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East meets West many ways these days, what with Nintendo buying the Seattle Mariners, but the most felicitous conjuncture is in the crossover kitchen. The idea took root in California some two decades ago, with what was then called Franco-Japanese cooking; now it’s referred to more fashionably as Pacific Rim cuisine, with California being an integral part. Here some call it fusion, which reminds me of bad jazz-rock, while others call it Eurasian, though our own Eurasia restaurant never quite got its act together....

I love sarcasm. Not only is it a straightforward way of communicating, but those who use it regularly are some of the kindest people in the world. Really. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the best things about sarcasm is that it rarely causes people to get upset. Rather, it enables one to be tactful. For instance, when I walk into my apartment and my roommate is playing some marshmallowy drivel on his stereo, I’m not so cruel as to tell him that even John Denver would probably retch from listening to such sentimental goo....

The toughest call. “Number of calls the Illinois Animal Poison Information Center received last year regarding pets swallowing marijuana: 68” (Harper’s “Index,” September 1990). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gone underground. Martin Marty of the University of Chicago divinity school warns complacent liberals that “there are not fewer fundamentalists than there were before the Pentecostalist scandals, the folding of Moral Majority tents, and the signs of corruption that came with power....

THE DOWNSIDE The play takes place in the offices of Mark and Maxwell, a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey that is about to introduce a new tranquilizer called Maxolan 3000. The FDA has given it the OK, and the company president, who like God communicates as a disembodied voice (over the conference telephone), wants the drug on the market immediately. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A third complication involving Maxolan introduces an ethical issue, but nothing serious enough to induce thought....

When the temperature in the old Lakeview library climbed past 90 one summer day in 1982 and the building had to be closed, the bosses downtown decided the time had come to rehabilitate the 40-year-old building at 644 W. Belmont. The success has come in the face of many obstacles. Construction funds come from different state, federal, and local sources, thus multiplying the paperwork. At times contractors complained that their paychecks were delayed when blueprints went through two or three stages of review....

THE NIGHT OF THE TRIBADES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Take his first marriage, for instance, the background against which The Night of the Tribades, currently being staged by Center Theater, is set: as long as Siri von Essen was married to somebody else, Strindberg adored her. In a letter he called it “a love which is not sensual and that is not consummated and does not wish to be consummated ....

Before we return to the National Basketball Association final, let’s dwell–as the Bulls themselves have–on their victory over the Detroit Pistons. After all, we’re fans, not players, and a little reverie now isn’t likely to hurt our performance in appreciating the next game between the Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We got out to see the second game, at the Chicago Stadium, and it was our belief, as the stadium filled, that it was here that the Pistons would find out they were in much deeper than they thought, that the old tricks and the old ways would no longer work....

I just received a letter from a friend of mine in France, and it occurred to me that he had purchased his stamps there in France. Why then did the U.S. Postal Service bother to deliver the letter? What’s in it for them? How does this intercountry mailing business work, anyhow? –Ray Balestri, Dallas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First the easy part. Cheap, efficient international mail was one of the great achievements of the Victorian era....

An Offer She Couldn’t Refuse Seven names made that list. And all seven of them, it turned out, were willing to come in and talk whether they’d applied or not. That was even more encouraging. The other day, the position was given to someone who hadn’t asked for it. “I’m leaving a great job I love that I had no intention of leaving,” said Laura Washington, “because I’m getting a job offer I couldn’t refuse....

An artist with the celebrity status of the late Andy Warhol poses certain problems for the viewer. Can one look at his work without thinking of his party going, his gossipy Interview magazine, his alleged friendships with the Shah of Iran and Imelda Marcos, or his own carefully cultivated media image, complete with silver wig and blank stare? Is it folly to consider this serious art? After all, Warhol was known to crank out paintings like this almost on an assembly line....

This decidedly offbeat 1992 French comedy-drama–Confessions d’un barjo in French–from Jerome Boivin (Baxter) is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap-Artist, set in contemporary provincial France rather than 50s California but otherwise reportedly fairly close to the original. The central characters are an unconventional pair of fraternal twins who maintain an unusually close bond into adulthood–a sort of dysfunctional holy fool (Hippolyte Giradot) who serves as narrator and his impetuous sister (Cyrano de Bergerac’s Anne Brochet)....

As a moviegoer who was privileged to see a good many films, both new and old, in a number of contexts, places, and formats in 1989, I can’t say it was a bad year for me at all. I saw two incontestably great films at the Rotterdam film festival (Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli me tangere and Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s A Story of the Wind), and several uncommonly good ones both there and at the festivals in Berlin, Toronto, and Chicago....

Friday 2 Saturday 3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reverend Cecil Williams, a cochairman of the first national symposium on the black family and crack cocaine, will be the keynote speaker at today’s citywide youth rally against drugs. Sponsored by the Chicago Temple and the local chapter of the Urban League, the free program starts at 12:30 PM at 77 W. Washington. Call 236-4548 or 285-5800, ext....

MAY Friday 27 The anger on both sides after Congressman Gus Savage’s criticism of the strong support the pro-Israel lobby gave his opponent Mel Reynolds was a sad reminder of how far apart the African American and Jewish communities have drifted since the days of the civil rights movement. Cornell West, chairperson of the Afro-American studies department at Princeton University, will be the keynote speaker at tonight’s Black Jewish Relations, a free program sponsored by New Jewish Agenda that also features a commemoration of the solidarity between the two communities in the 60s....

Eleventh Dream Day Gives Atlantic a Second Chance Eleventh Dream Day’s new album, El Moodio, will be released next March on Atlantic. That’s surprising news, given the band’s history with the label. After its first two records, Beet and Lived to Tell, it looked like the band was going to leave Atlantic, and like Atlantic didn’t much care. But then circumstances changed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But sources say that the top echelons of the label didn’t understand the future of alternative music and never really backed up the department....

MADAMA BUTTERFLY Cio-Cio-San’s marriage to B.F. Pinkerton of the U.S. Navy is a joke to the callow lieutenant, but a matter of complete seriousness to the 15-year-old geisha, who’s known as Butterfly. She abandons the ways of her people for him, and is in turn abandoned by her people. When Pinkerton finally returns with his Anglo wife, Cio-Cio-San commits suicide rather than enter the life of genteel prostitution that seems her only alternative....

Nesting mockingbirds are not major news in most of the United States. Northern mockingbirds–to give them their full, official title–are not only common, they are conspicuous. South of the Ohio River, practically every backyard has its nesting mockers, and the birds sing for much of the year. During nesting season, they may sing all night. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Catesby was another pioneer in the days when men could call themselves natural historians and collect and classify everything from dragonflies to rhododendrons, without worrying about specialization....

A historically fascinating picture about the Civil War’s 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, made up of black enlisted men and headed by a white colonel named Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick). Directed by TV award winner Edward Zwick (thirtysomething, Special Bulletin) from a script by Kevin Jarre (Rambo: First Blood Part II), the film suffers from some of the war-movie and liberal-movie cliches that one might expect from filmmakers with these credits, but the cast—which also includes Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Cary Elwes—is strong, and the training and battle scenes seem carefully researched....

Toward late afternoon, when Matt Jones takes Luke out of the station wagon for the last hunt of the day, we are all expecting very little. It has not been a good day for hawking. The weather is way too warm, and anyway the only rabbits that have survived the winter are the quick and canny ones. Matt pulls a heavy brown glove made of three layers of goatskin onto his left fist....

It seems that almost since he began playing Henry Kaiser has been reaping kudos as a pioneering pillar of avant-garde guitar; in fact, that label has been in place so long it’s hard to tell what (if anything) it still means. Kaiser has never been afraid of electronics or of musical noise–sound for sound’s sake–but he certainly has never restricted himself to that. His music has in the past sounded strikingly anarchistic, but just as often it adheres to traditional dictates of melody and form....