Obscenities The terms of the probation require the artist to stay away from children and to stop drawing his characteristic work. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the above items are obscene; some, perhaps, aren’t–it all depends on who’s doing the defining. Earlier this year on the gulf coast of Florida, the definers were the Pinellas County state’s attorney’s office. To them Mike Diana’s drawings were obscene, and a judge and jury agreed....

Fishbone Hype isn’t always a good thing. It’s not a new idea, but it struck me as I watched one of the most hyped groups of the early 90s perform exactly the way they sound on their latest album: hesitant and confused. The irony was that I had just spent 15 minutes lamenting the lack of media rhapsodizing and eager radio play for a band that I feel deserves it....

Near the corner of 71st and Euclid, in the south-side lakefront neighborhood of South Shore, sits an ordinary reddish brown brick apartment building that’s a small part of an extraordinary tale. Four years ago, when James Trice decided he wanted to buy it, the ten-unit building was by his account “dilapidated and half-occupied. Some areas had not been lived in for four to five years.” Without rehabbers like Trice, these once-solid, moderate rent buildings might well have been abandoned, then become eyesores and centers of crime and community collapse....

Fans of TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation know that Mr. Data, the ultralogical android played by Brent Spiner, took on the role of Sherlock Holmes in several episodes. On Monday Spiner portrays another Sherlock surrogate, this time on the stage: Osgood Sigerson (a Holmes alias, as Arthur Conan Doyle buffs know), the hero of this Lifeline Theatre adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater’s kids’ book. Super-sleuth Sigerson helps the “snarkout boys”–two teenage misfits who “snark out” for fantasy adventures in Chicago-like Baconburg–track down a mad scientist and save the earth from alien real estate agents....

(With this column Ted Cox returns to the Sports Section. Three and a half years ago, Cox was forced to curtail his free-lance writing, and his close friend Alan Boomer took up the column in his stead. Cox now finds himself in a new situation, and Boomer has graciously agreed to step aside. Both trust that the transition will be smooth and uneventful.) When Jackson stepped in, in 1989, the Bulls had just taken the Detroit Pistons to the Eastern Conference finals the previous season....

Why is it that occasionally (about once a week) your telephone answering machine records as a message the “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again” recording that plays when you leave the phone off the hook? This has happened to me with various machines, telephones, and telephone numbers, as well as to friends and family, even though no one was home to knock the phone off the hook....

A Changing Court Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Court has accomplished more in 23 years than many other medium-sized companies: it carries no debt and has one of the city’s newest and best-equipped theater spaces. The chance to put a fresh stamp on a stable theatrical organization is a rare one these days. But Newell does have challenges to confront. As evidenced by recent marketing initiatives aimed at younger audiences, Court is trying to revamp its stuffy image, the result no doubt of its classics-oriented mission....

A Restless Critic Moves On Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ben Kim notes with pleasure the development over the last few years of both zines and the on-line world; they’re democratic alternatives to the cultural hegemony of media like the two dailies and even the Reader. His contribution to the phenomenon, and personal twist, was to simply declare himself a rock critic. He did it in 1991 by entering–as a private citizen, so to speak–the de facto establishment of the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll; he continued by peppering the Reader with letters, some directed at yours truly....

Siegfried Wagner’s interest in the shadowy world of myth and medieval history gave rise to all ten of his mature works. His first three thoroughly derivative works aped the mannerisms of German, Italian, and French opera, but then he got on his mythic hobby horse and never looked back. Viewed as a single work, the “Ring of the Nibelung” was Wagner’s greatest labor. The gestation was also prolonged; more than 25 years elapsed between the earliest prose sketches and the performance of the first complete cycle....

Bright Sheng is a descendant of Bartok, Copland, and Prokofiev–a 20th-century national composer who deftly incorporates folk materials into emotionally expressive, technically brilliant works molded by the mainstream. Like those composers, he pays attention to–and is unfettered by–the avant-garde orthodoxies of the moment, but he’s not a conservative nostalgic for the harmonic world of the 19th century. Born in Shanghai, he grew up listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and other Western titans approved by the communist authorities....

Friday is closing day at Bucket O’Sud’s, the dusty little tavern on Cicero near Belmont that’s better known simply as the Bucket. For 32 years it’s been owned and run by Joe Danno, who always wears a frayed shirt, low-riding polyester pants, sneakers, and black-rimmed glasses and always takes his own sweet time cooking up whatever drinks his regulars order. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Danno opened the Bucket in 1964 it was a combination tavern and family restaurant....

DARK MATTER, Cave 76, at the O Bar & Cafe. In this psychological thriller Reader contributor and playwright Adam Langer explores the psychology of perception, filling the story of a failed art heist/forgery with surreal characters whose obsessions range from the bleak to the lyrical. Under Dan Torbica’s direction, the three cast members perform an effective hybrid of naturalistic and ritualistic drama. The thriller’s through line is provided by Helena, a traumatized, unemotional painter (played with blunt eloquence and impressive focus by Eileen Glenn) who’s being used by a night watchman and a delivery man to act out their confusions and dreams....

With Rick Rizzo and Janet Bean occupied with parenting, Bean and Douglas McCombs heavily involved in other projects–Freakwater and Tortoise, respectively–and the recent departure of guitarist Wink O’Bannon, Eleventh Dream Day is sadly inactive these days, which alone would make this appearance a pretty big deal. What makes it even bigger, however, is that the band will be performing material from their forthcoming album Ursa Major, their debut with Chicago independent Atavistic....

Definitely the new-music event of the fall season, Ensemble InterContemporain’s return marks the group’s first appearance here in seven years. The well-known collective of 31 soloists–founded in 1975 at the request of the French Ministry of Culture, led by Pierre Boulez, and affiliated with his Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique-Musique, the Parisian citadel of music research–has become the most potent force in the European avant-garde, having premiered more than 300 compositions, at least 100 of them commissions....

You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland, things which nobody has ever said before,” William Butler Yeats told George Bernard Shaw about this 1904 comedy, Shaw’s sardonic response to the legend-obsessed lyricism of the neo-Gaelic movement, of which Yeats was a part. Many of the play’s details are antiquated today; but its truest elements remain true, and not only of Ireland. By turns raucous, poignant, and chilling, it concerns a blustery British land developer, Tom Broadbent, who comes to an Irish village preaching political liberty but practicing economic and cultural exploitation....

More Less at the Sun-Times For repositioning, think diminishment. Not just the Sun-Times, but newspapers throughout America are cutting back. Readers simply don’t buy them the way they used to. Papers will have to be reinvented, Nadler was saying, to appeal to a balkanized public. That raises a “really scary question,” Nadler went on, which is whether anything at all will glue a metropolitan area together when even its daily papers are aimed at niches....

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST Still, this is a fable set not in a symbolic microcosm but in a specific state mental hospital in the northwest, as seen by Chief Bromden, the last of his tribe and the Ishmael who escapes to tell the story of the revolution McMurphy initiates. The drugged-up inmate/patients, rabbits to be exploited by Nurse Ratched, include the acerbic Harding, who’s terrified of his wife and unsure of his sexuality; Scanlon, who sees bombs everywhere (not so crazy during the Cold War or today); lobotomized Ruckly, who becomes the show’s most useful prop; and Martini, who hallucinates better stuff than what’s really going on around him....

Premature Admiration “It’s the best problem to have,” admits Minty Fresh Records capo Jim Powers, but it’s a problem all the same. Six weeks before the release of their debut album, Veruca Salt are getting airplay (for their single “Seether”) on some of the biggest modern rock stations in the country: LA’s venerable KROQ, Chicago’s Q101, and other outlets in Seattle, New Jersey, and Boston. The label is gratified by the attention, but worried....

PSYCHOACOUSTIC ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This weekend’s Chicago Jazz Fest offers no less than five wildly varied large-ensemble performances; even so, you’ll find one of the weekend’s most impressive big bands ensconced miles away from Grant Park. That shouldn’t bother composer-arranger Patrick Kelly and his PsychoAcoustic Orchestra, who are no strangers to life off the beaten path: they’re from Cincinnati, an unlikely home for some of the most inventive and promising big-band jazz of the 90s....

I was heading north on the el from Chicago and State about 4:15 on a Tuesday afternoon. Across the aisle a boy who looked about nine stood in front of his seat facing the window. Holding a pencil in one hand and a wide-ruled sheet of paper against the window with the other, he was writing something over and over again. Although his legs were spread to absorb the train’s sway, the boy couldn’t keep his balance....