Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But this week Mayor Daley chastised Gold Coast opponents of a helipad Children’s Memorial Hospital wants to build as part of a new facility on Chicago Avenue east of Michigan. Some area residents have raised concerns about the safety of helicopters taking off and landing from the area, which is packed with residential and commercial high-rises. The mayor, though, insinuated that their questions were petty next to the possibility that kids could be saved, according to the Sun-Times....

Friday 18 LETOYA LeToya Luckett was a founding member of Destiny’s Child–she cowrote and sang on hits like “Bills, Bills, Bills” and “Say My Name” before getting booted by her childhood friend Beyonce. She’s bounced back with a self-titled solo debut on Capitol that’s every bit as irresistible–and superfluous–as the best music of her old group. She’s not a great singer, but she’s got the hit-making formula down cold: the disc mixes hip-hop-driven tracks (featuring fellow Houstonians like Paul Wall, Slim Thug, Mike Jones, and Bun B) with boilerplate balladry about searching for Mr....

In the three and a half months since Douglas Post horrified attorney Jeanne Bishop with the news that he’d written a play inspired by the worst experience of her life, Post has overhauled the play and City Lit Theater has opened it. The changes failed to placate Bishop, who remains adamantly opposed to the production. Since I wrote about this story January 27 the play, Somebody Foreign, has gotten mixed reviews–and worse from the Sun-Times’s Hedy Weiss....

Even when she plays solo, violist Charlotte Hug is in a constant dialogue, responding both to her instrument and her surroundings. The Swiss improviser pushes against the conventional limits of the viola–she routinely changes its tuning, and on 2003’s Neuland (Emanem), her most recent solo album, she gets rich and eerie sounds by loosening or moistening her bow. Her work is informed by unusual settings, with resonances both emotional and acoustic; much of Neuland was inspired by a trip to a former underground prison, and she recorded parts of another disc inside a glacier....

Tap dancers go rock star in the second of two “Global Rhythms” programs produced by the Chicago Human Rhythm Project. Tokyo’s Stripes performed in Takeshi Kitano’s 2003 film The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, where they played “jiving peasants” (thank you Time Asia) in hip-hop-inflected tap routines. Their show Funk-a-Step is something like Stomp (at one point they perform with flicked Bics) but more like the Australian Tap Dogs–except the Stripes are urban hipsters in dreads and thick glasses and sneaker-style shoes instead of macho men in flannel shirts pretending to be construction workers....

Thelonious Monk is best remembered for his classic quartet recordings, but he applied his keen ear to other formats as well. In the late 40s he wrote for multiple horns and Milt Jackson’s vibraphone; in the late 50s and early 60s he worked with composer Hall Overton to produce terrific orchestrations of his songs for a ten-piece band. Then, in 1968, Oliver Nelson created a set of arrangements for a standard jazz big band, though they were widely disparaged for misplacing the essence of Monk’s music....

Deeply Rooted gathers old and new dances under the rubric “Classical Roots,” divided into three acts: European, gospel and blues, and contemporary African-American. The European section includes artistic director Kevin Iega Jeff’s 2004 Tleftraeh (heartfelt spelled backward), set to music by Dvorak. A family of four are first seen in the stiff poses of late-19th-century photographs, but then they suffer a series of emotional disruptions. Jeff says he was aiming for photography’s simultaneous simplicity and depth of expression, and this restrained piece does have gravity....

The Dresden Staatskapelle, founded in 1548, is one of the finest orchestras in Europe, renowned for its luminous winds, lush string playing, and precise, well-blended sound. It returns to Chicago for the first time since 1987 to give a single performance of two Beethoven symphonies. The monumental Third, or Eroica, altered the direction of music forever. It was twice as long as a Haydn or Mozart symphony, and it offered radically new techniques and stylistic devices–additional thematic material, a drastically expanded development section, a fugue in nearly every movement....

George Flynn Before coming to Chicago in 1977 to chair DePaul University’s composition department, George Flynn had been studying and teaching at Columbia University. The new-music scene in Manhattan was then divided into two camps: an uptown group associated with Columbia and Charles Wuorinen that focused on 12-tone and serial music, and a downtown group associated with John Cage and Morton Feldman that was more freewheeling and experimental. “I was really midtown,” says Flynn, who hung out with both groups as he wrote his Ives-inspired nonserial music....

Originating in Persia, the style of Hindustani vocal music called ghazal migrated to India in the 12th century. Ghazals are mostly love songs (the word means “to talk amorously with women”) built around formal Urdu couplets, with five or more stanzas that twist and turn but always come back to the same rhyme. Ghulam Ali, one of the world’s most versatile ghazal singers, sings verses set to his own complex compositions, infusing his lines with such rich emotion that you don’t need to understand the words to appreciate it....

When Lindsey Boland, who designs clothes under the label Superficial Inc., moved to Chicago from New York two years ago, she looked for the sort of store where she’d been selling her stuff in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Portland, and Ottawa–a boutique specializing in up-and-coming designers who work on a small scale. Finding none, she set about making her own: Habit, at 1951 W. Division, a small-label-only shop with a focus on local designers, opened two weeks ago....

Part of the Goodman’s Mamet festival, this program of three short plays starts with a very early work and progresses to a very recent one, getting meaner but also more masterful along the way. The Duck Variations (1972) portrays a pair of old kibitzers whose park-bench ruminations produce only one solid conclusion: that the young Mamet was a talent of extraordinary potential. In The Disappearance of the Jews (1983) the ruminations come from a couple of boyhood friends who’ve reached their late 30s and have wives, kids, solid jobs, some fond memories–and dark fantasies of escape....

For years John Parish was content to work behind the scenes, building an impressive resume as a producer on albums by Goldfrapp, Eels, Sparklehorse, and Polly Jean Harvey (who played in his first band, Automatic Dlamini, back in the late 80s). His first solo album, 2002’s How Animals Move (Thrill Jockey), was assembled from five years of intermittent recording with a variety of players, but it was a good sort of hodgepodge–the mostly instrumental songs functioned as a gorgeous imaginary sound track....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November artist Muhammad Mueller started work on a new project: a tunnel, to be dug by two people using only shovels, from Graz, Austria, to Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia, 42 miles away. Mueller estimated it would take 5,600 years to complete. And in September a federal appeals court refused to reconsider its ruling that threw out the safety standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency for a proposed nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada....

The cuisines of Mexican states such as Guerrero and Michoacan are well represented in the Chicago area. Preparations from Yucatan, Nayarit, and Nuevo Leon appear less frequently, but these geographically disparate regions have cooking traditions that are also worthy of exploration. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the most popular Yucatecan standard on Chicago menus is cochinita pibil, pork shoulder slathered with achiote, a paste of ground annatto seeds, lime, and vinegar; traditionally it’s cooked in a pit....

[Chicago, 1957. A lived-in, working class apartment in a six-flat in Albany Park. The decor reflects a notion of gentility from the 30s, which is when the current occupants moved in: cut-glass candy bowls and Chinese figures in painted porcelain. Sofa downstage center, in the parlor. Big winged leather chair beside it. Bedroom door upstage center. Kitchen offstage left. Bathroom offstage right. An old man, Sam, is lying faceup on the sofa....

Am I out of bounds if I try to have a dialogue with my nephew about masturbation? He’s 17 and I’m 52, a balanced bisexual male in a good marriage. I masturbate a lot and sometimes enjoy pornography. I have fun, easy orgasms. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Are your motives pure, UNCLE? Your “previous frank discussions with other nephews” got you into trouble, which probably means either that you’re a creepy old fart who gets off on talking about sex with his nephews–and your relatives know it–or that you come across that way when you talk to your nephews about sex....

German composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist Stephan Mathieu had a knack for generating campfirelike warmth from digital crackles on his early records, as well as on the remixes he made under the moniker Full Swing. But on his two most recent discs, his most ingratiating to date, he successfully incorporates analog methods. Last year’s On Tape (Hapna) is an honest-to-goodness live album, on which Mathieu’s restrained, abstract drumming and Magnus Granberg’s painterly saxophone playing merge with edits of recordings given to Mathieu by the Swedish electroacoustic trio Tape....

With “Fury Road,” the fourth Mad Max movie, on indefinite hiatus, not even professional gossips can be bothered to speculate about whether Tina Turner will reprise her Aunty Entity role from Beyond Thunderdome. (“We Don’t Need Another Hero,” remember?) Personally, I’m still pissed that the screenwriters killed off Lord Humungus–“the Ayatollah of Rock ‘n’ Rollah!”–in The Road Warrior, but I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones and offer the producers some free advice....

Some background: When I was a kid growing up in the late 50s-early 60s, one of the things we used to do was induce ourselves to fart by sticking the nozzle of a bicycle hand pump into our behinds and giving ourselves several pumps of air. We would then get close to another kid and open the floodgate. Although the scent wasn’t potent, the sound was still funny. After we’d done this a few times, we learned to generate different kinds of sounds, ranging from a sudden burst like a sonic boom to high-pitched sound like that of an out-of-tune trumpet....