“Music is a form of expression that’s not destructive; it allows me to express things that I’m thinking and feeling. It allows a moment of transcen­dence; it’s always amazing to dance and feel the music in your body. It gives you that momentary feeling where someone has put your emotions into words and sounds, and you feel a special kinship with the music and the artist.

When Grammy-winning pro­ducer Mark Johnson fol­lows through on a gut feel­ing, he doesn’t just super­size it, he goes for a world­wide, grand slam swing. His idea for Playing For Change, a record and documentary film, and now even a live touring band, was formed to make a dent in the global land­scape where indifference abounds.

Thirty years ago singer/song­writer Rickie Lee Jones won her first Grammy for Best New Artist. Since then she’s been delighting fans and critics with her introspective, heartfelt songs.

Lillian Bassman is 92 years of age. She still shoots almost five times a day. She doesn’t use a digital camera, being loyal to her Has­selblad. At times, she takes her old images and re-visits them. As she can no longer stand up for long hours in the darkroom, she has learned how to use the computer and alters her photographs using the new medium.

We meet in Chelsea, in New York’s downtown district, where a multitude of gal­leries stand door to door to one another, like pearls on a necklace. Willem Dafoe, after a day’s rehearsal at the Public Theater, arrives at the photo studio, dressed casually, with a quiet intensity, gracious, at once warm yet reserved. While chatting, he says he feels most inspired when looking at art. “There is something so transparent in the ideas and art you see in galleries.

Regina King has cleverly persuad­ed me to sit outside on one of the hottest days of summer. It’s an oppressive, triple-digit degree afternoon in August for which the only logical cure is a continuous blast of near-freezing, air-conditioning. But instead of taking a seat inside Puran’s Restaurant in Los Feliz, we don’t make it beyond the sidewalk.

On Central Boulevard across from Garfield Park, in a rough neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, is a top-notch prep school. Amid an inner city rid­dled with violence and gangland rule, Prov­idence St. Mel is a sealed-tight safety zone that boasts 29 consecutive years of send­ing 100% of its graduates off to four-year colleges, and over the last seven years, half of them have gone to first-tier and Ivy-League schools.

It’s not often you go to a press event and find the publicist practicing her Hebrew alphabet, and overhear a conversation about the length of the fast on Yom Kip­pur. The writers and photographers have gathered to cover Michael Stuhlbarg, star of the new Coen Brothers film, A Serious Man, a darkly droll exploration of the Ameri­can-Jewish psyche.