It was strange to see a seminar on “Generation X: Media Myth or New Reality?” listed in the catalog for this year’s Folio: Midwest show, a cracklingly dry four-day conference at the Sheraton that purports to teach magazine professionals how to run magazines. In light of the seminar’s description–“It’s 41 billion [sic] strong and spending over $200 billion annually. Here’s how to get your share of the 18-28 Generation X market”–it was stranger still to see the Baffler’s Tom Frank listed as a panelist....

THE END OF THE ROAD In his brilliant staging of Barth’s work, director Paul Edwards has grasped the idea that Jacob’s inactivity is in fact the central action of the play. Jacob’s very passivity leads him into a situation where he must finally take action, and the results are devastating. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Edwards emphasizes the theme of Barth’s story by framing the entire production in inaction, with Jacob as its center....

Now that tenor saxist Joe Henderson has attained household-name status–at least in jazz households–one wonders if his contemporary Dewey Redman can lag all that far behind. Henderson’s late-breaking popularity, well-deserved as it may be, stems in large part from his affiliation with a major record label; but Redman has gained no little attention for fathering a spectacular young tenor star (Joshua Redman), and if that serves to turn some heads to dad’s unique sound and sinuous style, who’ll complain?...

It takes a long time for Father Jerry Bleem to answer the bell. It rings somewhere deep in the empty building, a long walk from the friary door. Saint Paschal’s, an Oak Brook school that became a home for 90 retired Franciscans, is soon to be sold to the Du Page County Forest Preserve District. Only Father Bleem and four other brothers live here now, rattling around in its vastness, tending to its needs until the order finally shucks it off....

Sandra Dawson Lying nude on a dark slab, his hands resting behind his head, he looks like a man sleeping, except that his eyes are open. The bed seems to float in a tan sea of splotches, with nearby streaks and incisions echoing its form, enclosing it. Outside this cocoon, confusion reigns. The uneven tan ground, interrupted by red smears and crosslike marks, seems to represent the uncontrollable world of dreams, placing the man on the brink of a voyage into the unknown....

APRIL Randolph Street Gallery is presenting two nights of sound experimentation organized by Steve Clark and Margaret Goddard, who, like all the other artists involved, are students at the Art Institute. Heard Things kicks off tonight with a “fantasy documentary” by Nancy Andrews that uses songs, video, film, and go-go dancing to tell a story about a girl raised by squirrels. A work-in-progress by Louise McKissick shares the bill. Tomorrow night is Tommy Eddy’s Almost Heaven, a “multisensory ritual” that features bird sounds, bells, and tribal vocalizations, and a collaborative piece from Clark and Nancy Andrews that experiments with the violin and the human voice....

Friday 10/4 – Thursday 10/10 In his new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, Harvard professor, sociologist, and former University of Chicago faculty member William Julius Wilson examines what happens when blue-collar jobs leave the city and middle-class residents desert urban communities for the suburbs. Wilson, whom Time named one of America’s 25 most influential people, will discuss his findings tonight at 7 at Breasted Hall in the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, 1155 E....

FEBRUARY Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer charts the swirling media overkill that obscured the dark tale of Wuornos, that rarest of all criminal oddities, a female serial killer. (She admitted killing seven men.) The film shows tonight at 8 and Sunday at 7 at Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division. Admission is $5, $2.50 for members. Call 384-5533 for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Chris Knox is the grand old man of New Zealand’s independent music scene. In the late 70s, he sang in Toy Love, the kiwi counterpart of the Sex Pistols, and as half of the Tall Dwarfs (since 1982) he has pioneered a low-tech recording aesthetic that still distinguishes the antipodean underground. He also engineered the earliest recordings by pop sensations the Chills, the Verlaines, and the Clean, is an accomplished cartoonist and painter, and has released four solo albums in New Zealand....

In wine country some years begin with routine weather conditions that suggest an ordinary crop. Then late in the season a perfect confluence of sunshine and rain brings a special magic to the vineyards. So too may things change on the political landscape. No one noticed when the former tree trimmer switched from couture by J.C. Penney to wearing $3,000 cashmere suits, started driving a big Beamer, and blimped up to 300 pounds–signs he wasn’t merely making wise investments with the spare change from his aldermanic salary....

ELIZABETH COYNE: INTO THE SPACES WE BREATHE This juxtaposition of masklike faces and patterns suggests that Coyne’s central subject is the way one’s experience–of nature, of thoughts, of dreams–affects, even determines, the self. The faces, often with little more than slits for eyes and a few curved lines for the mouth, serve as metaphoric mirrors that reflect their surroundings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was moved by the wonderfully complex relationships–contrasts, tensions, but also connections–between the clearly delineated visages and the more varied, lyrically beautiful surrounds....

Naming your group after Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Players takes some chutzpah, especially when you’re offering a vehicle that’s not even worthy of Orson Bean. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taking his cue from David Ives’s largely applauded collection of vignettes, All in the Timing, Vincent Bruckert strings together a series of short, incomplete pieces, Faces of Farce, that showcase different aspects of twisted, emotionally empty life in the late 20th century....

CHANCE DANCE FEST Eisen achieves his effects by stripping the choreography down to its essentials–rhythm, form, energy–and manipulating their cousins: time, space, and light. Actually, it’s by not manipulating time and light that he creates some wondrous effects. For example: the lights are off as the audience enters Link’s Hall. Eisen likes the lingering twilights of August, the way the light filters through the windows and reflects off the polished hardwood floor....

In a small conference room on the 34th floor of the old Prudential Building on East Randolph, four architects huddle around a table strewn with drawings, sketches, and photographs. Before them is their firm’s evolving plan for a 22-story office building to be constructed in Santiago, Chile. In four weeks Loebl Schlossman & Hackl’s design will be presented to the client, along with four competing proposals. Senior partner David Marks asks if the base of the crown atop the building–a huge decorative wedge the architects refer to as an “inverted potato chip”–might hold some of the air-conditioning equipment....

Richard Strauss’s incidental music for Moliere’s play Le bourgeois gentilhomme has a convoluted history. The project was first proposed to him in 1911 by his frequent librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who wanted to modernize the Baroque comedy about the pretensions of the nouveau riche for director Max Reinhardt to stage. Strauss, then fresh from the success of Der Rosenkavalier and at the height of his creative powers, also agreed to contribute a miniature opera in place of the ballet in Moliere’s original....

THE DIRTY PICTURE MAN Hanging Bog Theatre Company at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his one-act The Dirty Picture Man Mark Medoff has fallen victim to the “make your play socially relevant” syndrome, though his writing shows more promise than nearly anything seen on prime time. He creates the intriguingly banal character Stephen Ryder, a nearly featureless, achingly well intentioned schlepp who holds forth on such topics as the intricacies of sweeping a floor....

A Book of Verse, a Cup of Joe, and Thou Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Observers view the new additions at Waterstone’s as a major departure from its previously announced sales philosophy. Notes Fred Karr, manager of the Borders Books & Music store in Oak Brook: “I had gotten the impression that all they did was sell books.” Waterstone’s executives insist the changes are the result of a recent market survey in which an overwhelming 84 percent of respondents suggested Waterstone’s should add music....

BILL HENDERSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the native Chicagoan Bill Henderson started singing at Stelzer’s Lounge on the south side–sometimes sharing the stage with the young pianist Ramsey Lewis–he must have answered a few modern-jazz prayers. Hip and savvy, unencumbered by excessive angst or showy virtuosity, Henderson sang in a clear, luminous voice; like his hard-bop jazz contemporaries, he could weave gospel roots into a down-home soul bag, most notably on his recording of Horace Silver’s “Senor Blues” in 1958 and on songs like “Moanin’” and “Sleepy” (now available on the CD Complete Vee-Jay Recordings)....

Friday 11 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crime and Punishment is the theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, which will examine the current fixation with all things illicit. It begins at 4 this afternoon with journalist and historian Tim Pat Coogan, a noted authority on the Irish Republican Army, who will draw a distinction between Terrorists and Freedom Fighters in a lecture at DePaul’s Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E....

Recently I was waiting in line at Starbucks behind a couple holding hands and whispering playfully to one another. The young man stepped up to the counter to place their order while his partner took their leather book bags and found a seat on one of the metal stools near the window. Then she bellowed the order in a singsong voice, to another employee standing only four feet behind her waiting to make the drink, “Grande cappuccino over i-ice!...