Last Saturday night my boyfriend and I went to Mysore Woodland to stuff ourselves on South Indian carbs with a friend who’d just lost a swank job involving something I can’t talk about because she signed a confidentiality agreement. “Let’s try to find proof that infinity exists on earth tonight,” she said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Technically, I guess, it was a benefit–for Bop Camp, a local “sport, art production, healing therapy, and performance” collective that plays a sort of jousting game involving long PVC poles padded at one end with stuffed animals....

Chiyo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I guess Chicago wasn’t ready for an all-kaiseki restaurant. Elaborate multicourse dining based on simple, pure ingredients chosen to philosophically coincide with the changing seasons was an ambitious idea, and the meal I ate at Matsumoto, Isao Tozuka and chef Seijiro Matsumoto’s Albany Park restaurant, was one of my most memorable. But despite intense media interest the place never seemed to be occupied by more than a few diners at a time....

Wicked But let’s face it: if the only magic lady encountered by Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale when she was transported by cyclone to Oz had been Billie Burke’s airy-fairy Glinda, The Wizard of Oz would not be the classic it is. The MGM musical greatly expands the witch’s presence, and Hamilton’s character is genuinely frightening. But we identify with her too–with her anger at the squeaky-voiced Munchkins and at the child who stumbles into her world and kills her sister (with a house yet)....

Your recent article by Keith Harris, “Bitter Without Bite” [March 17], was the most masturbatory and useless exploitation of vocabulary I’ve encountered in a long long long time. In fact, after ingesting that piece of pseudo-literary crap, I feel at least three IQ points dumber. Either I’m missing something, or this is really the boring echo of every paragraph, spit out over and over again: “I’m nauseously ambivalent toward Turner and have no ideas of my own so, uh, here’s some snobby references and self-absorbed prose that will do nothing more than compromise my audience and provide such a vain ego boost that I might as well just go float in the yellow puddle of my own condescending ambiguity for the rest of eternity and try to get a suntan....

When the ball is in Devin Hester’s hands, the game of football opens up and flowers. A sport that has entangled itself in ever more complicated strategies over the decades becomes again simple and beautiful. It returns to its origins, a man with the ball trying to elude all others. No wonder every punt and kickoff brings calls to come watch. At home, in a bar, or on site at Soldier Field, this is no time for a bathroom break....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new leaner, meaner, more melancholy Reader has come in for a little sympathy from New York Times media writer David Carr. A former editor of the Reader‘s sister paper in Washington, D.C., the Washington City Paper, Carr’s Monday column tells the story of the Reader‘s devastating layoffs last week (City Paper took the same kind of beating) by focusing on John Conroy, one of the four writers dismissed here....

The wispy, poetic tentativeness of Zoe Charlton’s figures recalls the soft focus of Gerhard Richter. But where Richter’s objective was to question the meaning of painting, Charlton’s two paintings and 24 drawings at Wendy Cooper question the nature of identity, especially as determined by culture. In the painting Three Grace Tryout (2000), three black women do the cancan in the foreground while three white women cluster behind them. The figures are all somewhat sketchy, their softly variegated skin echoing the patchy background....

Bill Murray’s minimalism as an actor combines with Jim Jarmusch’s as a writer-director to yield a certain redundancy, making this comedy Jarmusch’s starkest feature to date. The tragedy of Dead Man and Ghost Dog is missing, but there’s genuine poignancy in the attempts of Murray, who plays a wealthy retiree in perpetual denial, to discover which of his former girlfriends (played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton) is the mother of the 19-year-old son who he’s been told may be looking for him....

Chicago’s Carey Bell learned his craft from postwar harmonica masters Little Walter and Big Walter Horton; he eventually worked with Willie Dixon, among others, and by the late 70s he was fronting groups of his own. One of those aggregations, a Bell family band sometimes billed as the Ding Dongs, featured his son Lurrie, who by then had already established himself as a promising young guitar player adept in styles ranging from rootsy shuffles to funky blues-R & B fusion....

Christopher Hayes’s cover piece on conservative pundit-in-training Guy Benson [“Birth of a Pundit,” March 4] unwittingly contributes to the very problem it seeks to diagnose: namely the rise of a self-assured cabal of young journalists, primed and poised to make the world safe for today’s particular brand of deceptive right-wing-speak. We mustn’t delude ourselves any further in thinking that there is anything “new” about jingoism, empty rhetoric, circular logic, the abandonment of ethics in favor of a glib and duplicitous language of morality, and so forth....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2004, you’ll recall, Thomas sued Page and the Chronicle on the grounds that Page had defamed him in a series of columns that accused him of working a “little political shimmy-shammy” — Page said Thomas let the Kane County state’s attorney off easy in a disciplinary case before the court in return for favors done to a Thomas ally in a judicial race....

Written and directed by Bruised Orange Theater Company artistic director Clint Sheffer, this unfocused, seldom funny dark comedy about a corrupt small town would have been much more successful with fewer story lines and a coherent, complete narrative. Sheffer tosses in so much–including a pointless, sensational subplot about finding the killer of two locals–that we stop caring about his characters. He does have an ear for convincing dialogue, however, and there’s some strong acting, especially by the women....

Rich Seng, creator and producer of Rhyme Spitters II, the freestyle battle tournament that took place last Saturday, was so confident about his favorite MCs that he had a couple camera crews for an upcoming DVD trailing them at ten in the morning. Prime, T-Scar, Jah Safe, Vitamen D, Shamgod, Jargon, Jitu–he expected them all to advance to the finals at the Note that night. But crowds always love to cheer on an underdog, especially one who can shake up a veteran....

Lisa Lampanelli’s act and Michael Richards’s outburst against hecklers prove there’s a fine line between comedic bigotry and actual bigotry. Nicknamed the “queen of mean,” insult comic Lampanelli, an Italian-American who looks as if she could host The View, combines Don Rickles’s clever irreverence with a touch of Andrew Dice Clay’s ethnic attitude. She’s been a fixture on New York’s comedy scene for several years but has generated national buzz recently for her show-stealing appearances on Comedy Central celebrity roasts....

Maribel Portela Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Portela, who’s Mexican, is more artist than anthropologist; while her work is full of cultural echoes, she invents many of the details. She says that growing up surrounded by pre-Columbian art had an influence, but that her “passion” for living and for the 21 million people of Mexico City, each with “a story to tell,” was a bigger factor....

Ivy League Crime Mamadou Obotimbe Diabikile was unsuccessful in his alleged attempt to rob a bank in Bamako, Mali, in March; he may have been hindered by the 33 pounds of talismans he was wearing to make himself invisible. And Edna Chizema went on trial in March in Harare, Zimbabwe, for theft by deception. Magrate Mapfumo testified that she gave Chizema the equivalent of $5,000; in return Chizema said she would fly five invisible mermaids (thought by the Shona people to be goddesses of revenge) from London to Harare to help recover Mapfumo’s stolen car....

I’ve been with Second City for five years, and though we dearly love our audiences . . . Hey, didn’t I just sound like the perfect mouthpiece when I said that? Anyway, over time I’ve developed a mental list of things not to do at an improv show. For instance, improv is not necessarily call-and-response–the actors will let you know when they want your feedback. When giving suggestions avoid sexual situations–the actors are not going to take off their clothes, so save the dry-hump fantasies for when you get home....

continued from last week . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So there were five of us jammed into the backseat of an SUV on our way to a Cubs night game when the old man driving asked, “Do you guys smoke weed?” We were pretty cautious with our answer, but we didn’t actually say no. Then one of our friends got brave and piped up, “I do....

No Shit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their way to making Chicago the first major city with a cultural participation map, the researchers collected 1.4 million electronic records from the dozen big institutions for 2004. The institutions were chosen according to the size of their budgets ($8 million was the minimum) and ranged from the Art Institute to the Joffrey Ballet. The researchers tracked 600,000 participating households in the 14-county metropolitan area and sliced and diced that information with data from the 2000 census....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music runs through 10/31 at Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston. Rhino Fest is coordinated by the Curious Theatre Branch and features emerging and established artists from Chicago’s fringe. Performances take place in Prop’s north or south theaters, except where noted otherwise below. Admission for most shows is $15 or “pay what you can”; exceptions are noted below. For information and reservations, call 773-267-6660 (except as noted below) or visit www....