XSight! Performance Group The opener, Cycle of Unveiling, is at one end of the current XSight! spectrum, the end focused on angels, love, death, and transcendence. Five of the dancers–Carpenter, Martha Donovan, Jeffery, Kim, and Julia Rhoads–are nude except for strategic bits of gauzy cloth. But it’s amazing what a little bit of cheesecloth can do: I’ve never seen nudity onstage as offhand and natural as this. Where complete nudity is often an affront, a challenge (think of Bill T....

Mono Man Dave Crider recently characterized his band this way: “You’re not going to see any of us changing the face of music. Someone else can be in charge of that.” What with about five million bands in the U.S., all earnestly trying to capture their generation’s zeitgeist and come up with the Next Cool Sound, all providing grist for the mills of rock critics who discourse ad nauseam about the “significance” of their porous lyrical musings, it’s certainly refreshing to encounter the Monomen....

“Tired of having the same hairdo as every other ghetto bitch?” didn’t sound like an article you’d read in the newspaper. It sounded like something you’d hear on a rap tape. But none of us had ever read anything like it–so raw, so smart, written by a black public high school student for an audience of his peers. There were 90,000 publications listed in the Standard Periodical Directory last year–and many more were unlisted....

New Wardens at the Royal George The Royal George Theatre, which has some of the off-Loop theater scene’s finest facilities and one of its most checkered financial histories, is poised to enter a new era under the just-cemented joint ownership of Perkins Theatres and the increasingly prominent and powerful New York-based organization Jujamcyn Theaters. Though he would not specify a purchase price (believed to be in the $1.75-million range), Robert Perkins, head of Perkins Theatres, says he and Jujamcyn will equally share control of the property....

Lead Story In February artist Lars Kraemmer of Vancouver, British Columbia, ended a seven-week performance piece that consisted of him living in a box built using five of his paintings that enclosed a five-foot-by-five foot space. Kraemmer called the piece Retreat and said he saw dazzling colors in the total darkness, which inspired him to develop a new theory of color. Said Kraemmer, “One thing it has done is put me at ease....

Lead Story Terry John Wilson, 53, was charged with murder in Houston in September when the man he had hired to rough up his wife’s suitor accidentally killed him. Wilson told police he had only wanted the suitor, who was a bowling partner of the Wilsons’, to suffer broken arms and legs so that he could no longer bowl, thus becoming less attractive to Mrs. Wilson. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By Michael Miner “Among the teenage population of the city,” he replied, “I think it carries some truth.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The journalism adviser at another suburban Saint Louis school reacted less inanely to the decision. “I can’t think of any better program for developing critical thinking than journalism,” said Homer Hall of Kirkwood High (my old school, as it happens). “But if that’s taken away from students, and all high school journalism is about is reporting on the prom king and queen, we’ve lost the point of what education is all about....

The calls usually come at the dinner hour, as my family and I are knifing into our chicken. “Bob, your representative, just called me,” I inform the supervisor. “Like many consumers I don’t like to receive telemarketing calls. Our only recourse is to complain about them.” If a hapless telemarketer phones Bulmash, he masquerades as “the perfect telesucker,” saying something like: “Oh, hey, the Policemen’s Association. Fantastic! As a matter of fact, my aunt just had a problem with a prowler in the neighborhood....

This starts out as a piece of yuppie consumerist pornography calculated to get audiences drooling. Then it suddenly and purposefully turns into an enjoyable, nimble thriller that manages to sustain interest for its full running time of a little over two and a half hours. It’s the first Sydney Pollack movie I’ve ever liked. A lot of what makes it work is a well-constructed script by David Rabe, Robert Towne, and David Rayfiel, rather freely adapted from the best-selling John Grisham novel, and an excellent cast that Pollack (as producer-director) gets the most out of–including, among others, Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Gary Busey, Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Wilford Brimley, and Paul Sorvino....

You can figure out a lot about the differences between our culture and French culture by comparing two current series of low-budget TV features about teenagers. The French series, “Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age” (“All the Boys and Girls of Their Age”), produced by the French “cultural” channel Arte, has yielded half a dozen features, most of them first-rate. The idea is for the filmmaker to make a fictionalized version of his or her own teenage years set in the appropriate period (different in each film) and to include at least one party scene in which pop songs of that era are used....

Her hair is bouffed, her lips pursed, bright red. Her face is full and powdery; she’s wearing an ankle-length brown skirt and a big-shouldered cowboy shirt with brown trim. She’s pacing up and down the halls of the Fine Arts Building humming “Crazy,” and she wants to be Patsy Cline. In the lobby, another Patsy is practicing. “I’m back in ba-bee’s arms…” echoes down the hall. The tall Patsy heads for a pay phone and places a collect call to Tennessee....

Benefit concert for EDDIE HARRIS with RAMSEY LEWIS, WILlie PICKENS, wilbur campbell, and others I never tire of singing the praises of Chicago-born saxophone innovator Eddie Harris: of his stupefyingly original tenor style, filled with intrepid octave leaps and feathery grace notes; of his Ellingtonian ability to blend majestic virtuosity with street-smart imagery; of the underrated accuracy he brings to his improvised melodies, his phrasing, and even his focused, narrow tone....

Dueling Tappers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What bothers Alexander is that almost no Chicago tappers–not even himself–are included on the bill. “Almost all the money going into this festival is going back to New York and it’s making those of us in the Chicago tap community look really bad,” he says. With the exception of Sarah Petronio, who is a tap instructor at the Dance Center and also the Chicago on Tap curator, all the other featured artists in the celebration are based in other cities....

Editor Under Siege The sting operation that led to Smith’s arrest is described in the criminal complaint the FBI filed in federal court. It involved two undercover woman agents and a cooperating federal prisoner. The complaint alleges that shortly before the FBI broke in “Johnny L. Smith” passed two counterfeit cashier’s checks totaling $300,000 to one of the agents. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was stressful for Leavell, too....

GRANT PARK SYMPHONY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pianist Stephen Hough is one of those unassuming, learned soloists who slowly compile impressive track records without a lot of hype. At 35, the Englishman boasts an extensive discography that includes the complete solo keyboard works of Benjamin Britten and a pair of Hummel concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra. In the studio and in concert Hough is fond of exploring the obscure corners of the classical repertoire; true to form, he will perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto no....

I can cry only if I let myself cry, which comes perilously close to saying I cry only if I make myself do it. So when I woke up in the dead of last night crying, I felt shame. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As if this weren’t bad enough, I soon discovered I couldn’t make the adding machine work. Our store had one of those old-fashioned mechanical adding machines that very reliably totaled things on a roll, but now, in the way of dreams, the paper somehow twisted up and got stuck....

For four years Mary Andrews sent her son to neighborhood public grade schools, and it was almost always a disaster. In most cases, enrollment in schools like Vaughn is voluntary; placement is determined according to something called an IEP (individual education program). “An IEP is written in conjunction with the student, the parents, and the student’s teachers, counselors, and psychologists,” says Jay Mulberry, Vaughn’s principal. “The point is to determine what kind of a program would best meet that student’s needs....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wyman has taken it upon himself to critique my writing on a regular basis. He could have kept his left of center, PC image intact if he had done a thorough job and included the works of all the music journalists in town. Instead, he has singled me out for his smug, arrogant treatment. He must not realize that he comes across not only as petty, but as sexist and racist....

Why on earth does the Reader give Peter Margasak his own column in Section Three? This local loser is the epitome of the smart aleck rock critic. Incapable of creating anything of worth or note, he has to attack and tear down other people’s work with such zeal it’s nauseating. What a small and inconsequential human being. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never read a column more consistently and unabashedly vicious and mean-spirited....

Everything Is Wrong, the first full album from techno superstar Moby, is a brilliant and monstrous affair. In keeping with his various causes–he’s vegetarian, an up-front environmentalist, and Christian–his shows and recorded tracks are produced with an adamantine rigor: the utter clarity of the conception and the execution demand respect. And indeed at its pulsating best Everything Is Wrong is disco music as lethal as it’s ever been constructed: you revel in the power of songs like “Everytime You Touch Me” and “Feeling So Real,” their lethal assault given some humanity by the keening vocals of diva Mimi Goese....