Damhsa: A Celtic Odyssey Essentially Howard’s goal is to create a new dance form that blends the best of Irish dance with the best of other contemporary dance forms. And he doesn’t seem to be a man who does things in a small way. The company’s full-evening Chicago debut, “Damhsa: A Celtic Odyssey,” employed more than 60 dancers and eight live musicians in 12 dances. The Friday night performance lasted two and a half hours....

In good company. Dawn Clark Netsch in Chicago Life (September-October) on the Northwestern law school 1952 class picture: “There are only two faces that stand out. Mine and Harold Washington. He was the only black and I was the only woman graduating that June.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Getting acquainted. Cook County Commissioner Danny Davis on the Nature Conservancy’s Mighty Acorns program, which brings urban third- through seventh-graders to the Cook County forest preserves: “We need this program to introduce our children to the rest of the universe” (Natural Area Notes, Fall)....

Though I haven’t yet seen the Miramaxed version of this feature by the country’s most gifted black filmmaker, Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep With Anger), it’s reportedly more upbeat and somewhat less angry than the original and contains some additional rap music on the sound track. But this heartfelt and persuasive look at the racism and corruption of the Los Angeles police force, based on a true story, is surely well worth seeing regardless of what Burnett was forced to do to it to get it released....

Why were the Russians always able to land their cosmonauts on land while we had to land our astronauts on water? –Jim Blewer, Alameda, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Russian space center is located in central Asia in the midst of a huge unpopulated grassland. Landing nearby seemed like the obvious thing and was only slightly more challenging technically than landing in water....

*** GUELWAAR (A must-see) Directed and written by Ousmane Sembene With Omar Seck, Mame Ndoumbe Diop, Thierno Ndiaye, Ndiawar Diop, Moustapha Diop, Marie-Augustine Diatta, Samba Wane, and Joseph Sane. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guelwaar, for instance–which is about the separate, if interlocking and interdependent, Christian and Muslim communities in a Senegalese town–presents the most detailed and knowing treatment of tribalism I’ve seen in any film of the 90s, and it offers the most blistering attack on the ethics, administration, and effects of foreign aid I’ve ever seen....

For the last several years the Ravinia Festival has scheduled a blowout jam session to end its early-season jazz series; this year the concert plugs into the worldwide revitalization of interest in Louis Armstrong, offering a putative 95th-birthday tribute to jazz’s first enduring genius. (The concert takes place on what Armstrong himself always claimed to be the date of his birth in 1900; however, the latest surge of research into his life–much of it displayed in a national touring exhibit that has just closed at the Terra Museum–reveals he was actually born on August 4, 1901....

DEBORAH HAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hay’s method for 30 years has been to find the simplest, most emotionally rooted movements. She now uses mantras to create a kind of meditative dancing; the mantra she used in her Chicago workshop was “All 53 trillion cells in my body are saying yes and no at the same time.” She encourages a roomful of people to move in any way they want while remaining mindful of the mantra....

Leah Poller: Bed…Not Bored The 19 beds now on view at Portals gallery are part of a larger series that Poller began a year ago called “One Hundred and One Beds,” a fanciful allusion to surrealist Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Woman. While the series numbers about 30 so far, Poller has already come up with more than 100 titles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 52-year-old Poller recalls being greatly impressed by the stone sculptures and ceramics during an early visit to the Museum of Archaeology in Mexico City....

Imagine the rush if you could take a building you really hated and just blow it up. Most of them were ecstatic. “He thinks it’s wonderful, but he’s reluctant to publicly name a building to blow up,” said Thomas Beeby’s secretary. Beeby designed the Harold Washington Library. “He suggests you call Stanley Tigerman.” “I don’t believe in blowing up buildings, not even the worst,” he had huffed when we called. “I think it’s not what architects do....

When Peter Taub came to Randolph Street Gallery in 1985, as executive director, it had an annual budget of $60,000 and was $50,000 in debt. That was in the midst of one of the biggest art-market booms in U.S. history and during a period of enthusiastic governmental support. Eight years later, at a time when the private art market and government funds are best described as meager, RSG has increased its annual budget eightfold, has erased its deficits, and is aiming to raise $600,000 to buy its space on Milwaukee Avenue....

The Goo Goo Dolls are one of those unlucky bands who are a lot better than fair but not much more than pretty good. Like that of their latitudinal compatriots Soul Asylum and the Replacements, the Buffalo threesome’s output teems with hooks and swelling choruses, and boasts both dynamic song construction and an assaultive guitar attack. They’re occasionally goofy–as their romp with the Lime Spiders’ “Slave Girl” on the new A Boy Named Goo attests–and wouldn’t know how to spell pretentious, much less be it....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, I was unable to respond to the inaccuracies in Lewis Lazare’s [July 21] Culture Club piece regarding HotHouse earlier but I had my hands full moving and relocating HotHouse, an endeavor hampered by the miscasting of our business as tenant deadbeats. However for the record it is important to dispel the damaging falsehoods left to stand in his piece....

No Alternative Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Sunday I went to the New World Music Theatre for Q101’s Jamboree ’96, a veritable who’s who concert of the station’s current playlist. Since “alternative rock” was originally a marketing term and is now, among other things, a radio format encompassing everything from fun-wanting popster Sheryl Crow, who played at last year’s Jamboree, to blunt-smoking hip-hoppers Cypress Hill, who headlined the festival this year, to Metallica, set to headline the next Lollapalooza, its definition was sufficiently far enough out of my grasp for me to ask around....

SHADOWLANDS at Urbus Orbis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nicholson deftly contrasts Lewis’s donnish life–surrounded by vaguely misogynistic pedants and living with “Warnie,” his crusty bachelor brother–with the new life Joy offers. She enters Lewis’s stuffy, tweedy world initially as a passionate correspondent who shakes him with her forthright questions: “Is it better to be the enchanted child or the magician who casts the spell?...

STEPPER’S BALL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stepper’s Ball opens with a memory, as old Sammy, the proprietor of the Castle Dance Club, puts down his broom to play a mellow tune on the jukebox and dream-dance with his young bride of long ago. In this moment the universe of Phyllis Curtwright’s play is established, so that when Sammy’s reverie is broken by the arrival of the club’s habitues it comes as no surprise that the chief topic of conversation is the upcoming Fourth Annual Stepper’s Ball....

What good is that bird? In a state department of conservation report John Schwegman writes about a study coauthored by suburban Morton Arboretum foresters in which they caged some small oak trees to keep away insect-eating birds and left other trees alone. Sure enough, over two growing seasons the bird-free trees grew significantly less than did the controls. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » AIDS educators in denial....

Anyone serious about making new public housing different from the old has to make sure that it doesn’t look like the ugly modernist boxes everyone expects. This part of the job brought Philip Hickman, head of scattered sites for the Habitat Company, up against the Reagan-Bush Department of Housing and Urban Development. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Hickman ever takes up a new line of work, he could turn his HUD stories into a stand-up routine....

I have read your column ever since my then 13-year-old daughter pointed out your discussion on the subject of breaking the penis. The years of keeping track of you have been very entertaining and mildly informative. I feel I owe you one. Perhaps the following will satisfy that obligation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first one is easy. Achenbach’s explanation of why golf balls have dimples (enclosed) is so full of errors and so clearly down your street that you will have no trouble slaughtering the bum....

Though she invites comparisons to Dietrich, Piaf, and Lotte Lenya, German chanteuse Ute Lemper is slowly forging a persona of her own–that of postmodern siren. She started her career in the mid-80s, in the Viennese production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. She did the title role in a revival of Peter Pan, portrayed Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and a couple of years ago played Lola in the ill-fated German stage adaptation of The Blue Angel....

Taking its name from the Tower Building at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, which once housed the Coyote Gallery, this multimedia arts event includes a sizable theater and performance segment. Running September 7 through 11, the fifth annual Around the Coyote features nine different productions at Centrum Hall, 1309 N. Ashland, and the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Admission to all shows is $2; for more information, or to confirm the schedule below (which is subject to last-minute changes and mishaps), call the Coyote hotline at 342-6777....