NEXT GENERATION PROJECT The little we hear of this story makes it sound about as silly and misguided as stories get. In fact the whole piece seems an abortion from beginning to end, as the disaffected dancers suffer accidents–a stepped-on finger–and bruised egos with no dignity whatsoever, interrupting the dance constantly to complain. Text, movement, and music all work at cross-purposes, until finally a dancer plants herself in front of the audience and starts a long, elaborate math and word problem, insisting that we focus on what she’s saying; behind her the other five cavort and swing and sweep wildly....

Lead Story A woman in Pearl River, Louisiana, reported to police in October that someone who’d broken into her house left without taking anything but had put her garbage on the porch and cleaned all of her ashtrays. And in Woodbridge, New Jersey, in July, a resident also reported that someone who’d broken into her house left without taking anything but had moved a TV set into the den and a camera from one table to another....

Lead Story Convicted murderer Allen Kinsella told an Ontario judge in November that he intends to sue Bath Institution prison officials. Kinsella, who was harshly punished after an escape, said that a ladder left behind by a construction crew and not removed by prison officials gave him the idea that he could slip away. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August a judge in Ogden, Utah, awarded $267 in damages to the owner of a dented car after a man admitted to having sex with a woman on the hood....

Since Chicago Hope got stomped by ER early on in the season, CBS has done everything for it but hold a bake sale. They’ve run episodes all over the program grid, as though they were giving away free samples; now they’ve shouldered aside Northern Exposure (granted, a show long overdue for the phasers) just so Chicago Hope can bask in a sunnier time slot. If you called them up and told them you were going to be out Monday night, they’d have a truck over at your house inside of an hour to help you set your VCR....

Bridging Continents: Connecting African and Latin American Art The surrealistic image of a sleeper in Alberto Donat’s La siesta has an almost classical balance: dark lines on the left are matched by similar lines on the right; there are red areas above and below the figure. A modest Kuba textile from Zaire, exhibited below Donat’s painting, has only simple geometric designs, but the two that are visible in this folded cloth are very different from each other....

Putting the Temp in Tempo The Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune has just been torn apart. What didn’t look broken to the outside eye is being fixed regardless. Editor Howard Tyner praised Tempo to the skies when he lifted James Warren last winter from editor of the section to editor of the Washington bureau. In retrospect it wasn’t the section he admired but Warren, his own discovery, for holding Tempo together by inspiration until Tyner could rescue the operation with a bulldozer....

The Ex are a striking model of form following function. Forming in Amsterdam 15 years ago under the sway of left-leaning English punk bands like the Pop Group, Crass, and the earliest Mekons, they learned their instruments as they went along, espousing anarchist virtues and squatters’ rights and practicing a punishing, numbed-out postpunk throb. Over the ensuing years, as their abilities and interests have shifted toward, among other things, Kurdish folk tunes, songs of the Spanish Civil War, and free jazz, their musical reaching has never strained or settled on imitation....

The Young and the Uppity Anyone who’s just won the Nobel Prize won’t be easily destroyed by criticism. Testing this hypothesis, we called Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago. He’s that school’s fourth scholar in four years to receive the Nobel for economics, but the first to be attacked by a campus publication as “a second-rate scholar.” A very forceful case, and a pretty damned smart one. We’d decided to ask Fogel what he thought because the student who ripped him, fourth-year history major Josh Mason, was wondering how Fogel took it....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To be sure, there are some lessons to be learned here, although I fear many might overlook them. However, at the risk of being presumptuous, I feel a strong inclination to point out at least several. Firstly, I was wholly mystified as to why Quona’s brother Darryl (who admitted to his own homosexuality) felt the need to badger Quona for being a cross-dressing gay!...

Friday 12/26 – Thursday 1/8 27 SATURDAY Louisiana-born bluesman Lonnie Brooks cut his teeth playing guitar under Clifton Chenier, the king of zydeco. He first came to Chicago in 1959 as part of Sam Cooke’s backup band. In the 1970s he hooked up with the local Alligator Records, and the rest, as they say, is history. The blues tradition continues today when Brooks and his son, guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks, perform as part of the Cultural Center’s “Rollin’ on Randolph” series....

Dailies Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune owns the Cubs, TV and radio stations, other papers. The Sun-Times is the Ottoman Empire of Chicago papers, watched carefully for signs of impending mortality. It was removed from the death watch recently by an infusion of foreign capital, but it’s still a union paper, so still vulnerable to the possibility of crippling strike. The difference between the two is easiest to see on Sunday, when the Tribune becomes such a behemoth that the Sun-Times acutally once tried to advertise its own scantness as an advantage, crying, “Less fluff, less filler!...

The immature reddish egret lingers at Lake Calumet. It is a sign that summer is still with us. But walking my dog in Horner Park this morning, I heard in the soft hissing call notes of migrating warblers the first whispers of fall. I first visited the Calumet marshes in the summer of 1981. Larry and Barbara Balch were my guides. I was working on a story about birding for Outside magazine....

It feels like I live on the screened-in porch I played on as a little girl. Air and light pour through my 4,000 square feet of industrial space, grand space that lets the mind wander, free to concoct dreams and ponder why people buy those pink flamingos. The el roars past the endless windows facing a western sky that’s sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes purple, sometimes orange. The sound rumbles through the steel I beams and old brick, drowning out all communication, interrupting thought....

Your host, Maximilian, looks into the microphone dreamily, and starts to croon. The show’s theme song drifts across the airwaves. It’s “Este Tarde Vi Llover,” an old Latin standard redone by Mexican jazz duo Nery & Lopez. Maximilian leans into the mike. “Good evening,” he says, “and welcome to “A Romantic Evening with Maximilian.’ Things are going to be a little bit on the softer side tonight. . . .”...

Lead Story In May, over the opposition of state senator Joe Neal, the Nevada senate passed a bill prohibiting people from carrying guns while drunk. Neal argued that the bill would hurt activities of gun clubs, some of which permit drinking during target-shooting socials. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May researchers at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory proposed that certain bantam chickens could be raised in radiation-contaminated areas in Aiken, South Carolina, where there’s a nuclear weapons plant, without harming people who eat the birds, because the chickens supposedly rid themselves of any radioactive contaminants they ingest in about ten days....

PEGASUS PLAYERS 1994 YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The results of a play contest may reflect the concerns of the contestants or the judges’ biases, but all four of the plays selected for this year’s Pegasus Players Young Playwrights Festival deal with the difficulties of integration with one’s society. Jennifer Asidao’s Fish and Rice is set in a Filipino American household on the eve of Mahalika’s marriage to a white man–an alliance her younger sister Lisa regards as a betrayal of the culture she is too young to have experienced herself and therefore idealizes....

Volcano Songs By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monk seems to draw sustenance from taking risks, from redefining herself. Starting out with New York’s interdisciplinary Judson Church crowd in the 1960s, she progressed through site-specific performance installations in the following three decades to her three-and-a-half-hour opera Atlas, commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera a few years ago. You never know what’s going to come out of her next....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While reading Elizabeth Weil’s “Good-bye, Girl Friend,” in the June 9 issue of the Reader, I become so very impressed with the depths a so-called “writer” will plunge to in order to disparage anyone on the political right. For Miss Weil to blame the death of Sassy magazine on the current political march to the right is a laughable and desperate attempt for a premise and just barely disguises her ignorance of society, publishing and politics....

By Robert M. Johnson Incongruous? Strange? Certainly. But that’s exactly what it’s going to take if you want to be a success at baby photography. You agree. After all, it’s free. Right? Six minutes after he’s entered your living room, he’s ready. His lights are glowing. His camera is loaded, mounted on its tripod, and pointed toward your coffee table. Your comforter is spread over the coffee table, and his backdrop is behind it....

This season finale of the eclectic Symphony of the Shores pushes the boundaries of the classical concert. Other than Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, included almost as an afterthought, the program is heavily jazz-inspired–certainly not the type of fare one encounters at Orchestra Hall. For starters there’s the 20-minute Three Pieces for Violin, Hammer Dulcimer, and Orchestra by Collins Trier and Katherine Hughes, both busy local performers. The first piece is neoclassical and Ravel-like; the second traverses the moody blues; and the exuberant third is almost rock ‘n’ roll....