I’ve been going to Riccardo’s longer than anywhere in the city except Wrigley Field, whose bleachers were introduced to my butt in 1938. For Riccardo’s it was 1950, a year before I was old enough to drink, but they served me a glass of red wine with my spaghetti anyway. Since then, as a hangout and more than occasionally as a dining room, Ric’s has disappointed me a lot less than the multifarious occupants of Wrigley Field–except for when the Bears used to play there....

These two recent short features for British television by the late Alan Clarke (1935-1990), each running a little over an hour, are separate entries but should be seen back to back. They’re not only strong examples of Clarke’s corrosive social vision and his skill in directing actors but also impressive demonstrations of his stylistic range. Road (1987), written by playwright Jim Cartwright, offers a potent look at poverty and alcoholism in Lancashire, with impressive on-location camera work and dialogue that exults in its own theatricality and musicality (rather like that of Alan Bowne in Forty Deuce and John Guare in Six Degrees of Separation)....

Scott Fields Trio Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not easy staking a claim to originality playing jazz guitar. Oh sure, there’s a dynamic history–Eddie Lang, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Grant Green, Jim Hall, James “Blood” Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Frisell–but when compared with horn innovators it doesn’t seem to rate. Saddled with an extreme reputation from the indulgent fusion days, the instrument doesn’t get much respect from jazz fans....

Restraint is not the first word that comes to mind with the Curious Theatre Branch. These artists’ near operatic-length productions have often seemed the playgrounds for their rare imaginations–from Bryn Magnus’s twisted fairy tale Natural Hostages to Beau O’Reilly’s blue-collar comedy Let the Dolly Do the Work to Jenny Magnus’s highly conceptual In. But with their most recent production, which inaugurates their new performance space, the Curious artists play it uncharacteristically close to the vest....

A few years ago I heard of a process where perishable foods such as milk and lettuce were bombarded with radiation to dramatically increase their shelf life. This process also killed off bacteria and vermin. Foreign countries seemed to employ this with positive results. There was talk of using this process in the U.S., with the only proviso being that the food in question be specially labeled. However, try as I might, I cannot find any radiation-treated food in my local grocery store–not that I’m eager to try it....

The exhibit In the Eye of the Storm: An Art of Conscience, 1930-1970 tracks the art of social commentary in America from the Great Depression to the Vietnam-era. Yet art collector Philip Schiller, a Chicago attorney, says he wanted to avoid work that was strictly political, favoring a broader consideration of life and times. Shown at left is Lunch, a 1964 painting by “magic realist” George Tooker. Schiller notes that the work carries a sense of estrangement common in Tooker’s art, but the presence of one black man in the midst of a fair-haired crowd also refers to the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement....

“We [homeless people] know that $5 an hour is not enough to get an apartment without some type of subsidy,” writes Joel Alfassa in StreetWise (October 16-31). “And of course, a situation where subsidies are necessary is not good for anyone in our country. . . . We know that it takes at least $7.50 to make a living wage that would allow us to live with dignity and self-esteem. ....

LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY An urban nightmare in two acts, Landscape charts the lousy luck of Betty, a woman who leaves a miserable family in Maine and flees with her 16-year-old son Bert to New York. There they meet a lot of Big Apple worms, various vintage Guare eccentrics: Raulito, a Cuban transvestite travel agent and scam artist who exploits Betty, and Durwood Peach, a disturbed ex-Good Humor man who offers her crack-brained affection and the illusion of escape....

I’d just sat down for some PC gruel at the Heartland Cafe when I noticed the large black letters on the back of the menu telling me to “Boycott France.” It said my refusal to buy French goods would be an effective protest against that country’s resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But then I got to thinking: Why pick on France?...

Bondagers We forget this sometimes even in the intensely verbal medium of theater, but British playwright Sue Glover’s historical drama Bondagers reminds us of the power of the spoken word. Set in rural Scotland in the 1860s, the piece offers a banquet of beautiful language. From the moment the play begins, the audience is immersed in the rich sounds of the Scottish dialect: the luscious vowels, the trilling rs, the scads of unfamiliar words, many of them ancient ancestors of modern words or mid-19th-century Scottish agricultural terms–“ken” for know, “bairns” for babies, “tumshie” for turnip, “hinds” for farmhands....

Lead Story For the January opening of Janine Antoni’s current show at the Matrix Gallery in Hartford, Connecticut, the artist soaked her hair in a scrub bucket filled with dye and “painted” the floor by swishing her locks across it. She called the performance “Loving Care.” Among the pieces at the show is a sheet of paper onto which Antoni had batted her eyelashes more than 1,000 times after applying Cover Girl Thick Lash....

One of 1993’s best productions–and probably its most provocative–Michael Maggio’s staging of David Mamet’s controversial play has grown enormously in sly effectiveness since its opening last September. The main reason is Daniel Mooney’s much-improved performance as a put-upon college professor whose career crashes around him when a student accuses him of being elitist, sexist, and pedantic. Mooney always had a strong grasp on his character’s emotional imbalance, a mix of idealistic high-mindedness, smug self-absorption, and self-destructive weakness....

G. LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE WORLD MUSIC THEATRE, JULY 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While riffs and bass lines from old Parliament-Funkadelic records were once the staple of hip-hop sampling, the frantic search now for that “rare groove” has resulted in increasingly diverse and creative borrowings. DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill and House of Pain pillages hard 60s R & B and blues–the heart of Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” is bluesman Lowell Fulson’s classic “Tramp”–and innumerable combos groove on everything from late-50s jazz (Digable Planets’ bop appropriations) to 70s soul jazz (just about everyone else)....

Why go to a restaurant to make your own meal? It seems to defy logic, but a microtrend of do-it-yourself eateries in town is catering to the hands-on crowd. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next up are the oils (olive, sesame, and garlic), sauces (black bean, sweet-and-sour, teriyaki, mustard, barbecue, and wine), and spices (curry, cayenne, dill, garlic, ginger, and other seasonings). Your first temptation might be to toss them all in....

The visiting room at the Dixon Correctional Center looks like a high school cafeteria. On a weekday in late December, prisoners are sitting around circular tables with their families, chatting, eating hamburgers, dealing cards. Kids are playing video games in the corner or buying candy from the inmate-run commissary. A bearded inmate in denim who seems no different than any other walks in, yet everyone somehow notices his arrival. He walks over to one table, where a skinny, elderly black inmate sits with his guests....

These Lifestep machines are a waste of time. The Stairmasters are harder, better for your ass they say, and if there’s one place I need work, well, it’s the stomach, but the ass is a close second. Why do they have the Stairmasters at the other place and not here? Might as well do 24 minutes. They say anything under 20 doesn’t give the heart that good workout; got to get the old ticker thumping....

Is there a biological reason for men to feel sleepy after orgasm? My girlfriend says there is some scientific basis for this. If so, is there any hypothesized rationale for this occurrence in terms of human evolution? –Chuck R., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before we drag Darwin into it, Chuck, we’d better make sure we have a genuine phenomenon on our hands....

My understanding is that Michael Jackson slyly acquired the copyrights to the entire Beatles library, much to the dismay of his ex-friend Paul McCartney. I also hear that despite much pleading, he refuses to sell any of them back. Does this mean that he can overdub the masters with his own voice? Are we liable to see copies of Abbey Road with five people crossing the street and mysterious falsettos throughout?...

THE WINTER’S TALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doing Shakespeare is like hitting a baseball. It doesn’t look hard and lots of people try, but even after years of practice professionals still have a hard time doing it. So when a young, relatively inexperienced company on a meager budget working in a stifling church auditorium take a crack at one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays, you don’t expect miracles....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Attacks on public broadcasting have often taken the form of complaints about a perception of both liberal and anticorporate biases. In these complaints WBEZ is cast as a station embodying, for want of a better term, a “humanist” perspective towards culture. Unfortunately, the usually complicated and long-winded response to this type of criticism is less forceful and less effective than it might be....