Trained by Sharon Isbin at the Manhattan School of Music, classical guitarist Paul Bowman is an adroit interpreter of various modern sensibilities–too bad the 20th-century repertoire for his instrument is so limited. For this recital–part of a series of faculty performances at the Sherwood Conservatory of Music–Bowman has compiled a program focusing on New York’s uptown school of composition. Clustered around Columbia University and Bowman’s alma mater, the uptowners include the likes of Elliott Carter and Otto Luening....

Large yellow signs that say Rat-o-Rama ’95 adorn the fence in front of Diane Wheat’s Bucktown bungalow. A lifelike shark protrudes from the second-floor window. More yellow signs scream “Read This!” and direct your attention to large white boards containing poems and facts about rats and sharks. In back of the coach house, facing the alley, an even larger sign proclaims “Better Rats Than Sharks!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Then they heard about the mandatory zero-calorie diet. From a Marshall Field’s release: “According to a recent survey by Mademoiselle magazine, 89 percent of all women have wanted to become a model at some point in their lives.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The emerging information superhighway…has the potential to be the most environmentally destructive technology of the early twenty-first century,” claims Northwestern University political scientist James Snider in the Futurist (March-April), because it might let people live where they want....

For 25 years Felix Shuman has been cultivating his garden near 48th and Cornell, protecting it from drought and flood. But now his garden, like the ones around it, confronts a challenge greater than all of nature’s attacks. “This isn’t someone’s pepper plant,” says Meryl Dann, a leader of the fight to save the gardens. “There are 200 mature trees here and hundreds of different species of birds, flowers, bugs, and plants....

A LETTER TO HARVEY MILK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seventy-seven-year-old Harry Weinberg, a San Francisco widower, takes a creative writing course for the elderly (“to pass the time”) and finds himself confronting, in unexpected places, the past that he is so keen to bury. Given the assignment to write a letter to someone from his past, he rejects the notion of writing to loved ones who died in the camps or even to his wife and instead writes to Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor slain in 1978....

EXTRACTING THE ESSENCE: PAINTINGS BY ESTELLE RICHMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 13 paintings and one drawing in this show span four years, allowing one to see Richman’s growth as an artist as well as the metamorphosis of her technique. Her somber palette–which ranges from black to sepia to gray blue–is an essential component in the work, which evokes a peculiar poignancy. As the show’s title suggests, Richman’s interest lies in merging visual consciousness with subconscious imagery, and these paintings map this murky terrain....

“There are many reasons given for the fan apathy surrounding the Sox this season,” sports columnist Ted Cox writes (September 6). Among the reasons he considered, an amalgam of the fans’ contempt for the club’s current regime of owners, the numbing sense that whatever this is, it ain’t baseball that the joint causes in all but the shallowest of “fans,” and the fans’ memory of how the Sox threatened franchise removal to get the new stadium built at the taxpayers’ expense came nearest the truth....

It takes a touch of genius to sum up Beckett, the gloomiest of modern playwrights, in a laugh. But Jonathan Harris as the preternaturally servile Clov does just that in the first minute of Splinter Group’s heartbreakingly funny Endgame. His laughter, after peering out the window at the desolated earth where he sees “zero, zero, and zero,” expresses all the mournful exaltation that gives Beckett’s relentlessly bleak masterpiece such cataclysmic sublimity....

Artist Chris Peldo was temporarily without a studio and looking for a place to paint when art dealer David Leonardis offered him a sanctuary of sorts for the weekend. Peldo plans to set up shop in Leonardis’s Wicker Park gallery and work almost continuously Friday through Sunday. Visitors are invited to bring items for Peldo to paint on. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re just going to rope off an area and go to town, paint all kinds of stuff,” says Peldo....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We are writing in response to the Guns & Women article in the February 4 issue of the Reader. It was distressing and surprising that the article makes little reference to the fact that nearly half (48 percent) of all gun deaths are suicides and that another 18 percent of gun deaths are friends shooting friends or family members shooting family members....

When he was 12, Edward Thomas-Herrera started having visions. It seems a little shocking to hear such serious musings from the normally mischievous Thomas-Herrera. These days he’s a performance poet with a quick, caustic tongue and a glamorously lowbrow persona, the spiritual love child of Dorothy Parker and Bette Midler. Despite his facility with language, he’s at a bit of a loss when it comes to explaining his prepubescent visions, though a strict Catholic upbringing by a devout Salvadoran mother surely primed the pump....

A broad satirical farce (1992) by Juzo Itami (The Funeral, Tampopo, A Taxing Woman) about the efforts of a luxury hotel in Tokyo to rid itself of yakuza who are using the place as a hangout. These efforts prove ineffectual, thanks to the gangsters’ not-so-gentle art of intimidation, until the hotel hires a lawyer (Nobuku Miyamoto, Itami’s wife and frequent leading lady) who’s well versed in the problems involved and who plans various counterattacks....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last year, Allen Fahden has operated the READundant bookstore in the Nicollet mall in Minneapolis. Though it’s set up like a traditional bookstore, with sections on sports, religion, history, etc, its 5,000-book inventory consists of only one title–Fahden’s own management book Innovation on Demand. Fahden said his store is based on one of his management principles: the use of opposites to generate creative thoughts....

Rock 101 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anthology 2, the second two-CD collection of Beatles archival material, delivers what volume one didn’t: a convincing account of the basis for the band’s utter musical and technological domination of pop music for a key period in the mid-60s and of course its reputation in the years since. It’s the (necessarily incomplete) sound track to Lewisohn’s book, and indeed, he supplies the liner notes....

Captured at Jason’s Pretty Good Home Page Now that you have a unicycle you need to learn how to get on it. The way you mount a unicycle is by placing the unicycle out in front of you with one pedal facing towards your prominent foot. Make sure that the pedal is also below the middle of the tire. Now that the pedals are situated place the seat in your crotch....

This dance is about falling, but nobody would get that but me,” says choreographer Nana Shineflug about her Bach Suites. “It’s one of those deep philosophical things,” she says, mugging as she says “deep” and “philosophical.” “We fall into the world, and the world is filled with problems and difficulties. What you do on the physical plane is get up and try to engage joyfully in the dance of life. You keep falling, but just getting up and trying to reengage is the name of the game....

Hey, at least they don’t cost as much. From a recent press release from the Chicago-based American Dietetic Association: “Healthful food items on a restaurant menu are like the various tools men collect in their garages–nice to have around, but seldom used for home improvements.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m a leftist (and a feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it,” writes physicist Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca (May/June)....

DAVID’S REDHAIRED DEATH Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We don’t discover this right away, however. Kramer’s play is like a puzzle: after slowly and painstakingly connecting a series of dots, one uncovers an integrated image out of what appeared to be chaos. Memory need not proceed linearly or at a uniform rate, and so we watch as Jean desperately lingers in memory over the pleasant details of her introduction to Marilyn, who embodies everything that she longs to be....

Pat Dowell-Cerasoli had the stage to herself in the auditorium of Malcolm X College. Positioned at a microphone, the deputy commissioner of Chicago’s planning department was offering a strategy for designing a federal “empowerment zone” application. An EZ would be a run-down urban area that the federal government would jump-start through a package of tax incentives, waivers, and cash. Time was scarce–it was now May 7, 1994, and the city’s bid had to be received by the U....

Freedy Johnston is a somewhat winsome, somewhat mopey singer-songwriter whose reedy voice and nagging melodic sense combine nicely with an almost uncomfortably tactile songwriting knack. The central thematic device in many of his songs (a proud but eager outsider comes to the big city) has reverberations both biographically (he’s from a tiny town in Kansas and now lives near New York City) and musically (he plays unadorned, folky rock in an age of baroque alternativism)....