Lead Story In February an arbitrator ruled that officials at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, must reimburse a civilian employee for the five days he had been suspended from work without pay for illegally using a government truck. The government had originally proposed to suspend him for 30 days but reduced that to 5. However, the arbitrator ruled that the law requires a minimum suspension of 30 days, and so the government must reimburse him for the improper punishment....

When it comes to what my friends think about TV and popular culture, I’m a tolerant man. I once listened to an argument about the Three Stooges between a traditionalist who held that Curly was “a true comic genius” and a cutting-edge subversive troublemaker who insisted that, all sentimentality aside, the episodes with Curly’s replacement Shemp were “objectively funnier.” At least five minutes went by before I began screaming. But everybody has a limit, and I have discovered mine....

Early in 1927 composer Virgil Thomson and his fellow Parisian expatriate Gertrude Stein decided to collaborate on an opera. After pondering a variety of topics, the pair settled on the lives of saints. “Not just any saints,” Thomson wrote in his reminiscences, “ours turned out to be baroque and Spanish, a solution that delighted Gertrude, for she loved Spain, and that was far from displeasing me, since mass-market Catholic art was still baroque....

Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, known best (if at all) in this country for his late-80s work with the Messengers, largely avoids depicting the extraordinary in his narratives, character sketches, and moral instructions. Instead he focuses on everyday events and situations: the reappearance of old lovers, the joys of successful partnership and really good sex, clandestine relationships, and especially the way men undo themselves with the bottle, women, or both. Talk-singing in a dry, slightly froggy voice, Kelly supplies telling details (“You’re wearing shades, your hair is red, it used to be light brown”), unconventional twists (“Seven children have I raised / I loved some more than others”), and artful metaphors (“Then the word on the wire / Would be just like Ash Wednesday brushfire”)....

Late one night in Minneapolis ten summers ago Billy Golfus was riding home on his motor scooter. He came to a halt at a stoplight. Suddenly the car behind him lunged forward, hurtling him 67 feet to the pavement. Golfus wasn’t wearing a helmet; he slipped into a coma that lasted more than a month. Adding insult to injury, the cops investigating the accident ticketed him for having an expired city sticker....

As previously predicted, The Kissing Booth franchise had a trilogy up its sleeve, and for those invested, it’s a must-watch. Picking up where the sequel left off, The Kissing Booth 3 takes almost two hours to watch Elle (Joey King) make the most difficult decision of her very privileged life. Will she move across the country with her boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi) or fulfill her lifelong promise to go to college with her best friend (and coincidentally Noah’s little brother) Lee (Joel Courtney)....

The Organic Regroups Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since the resignation of Organic artistic director Richard Fire in the summer of 1992, the 24-year-old theater company’s artistic decisions have been made by a 26-person collective, a group of actors, directors, and other theater artists who have both decided what to show in the theater’s studio and main-stage spaces and been involved in directing, writing, and acting in most of the pieces....

Over half a century J.S. Bach churned out at least 1,200 compositions; the surviving works alone fill 60 volumes, published by the venerable Bach Society. According to my calculations, that’s enough material for the popular Bach Week in Evanston to last well into the next century. Every spring since 1974 this multiconcert event, hosted by Saint Luke’s Church, rekindles our appreciation of the great Baroque kapellmeister by showcasing his choral, keyboard, and other instrumental works in a bewildering hodgepodge....

SEPTEMBER Avant-garde electronic percussionist Amy Knoles specializes in creating “electronic musical environments” for dance and performance art; most notably, her work accompanied a 1989 Robert Longo exhibit at the LA County Museum of Art. Her solo show Interactive Percussion/Electronics, featuring both live drum music and sampling, hits the stage at N.A.M.E. Gallery, 1255 S. Wabash, at 8 tonight and tomorrow. It’s $7, $5 for members and students. Reservations are recommended. Call 554-0671....

Rich Hyerczyk and I sat down at a picnic table in Harms Woods to discuss lichens. He had an assortment of books, information sheets, hand lenses, and bottles of calcium hypochlorite and potassium hydroxide to help with species identification. I thought, OK, here is all the equipment, where are the lichens? He pointed at the tabletop. The dark weathering wood was coated with a film of pale green. You have seen them as green films on wood or yellow patches on tree bark or gray disks on rocks....

The young Polish director Jan Jakub Kolski is a surreal fabulist and religious skeptic in the vein of Luis Bunuel. The protagonist in his 1993 Johnnie the Aquarius (better translated as “Johnnie the Water Bearer”) is a wizened old man who suddenly discovers he can cure ills by splashing his patients with water. He leaves his pregnant young wife to wander from village to village in search of fame and fortune, and when he returns, a proud, worldly sage, he finds a newborn son with a devil’s tail and his healing gift disappears....

Limbic Fix In this sultry, ominous climate, which simultaneously produces new and larger stages like the Music and Dance Theatre and anxieties about filling them, Limbic Fix is a gale of fresh air. A new contact-improvisation company of four women, they need only a bit of open space, some comfortable clothes, and their own nimble bodies and brains to produce art on the spot. No music, no props, no set or choreography....

Brave the windchill, or just reserve a weekend suite at the Blackstone Hotel, where Chicago’s unsinkable Marshall Vente has assembled a promising lineup for his second annual jazz festival. The pianist, composer, bandleader, and DJ–best known for his 9-to-12-piece band Project Nine–last year added concert promotion to his resume, and the 1994 model follows the blueprints for its predecessor: three days of music featuring several of the bands Vente leads, as well as groups headed up by various Vente sidemen....

A true giant of free jazz returns to Chicago. Once described as “apocalyptic,” German saxophonist and clarinetist Peter Brotzmann has used off-the-chart virtuosity and a restless search for new sounds to construct a richly detailed and even stunning style. At times he sails into an ocean of overtones with shrieks of passion and delight; he can also build a lattice of ten thousand rapid, interlocking notes, cutting through musical complacency like a tessellated scythe....

It is not surprising that there exists no great English novel in which the growth of national or imperial consciousness is chronicled. It is useless to look for this in the work of historians. They, more than novelists, work within the values of their society; they serve those values. –V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness Said’s argument runs through four stages. First, he explains that in any society committed to building an empire, as England was in the last century, imperialism has to be seen as an essential part of the culture....

BERN NIX TRIO, 10/30, HOTHOUSE Bald-pated guitarist Bern Nix served as a crucial yet overlooked component of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band for over a decade, and now he’s out on his own. Although Nix’s playing adheres to Coleman’s “harmolodic” theory–a musical system that replaces standard harmonic notions with layers of melody–his sound is surprisingly clean and supple (think Jim Hall’s biting clarity), especially in comparison to the brash, funk-based throb of the better-known Coleman guitar disciple James “Blood” Ulmer....

He did nothing wrong, Ozzie Rahman insists, even though last year he and a friend were caught with a stolen motor scooter, arrested, and sent to jail. The program represents a unique marriage between idealistic social workers and such hardheaded prosecutors as Cook County state’s attorney Jack O’Malley. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vehicle for Change was born from necessity as much as compassion....

I realized recently that if my young daughter matriculates in the usual way she will graduate from high school in June 2000, which, as I have learned from your book More of the Straight Dope, is pronounced “June of the year two thousand.” My question is, what will her class be called? I know how they’ll write it, of course: Class of ’00. But how will they say it? Class of Zero- Zero?...

THE WOODS Even more troubling is Mamet’s less-than-evenhanded treatment of his female characters. Not that there are many to choose from. And even fewer if you eliminate those who never make it onto the stage–like “fuckin’ Ruthie” and Grace in American Buffalo and all the offstage wives in Glengarry Glen Ross. Those you’re left with–the manipulative bitch Madonna played in Speed-the-Plow, the angry, kvetching shrew who makes even Lucifer’s life miserable in Bobby Gould in Hell, the emotionally stunted, mannish woman Lindsay Crouse plays in House of Games–are the uncharitable projections of an angry, not very perceptive, phallocentric writer....

AHARONI, BOYD, HALLORAN, PUTMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A path across the floor and a basic movement had been selected in advance, then the group of eight dancers asked the audience for suggestions for an emotion and a task. They huddled briefly, then started an improvised dance that moved in spasms along the chosen path like an out-of-balance washing machine. The movements were quick and graceful, and at times just silly....