To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Benson misses the point when she points to society’s responsibility for this community’s problems [Letters, August 20]. This society uses its problems as an excuse for inaction or, worse, as an explanation for its mistakes. Specifically, many of the problems mentioned stem from an attempt to rehab the area northeast of the Howard Street Station known as “the jungle,” which by the 70s had deteriorated into a nest of criminals and underclasses....

With six seconds to play in the first quarter of the Bulls’ first playoff game against Atlanta, Will Perdue pulled down a rebound under the Hawks’ basket and dribbled a couple of steps into the open. He then passed ahead to John Paxson near the center line. Paxson must have checked the time when Perdue came down with the ball; now his inner clock was ticking. He dribbled downcourt, into the free-throw lane, and put up a 15-foot fall-away jump shot....

Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Indeed the time has come for the women of Wicker Park and the surrounding city to bare their collective breasts and tell their personal stories through the mediums of paint, photo, ceramics, installation, spoken word and anything else their ovarian energy chooses to utilize at a given moment.” The organizers of a show called Juicy Fruits may write a bit grandiloquently, but they promise an “energy-thick evening of music, beverage and booty bumping” starting at 6 PM at Art Attack, 1937 W....

Friday 9 Saturday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Howard Brown Memorial Clinic has brought back native son Mr. Sleep, now a celebrated hip-hop DJ at New York’s Sound Factory, for a benefit dance party and fashion show at the Vic tonight. Besides the tunes, designers Rosalyn De’Lores, Lee Do, and Ila Allen will show off some new threads (around 1 AM). Cover is $10....

DEAR MASTER Writers’ Theatre-Chicago at Books on Vernon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They were very good for each other–at a safe distance. So it’s not surprising that in Michael Halberstam’s excellent 90-minute staging for Writers’ Theatre-Chicago, Sand and Flaubert keep to separate sections of the elegantly appointed stage and address each other through the audience (producing the same sort of tension born of separation that worked in Dear Liar, about the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs....

Death of a Regular Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Great Tavern Scare of 1995 began the morning of Wednesday, February 8, with a front-page story in the Tribune. The article said that Alderman Eugene Schulter was proposing an ordinance that would revoke the liquor license of any establishment that generated five nuisance complaints in a year. The ordinance would hold bars responsible for their patrons’ activities, not just on the bars’ premises but anywhere in a two-block radius, allowing barroom flotsam–sports fans pissing on lawns, package-goods patrons drunk on the sidewalks (and the people they annoy)–to harm the establishments that spawned them....

My list for this year’s statewide spring bird count included 50 species of birds, two species of amphibians, and one reptile. The reptile was a pretty-good-sized specimen of the northern water snake that I saw just a stride before I would have stepped on it. My snake had a tan body marked with dark chocolate brown rectangles down its back and smaller, irregular blotches on its sides. According to the books, this is the typical pattern of the northern water snake, but the books also say the snakes get darker as they get larger....

DALEY PLAZA EVENT FOR EARTH DAY Wilson’s pieces, both as a solo artist and with collaborator Mark Alice Durant under the name Men of the World, stand as examples of how powerful public performance art can be. While his work is carefully scripted and highly self-conscious–in one of my favorite pieces, he and Durant cleaned public statues of war heroes with scrub brushes and soapy water–they seem to unfold effortlessly and artlessly....

If stuffy old Christmas ballets danced in cavernous halls simply bore you and the little ones, Nuts & Bolts: A Nutcracker for the 90s, Joel Hall’s hip, evening-length modern jazz dance, provides an alternative. Set to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s rendition of the Nutcracker Suite, plus a generous dose of house music, Nut & Bolts unabashedly celebrates the holidays in a funky kind of way. Sure, there’s the requisite dance on pointe, but beyond that anything’s fair game....

LIRA ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best known for performances of Polish music and dance, the Lira Ensemble also teams up with other national folk-art groups for intriguing cross-cultural collaborations. In this free concert–now an annual tradition–the Lira’s honey-voiced female singers join the Cuerdas Clasicas String Ensemble’s Mexican-American male singers and fiddlers to perform Christmas carols. The Polish selections draw attention to the three types of carols that evolved in central Europe through the centuries: apocryphal, religious, and pastoral....

All the elements of Leon Forrest’s previous novels explode through the 1,135 pages of his recent epic novel Divine Days, which centers on one week in the life of aspiring playwright Joubert Jones in 1966. Tending bar in his aunt’s tavern on Chicago’s south side, Jones reflects on theology, African American history, and contemporary society as he observes the tragic, perverted, and often hilarious patrons. It’s Forrest’s own poetic blend of myth, folktale, and cultural insight, but wrapped in a great deal of humor....

MARYAM’S PREGNANCY The play begins with Maryam howling like a dog and sniffing a garbage can. She’s so hungry, she says, she dreams of swimming in a broth of carrots and peas–her own “dog soup.” Then another actress comes out of the audience claiming to be the “real” Maryam, and accuses the first actress of portraying her falsely. It’s as if the writer were being called to account for her portrayal of her subject–by her subject....

It’s hard to believe Mike Henderson’s debut Country Music Made Me Do It is a major-label Nashville release. The album was reportedly recorded in less than a week, mostly first takes cut live. It sounds like it, and I mean in a great way. There’s no A-team session-player sheen here, none of the studioitis that blights a lot of Music City product–just raw, stinging guitars, wobbly bass lines, chunking drums, and insinuating riddles, kind of a cross between the churning undertow of Steve Earle’s Guitar Town and the careening giddiness of the Green Acres theme song....

Lead Story Police in Santa Rosa, California, went door-to-door in January to warn residents that a six-foot-long python had escaped from a bathtub down a drain and that they should keep their bathroom doors closed and their toilet lids down. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A pro-nuclear-power video sponsored by a private company seeking to build nuclear reactors in Japan features the cartoon character “Mr....

In his 1991 book Out of the Shadows: A Photographic Portrait of Jewish Life in Central Europe Since the Holocaust photojournalist Ed Serotta documented a way of life almost wiped out by World War II. When he traveled to Sarajevo in 1993, he departed from the routines of other journalists staying at the Holiday Inn. They fanned out daily to funerals, hospitals, UN press conferences, and meetings with military leaders. “Me, I did Jews,” writes Serotta in his new book Survival in Sarajevo: How a Jewish Community Came to the Aid of Its City, published by Verlag Christian Brandstatter of Austria....

One sign that chamber music still thrives–albeit modestly–is the popular series at the North Park College that has been drawing residents in the city’s northwestern neighborhoods. Another sign is the number of young conservatory graduates still willing to collaborate in string quartets. The Rackham was formed only a year and a half ago at the University of Michigan, and it has already embarked on the requisite course that may eventually propel it to the top of the chamber-music world....

Charges of racial discrimination have haunted the Chicago Housing Authority since its creation more than 50 years ago. Now the voices of protest speak Spanish. Cases like Sypien’s are not many. That’s not because other Latinos are processed more promptly, but because so few Latinos who need public and assisted housing apply for it. Since last June the two sides have tried to find an agreement out of court. “We have put together a remedy proposal,” DeJesus said....

OVER THE RHINE 10/7, CUBBY BEAR On its third album, Eve (I.R.S.), this Cincinnati quartet plays a sweeping yet wistful, melodic, full-sounding folk rock heavy on atmospherics. But the dominant presence is vocalist Karin Bergquist, whose elastic singing flutters, swoops, cracks, quavers, and floats over the band like a dry leaf falling from a tree. Imagine Kate Bush or (yikes) Tori Amos tempered by a bit of the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and backed up by a precise and tasteful rock band rather than ethereal nothingness and you’re pretty close to Over the Rhine....

Fasback Productions, at the National Pastime Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A college professor once told me that the key to directing a play is learning how to read. From the looks of director Frank Alan Schneider’s production of Frank Wedekind’s turn-of-the-century masterpiece Spring Awakening, I fear Schneider may be illiterate. Wedekind’s text is darkly satirical and highly stylized, complete with characters named Professor Bonebreaker and Headmaster Sunstroke, but Schneider wholeheartedly encourages naturalistic acting in his 13-person cast, turning this protoexpressionist denunciation of the West’s fatally repressive sexual norms into a plodding after-school special....

Apt Pupil Splinter Group Studio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s interesting about Peter Weiss’s The Investigation and Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, being performed respectively by Splinter Group and the Defiant Theatre to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, is that neither ever mentions the word “Jew.” Like many attempts made over the years, these plays aim to universalize the Holocaust to make it understandable to a contemporary audience, taking the point of view that what happened to the Jewish people in the 30s and 40s could happen to anybody....