I am responding to Michael Miner’s November 29 column [Hot Type]–specifically to comments he attributed to me which I feel were taken out of context. Miner and I spoke for at least a half hour regarding Rene Brown’s role in the Ford Heights case, and about David Protess’s contribution. He quotes me quite accurately about Brown. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let me ask your readers a question: Which Chicago journalist leads the pack in getting people out of prison who were wrongly convicted of murder?...

Five years ago, when Ballet Folklorico de Mexico was last in town, I blasted the company for not being Urban Bush Women, the modern-dance troupe I saw the same weekend. The young are so judgmental. Today I see the value of traditional dances done well, even extravagantly, with the result that people actually go see them–even people of a different ethnicity. Amalia Hernandez’s company, which she founded more than 40 years ago and which is now an official Mexican export operating under the auspices of the National Institute of Fine Arts, is a true crowd pleaser, a well-trained troupe of 65 dancers and musicians who re-create Mexican history with the help of sequins and confetti, feathers and lace....

Big Ticket Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tigrett, 48, made his vast fortune by starting the Hard Rock Cafe, whose first outlet opened in London back in 1971. The rock ‘n’ roll theme restaurant became a model for gimmicky eateries, as one glance around River North reveals. Unfortunately, in their search for uniqueness, these prefab palaces have inadvertently become identical to one another....

Singer/guitarist/songwriter Bill Direen is a controversial figure in New Zealand’s musical underground: he helped originate it, but he’s also stood well apart from it. Members of key bands like Tall Dwarfs, the Bats, the Renderers, and the Terminals have passed through his group, the Builders (aka the Bilders, Bilderine, and Die Bilder). The early Builders, whose records have recently been reissued on CD by Flying Nun Records, played gritty garage punk that owed a heavy musical debt to the Velvet Underground while addressing more indigenous lyrical concerns....

Travesia, the evening-length work that begins this Venezuelan company’s engagement, opens the door on a surreal world. A platoon of men and women in luridly colored old-fashioned garb–long-tailed coats for the men, bustiers and full skirts for the women–sails onstage in a skeletal ship. Disembarking, they totter like drunken sailors or seasick landlubbers, then sway in unison. The movement throughout has a wild, careless energy, the dancers throwing themselves off balance, upending themselves, not bothering to recover their equilibrium....

Deseret By Jonathan Rosenbaum Broadly speaking, Deseret–whose title refers to the name the territory of Utah originally proposed for itself when campaigning for statehood in the 1860s (it joined the union as Utah in 1896)–consists of the subtle, artful, and complex interface of the condensed news stories, the recorded sounds, and several hundred stationary shots. Each shot generally corresponds to a sentence in the narration, the only exception being that each of the film’s 93 segments begins without narration; the narration of a news story always begins with the second shot, on the lower portion of which is superimposed the story’s date....

EAT YOUR ART OUT The first rule in a Nomenil production is that there are no rules. Time and space are stretched and distorted in any direction that will serve the needs of an imaginatively cheesy script. Melodramatic hallucinations intrude on mundane moments like unexpected party guests bearing cheap but exotic gifts. Absurdly overdone characters, with names like Madame Quiche, A. Fag, and Crueller Pigg, race about the stage tearing through thick, literary monologues....

“Attacking a pinata is a lot like attacking life,” says Governor Lewis. “You go in blind, and there aren’t very many rules. You sort of have to swing at it, and if you hit it just the right way you get all the rewards of life. If you screw up and don’t use your instincts, you miss and you die.” Marquez, mother of five, and Lewis, father of two, both began making pinatas for their children....

Vance Packard’s classic 50s study The Hidden Persuaders revealed that advertising has all kinds of ways to make us buy what we otherwise wouldn’t. The tactics, he argued, are subliminal; only in retrospect do they seem blatant: “new and improved” comes to mind, as do urgings that you avoid loserhood by being part of the Pepsi “generation.” Those persuaders were “hidden” only to the extent that we failed to give them notice even while being bombarded by them....

We met Mike Archambeault loitering outside Lincoln Park High just after the final bell. His slack slacks and tight tights raised a hand to recite the ABCs of classroom comfort. Still, our Fashion Principals called the look into the office. Did it conform to the dress code? Or was it shooting spitballs behind the teacher’s back? They issued this report card: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Black dominates the discussion–from tip to toe....

City of God Jeff McMahon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Without this space, art tends toward the literal and prescriptive. Instead of images that speak for themselves, we get endless explanations of images. Instead of suggestion, we get declaration. Instead of possibility, finality. This sledgehammer approach certainly makes an artist’s message accessible; audiences can leave the theater satisfied that they have understood everything perfectly....

R & B vocalist Garland Green made his name in the late 60s as one of the most eloquent purveyors of Chicago “soft soul,” a style that mixed pop romanticism with sensuality and longing. Unlike some other soft-soul artists, however, Green–who spent his childhood singing spirituals in Mississippi–never sacrificed his emotional intensity. Though he followed up his biggest hit–1969’s million-selling “Jealous Kind of Fella”–with a couple of strong efforts (“Plain and Simple Girl” in 1971 and the local smash “Let the Good Times Roll” in ’74), he never again achieved nationwide top-ten status....

“It’s nice to see a man looking like a complete piece of meat for a product endorsement,” said Rhonda from the Heidi Salon in the Merchandise Mart. She and her colleagues Monica and Patty were taking a little Monday-afternoon diet Coke break in the lobby. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, it was a big diet Coke break. It was the real thing. Lucky Vanous was sitting at a red-clothed table on top of a platform signing autographed pictures of himself....

The work of Men of the World is difficult to preview, since generally no one, including the artists, knows what it’s going to be until the last minute. Mathew Wilson, half of the duo, explains that he and partner Mark Alice Durant often stay up late the night before planning the action for the next day. Sometimes their work, made up of simple images and elegant gestures executed for the most part on city streets, takes its impulse from the politics of the moment....

Like jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan, folksinger Rosalie Sorrels can make you feel she’s touched life so deeply–and paid her dues so courageously–that she is as personally inspiring as the artistry she brings to her music. The sly sophistication of her vocal phrasing–a countrified fusion of Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline laid over dreamily melancholy acoustic strumming–be- speaks an adventurousness that both embraces and transcends western folk roots; meanwhile her reedy Idaho twang brings a sense of sturdy realism to even the most complex material....

Show Boat’s Tax-Free Ride Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The arrangement with the Auditorium has allowed Drabinsky to save a considerable chunk of change. Show Boat has been pulling in around $1 million a week, so the city’s share would come to about $70,000 a week, or $3.5 million a year. Tickets for the production are currently on sale through January 1997. On the other hand, the city stands to collect a considerable amount of money when Drabinsky’s restored Oriental Theater opens in early 1998....

Richard Tuttle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I lived in New York then. Curiosity piqued and expecting to be amused, I trudged off to the debacle. But Tuttle’s “lessness” was surprisingly, thoughtfully elegant. Admittedly it was strange to see small strands of wire displayed in the Whitney’s high-ceilinged rooms, and I recall standing in front of an inch-long piece of rope attached to the wall, wondering how this could be art....

GRIFTERS, 10/23, LOUNGE AX On record this Memphis band weave a somewhat maddening labyrinth of bewildering obscurantism, swaddling their catchy, unpredictable tunes songs with wild splotches of noise, tune fragments, and general confusion. Live, however, it’s another story. Instead of burying their treasure, they inject their hooky, melody-rich rock songs with raunchy Memphis swagger. Hope they leave their arty pretentions home. BOREDOMS,10/28, METRO Osaka’s acrobatic Boredoms perform mind-numbing antecedent-destroying stop-start punk rock mayhem....

The description “Tenor Madness” stems from a famous Sonny Rollins blues of 1956–a recording that paired his saxophone with that of the other major source of inspiration for tenorists of the postbop era, John Coltrane–and ever since it has regularly popped up as a catchall phrase for battle between the saxes. But that original matchup involved stylistic contemporaries; this assemblage, on the other hand, features three generations of Chicago tenor men (and one distinct ringer)....

Bistrot Zinc offers a confusion of options – the late-night crepeteria, the crowded (and, indeed, zinc) bar, a clubby lounge, and a wide dining room–all cluttered with the cliches of French dining: rattan chairs askew on the sidewalk, Edith Piaf on auto-reverse, and a taxidermied chicken on duty by the register. Dining here takes gumption too. You’ve got to be clearheaded about your strategy, insistent about landing a table, and willing to down some heavy-duty cuisine, no matter how likely it is to be August in Chicago outside....