Contact on Southport)....

“Empowerment zone,” huh [“EZ Does It,” March 3]. Dollars dangled from D.C., PC buzzwords jam the PR lines downtown, the people come running with fists up and hands out, acronyms fly in alphabet flurries as the scramble for control commences. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thirty years since the War on Poverty began, the programmatic vogues come and go. The names change, the alignments of power shift around new players, but it’s still the same standoff on the payoff....

In this breezy, dreamlike 1917 French serial, an enormous pack of hounds runs with the car of the dorky title hero (Rene Creste) as he drives around the Paris suburbs in his flowing black cape, righting wrongs and generally taking care of business; one of these dogs even rings the gate bell for him at one of his stops. These glorious, goofy mutts are emblematic of what makes Louis Feuillade an even greater director of popular cinema than Spielberg or Lucas; his serials from the teens may be the greatest of all adventure films, representing the essence and peak of fantasy filmed on real locations....

Last week’s editorial [Hitsville, April 15] about Kurt Cobain’s life and death was insulting to Rock music fans everywhere. By trivializing rock legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and Prince, the Reader alienated everyone but the trendiest “alternative” fans. And to make matters worse, the Reader idolized Cobain as the savior of rock music. In fact, Cobain really offered nothing innovative to rock music; his message was “life sucks, and you suck, so buy my record!...

This difficult-to-categorize masterpiece by Tony Gatlif (1993) is many things at once: a Gypsy “docu-musical” (actually an adroit mixture of documentary and fiction) in ‘Scope and stereo featuring musicians, singers, and dancers from India, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France, and Spain; an epic account of Gypsy migrations over the past thousand years; a political statement about Gypsy persecution that never descends into bitterness; a poetic evocation of the passing seasons; and a gorgeously filmed and edited compilation of some of the most joyous, soulful, and energizing music and dancing you’re likely to encounter, taking on the musical forms and styles of each successive country (including Django Reinhardt-style jazz in France and flamenco in Spain)....

Nacho Alfonso: Memorials Alfonso’s memories include personal recollections as well as collective political memory: he stitches the two together seamlessly. Masked Zapatista guerrillas are the subject of three of the works in this exhibition, all monoprints created at the Taller Mexicano de Grabado while on this visit to Chicago (Alfonso’s first to the United States). Yet the series also recalls the time the artist spent with indigenous tribes in Chiapas....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, through the efforts of the Illinois Labor History Society and particularly Bill Adelman, the historical events of Haymarket were rescued from the dustbin of history. Popularizing the event, Bill has spoken to thousands of high schools, community organizations, civic clubs and unions–inspiring them to understand this class-based travesty of Justice. In fact his presentations have done more to publicize the existence and traditions of the Chicago anarchists than Craig and all his well- intended purists....

Whether the dinosaurs that dominated the earth for 125 million years were warm-blooded or cold-blooded is a continuing source of debate, as is the question of whether their descendants live among us today as birds. Also hotly debated is the cause of their sudden and mysterious disappearance at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. Blond and boyish, Markwick is a native of Worthing, on the south coast of England....

West Side Story But to fully appreciate this American classic you have to see the original Jerome Robbins staging–the fully realized theatrical vision that links dance and gesture, script and score, drama and design. The genius of Robbins’s conception goes far beyond turning Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a story about the turf war between two 1950s youth gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the European-American Jets. (The details are dated, but the conflict is still with us: the Jets’ declaration of war–“We’re hangin’ a sign / Says ‘Visitors forbidden’– / And we ain’t kiddin’!...

I wish to praise the articles by John Conroy, “Town Without Pity,” and Michael Miner, “Cops Want Watchdogs Leashed,” which appeared in the Reader January 5. Both articles were timely and informative. They examine the recurrent problem of police brutality, and how public officials treat police use of excessive force lightly. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently researched and published an article looking at police brutality in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston (“Police Brutality in African-American and Latino Communities,” The Latino Studies Journal, Vol....

With the emphasis on texture and tone color in postwar classical music came an intensified interest in the possibilities of percussion: Edgard Varese’s pioneering 1933 all-percussion composition Ionisation, John Cage’s prepared-piano and early percussion explorations, and works by a host of others, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Toru Takemitsu, and Morton Feldman, ushered in a new solo percussion repertoire and with it specialist performers like Max Neuhaus and Stomu Yamash’ta. Chicago’s Steve Butters is a bright new part of this lineage....

For the past few months the phone company’s been singing the same song: with the demand for phone lines increasing and the pool of available phone numbers decreasing, the time has come to split Chicago into separate area codes. This change is particularly controversial because it’s not clear why or even if the shortage is so severe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Cohen says the shortage was grossly exacerbated when Ameritech assigned 430,000 wireless numbers with the 312 area code to wireless phones and pagers in the suburbs....

SYMPHONY II Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The aptly named Symphony II sees itself as a reasonably priced alternative to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. With only three concerts per season so far, it hardly poses a threat, but in terms of performance quality it’s definitely on par with the Lyric Opera’s pit orchestra and the Grant Park Symphony. Hardly surprising, given that most of those orchestras’ first chairs and other members play for Symphony II, which also means that the problems often plaguing the Lyric Opera orchestra–errant brasses, dry string intonation–sometimes crop up in Symphony II’s performances....

A powerful, provocative, and highly disturbing Austrian film by Michael Haneke that focuses on the collective suicide of a young and seemingly “normal” family (1989). Prompted by Austria’s high suicide rate and various news stories, the film’s agenda is not immediately apparent; it focuses at first on the family’s highly repetitive life-style, taking its time establishing the daily patterns of the characters. The roles of television and money in their lives are crucial to what this film is about, but the absence of any obvious motives for the family’s ultimate despair is part of what gives this film its devastating impact....