For its sixth season the Chicago Composers’ Consortium has come up with a heavyweight lineup: each of its three concerts will headline chamber pieces by a distinguished American composer. That is not to say, however, that the consortium’s own members are being neglected in favor of prestigious visitors: recent works by Lawrence Axelrod, Michael Pisaro, Pieter Snapper, Kathleen Ginther, and Elisabeth Start will also have a chance in the spotlight. Featured artists in the opening concert are Bruce Saylor, the Lyric Opera’s composer-in-residence, and Constance Beavon, the mezzo-soprano who happens to be his wife....

Competitive Sports So here’s some good news. The sports sections of the Sun-Times and Tribune are now entering a still more perfervid era of competition, driven by a force that over time might be more lethal than hatred: friendship. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These are two guys who’ve always been there for each other. When Sherwa felt edgy about leaving LA, where he was the Times’s deputy sports editor, Jaffe told him Chicago was a great sports town; LA didn’t compare....

Freud meets Marx in this clever 1979 adaptation by Joseph Losey of Mozart’s operatic masterpiece. Don Giovanni, as portrayed by the scowling baritone Ruggero Raimondi, is a cynical and cruel yet oddly vulnerable bisexual who no longer gets a kick out of his compulsive behavior; the aristocratic milieu that is his hunting ground is suffering from ennui too, as its impeccably coiffured players go through the motions in their elegant Palladian villas....

In 1983 Boston-area songwriters Kirk Swan and Seth Tiven, working under the name Dumptruck, released their debut record, D Is for Dumptruck, a solid collection of songs with tuneful R.E.M.–style melodies, occasionally searing guitar solos, and some of the most dour lyrics since Joy Division. But after their more polished follow-up, Positively Dumptruck, received glowing reviews and some modest MTV airplay, Swan left the group, leaving Tiven to continue with an ever-changing supporting cast....

In these times of crime and the fear of crime it is important to remember that a dog can prevent the theft of your furniture but your furniture cannot prevent the theft of your dog. I keep a loose rein on the animals in part because I am disposed to prefer loose reins in most situations. But I also think that if I let the animals do more things, many of the things they do will give me pleasure....

Early-60s girl groups like the Shirelles and the Chiffons conjure a bygone, more innocent time when female adolescent concerns ostensibly could be summed up in songs like “Chapel of Love” and “I Wish I Knew What Dress to Wear.” Because of this perception, and because the girl groups merely sang–they almost never wrote their own material or played instruments–their records are often assumed to have little bearing on rock, which everybody knows is made by self-contained bands of bad boys who write their own songs....

The shtick of the New Crime troupe–roiling emotions broadcast by a primary palette of pained expressions, virtuoso choreography married to Jef Bek’s crashy, bashy percussion and cartoony keyboards, an oxygen-sucking pace–has never been so overwhelmingly packed together as in its current offering, Heart of a Dog. The show’s been playing for a while, but it closes soon; the story, written by Soviet dissident Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s, is that of an enterprisingly demented professor whose latest crackpot scheme is to put a man’s pituitary gland into a dog’s body....

Many people think of Eddie Harris and Les McCann as the jazz equivalent of Mutt and Jeff, and the analogy concerns more than their appearance. (Harris is relatively trim, McCann extravagantly rotund.) McCann came on the scene as a blues-drenched pianist/vocalist, soulful, entertaining, and not too much of a challenge–a description that holds true today as well. Harris started with a majestic tenor-sax virtuosity that often gets lost in his street-smart imagery and went on to experiment with the hardware, mastering various electronic enhancements and inventing the hybrid “reed trumpet” in the 60s; in the 70s he confounded listeners by producing an entire album of X-rated onstage monologues....

Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal make dances as bare and abrasive as dry sand. Their Circles of Lust, the evening-length work that opens the “Festival of Israeli Dance,” claws at the viewer’s gut with its picture of the grinding predictability of urban life. The movement itself is as fast and furious and as stressful and wrenching as anything you see on television, but it articulates a vision of sex and sexuality far more complex and disturbing than MTV’s male adolescent fantasies....

LIRA ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Lira Ensemble, which bills itself as “the nation’s only professional performing arts company specializing in Polish music, song, and dance,” has improved greatly over the years. Its reputation got a tremendous lift when its choruses were invited to participate in the recording of Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s Miserere (Elektra/Nonesuch), and its current core of 12 female singers are in tip-top form–as are the recently added dancers, who wear authentic folk costumes and can high-step up a storm....

Morality? What Morality? Sheldon Duecker, Methodist bishop of northern Illinois, who’s also met with the editorial board of Courier News in Elgin: “It’s been almost as though they haven’t had respect for the opposition forces. I asked one board if they could give me studies they have read which convinced them gambling would be a good thing economically and for the quality of life, and they had nothing to offer. They had no awareness there were other times in our history when gambling was very prominent and was voted out in almost every state....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Philadelphia Inquirer analysis in December questioned military rulings that suicide was the cause of at least 40 recent deaths of U.S. servicemen. The newspaper quoted former military investigators who said they were “stunned” or “astonished” at how shoddy some of the 40 investigations were and at how the military often calls hard-to-solve cases suicides just to close them out....

There are sopranos, and then there are divas. The great ones’ names evoke a thrilling heritage: Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, Nellie Melba and Zinka Milanov, Emmy Destinnova and Amelita Galli-Curci, Galina Vishnevskaya and Vera Galupe-Borszkh . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vera Galupe-Borszkh? Reviled–er, revered–as “La Dementia” by those in the know, this Russian star’s unique mastery of both bel canto and can belto has elevated her above soprano drammatico to a new category, “soprano traummatico....

Eve Andree Laramee: Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions But Laramee’s poetic fantasy is partly grounded in the logical principles of chemistry. A closed glass bulb with a small burner under it and a tube at the top leading to a lower bulb is apparently a simple distillation mechanism. The wires often suggest a chemical battery–immersed in some solutions, copper wires can produce a tiny voltage. Four udderlike protrusions under a glass bulb lead to tubes that drain into a large evaporation plate full of a deep blue liquid and bright blue crystals–a solution has been reduced to salts....

The idea that children might have their own legal rights and interests has only recently begun to gain ground in this country. The first case to establish that theUnited States Constitution applies to minors, In re Gault, a delinquency case, was heard in 1967. And it was only in 1969 that the Supreme Court held that children have a right to due process and free speech, in Tinker vs. Des Moines, a case concerned with high school students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam war....

After much inquiry and research I have reached a dead end as to how to get my home phone number taken off all telemarketing and tele-fund-raising call lists, locally and nationally. Even after I tell callers who want donations for local causes to stop calling me, the calls persist–and seem to multiply! I’ve searched for some sort of national “do not call” list and have only come up with a lame address in Farmingdale, New York....

Whenever I take an airplane trip and check my bags they hand me this little ticket, and on the back it says, “This is not the baggage check described in the Warsaw Convention.” Funny, it sure looks to ME like a baggage check. If it’s not a baggage check, what is it? And what do you have to do to get a REAL baggage check? –Bill Kinnersley Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Embarrassment The Oily Years (1983-1993) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stuck in Lawrence, Kansas, boyhood chums John Nichols, Bill Goffrier, and Brent Giessmann listened to the standard proto-punk outfits like the Stooges, Velvet Underground, and the Ramones but found liberation with the Sex Pistols. At art school Giessmann met Ron Klaus, who joined the inseparable trio to start the Embarrassment. The recently issued double CD Heyday 1979-83 compiles the band’s entire official output–a pair of EPs as well as several posthumous full-length collections of previously issued and unreleased material (they never made a proper album)–as well as a full disk of assorted rarities....

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” According to the most recent edition of Death Row, USA, a quarterly publication from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, 40 percent of America’s 3,009 death row inmates are black, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. In Illinois, with a 15 percent black population, death row is 62 percent black. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The decision was handed down June 6–in the same month President Clinton began airing a precampaign television commercial in which he proudly takes credit for expanding America’s death penalty to include some 50 new offenses like drive-by murders and violence against “maritime navigation....

Safri Boys Various Artists The Indian presence in mainstream England has become increasingly visible, and Indian influence in popular music is growing as well, most notably via the ascendence of bhangra. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Traditionally bhangra was the music of harvest festivals in Punjab, the northwest region of India before it was divided to create Pakistan in 1947. The heartbeat of the strictly percussive music was supplied by the dhol, a large two-headed, wooden-barrel drum beaten with a heavy stick in patterns that were said to reflect the movements of a reaper with a scythe....