The two major strands in Leos Janacek’s operas, enchanting fantasy and gritty psychological naturalism, weave into a compelling, mordant melodrama in The Makropulos Affair. It has a rather far-fetched story line–a 300-something diva tries to retrieve the formula for an elixir of youth concocted by an alchemist named Makropulos while fending off the amorous advances of her own great-great-great-grandson and other suitors–but Methuselahian dilemma intrigued writers and philosophers in early-20th-century Europe, including Shaw and Karel Capek, from whose play Janacek adapted the libretto....

CLICKING: 16 TRENDS TO FUTURE FIT YOUR LIFE, YOUR WORK, AND YOUR BUSINESS, by Faith Popcorn and Lys Marigold (HarperCollins, $26). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » REPRESENTATIVE QUOTE: “As we approach the millennium, the need to Click intensifies. Why? Because as the odometer of the century begins to turn…the gaps will continue to widen–between winners and losers, between the Haves and Have-Nots. What we’re talking about goes beyond money....

A much more serious treatment of Buddhism than Little Buddha, this 1989 Korean feature by Bae Yong-kyun (who produced, directed, shot, and edited), winner of the top prize at the Locarno film festival, has already become something of a cult film, and it’s easy to understand why. The title is an unanswerable Zen koan, at one point echoing the narrator’s queries: “Who is Buddha? Who isn’t he?” The skeletal plot concerns an old master, a young disciple, and an orphaned boy in a remote Korean monastery in the mountains, but the film’s main offering is its contemplation of and inexhaustible fascination with the natural world; indeed, we periodically have the sensation that the narrative has been suspended almost entirely for the sake of this meditation....

BOBBY RUSH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Louisiana-born bluesman Bobby Rush hit Chicago in the early 50s. By the mid-60s he had a series of local recordings under his belt, but it wasn’t until 1968’s “Gotta Have Money,” on ABC-Paramount, that his blend of R & B urgency and sly down-home wisdom solidified into the distinctive personal style that Rush describes as “folk funk....

For someone who likes to fly by the seat of his pants, Bob Eisen is awfully businesslike during rehearsal. Watching his five dancers walk, crawl, and hurtle through their paces, he looks and sounds grim. He calls out to Dan Prindle that he’s not drawing out a pause in his crawl long enough, and runs down to the stage to demonstrate on his hands and knees. “You lose a little stillness,” Eisen complains....

Wacker Drive streaks north through the Loop, swerves to miss the river, and roars along hotel row, the bottom level pulling a tight left into the drive, the top screeching to a halt midair. Here, at the dead end of upper Wacker, peace reigns. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As havens go, it’s pretty sparse: a wide asphalt cul-de-sac, two curbside trash cans, and a glorious view of Lake Michigan unencumbered by fire hydrant, parking meter, or tow zone....

I experienced my usual irritation with Jack Helbig to an unusual degree while reading his attack on Paula Killen, “State of Denial” [February 4]. Once again Helbig misses the point. The half of the “review” that purports to examine Killen’s piece “The State I’m In” is obtuse. The half that slams Killen’s press exposure is shortsighted. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently, Helbig saw a different show than the rest of us....

To the author of [“Wigger: Confessions of a White Wannabe,” July 8], Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just want to say how happy I am that you wrote the article, “Wiggers.” I believe it gave voice to a number of important ideas–ideas that a lot of my white brothers and sisters (to co-opt a term that I think applies more aptly in traditional black communities) should become familiar with....

In late 1994 Sunny Chapman’s boyfriend learned that the skin cancer he’d had years before had now spread to his brain, lungs, and bones. Though he had a bevy of symptoms, the extent of his illness went undiagnosed for months because he had no health insurance. As she searched for competent and cheap doctors to care for her boyfriend, Chapman wondered why they were so hard to find. Angry and frustrated, she decided to compile her own guide to low-cost and free health care in Chicago....

Once upon a time, there were mythical figures called Drunken Sign Painters. They carried their paints and brushes in shopping bags or bushel baskets, traveling from store to store, tavern to tavern. Their hands were shaky, but once they picked up a brush their hands weren’t shaky at all. They painted for spending cash, just enough for their next beer or next meal. Every small town and every neighborhood, the myth goes, had a Drunken Sign Painter, and everyone had their theories as to why these painters were drunken: the fumes got them so high they needed liquor to bring them down; they drank to get the taste of paint out of their mouths; they had planned to become fine artists, Great American Painters, but instead found themselves lettering grocery store windows–so they drank....

RE: “A Pair After Moliere,” by Adam Langer, Chicago Reader, 10/6/95, pp. 42-43 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would like to recommend that you expand the first section of your venerable weekly newspaper to include a poetry and fiction section, where Adam Langer’s theatrical reviews would be better placed: his incisive improv-style prose and cutting-edge poetry do not deserve to be sullied by association with the plodding, workaday prose of his colleagues....

WILLIAM SMITH: One begins to notice that diverse parts of the work strangely resemble each other in form or function and that one movement causes another–rotating wheels collide, and that sends them shooting away from each other. The specific forms of each machine start to seem less important than the operational principles underlying it, and the mental image the viewer is left with is completely unlike the images that linger after viewing more conventional sculpture....

NEARLY GOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nearly God is a vaguely defined side project of Tricky with an eponymous album featuring help from a slew of oddball British pop singers–Bjork (by way of Iceland, natch), Terry Hall, Alison Moyet, Neneh Cherry, and Cath Coffey (Stereo MC’s). The album–currently available only as a pricey import but planned for a U.S. release after all of its samples are cleared–is considerably more murky and moody than Tricky’s landmark 1995 debut, Maxinquaye, but it still suggests many of the band’s characteristic sounds: the trippy rhythm loops; dark, whispered voices; layers of ominous, unidentifiable textures; and a keen pop sensibility emerging from the nicely muffled din....

Other festivals run one weekend, maybe two or three; but this one, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs three months–through December 17, with shows Fridays-Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM, as well as children’s matinees on selected Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM. Most evenings feature two or more artists, with intermissions between each act. Aiming to mix theater, performance art, dance, poetry, and music, the fest has scheduled 80 artists in 40 nights, by such groups and individuals as Theater Oobleck, Redmoon Theater, Donna Blue Lachman, Carmela Rago, Jeff Abell, MASS, Bob Eisen, the Chicago Moving Company, and many more....

Ten years ago, when she was 18, Kimberly Johnson got kicked out of high school for fighting in the hallway and was left on her own to figure out what comes next for a teenager without a diploma. The City Colleges board, Johnson counters, is being unrealistic. “They don’t understand the consequences of what they’re doing,” she says. “They’re abandoning thousands of students and leaving them without hope. Now there’s no place for dropouts to get their high school diplomas....

ETA Creative Arts Foundation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Slice-of-life dramas about the everyday joys and tragedies of a group of neighborhood kids are as enduring as the lifelong friendships they detail; the plot line of Crystal Rhodes’s Stoops is comfortably familiar. Three African American girls in a poor but close-knit community come of age during the 60s and 70s, evolving through first loves, senseless deaths, rocky marriages, prejudices and pregnancies, and their own turbulent but abiding friendships with one another....

Depending on your point of view, turnabout is fair play or payback is a bitch. We critics tend to get the last word, but this weekend the Blue Rider turns the tables on us with The Bad Review, a two-evening coup de theatre featuring more than a dozen local artists performing excerpts from and interpretations of their own worst press. On Friday night Kenn Frandsen and Michael Bruce from Rococo Rodeo plan a “bad musical interpretation of their bad reviews....

The 16th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival runs from Friday, November 8, through Sunday, November 17, at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, and at the Halsted Street Cafe, 3641 N. Halsted. Advance tickets can be purchased half an hour before the first show of the day. Tickets are $5 for shows before 6 pm, $7 for shows after 6; discount passes are also available. For more information call 773-384-0048 or 773-384-5533....

Whoever put the curse on the White Sox made sure it was a good one. For the first month of the season the Sox not only played poorly on the field but were beset by bad weather, which dragged down attendance and afflicted them at home and on the road. From the first Chicago baseball games of the year, the pair of Cubs-Sox exhibitions before the season began, when the Sox were at Comiskey Park dark clouds gathered over the franchise, and when the Cubs returned to Wrigley Field the clouds parted, the skies cleared, and all was well with the world....

It must have been something you ate. “A lot of these people with smaller stores have been doing it secondarily to make money,” says Frank Lampe, editor of the monthly trade magazine Natural Foods Merchandiser. “It was primarily a life-style choice or a mission. But now they’re going up against people for whom money is the primary driving force. It’s going to mean major changes for them.” In the industry, Fresh Fields is widely considered more a profiteer than an evangelist for tofu....