Lead Story In Winnipeg, Manitoba, in February, Andrew Hofer, 26, gave his brother’s name when police asked for identification. Hofer, who was trying to evade the police because he’d failed to pay a fine, didn’t know that a warrant for more serious charges was outstanding on his brother. Said Hofer’s lawyer, “This is the only time . . . I’ve heard of a person giving the police the name of somebody who’s in more trouble than they are....

NOT SO EPIC BRECHT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That sound you hear is Bertolt Brecht scrambling frantically around in his coffin. Not necessarily to defend himself from playwright Brian Edwards’s depiction of him as a ranting shit unrelieved by human virtue–by all accounts Brecht was and didn’t care who knew it. No, it’s this Off the Street Theatre production that Brecht would be more apt to despise....

Santaru Stephens is brushing sunshine yellow paint on a rough brick wall at Clybourn and Division. Shadows are forming across his mural on this crisp fall day, and he’s pulled the hood of his paint-speckled sweatshirt over his head to keep warm. He looks vulnerable standing alone on the narrow sidewalk with cars and trucks streaming behind him as they take shortcuts through the Cabrini-Green neighborhood. In the first panel a family watches television in a cozy living room, the daughter nestled in her father’s lap and the son lying on the floor....

Rock and roll has been around long enough for us to see that it’s as susceptible to the cyclical movement of fashion as any other element of pop culture. Discomania evolved into the recent disinterment of bell-bottoms and eight-track tapes and the nostalgic Dazed and Confused. Now scary TV ads for the “Totally 80s” CD compilation herald the next wave. The circular motion of rock has created other, subtler ripples in the roiling stream of popular music, and caught in one of the eddies is, coincidentally, a boy named Eddie....

At first glance Seattle-based performance artist David Schmader is doing what countless other monologuists across the country do these days: telling painful autobiographical stories to total strangers and calling it art. Schmader’s stories detail his experiences as a gay man in America–his first sexual encounters, crushes on pop stars, bathhouse liaisons, the games he plays to “pass” in straight society, that sort of thing. And he does it very well: he’s so open and likable you want him to reveal more....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Mr. Hoover. A pleasure”–pauses for a photograph with group. “Kids, this is Mr. Hoover,” a man says to his grandchildren no less. A woman shakes his hand and wishes him “Happy New Year.” I paused and said who am I reading about here–then it dawned upon me that I was reading about a convicted, cold-blooded, gangbanging murderer who elected to be a functional illiterate until the age of 22 and cofounded a political organization with another man who has been charged in the rape and murder of a woman in 1993, and a teacher of young children in this political organization was convicted of murder in 1976 and served 16 years in prison while his common-law wife heads another organization called “Save the Children” while he has done all that he could in destroying them....

It’s night, and the first floor of the building is dark and deserted. But as you make your way up the stairs, the pounding of Native American drums begins to echo through the hallways and the faint smell of turpentine enters the air. On the third floor the drums get louder, the turpentine scent stronger. Dim bulbs in a large room reveal a thin, wiry man with long gray hair and a narrow, lined face kneeling on the floor with a paintbrush....

The pennant race began unusually early this summer, which is only fitting for the craziest, juiciest, most hectic, most heroic (read homeric), and potentially most absurd baseball season in memory. Last weekend the Cleveland Indians came to Comiskey Park percentage points ahead of the White Sox in the American League Central Division. It was only the first series after the all-star break, but already the games would prompt charges of watered-down base paths, doctored baseballs, and corked bats....

World renowned as one of the preeminent vanguard filmmakers and videographers, Tony Conrad created the sound track for Jack Smith’s notorious Flaming Creatures, and his own Flicker is an acknowledged classic of experimental film. But until recently Conrad’s reputation in the musical world rested on one extremely rare record: Outside the Dream Syndicate. This brilliant recording, made 24 years ago and finally reissued last year by the important new Table of the Elements label, documented a one-shot meeting between Conrad and German experimental-rock group Faust....

One dose of Wayne Hancock’s piercing nasal voice should hook you. On his superb debut album, Thunderstorms and Neon Signs (Dejadisc), the rough-and-tumble Texan, who first attracted attention with his role in Jo Carol Pierce’s music-theater piece Chippy, invokes the spirit of old-time honky-tonk, particularly the liquor-cured wail of Hank Williams, right down to the parched yodels. On paper, Hancock and his crack ensemble might seem like unabashed purists, stuck in a musical era they never lived through as they eschew drums in favor of percussive, thumping upright bass....

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 1992 afterword to the two-volume edition of his “Vietnam Plays,” David Rabe writes: “Since the end of the [Vietnam] war the level of violence accepted as routine in this society has risen steadily, and there are times when I think that the war was the turning point, the launch pad that fired us into this lethal drift…....

An example of the new multiculturalist wave in French cinema, this second feature directed by Karim Dridi follows the travails of Ismael, a young Parisian of Tunisian parentage, as he and his rebellious teenage brother Mouloud adjust to life in Marseilles. Though Dridi, who also wrote the screenplay, disclaims any autobiographical element, his knowing and loving portrayal of the working-class immigrant subculture seems to be drawn from his own experience growing up as the son of a Tunisian father and a French mother....

AUGUST If you’re one of those people who think a salon is where you go to read People with cotton balls stuck between your toes, you probably wouldn’t have the best of times at Urban Art Retreat’s Gertrude Stein Salon, where artists and friends get together to munch on refreshments and talk about the isolation of contemporary artists. The first of two August salons will take place tonight at the gallery, 1510 W....

Friday 4 For the African-American Leadership Forum’s Gubernatorial Candidates Night, Roland Burris, James Gierach, Dawn Clark Netsch, and Cook County Board prez Richard Phelan have agreed to appear and be grilled–and Governor Jim Edgar hasn’t. Unless he changes his mind, forum president James Exum comments pointedly, the guv risks being viewed as “insensitive to the needs of the community.” The free forum starts at 5 PM at the auditorium of the Kenwood Academy, 5015 S....

“The Sun of Latin Music,” pianist Eddie Palmieri had already made his name in salsa circles by the time he established a combo called La Perfecta in 1961; after that the fame came mixed with notoriety, and it spread far beyond the barrios of his native New York. With that band Palmieri began to create music using the traditions of both Puerto Rico and Cuba, weakening the fire wall that stood between those cultures; at the same time his own piano playing began to display the rich, dark complexity he heard in the fervid jazz piano of Bud Powell (and later McCoy Tyner)....

The scene: Rudi’s, the French restaurant and wine bar on Ashland, late on a weekday evening. Among the few diners, a couple, getting on in years, amiably celebrates the man’s birthday with what seems to be a smattering of adult children, in-laws, and an elderly mother. As the evening wanes, the restaurant nearly empties. Finally a heavyset man, his expressive face slightly covered by a lumpy hat, sits down to exchange greetings....

As a young baritone saxophonist in the Kansas City area, Kevin Mahogany eventually grew frustrated with his limitations as an improviser: he could hear some great solos inside his head, but he couldn’t always get them to his fingers and through the horn. He could sing them, though–which convinced him to try another avenue of musical expression. Mahogany is certainly not the first musician to shed his instrument and emerge as a vocalist....

“I’ve been going to Africa since 1968, and every place I’ve gone there are masks, usually for religious symbolism,” says art historian Margaret Burroughs. Burroughs made two ceramic masks in the South Side Community Art Center’s current exhibit Mask of the Spirit, which displays masks created by 14 local artists influenced by African art. Burrough’s masks resemble authentic tribal craft work, with gaping eyes and expressive mouths. “I did those in the 50s or 60s, but they look contemporary,” she says....

SKELETON Will Kern’s Skeleton is the kind of play that made Chicago theater famous. Like David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, it’s a Chicago love story, the tale of Annie, a deeply damaged woman, and Edge, the man who loves her desperately. They might be the boy and girl next door: they’re young, educated, unemployed, and losing hope. They walk by the lake, and the beach is covered with dead smelt....

Scandalously neglected and all but forgotten in recent years, Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson (1924-1978), perhaps the first world-class Argentinean director, enjoyed a certain vogue in this country in the early 60s–despite the stiff competition from France, Italy, and Japan in offering personal and stylistically expressive cinema. Among his films distributed in that era, La casa del angel (1957)–also known back then as End of Innocence–is almost certainly the most impressive, a gothic tale of female adolescence with an arresting and original flashback structure and a baroque visual style worthy at times of Orson Welles (especially in his Magnificent Ambersons mode)....