Dear folks: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year in mid-November I was standing at my desk talking to some coworkers when I turned bloodred and nearly passed out on the spot. Days later, medical tests showed that the diabetes that haunts my family had finally caught up to me. Fortunately, I had not gotten to the insulin-dependent stage, but I can tell you that I have no doubt that the steady decline I was in and the problems I encountered in the next four months would have seen me there within a matter of years....

Chicago Reader Editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second I am very offended by something in Miller’s interview of egyptoligist Emily Teeter. Teeter stated that the Prophet Joseph Smith was wrong in his translation of the papyrruses that we know now are the Book of Abraham. The Prophet Joseph was Gods’ messinger sent here to restore Christianity which died out right after the time of chirst, when the church went over to the Devil and we had the Great Apostacy....

HOORAY! at Factory Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seeley adopts the basic structure of Zoom–an ensemble of young teenagers appear in a series of sequences in which they play didactic games, engage in “discussions,” or read letters from listeners–but makes one crucial change. Instead of a TV world populated with the usual idealized representations of childhood, we get one kid from an interracial family, another who recently moved in from out of town and is having trouble fitting in, and a third from a broken home....

Within hours of Charlie Parker’s death in 1955 (so the story goes), the graffito “Bird Lives” had begun to materialize on walls and sidewalks around New York City. Nothing that has occurred over the last 40 years would argue against that bold assertion. Indeed, the renewed ascendancy of bebop has amazed even the music’s most ardent traditionalists, as a seemingly endless geyser of wannabeboppers gushes forth, copying and occasionally varying the music that Parker and Dizzy Gillespie discovered and perfected as an alternative to the big-band swing of their mentors....

Yo La Tengo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The husband-and-wife team of guitarist and organist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley has served as the band’s core throughout its lengthy history, but it wasn’t until the arrival of bassist James McNew on 1992’s May I Sing With Me (Alias) that Yo La Tengo got its proverbial shit together. Their earliest releases, with an ever-shuffling cast of bass players, demonstrated a nicely ragged post-Velvet Underground folk-rock appeal....

At 8:30 on the morning of December 11, 1991, Ronald and Angela Rakow were like a million other tag-team parents. He’d just come home from Mount Sinai Hospital, where he worked as a security guard on the midnight to eight shift. She’d just gone out the door to Dock’s restaurant, where she was a cashier a couple of days a week. They had jobs and kids and no day care. It was a typical day until quarter after four that afternoon, when Ron went to change the diaper of his three-and-a-half-month son, Paul, and found he wasn’t breathing....

In her first feature, Son of the Shark (1993), which deals with troubled adolescence in a rural French town, Agnes Merlet assiduously avoids using psychoanalysis to explain societal ills. Rather, she matter-of-factly depicts the wasted lives of two brothers through a series of evocative vignettes that accumulate emotional power. Martin and Simon are street urchins abandoned by their bickering parents and condemned as “losers” by their elders; barely surviving on the fringes of law and society, they engage in petty crime and childish high jinks....

The habitues of Sammy’s Castle Club are normally content just to get by as best they can in an indifferent world, but as the dance contest at the fourth annual Stepper’s Ball approaches, latent ambitions and interpersonal conflicts arise that force each individual to decide what is most important to him or her. Phyliss Curtwright’s Stepper’s Ball, last July’s modest little summer musical, has mellowed into a warm and nostalgic autumn showcase for Curtwright’s original songs (written in a variety of styles to echo such benchmark 1960s vocalists as Dionne Warwick, James Brown, and the Shirelles), Julian Swain’s intricate dances (many of which have been rechoreographed to include more full-ensemble numbers), and a talented cast of mostly young actors who attack their archetypal roles with compassion, humor, and enthusiasm....

Percentage of people boarding Orange Line trains daily who used to drive instead, according to a survey by the CTA’s market research department: more than 25 percent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Chicago has become a potent force in American culture,” Sarah Solotaroff of the Chicago Community Trust tells Ronald Litke in Trust News (Winter/Spring). “Artists of all kinds come here–and stay here–to hone their work....

Really crappy merchandise. The California-based Real Goods mail-order catalog now offers “Biodegradable PooPets,” allegedly germ-free “cow manure figurines…hand-molded by Amish craftspeople” to decorate the garden and gradually release “nature’s finest fertilizer” into its soil. Your choice of Sluggo Snail ($14), Stool Toad ($12), or Dung Bunny ($12). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Economic development, Daley style. “Riverboat gambling did not create the jobs that were promised and had very little effect on reducing unemployment” in 11 of 12 suburban and downstate counties where monthly employment data before and after riverboats were studied, reports U....

Your column about infant circumcision [January 28] contained erroneous information. The enclosed remarks by Dr. John Taylor should clarify that “God’s little mudguard” is not basically ordinary skin. It is a highly specialized organ that serves several distinct and important purposes. Arguments about penile cancer and urinary tract infections may be enough to scare American physicians into perpetuating this dubious practice, but the fact is that 85 percent of the world’s males are uncircumcised....

Valentine’s Day Grinch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Straw–actress, rock ‘n’ roll singer, songwriter, scenester, and raconteur of the first order–is known for a couple of things that happened some years ago. Her distinctive voice marked Visions of Excess and Blast of Silence, two of the better late- 80s experiments by the Manhattan art rock ensemble called the Golden Palominos, a downtown supergroup that included ringleader Anton Fier, Michael Stipe, Bernie Worrell, Bill Laswell, and Chris Stamey, among others....

I’ve never been a fan of the “this film’s so bad it’s good” aesthetic, but Donnie T. Tremors’s Vanity, Ugly Vanity has such an absurd plot and extravagant mix of bizarre characters that I rather enjoyed it. Completed recently while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute, it’s the antithesis of slick: the lighting is often mismatched, the images are sometimes washed- out, the performances take bad student-film acting to a whole new level of abrasiveness....

He was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1909, but lived much of his life in Bloomington, Indiana, where he taught photography at Indiana University. Before that Henry Holmes Smith taught at Chicago’s famed New Bauhaus, which later became the School of Design, then the Institute of Design, and finally a part of IIT. On view this weekend as part of a special exhibit of photographs made by instructors and students of the School of Design is this exquisite untitled “light study” by Smith from 1946....

From the pages of Bicentennial 20th Anniversary Special! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the 70s, the ultimate way to display your plants was to suspend the pots in elaborate macrame hangers. What possessed thousands of men and women to spend hours knotting rough cord till their fingers bled? Perhaps the attraction of doing a handicraft yourself–there must have been quite the sense of accomplishment when you’d done the last of 6,000 knots....

There’s nothing particularly spectacular about Bush League All-Stars, which is exactly why their recent debut album, the Bob Weston-recorded Old Numbers (Pop Narcotic), sounds surprisingly fresh. Dispensing with indie rock’s de rigueur obscurantism–lo-fi production, extraneous noise, antinarrative lyrics, suppression of melody, etc–this quartet from Columbus bashes out country-tinged rock filled with a bluster and passion that’s somewhere between the largeness of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse and the rawness of early Replacements....

No organization has symbolized the essence of jazz any better or any longer than the Count Basie Orchestra, and it honors Basie’s innovations that such a characterization can remain true more than a decade after his death. Lots of bands carry on in the name of their leaders, only to fall into precipitous decline as “ghost” bands, pallidly recapping hits of 40 years past; but the Basie band has actually expanded its horizons since its founder’s passing....

By Diana Wright Her words–cutting, uplifting, acerbic–have defined her role as a grande dame of Chicago’s gay community. But inside, Cannon says, she feels nothing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t consider getting out 1,300 meals a night to people with AIDS small,” she says, still sounding a bit angry. “My focus has never been direct action. That was my avocation. Taking care of people who are sick is what I have always done....

DON WALSER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After serving in the National Guard for 39 years, 61-year-old country singer Don Walser has a bright future ahead. Though his new album, Texas Top Hand (Watermelon), displays his natural ease with country styles of the past, he sings with so much energy and charisma that there’s no trace of sentimentalism. Whether Walser’s yodeling gleefully on the spritely title track, singing with honky-tonk punchiness on a cover of the Merle Travis ditty “Divorce Me C....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be sure, the book authors are correct with regard to certain of the specific issues they discuss. But three basic views advanced in Henderson’s article are misguided. First, after citing a series of isolated “comforting” facts which Henderson admits are “inconclusive,” Henderson uncritically relates the position of one of the reviewed books that environmentalists are manufacturing crises to scare policymakers into trying to solve problems which have not been proven to exist....