Last spring Vince Michael, age 33, was getting restless. Work was still fun: he spends his days protecting historic buildings as the Chicago programs director for the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. Evenings were long: he’d expended considerable energy restoring his Logan Square greystone, and the thrill of dog ownership had worn off. While his artist wife, Felicity, spun images on her computer, Vince watched TV. But then last April he won a beermaking kit in a silent auction....

In 1991 I had the opportunity to photograph at Site 2, a sprawling refugee camp along the Thai-Cambodian border. Having seen films, photos, and news reports showing Cambodians only as helpless war refugees, starving victims reaching out for western aid, I was surprised to discover a people deeply concerned with rebuilding and upholding their cultural traditions, and desperate for normalcy after nearly 210 years of chaos and brutality. I was frustrated that in the short time I had access to the camp I was not able to document the vitality I witnessed....

Norma Field nixed the expression “Japanese American” when her editor drafted a publicity blurb for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (Pantheon), her book about contemporary Japan. Field, a professor at the University of Chicago, says in Japan the comparable term is haafu, a label based on the English word “half.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ve been described as ‘blue-eyed,’ which is absurd,” says Field, whose eyes are not blue....

The offices of Auto Driveaway, the company John Sohl founded in 1952, fill most of the 14th floor at 310 S. Michigan. Sohl’s company, the largest driveaway outfit in the world, is responsible for about 60,000 car deliveries a year. Some of those are made by truck, but the bulk of Auto Driveaway’s deliveries are made by nonprofessional drivers in need of transportation, known in the business as “casuals.” Though it is perfectly legal, a cloud seems to hang over this practice; some ads for auto movers in the Yellow Pages assure car owners “no casuals....

Does the Northwest Incinerator really put 17 pounds of lead into the air every hour? That would be 150,000 pounds a year, and it would make the incinerator the largest lead polluter in Cook County by a factor of about 100. (The next largest–a recycler of nonferrous metals–gives out about 1,500 pounds a year.) Members of the anti-incinerator coalition WASTE say it does; William Abolt and Henry Henderson of the city’s Department of Environment say the claim is no longer true and WASTE knows it....

When art historians gather, they discourse on old schools and new schools, critics and canons, originality and plagiarism, purity and commercialism. Such academic concerns are usually out of place at an alternative space like the Randolph Street Gallery. But the recent assembly there of historians, artists, and apprentices was not typical. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One rapper and tagger in a white painter’s cap repeatedly announced his readiness to sign a new recording deal while denouncing CTA ploys to domesticate graffiti writers with art-school scholarships and legal spray zones....

Right now our town is blessed with an unusually large number of talented flutists and guitarists, so perhaps it’s inevitable that some of them should team up. Matthew Heaton and Shannon Murphy met when they were graduate students at Northwestern; he studied with guitar veteran Anne Waller and she with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Walfrid Kujala. Busy teachers and free-lance performers these days, they’ve put aside room in their schedules for this concert of chamber works by local and South American contemporary composers....

When Abby Schachner was 14 she stopped eating. She and a boy at school had fallen in love, and when it didn’t work out she withdrew. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After she got out of the hospital, Schachner became bulimic. “That was much worse, because I’m a pretty guilty person anyway, and when I’d see myself doing that to myself, and I’d see the vomit dripping down the heart wallpaper next to the toilet seat, it just–” she stops suddenly, twisting off a piece of the Rice Krispies treat she cradles in her lap....

Stupid people belittle artists who manipulate style because they’re uncomfortable with the emotionality it expresses. British superstars Suede–called London Suede in the U.S. for legal reasons–are as a consequence almost always sneered at by the American rock intelligentsia. But the band held worlds of contrivance, emotionality, and promise in its redolent, hysterical debut album. Suede was the sound of the dreams of misfits–the weepy, overemoting, self-invented singer Brett Anderson, and wondrous, vibrant guitarist Bernard Butler–translated into a barrage of baroque arrangements, rampant homoeroticism, and unapologetic glammed-out nostalgia....

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With nothing but an acoustic guitar and a lyric, Loudon Wainwright III can pull off things more powerful than most Hollywood narratives. That said, his albums have occasionally veered into the overwrought; his 25-year recording career has taken him through many labels and many phases, from his best-known single “Dead Skunk” (actually one of his weaker, more gimmicky songs) and thin LPs T Shirt and Final Exam (both on Arista) to the classic gender-gap anthem “Whatever Happened to Us,” the stinging vitriol of “Revenge,” such hilarious one-liners as “I Eat Out” and “Kings and Queens,” and a few surprisingly affecting tearjerkers....

Last year the indefatigable pianist, composer, and bandleader Marshall Vente took on a Sunday night slot at WDCB (the College of DuPage radio station), and he’s now added concert promotion to the mix. Instead of staring idly at his vacant January calendar, he has pulled together three days of music featuring several of the bands he leads–such as his Latin jazz group Tropicale and the original vehicle for his energies, the delightful little big band called Project 9 Plus–as well as groups headed up by various Vente sidemen....

Joseph A. Ruiz II Two decades ago New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer was asked by movie critic Vincent Canby to consider reviewing some avant-garde abstract films by Paul Sharits that Canby had found puzzling. Kramer replied that he had long ago determined “If it moves, it’s not for us.” This story has been used to illustrate Kramer’s conservatism or myopia, and perhaps it does, but he did have a point....

“People are still mystified by free improvising,” says Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers. “I think they think it’s some sort of esoteric craft that should be worshiped regardless of whether or not it’s good music. If you have to think about whether or not you’re liking the music, chances are you aren’t.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the tradition of the late 70s/early 80s New York-based no-wave movement, the Luttenbachers’ noisy, chaotic assault combines the seemingly disparate elements of free jazz and punk rock....

Snooks Eaglin (Black Top) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blind since the age of two, Eaglin broke in on the scene in the 50s, first as a session guitarist and later as a member of the Flamingoes, a popular R & B combo led by Toussaint. By the end of the decade Eaglin was leading a double life of sorts. Folklorist Harry Oster started recording him in 1958, and the solo acoustic results presented Eaglin as a quaint bluesman smack-dab between rural urgency and urban smoothness....

The Lost Vegas Series, Zebra Crossing Theatre. For anyone who complains about the lack of strong female characters in contemporary theater and film, playwright Julie Jensen has an answer in the world premiere of The Lost Vegas Series, an intelligent, humorous, heartfelt portrayal of a woman’s ability to survive. In six connected vignettes we follow Our Girl, as she’s called, as she deals with men, makes a living, and copes with her dysfunctional family in the flashy desert oasis of Las Vegas....

You’re familiar with Tim Miller, one of the “gang of four” performance artists whose NEA grants were pulled last year (they were subsequently reinstated) because of the subversive and specifically homoerotic nature of their work. Now that the storm has blown over, it’s time to see Miller’s work on its own, without the controversial hype that can raise expectations to unrealistic heights. Fortunately, his new full-length performance piece, My Queer Body, delivers quite a punch with or without sensationalistic spew surrounding it....

Barbie dolls are no strangers to controversy. Still, it is unusual when they attract plainclothes policemen and workers from Streets and Sanitation, as the Barbies hanging out in front of 1874 N. Bissell are doing. Whatever are those naughty Barbies up to? “One of the neighbors had been bitching about dogs peeing on his plants, and all this stuff just started to–hmmm–ruminate,” says Stasewich. The second installation was born, with more small explanatory signs....

A group of men sits huddled near a giant hot-air vent on Lower Michigan Avenue, dry, quiet, and almost protected from the icy wind blowing sheets of snow on the crowded streets above. Slowly, a red Chevrolet Beretta winds through the maze of Dumpsters and loading docks. It pulls into a parking spot near 200 N. Lower Michigan, and one of the men shouts out “Hey, here comes the Beretta. That’s one of my regular customers....

In the mid-1980s NYC Lower East Side hipsters Lydia Lunch, Foetus, Annie Sprinkle, Sonic Youth, Wiseblood, and the Butthole Surfers got together with such filmmakers as Richard Kern and Nick Zedd to make some very dark low-budget films that incorporated elements of hard-core porn, punk rock, violence, drug culture, and modern art, which Zedd dubbed the “cinema of transgression.” I saw a few of these films as a young punk at the old club Exit around the time they came out, and they blew my small-town mind....

By Michael Miner Aaron is an Orthodox Jew himself. He’s also every inch a journalist. His only apprehension about the Bright story was that he’d be beaten to it. “We wanted to get it in as soon as possible out of the feeling that we were going to get scooped. So we put everything aside and had everybody on the staff working on it. It was very intense. I’m telling you, every day I would open the Sun-Times and Tribune with dread, thinking they would have that story....