“I thought about being a rock critic,” says Hank Neuberger, “but then I had to come up with an honest way to make a living.” Neuberger–recording engineer and producer, operations manager of the tony Chicago Recording Company, and chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences–takes a lot of guff about the Grammys, and he can give as good as he gets. The youthful-looking 42-year-old studied film at Northwestern and actually did write about rock for the 70s Chicago rock mag Triad....

Dear Bill Wyman, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re going to make part of your living from being a typical white “cultural tourist,” you should make an effort to be more accurate in your depictions of the flora and fauna of “black kids’” lives [Hitsville, February 11]. (By the way, Black men sporting full beards aren’t “kids” even though racist America advances this myth....

In the late 70s my father used to take my friends and me to see the Phoenix Inferno, our local Major Indoor Soccer League team. The game was perfect for bored eight-year-olds: even though there was nothing at stake, we didn’t understand the rules, and all the teams looked and played alike, it was fun to watch. Unlike professional baseball or football, where franchises had decades of tradition and rivalry to elevate their status, indoor soccer had the atmosphere of a bad traveling carnival....

Young Asian and Asian American performers these days tend to be from well-to-do families that value the Western classical tradition: encouraged at an early age to take up an instrument, they’re often weaned on the toddler-friendly Suzuki method. And even though Asian households don’t always consider a career in music a desirable profession, parents and relatives invariably put up the money for the best of schools if their children insist. So it’s hardly surprising that Asian enrollment in the prestigious conservatories–most of them in this country–hovers around the 50 percent mark, and that the story of up-and-coming pianist Mia Chung follows this outline....

Frederick Moyer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The piano was elbowed out of its pivotal position in the family’s affections with the advent of the broadcast media; radio wounded it, television provided the coup de grace. Today fewer and fewer children are dragged away from their Nintendos to put in a daily half hour of practice or to learn the meaning of stage fright in their teachers’ living-room recitals....

On a sweltering afternoon a middle-aged woman in cutoffs and braids rushes into the store on the corner of 85th and Cottage Grove. Reggae streams from two midsize speakers, and the yellow awning reads: the African Hedonist CDs and Tapes. She glances around and approaches the owner. “What’s an African hedonist?” she says. “I thought this was an art store.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The small store does resemble a center for black culture: an African mask hangs over the door, a glass case displays multicolored kufis (crownlike hats), and the shelves are lined with rap, jazz, R & B, soca, reggae, highlife, juju, and soukous recordings....

With next week’s Democratic Convention promising to hit all-time highs of boredom and pointlessness, the attention of the media legion will naturally be turning to recollections of and comparisons to that other Chicago Democratic Convention, you know, that one in 1968. In some ways this is as it should be. It’s no coincidence that Clinton and Company are coming to Chicago in a year without any significant intraparty battling. Chicago is where the Democrats came apart as a ruling party, where they opened the door to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, where they provided an instant language and credibility for the legion of small-town cranks who populate the nation’s statehouses, always looking for a way to slam-dunk the social reforms that make up the party’s primary legacy....

Savor this, atrocity buffs: It was the year they shut down the government and no one noticed. All because Newtie had to sit in back of the airplane. He quickly pulled himself out of that pile of doo-doo by telling us that the monstrous murder of a pregnant woman in the west suburbs was the result of liberalism and the welfare system. Sort of like when Richie Daley told us that the Cook County medical examiner was to blame for the 500-plus heat-related deaths this past summer....

A Family Thing By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The little I’d heard about A Family Thing in advance made me curious but skeptical. It sounds awfully contrived: Earl Pilcher Jr., a man in his 60s from small-town Arkansas who sells and rents tractors (Robert Duvall), discovers after the death of the woman he believed was his mother that his real mother was a black maid who worked for his family and died in a shack giving birth to him....

Why are there push buttons at intersections that say “push me and traffic will stop so you can cross quicker,” or something like that? It doesn’t work! I wouldn’t say I’m neurotic about it, but about 15 years ago I quit my job to hitchhike around the USA to find a push-to-walk traffic signal that would actually stop traffic. After countless pairs of shoes and as many near misses with cars, I can say that without a doubt none of these traffic signals provide the pedestrian with a quicker cross....

In her latest work, Three Domestic Interiors, Bay Area experimental filmmaker and installation artist Lynn Kirby combines video, film, and still images to delineate space (film for long shots, video for close-ups) and mark the passage of time. The characters–a grandmother (sometimes identified by the color green), a flirtatious young woman (red), and a nonchalant young man (blue)–are seen only in their living rooms, where the camera picks up objects that hint at their backgrounds and expectations....

Chris Jordan was making good money working at a factory in Ravenswood when the crash came. “There are so many stereotypes that dominate the welfare debate,” says Roger Bennett, JCUA’s director of policy. “You hear it all the time: they’re lazy, they’re freeloaders, they don’t want to work. We don’t want people to take one or two shocking cases and make them universal.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jordan agrees with most politicians when he says, “Welfare stinks....

BURN THIS Theatre: Ground Up Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In many ways, Pale seems to embody all the qualities the other characters in Wilson’s play seek to repress–uncompromisingly emotional, he almost appears to have leapt out of one of Anna’s dances. When he’s sad, he blubbers and bawls; when he’s angry, he punches and swears; when he’s tired, he curls up in a ball and snores contentedly; and when it’s time to make love–to paraphrase Matt Groening–he performs like a crazed weasel....

Contrabbasso Quartet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not a particularly versatile instrument, the double bass has nonetheless charted an interesting musical history, from its lowly origins in the early 1700s as a maritime fog signaler and an orchestral support player to its current preeminence with the jazz set. As with the percussion family, whose lower sounds it was meant to “double,” the bass has come into its own this century in compositions prominently featuring its peculiar deep drones and moans....

IGGY POP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If it hasn’t happened to you yet, don’t worry, it will; you reach a certain age and suddenly realize with a shudder that not only is life precious, but more of it lies behind you than ahead. A similar awareness lurks between the cracks of Iggy Pop’s joyful new Naughty Little Doggie, an album that breaks no new stylistic turf musically but screams a power and vitality that his last release, 1993’s American Caesar, utterly lacked....

Adapted from a successful play, this tense and effective Venezuelan political thriller (1992), directed with craft and discretion by Alejandro Saderman, follows the principled decision of a nun to shelter a fugitive from armed rebels during a state of civil war, the ambivalent cooperation she elicits from a fellow nun, and the price they both have to pay for their courage. Saderman sticks to the claustrophobic feeling I assume the original play had, while still conveying a detailed sense of the surrounding community, from mayor to bishop to shopkeeper....

In an invitation without precedent the city last summer offered the public a chance to design a multimillion-dollar public works project–the relocation of part of Lake Shore Drive. “We wanted to listen to everyone,” says Tim Martin, chief highway engineer for the city’s Department of Transportation. “This project would have more public input than any other.” Reinhaus wanted Soldier Field’s southern parking lots removed. The Bears wanted them to remain. Guess whose side the city planners took?...

Before 1964 Leon Fleisher was among the greatest pianists of his day, a renowned interpreter of Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and Brahms. But when carpal tunnel syndrome, then a mysterious illness, rendered his right arm useless, his concert career came to a halt. One of his contemporaries, Gary Graffman, was struck by the same condition and is now in semiretirement, but Fleisher has slowly returned to the limelight, first as a conductor, then as a performer of keyboard music for the left hand, some of which was written earlier this century for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost an arm in World War I....

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial Especially in the era of O.J. and Oliver North, as we’ve become overly familiar with the ins and outs of the legal process, courtroom drama is theater with one hand tied behind its back. Military courtroom drama, which turns performers into “Yessir, Nosir” automatons, pretty much ties the other hand behind the back. And mounting a 40-year-old work complete with creaky, simplistic notions of human personality and psychology is an even tougher task....

Last spring, while perusing The Andy Warhol Diaries, Amnon Wolman thought about turning the voluminous name-dropping journals into an opera. “The materials cried out for a larger-than-life, operatic treatment,” says Wolman. “After all, Warhol was a master of exaggeration, always trying to achieve boredom and overexposure.” But he quickly dropped the idea. “I realized that it would have had to be very long, using tons of text,” he says. “I definitely didn’t want to do a Wagnerian opera....