Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Six people have been chosen for the American team for the World Championship of Hairstyling, which is scheduled for next summer in Washington, D.C. (In all, 200,000 hairstylists will attend the event.) The teams compete in such categories as “business hair,” “nighttime social hair,” and “progressive hair” as well as in a technical hairstyling event. The hairdressers march in an Olympics-style opening ceremony, and after each event the flag of the winner’s country is raised and its national anthem played....

Lead Story A Russian parliamentary committee announced in November that the country could not yet comply with the world’s ozone-protecting chlorofluorocarbon ban treaty (which took effect in January 1996). Russian scientists proposed an alternative, however: a ten-year, $100 billion program in which 30 to 50 satellites would bombard the atmosphere with lasers to stimulate production of ozone, thus compensating for the Russian CFCs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Therisa Frasure, 22, and a 16-year-old accomplice were indicted in July for murdering an elderly woman in Cincinnati....

Lead Story In December the Canadian mining company Inco Ltd., in Sudbury, Ontario, informed 58 female secretaries (many in their 40s and 50s) that they had three weeks to decide whether to accept layoffs or report for training classes in mining. Said an Inco official, “Mining is not as physically demanding as it once was.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Officials in Marion County, South Carolina, finally agreed in February to change the name of a lake next to the Great Pee Dee River, in the southern part of the county....

There’s something both whimsical and dead serious about Bob Eisen, something daunting and elusive that makes anything you say about him bound to be wrong. He won’t let me tell you much about his new piece, Performance by Bob Eisen Revisited, which he’s calling “part performance art, part ritual, part environmental theater.” But that’s less a matter of hating to be pinned down than of wanting to surprise us. And if art can be defined as whatever makes us see things anew, this work promises to fill the bill....

Scenes From My Love Life, at the Theatre Building. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dispatches from San Francisco’s sexual front, Scenes From My Love Life depicts gay singles and couples in well-worn situations and crises. We eavesdrop on Jerker-like sex addicts who lie about their bodies to trigger phone sex or set up blind dates. Vignettes depict the drill-like routines of young hopefuls dressing up (or down) for a night at the bars (accompanied by “You’re So Vain”), a man’s agony over a misplaced personal ad, various self-defeating pickups and sexual strutting, and sudden flashes of AIDS paranoia....

It seems a lot of people–maybe even all of us to some degree–choose what music to listen to not on the basis of what it actually sounds like, but by how well it reinforces a desired self-image. Many who crave to be seen as urbane, sophisticated jazz aficionados, for instance, haven’t likely given Johnny Cash a fair listen. And there are plenty of tattoed rock-and-rollers who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to the CSO at Orchestra Hall–even though they’d probably enjoy the music much more than those affluent suburbanites who yawn in the expensive seats, struggling to conceal boredom....

How do “ear candles” work? Recently my hearing became impaired, and I was advised that my ears were impacted with wax. A friend recommended that the wax could be removed if I stuck a candle in my ear and lighted the other end. To humor her, I accompanied her to a homeopathic-remedy shop. Ear candles were prominently displayed. An ear candle is a hollow paper cone impregnated with ordinary candle wax....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » President Clinton’s Health Care Proposals to target tobacco users, again, to pay for the cost of national health care, is also way off base. The need to stop the waste and fraud in our current Health Care/Insurance system should be the major concern, not punishing adults who choose to use tobacco. Tobacco usage does not cause STDs, broken bones, AIDS, pregnancy, mental disorders; in short, it does not cause all the health problems, so should not be made to pay for all of them....

Magnetic Fields Ocean Beach Rock ‘n’ roll’s raucous bellow is louder than ever. In the few years since Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became a nationwide hit, aggressive guitar rock has become stupendously popular. Less talented but equally noisy bands like Green Day and the Offspring are selling records by the millions. Media giants have set up radio formats across the country just to blare the latest bombast by Bush or the next nugatory nugget by Stone Temple Pilots....

“I guess I need more blood on the banana,” says cartoonist Nicole Hollander. She’s inspecting one of the tiny plastic murder weapons she’s assembled in an art piece made out of an old set of printer’s drawers. Its title, The Case of the Errant Playboy, is painted in handwriting familiar to readers of her syndicated comic strip, Sylvia. She seems open to the scenario: “You know, that could happen. It could be an accidental death....

Whenever the winter weather gets to be unbearable, I put on a recording of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise. Curiously, these songs describing the lost leg of life’s journey can lift the gloom; their poetry and humanity have a way of nudging the listener to ponder and savor the small mysteries of life. When sung by a master baritone–Hans Hotter, Hermann Prey, or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau–the 24 songs, all using texts by the minor German romantic poet Wilhelm Moller, become existential declarations that gradually and subtly gather emotional force....

Christoph Eschenbach, Christian Tetzlaff, Tabea Zimmerman, and Heinrich Schiff Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like James Levine, his predecessor at Ravinia, maestro Christoph Eschenbach is also an ace chamber pianist who likes to nurture upstart talents. In the honored tradition of conductor mentors, he’s collected a number of proteges around him, and two of them are featured in this recital. The German-born violist Tabea Zimmerman, though only 30, has already garnered coveted prizes and recording contracts in Europe, where she’s highly sought after for chamber collaborations by the likes of Gidon Kremer and Heinz Holliger; her fellow countryman Christian Tetzlaff is probably the best-known violinist under 40 not trained in the former Soviet Union....

They say the restaurant business is tough, and it is. For every new eatery that gets glowing reviews and has tightly packed tables on Saturday night, another one sinks into oblivion. Yet there’s always someone crazy enough or passionate enough to tempt the odds. Including Wendy Gilbert, who recently opened the Savoy Truffle in West Town. The sounds of Afro pop are wafting through the Savoy Truffle, and Gilbert, who likes to dance to salsa music in her spare time, pivots in her sandals on her way to the stove in the kitchen....

“Are press photographers to be reduced to little more than fleshy bipods?” wonders MIT prof William J. Mitchell (pictured at left) in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, his recent book on the implications of digital photo manipulation, that computer wizardry that permits pictures full of lies to look as real as photographs. In his article “When Is Seeing Believing?” published in last February’s Scientific American, Mitchell presented two digitally tampered-with variants on a news photo showing George Bush and Margaret Thatcher strolling through a garden....

GRISMORE/SCEA/SHORT/SHULTZ PROJECT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That handle won’t win any prizes for creativity, but to those familiar with the individuals named, it tells the story–and whets the appetite. Guitarist Grismore (Steve) and saxophonist Scea (Paul) colead their own quintet, which has released one quite good album–imaginatively textured and full of surprises–and plans another. They also appeared last summer at the Bop Shop in one of the year’s live-performance highlights....

Annette Messager Annette Messager, a French artist of international repute whose first solo Chicago exhibit now occupies several rooms at the Art Institute, makes self-contradictory works that transgress the established boundaries between object and photograph, reality and representation, high art and mass culture, art and life. Hers is an uncannily obsessive art–she knits garments for dead birds; she writes the same words again and again on the wall. It’s also frequently creepy....

Now that the word “jazz” has lost the opprobrium it carried in the 60s and 70s, everyone wants a piece of it, from dance bands to new-age pianists to singers trying to prop up their careers by basking in the tradition of Billie, Ella, and Sarah. So the Kansas City vocalist Karrin Allyson, making her Chicago debut this weekend, could conceivably get lost in this fast shuffle of jazz wannabes–that is, unless you’ve ever heard her....

This masterful and extremely moving feature by Gianni Amelio (Open Doors, Stolen Children) is a powerful piece of storytelling that recalls some of the best Italian neorealist films. It depicts the adventures of an Italian con artist (Enrico Lo Verso) trying to set up a fake corporation in postcommunist Albania in order to get his hands on state subsidies. With his business partner, he digs up a traumatized 70-year-old former political prisoner to serve as the phony president of his phony company, but the poor creature–whose memory, like Albania’s links with the outside world, seems to have frozen a half century earlier–keeps wandering away....

Lead Story Voter decisions: Friendsville, Maryland, mayor Spencer Schlosnagle was returned to office in February, though he’d been convicted a week before of indecent exposure and had four other such charges pending. Hialeah, Florida, voters elected Raul Martinez mayor in November, though he was awaiting sentencing on federal extortion charges; in 1971 Hialeah voted in as mayor a recently convicted felon. And Baldwin, Georgia, voters returned ex-mayor Tommy Lee Barrett to office in November, though in 1991 he’d faced theft and forgery charges and under a plea bargain was forced to resign and to promise never to run for mayor again....

Richard Davies Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Moles were a wiggy Australian pop band that released one brilliantly addled album, 1992’s Untune the Sky, and an even stranger single before running aground. Moles main man Richard Davies left London, where the group had briefly relocated while searching for success, for Boston, making one last record with the Moles moniker–though 1994’s Instinct was more an uneven solo record than a group effort....