No doubt. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (April) picks this up from columnist Lars-Erik Nelson in the New York Daily News (February 8): “On Friday, February 5, at 10 o’clock in the morning, I telephoned the Pentagon press office and told the colonel who answered the phone that I needed information on duplication in the armed forces. He replied: ‘You want the other press office.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

WHEN THE REST OF HEAVEN WAS BLUE Director Max Macadam’s adaptations of four Poe short stories are interspersed with clips from silent films and songs created from Poe’s poetry. Liane LeMaster’s melodies and Lori Anne Wagner’s a cappella singing are equally sweet, but they detract from rather than add to Poe’s writing. Often neither Poe’s lyrics nor the music is particularly memorable, except for “Bridal Ballad To,” in which the irony of the bride’s voice can be clearly heard as Wagner sings a sprightly “And I am happy now....

As the growing decadence and ultimate deciine of alternative rock is charted over the next few years, it’s possible that Beck’s recent appearance on 120 Minutes, where he was interviewed by guest host Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, will be remembered as a watershed event. Beck, a 22-year-old from LA, was riding (and still is) the enormous crest of his single “Loser”; he and Moore, the epitome of the full-of-himself underground rocker, spent their time on the air -trading non sequiturs, plainly delighted at their mutual wit....

I remember one time I was walking with him in the park. I think it was going very well for him at that time in his life. He had just won the special prize for speacial achievements in special activity in his special field of activities. And he is in love with one woman and she loves him too. And at home one beautiful child. And they live in one beautiful home somewhere in some beautiful place somewhere....

Friday 7 If you believed what you read in the local dailies, Otto and Daniella Kirchner–the natural parents of cause celebre Baby Richard–are demons of the first order, fanged and grasping parental incompetents who are trying to wrest an unknowing child out of the hands of the adoptive parents who’ve cared for him for nearly four years. Actually, they’re merely typical (i.e., less than perfect) parents who’ve been trying for most of that time to get their kid back from what the Illinois Supreme Court has ruled was an illegal adoption....

The lineup for the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival looks at least as good as the first, in some respects even better. I’m sorry to report that two of the best movies scheduled for last week, Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water and Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, were canceled after the Reader went to press. Both were replaced by an Australian movie, The Sum of Us, that we weren’t able to review....

The Count himself died in 1984; but like several of the other big bands that established themselves in the 1930s to become jazz institutions, the Basie orchestra has remained alive, if not exactly intact. (The roster had grown somewhat fluid even under Basie, and at this point only three or four band members can boast any firsthand contact with their namesake.) But the Basie band has avoided the fate of so many such outfits–the precipitous decline into a ghost band, pallidly re-creating hits of 30 and 40 years ago–through the efforts of director Frank Foster....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your article on the Haymarket site and, by extension, on the 1986 Centennial Commemoration [December 10] was inaccurate and misinformed. The commemoration was a series of events organized by hundreds of individuals and organizations. While they included both academics and ultra left anarchists, about whom you decided to focus your story, these elements were by no means the central or most important parts....

The combination of beautiful, easy movement and raw insight in the work of the Joe Goode Performance Group is seductive, even irresistible. Watching The Disaster Series and Convenience Boy, I laughed–laughed hard–until the absolute tragedy and unarguable reality of character and situation hit me. Convenience Boy, commissioned by the Dance Center and premiering there next Thursday, is about street kids–homeless, disregarded, disenfranchised–but Goode dissolves all the walls we build between us and them....

At age 40, Luis Rodriguez figures he should have enough life experience to deal with the problems of his 20-year-old son, Ramiro. He talks to Ramiro, draws him out about what he’s feeling. He talks to Ramiro’s friends, offering a nonjudgmental ear. He takes the boys to sports events and even helped them start a youth group. But none of it seems to matter. Ramiro is in trouble–gang trouble. So they crossed the river and moved to “La Colonia,” the Mexican section of Watts....

There was a bang outside my kitchen window–a big bang with reverb, a Hollywood bang. Whatever that was, it wasn’t a gunshot, I thought. A gunshot sounds like metal corn popping. “It’s little Mario.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes I get pissed when I think of them just hanging out. How can they do so much of nothing? Even when I’m screwing around I’m doing something–reading, watching TV, cleaning the bathtub....

Bill Wyman, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lines like “keep my affect to yourself” and tasteful homages to the Fall’s Mark E. Smith don’t come along everyday, even from the dozens of other precocious ivy school darlings who really have groomed themselves for alternaland, hence Pavement’s smartassish subtlety. There is no room here for any other musings, face it–music by and for white and well-fed underground types is the demographic at work....

Recently a letter ran from a man, Pissed, who felt I wasn’t qualified to give advice to breeders because I, Dan Savage, am not a breeder. I am a fag, and what could a fag possibly know about breeders, breeder sex, breeder mores, etc, etc? I told Pissed I was more qualified to comment on heterosexuality than the average homo-ignorant breeder is to comment on homosexuality. I probably know more about breeders than Ann Landers will ever know about queers, for example, yet Ann has been offering advice to unhappy homos since the Spanish-American War....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, EKG: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But your letter got me thinking. Perhaps never running complimentary letters has created a false impression. Not among my readers–you guys know what’s what. I’m worried about the editors at the papers that run my column. If all they ever see in here are angry letters, they might get the mistaken impression that readers don’t like Savage Love very much, and they might drop me!...

Should we root for Mike Tyson? What an inane question. It implies we can’t watch a sporting event without investing emotionally in the athletes, without identifying ourselves with them. It’s as if we couldn’t read a novel without considering it our story or watch a play or movie without seeing ourselves as the main character. Rather than representing “why sports don’t matter anymore,” as the New York Times Magazine recently phrased the issue in a bitter, nostalgic article by Robert Lipsyte, Mike Tyson represents why sports matter as much as ever, if not more....

WELCOME TO THE MOON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The popular idea is that spring is the season for lovers–but how do you know you’re in love? According to John Patrick Shanley in these six short plays, called collectively Welcome to the Moon, you know it’s the real thing when (1) you leave parties early or, better yet, turn back at the door, as John and Mary do in “The Red Coat,” (2) you blow off your oldest friends, as Walter does in “A Lonely Impulse of Delight” and the woman does in “Let’s Go Out Into the Starry Night,” (3) you obsess for 14 years over your high school sweetheart, as Stephen does in “Welcome to the Moon,” (4) you allow yourself to be killed to save the life of the one you love but never tell him he’s the reason, as Betsy does in “Out West,” (5) you repeatedly try to kill yourself–ineptly, of course–because the one you love doesn’t love you, but you never tell him he’s the reason, as Ronny does in “Welcome to the Moon,” (6) you love someone who loves you but is forever inaccessible, as Walter also does in “A Lonely Impulse of Delight,” and (7) you cry–a lot, as do all of the above in all of the above....

In Claude Chabrol’s new film Betty nothing is simple, nothing quite what it seems. Betty (Marie Trintignant), whose husband has recently thrown her out after finding her with another man, wanders aimlessly, alone and drunk. An older woman (Stephane Audran) takes her in and cares for her, and gradually Betty tells her story, which we see in fragmentary flashbacks as she tries to piece it together in her mind. Chabrol, one of the original French New Wave directors of the late 1950s, masterfully intercuts the various pieces of Betty’s life to show how each one affects every other....

Poor little Erin. My heart so breaks for you. Not. Never before have I read a more pitiful, self-indulgent writ of martyrdom as “Jerked Around”: The Erin E. Hogan story [October 27]. Next on Geraldo. Why did she want this story printed? Does she want us to feel compassion for her . . . empathy . . . outrage? I’m sorry, I’ll save that for the real victims of our society (and quite often our judicial system) ....

The Chicago Sinfonietta, a multiethnic, midsize orchestra that has won accolades for the quality of its playing, is also a tireless advocate of diverse programming. No mainstream ensemble in town has proffered a program as unusual and politically correct as the Sinfonietta’s this weekend. It features a curtain-raiser by an eminent African-American (the overture to Theatre Set by Ulysses Kay), a piano concerto by an Eastern European neo-medievalist (the ubiquitous Henryk Gorecki), a concerto for steelpan and orchestra written by a veteran local composer (Northern Illinois University’s Jan Bach) for a young soloist from Trinidad (Liam Teague), and one of the lesser-known symphonies by a gay Russian (Tchaikovsky’s Little Russian Symphony)–all under the direction of the Sinfonietta’s founder and much-honored maestro Paul Freeman....

For nearly 60 years a set of Works Progress Administration murals decorated the walls of Hatch School in Oak Park. Then one day last spring Darryl Lee, the father of a seven-year-old student, caught sight of them and was outraged by what he saw. After Lee complained that the murals contained offensive racial stereotypes they were covered. But on a frosty night in February they’re temporarily on display again. Best of Chicago voting is live now....