David Murray’s expressionistic tenor work has infuriated as many listeners as it has impressed. Supporters revel in his extended upper-register flights and ballsy rhythmic drive; detractors complain about uninformed squawks, repetitive phrasing, and general showboating. I wonder how much of the controversy has to do with the circumstances of Murray’s arrival on the scene. Having gravitated to the challenging “extended technique” of free jazz in college, the 20-year-old Murray arrived in New York in 1975–a time when the jazz-rock fusion was burning itself out and such avant-gardists as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor had begun to reestablish themselves....

Lead Story Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, North Carolina, when, awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but instead grabbed a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Grants Pass, Oregon, Michael Kennedy tried to shoot a beer can off Anthony Roberts’s head with a bow and arrow in May as part of what Roberts later said was an initiation rite for Mountain Men Anonymous....

Lead Story In an April column in Toronto’s Globe & Mail, Dr. Shafiq Qaadri selected memorable gastrointestinal patients from his practice and celebrated their “award-winning” problems in detail. They fell under the categories “greatest number of parasites taken from a patient,” “most obscure parasite,” “best vomit,” and “best stool.” The latter two awards were won by African men whose excretions had yielded worms about six inches long; the stool worm was pregnant with ten baby worms....

Critics and historians have had a hard time determining whether architect Bruce Goff was an eccentric or a genius. He began practicing architecture shortly after World War I and remained active until his death in 1982, leaving behind buildings and unrealized projects that were so highly personal they defy comparison with those of his contemporaries. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Design for the Continuous Present, a retrospective exhibit of Goff’s designs at the Art Institute, seems to indicate that many of Goff’s projects were more important as conceptual than as physical structures....

Sheeh! Dennis [Rodkin], chill out! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think you were too preoccupied with the thought that your readers would think you were some kind of jack-off machine freak [“Stroke of Genius,” November 4]. Disgusting and sick, right? It’s sort of like finding out you like whips and chains or whatever. I mean, what would the neighbors think? Well, who cares?...

PLAYWRIGHTS FOR THE ’90S Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evan Blake’s Strangers in the Night, sweetly directed by Sandra Grand and intelligently acted by Patricia’ Donegan and Ron Wells, is not only the most integrated production of the five included in the Chicago Dramatists Workshop’s sixth annual “Playwrights for the ’90s” showcase, it’s also the only genuinely good-humored one. This program includes plenty of laughs, but generally they have an edge....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, SITM: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I get a lot of letters like yours–not usually so verbose, but same issues, different circumstances–and it’s beginning to get on my nerves: “I have this problem, I’ve identified it, I understand why I act this way, I’ve come to the conclusion that this behavior makes me miserable. What should I do?” Which is, when you stop and think about it, a none-too-subtle variation on “Doctor, it hurts when I go like this....

Moving from baseball to football, as hockey and basketball begin to percolate, one is struck to discover that the source of continuity among sports these days is an almost universal revilement of owners. The Bears’ Michael McCaskey is regarded as a cheapskate and blamed for many of the team’s woes, as is the Tribune Company for the Cubs’ and Jerry Reinsdorf for the White Sox’. The Blackhawks run true to form, with widely hated Bill Wirtz blamed increasingly for the team’s poor fortunes....

One swell reason for seeing this fresh Americanized remake of La cage aux folles–the 1978 French farce about a middle-aged gay couple–written by Elaine May for her old improv partner, producer-director Mike Nichols, and costarring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as the couple–is its hilarious depiction of Pat Buchanan as played by Gene Hackman, which implies, among other things, that only a drag queen could adequately fulfill Buchanan’s dream of ideal womanhood....

One night last summer Philip Rinn tied a chain around the neck of his two-year-old, 80-pound Labrador retriever and dragged him behind his car, burning several large areas of skin off the dog’s body. When the dog didn’t die, Rinn ran over him a couple of times until he did, then left him in the ditch. Rinn later said he did it because the dog had chewed up his sofa. He was charged with cruel treatment of an animal and sentenced to 30 days in jail....

The Lost Boys I help the kid up and wipe a tear from his brown cheek with a tissue. His skin is smooth, his closely cropped hair soft. A jagged scab puckers his left eyebrow. “Are you hurt?” I ask. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m dumping these motherfuckers here right now,” she says. “I’m done with the foster-parent shit. I don’t care where they go....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once again director of the Mayor’s License Commission, Winston Mardis, is playing judge and jury over the fate of an important Chicago music club (Ben Joravsky’s Neighborhood News column, August 13). Just five months ago Ben Joravsky reported on an attempt to shut down the Wild Hare reggae club, this time it’s Rosa’s blues bar. There are similarities besides the cultural significance of the music....

Skew: The Unruly Grid The forms of geometrical abstraction, from Mondrian’s grids and Malevich’s polygons to Barnett Newman’s stripes and Ad Reinhardt’s black squares, were seen by their creators not as metaphors for the visible world but as ways of approaching the essence of the ordinary stuff of matter. These artists were evidencing an optimistic faith–if not in traditional religion, then in the possibility of reaching, through art, some higher form of awareness....

“Sweet” may sound like the wrong word to describe something as gritty as Vernon Garrett’s gospel-rich vocal imprecations, but rest assured: he makes some of the sweetest soul music around. His recorded output has been modest–he made some noise on the charts in 1969 with “Without You” and then again in 1977 with “I’m at the Crossroad (Pt. 1)”–but his recent work on the Ichiban label has begun to expand his reputation....

Gays and Mike Royko share several of the same enemies. These include cement-headed thugs, fundamentalist bigots, officious hypocrites, and Mike Royko. A reporter at one of the other big TV news operations told me the same thing. This reporter said Jack O’Malley’s people leak like the Titanic to serve O’Malley’s interests, and they’d shipped over a copy of Royko’s police report weeks ago. But the station didn’t consider Royko’s drunken ravings a news story....

In the early years of the Chicago Jazz Festival, Joe Segal figured he really couldn’t compete with the smorgasbord of free music on the lake, so he simply shuttered his Jazz Showcase and took the weekend off (grousing all the way). Then he hit on the idea of hosting after-the-fest jam sessions, with special guests drawn from the cornucopia of stars and phenoms booked for the Grant Park stage; this and other postprandial jazz snacks now constitute a secondary feast for the late-night crowd....

By his own admission, Shea Nangle rehearses his one-man autobiographical nightmare Bleeding Clear “to a bare minimum,” muttering to himself while walking down the street, waiting for elevators, or riding the el. “This isn’t the kind of piece I want a lot of people to overhear,” he explains–a paradoxical statement from a performer who publicly chronicles a life of chronic drug abuse, alcoholic tears, and repeated sexual molestation. Nangle’s ambivalence gives Bleeding Clear the palpable edge lacking in so many of the carefully packaged autobiographical pieces around town–if it looks like he’s on the verge of a breakdown, he’s doing his job....

Charley’s Aunt, Candlelight’s Forum Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A chestnut worth roasting in any season, Brandon Thomas’s 1892 drag comedy still bends the genders with contagious glee. The farcical plot provides the perfect excuse for female impersonation, here genteelly described as a “pious fraud.” College chums Jack and Charley, both courting young ladies, recruit Lord Fancourt Babberley as their “chaperon”–Charley’s aunt from Brazil (“where the nuts come from”), a role “Babs” must preserve even when he’s courted by two elderly gentlemen and finally exposed by the real aunt....

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 13th year, continues from Friday through Sunday, October 11 through 13, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $4 for children and adults, but various discounts are available to those who buy four or more tickets, including an unlimited pass for a family of four that can be bought for $100. For more information call 281-9075. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Chicago Theatre Company Gets Its Second Wind After two years of uncertainty, the eight-year-old Chicago Theatre Company is showing signs of coming back to life. Before things began falling apart in late 1990, the CTC, headquartered in a 100-seat thrust stage theater at 500 E. 67th St., was known for mounting feisty productions that attracted a loyal body of theatergoers. Among its most successful shows were the Jeff Award-winning Have You Seen Zandile?...