“I don’t think the black community clearly understands how the whole criminal justice system impacts on us,” he says. “So individuals and families struggle with their problems in isolation from one another. We have to stop what’s going on. We have to interrupt the cycle of crime, arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. And it’s got to be done at the community level.” In the 1980s he headed security for Mayor Harold Washington....

One of the most popular symphonies of our time will receive its local premiere this weekend. Though written in 1976, Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony was only “discovered” two years ago when the CD featuring Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta hit the classical best-seller chart. Its enormous appeal probably can be attributed to its solemn mysticism and gentle yet unwavering political stance: one can readily empathize with Gorecki’s lament for his native Poland and for the loss of innocence....

If determination and energy can make a dance company, Kevin Iega Jeff will make one. Last year the Joseph Holmes troupe–founded by Holmes in 1974 and directed after he died in 1986 by company member Randy Duncan–went outside the family fold, even outside Chicago, for its new artistic director, a New Yorker. Yet it seems that in some ways Iega, as he’s called, marks a return to the company’s roots: watching a rehearsal of his newest piece, I saw the highly colored emotional and physical emphasis characteristic of Holmes....

Mark Konewko is a church organist by trade and a new-music advocate on the side. It’s not surprising, then, that in programming the first concert in Saint Josaphat Church’s new series he’s combined both loves. The church’s 1924 48-rank Kilgen organ is the star of the show: Konewko, who’s played on it for almost 18 years, has picked a gamut of works that go well with its warm, brilliant sound. In chronological order, they include four sonatas for trumpet and organ by Baroque journeyman Girocamo Fantini; Puccini’s Suor Angelica aria and Bizet’s Agnus Dei (both sung with organ accompaniment); and Arabesque, a whiff of French Romanticism from master organist Louis Vierne....

Lead Story In January in Riverside, California, the fiancee of Frank Cisco Bridges, 43, bailed him out of jail, where he was being held on burglary charges, the morning of their scheduled wedding. They had the ceremony, and later that evening Bridges, who was reported to have AIDS, was arrested and charged with raping a seven-year-old girl at the reception. Bridges’s new wife is a San Bernardino County, California, probation officer....

Lead Story Blaise Pugh was arrested in Washington, D.C., in September after he made several boasts on a taped episode of the Sally Jessy Raphael TV show about having violated parole. Pugh told a surprised Raphael that he had no fear of being exposed on television. Federal marshals raided his home while the show was being aired and found Pugh watching himself on TV. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In 1955, the year Satyajit Ray’s beautiful first feature, Pather Panchali, won the grand prix at Cannes, no less a humanist than Francois Truffaut walked out of a screening declaring, “I don’t want to see a film about Indian peasants.” Time and critical opinion have been much kinder to this family melodrama–derived, like its successors in the Apu trilogy, Aparajito and The World of Apu, from a 30s novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee–than to Truffaut’s remark....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On August 20 I was scheduled for outpatient surgery at the University of Illinois Hospital on Taylor. My mother and I arrived early, but since I was the last patient scheduled for the operating room I had to wait for several hours. As the time crept by I became more and more apprehensive, and I frequently went outside to smoke....

Chicago hasn’t gained much fanfare for its trumpeters in quite some time–certainly not since Lester Bowie left town, and maybe not even since the 1950s, when Ira Sullivan threw flames from one end of the lake to the other. But the situation is on the verge of a turnaround, thanks to young veterans like Art Davis and Michael McLaughlin, and comparative newcomers like Rex Richardson and Rob Mazurek. Mazurek may have had to visit Scotland to record his first album–last year’s Man Facing East (on Edinburgh’s Hep Jazz)–but his music needs no passport to get through to listeners....

SCARED OF DEMONS Gillarlaine Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scared of Demons might be viewed as an exploration of our culture’s bias against sex, a bias so deeply internalized by this little girl, as well as by her fundamentalist family and teachers, that she perceives the natural desire to touch herself and give herself pleasure as a satanic force. In her mind, a demon repeatedly tries to force a crucifix between her legs....

Secrets and Lies By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nevertheless there has been a discernible change in Leigh’s work since his last dysfunctional-family opus, Life Is Sweet–a change well described by Australian critic Adrian Martin in a recent letter to me: “I think that as a certain angry anti-Thatcher 80s politics has drained from Leigh’s work, he has gravitated to either the bombastic nihilism of Naked (a film I have incredibly mixed feelings about) or the soft-heartedness of Secrets and Lies....

Jolene 2/23, Schubas This five piece from Charlotte may not be particularly good, but it does demonstrate that the country rock cordoned off under the tag No Depression is nothing new. On their debut, Hell’s Half Acre (Ardent), Jolene, a name swiped from the famous Dolly Parton tune, hitch the twang quotient that marked R.E.M.’s 80s music to the blandness of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s (Toad being, after all, R.E.M. sans personality)....

FOOD FOR THE GODS Anybody interested in discovering the future powerhouses of Chicago theater should board the Jeffery Express and head south. Now. The future David Mamets and John Malkoviches who can put Chicago back in the smack-dab center of the theater universe aren’t plying their craft in some Highland Park basement or walk-up near Broadway and Grace. They’re on East 67th Street and South Chicago, performing some of the city’s most innovative and challenging drama....

A friend of mine, who is paranoid about everything, recently told me that fluorescent lights cause cataracts. Everything I’ve read about these lights before talks about them glowingly–they’re so energy efficient I should replace every lamp in my home with fluorescent bulbs. And of course I and millions of other people toil under them for most of our waking hours every day. Are we all going to go blind? Why have I not heard about these harmful effects before?...

Until the ascendancy of the phenomenal Brij Bhushan Kabra in the late 50s, the guitar was simply not a part of Indian classical music. Even today it remains uncommon, but in Vishwa Mohan Bhatt India seems to have a worthy successor to Kabra’s pioneering slide-guitar virtuosity. Actually Bhatt plays a self-designed variant of the guitar, an instrument he calls the Mohan Veena; he’s added chikari (drone strings tuned to the tonic), as well as eight more strings that run vertically along the fretboard and react to the horizontal strings being struck....

ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR Charles Dickens knew what he was about when he set his best-known ghost story on Christmas Eve. If Christmas is the occasion for jovial generosity and reconciliation, it’s also the spookiest season, a cold, grim, reflective time when we’re haunted by memories of old failings and unresolved conflicts. The flip side of the merriment A Christmas Carol celebrates is the sad, scary soul-searching that overtakes Scrooge in the middle of the night: fear as much as anything else makes him become a better man....

By Cara Jepsen Novelist and performance artist Sapphire creates work that is gritty and realistic; in a recent short story in the New Yorker she offered aasdfg brutal account of a 15-year-old girl who’d been sexually abused by her father. The story was executed without cliches or condescension; the narrator’s distinct, colloquial voice matter-of-factly described unspeakable horrors. Sapphire will read from her new novel Push from 12:30 to 2:00 at the Afrocentric Bookstore, 234 S....

Behind the lace curtains at Gavroche the windows were steamed up. Glass lamps with flower decals hung over the tables, and orange lamps illuminated the bar. It wasn’t chic. It was comforting, like your mom’s kitchen. It was French. So French it seemed to belong in some faraway corner of Paris. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Crawford, co-owner of the restaurant, is one-quarter French....

By Mike Sula Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Park lawn cemeteries have no character,” he says, looking out over the flat landscape. Like all park lawns, Queen of Heaven owes much of its design to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, which opened its gates in 1913. “The thinking was that you could come to this place and not be constantly reminded of death, because there are no visible headstones to remind you of dead people....

Paul McComas felt like he had to do something positive after Kurt Cobain’s suicide. McComas, a video and performance artist, created a Nirvana tribute band called Lithiumand decided to stage a benefit concert series called Rock Against Depression (RAD). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The goal is youth outreach,” says McComas, who’s 34. He hopes the concerts have sent a message that Cobain’s suicide was not about the burden of stardom or about drug abuse or about any of the myriad reasons why people think he killed himself....