To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your Michael Miner (“Mad About Mariotti”) should wake up and stop kissing that phoney baloney Royko’s ass [Hot Type, June 25]. Talk about journalistic thievery. In the November 9, 1992, number of the New Yorker, in the “Department of Modest Proposals,” writer Jonathan Rubenstein suggested that the government ship all American prisoners to the emptied gulags in Russia along with small per capita fees to pay for their meals....

Hugh Livingston, a cellist based at the University of California at San Diego, is one of those traditionally trained, well-traveled young musicians who’ve taken up the cause of contemporary music and art with a vengeance. So it seems only natural that his solo recital should be part of the concert series that complements the Renaissance Society’s Rodney Graham exhibit; both installations in the show by the Vancouver-based conceptual artist “interpolate” famous musical scores....

4 X 4: Four Views, Four Roads It can’t be easy for an artist who’s achieved critical and commercial success to suddenly change direction. The pressure to repeat past successes must be difficult to resist. Rodolfo Abularach, originally from Guatemala but now living in New York, made his reputation years ago with works treating the human eye as an object of obsessive observation, filled with many meanings. For Abularach, “The eye is the most expressive part of the body…the window of being....

Lead Story According to a recently filed lawsuit, Utah state senator Sara Eubank, a women’s rights advocate, fired her employee Jacqueline Hedberg after alleging that Hedberg’s productivity had dropped drastically. The principal cause of Hedberg’s loss of productivity was that she hadn’t been able to recover emotionally from being raped in December 1992. Said a representative of the Utah National Organization for Women, “[The case] is a tough one for us....

Lollapalooza A friend of mine likes to tell the story of the time he went to see Black Sabbath at the Winnebago County Fairgrounds in Pecatonica, a town just west of Rockford. It rained, and the concert was moved indoors. No one in his party cared, because they were all tripping on acid. After the show, though, buzz-kill: Their cars were stuck in the muddy lot, and each one had to be towed....

Just what type of “laissez-faire liberal” is Ted Cox (The Sports Section, November 24)? Why can’t he identify a single lesson laissez-faire liberalism teaches us about the National Football League? Even a “namby-pamby Great Society” sympathizer like myself can see them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, NFL teams have faced and continue to face actual and threatened competition. The most notable examples were the All American Football Conference in the late 1940s and the American Football League of the 1960s....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, FL: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While some fat women are happy being heavy, many, many more are not. Being approached by a guy who’s into you for being fat, a guy attracted to the very thing you’ve been made to feel unattractive about, can be very traumatic. Fat people suffer for being fat–they’re ridiculed and made to feel grotesque and unlovable....

Sun-Times’s No-Nonsense New Editors Consider the paper’s two new editors–chosen by Radler and Barbara Amiel, the London-based wife of Hollinger Inc. chairman Conrad Black and the Hollinger papers’ editorial troubleshooter. Wade, 49, has been foreign-affairs editor of Hollinger’s Daily Telegraph in London since 1986. An Australian, he’s been stationed in Washington, and he’s run the Telegraph’s Beijing and Moscow bureaus. Green, 54, covered wars in Vietnam and the Middle East for the old Chicago Daily News, and before joining the Sun-Times in 1990 he managed the midwest bureau of the Los Angeles Times....

Despite its self-deprecating camp and convoluted plot, there is an appealing honesty to Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 1/2. The director plays Bruce, an over-the-hill porn star trying to restart his flagging career, in part by acting in a documentary about him by an up-and-coming lesbian filmmaker. We see footage from his porno loops and scenes from the film in progress and hear comments on Bruce’s own “unfinished” epic, “Super 8 1/2....

TENORES DE ONIFERI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The music of the Italian island Sardinia has remained largely untouched by modern European influences. As a result it’s kept as one of its greatest cultural treasures a striking vocal music going back 4,000 to 5,000 years–cantos a tenores. Sardinia’s Tenores de Oniferi carry on the tradition. In doing so they employ some of the polyphonic techniques of Tibetan monk chants and Tuvan throat singing while using a three-part guttural harmony–which, due to natural vibrations in the larynx, conveys resonant sounds suggesting far more than three voices....

No more bedroom suburbs. In 1990, for the first time, the census found that more people commute into Du Page County to work than commute out of it (Transportation Facts, June). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The aroma of pork you smell is not coming from weekend barbecues,” warns NEIS News (July/August), newsletter of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service. “It’s coming from the closing days of the Congressional session before summer break....

Bronze Productions, at TurnAround Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The six African American women in Cheryl Katherine-Wash’s play begin as easily recognizable types, but then the playwright supposedly strips away the layers of artifice. The first act is light comedy, taking us to a dinner party being given by fast-track lawyer Tomika. Here we meet Tomika’s sassy sitcom maid and her old friends from the ‘hood: a leather-jacketed, foulmouthed tough; a gospel-preaching community activist; a back-to-the-roots Afrocentrist; and a flaky artiste....

THE ROAD AND THE RIVER Studio 108 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t know. And “I don’t know’ is all I need to know,” Christopher confides to us, positioning himself downstage after freezing the play’s action. “The atmosphere is dense with unanswered questions . . . Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, or, worse yet, self- absorbed.” But he is self-absorbed, for what we call mourning the dead is really mourning our own loss, and the adolescent self-indulgence with which he and Sheridan wear their weeds is as annoying as the cutesy break-down-the-fourth-wall theatrical devices that threaten to turn The Road and the River into yet another exercise in recycled avant-garde gimmickry....

What do the Queen’s Guards or the Black Watch or whatever really wear under those kilts? And if the answer is nothing, like my boss claims, would the desire to follow such pure tradition really result in inspections at the lineup by sergeants or officers with mirrors attached to their shoes to ensure compliance? I could buy the naked bit, but am sure the inspections part (can you just picture a foot thrust between a guard’s legs?...

What’s a runcible spoon? In subsequent years Lear applied the principles of runcibility in other fields: “He has gone to fish, for Aunt Jobiska’s Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!” (1877). “His body is perfectly spherical, / He weareth a runcible hat” (1888). “What a runcible goose you are!” (1895). “We shall presently all be dead, / On this ancient runcible wall” (1895). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Satisfaction with the early results of runcilation led Lear and his admirers to overlook the fact that there were many un-answered questions about the runciatory process, e....

Measure for Measure Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As it happens, both shows are set in 1894. That’s the time director Barbara Gaines has chosen for her staging of Shakespeare’s 1604 study of sexual politics; it’s also the year Oscar Wilde wrote his famous satire of upper-class courtship. On the eve of a new century, this was a world of elegance masking debauchery, of impossibly rigid codes of conduct meant to restrain unstoppable eros, of class consciousness posturing as moral propriety....

Almost Blue, Next Theatre Company. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An homage to the noir tradition, Keith Reddin’s semithriller began life as a teleplay–a fact that sadly still shows. Though Almost Blue is energetically performed by a well-cast quartet in Steve Pickering’s taut and evocative staging for Next Theatre, the play remains a formulaic actors’ exercise, soaked in atmosphere but dramatically unsatisfying despite its supposedly staggering ending....

Foxfire With Hedy Burress, Angelina Jolie, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Shimizu, Sarah Rosenberg, and Peter Facinelli. With Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, George Corraface, and Cliff Robertson. With Kevin Costner, Rene Russo, Cheech Marin, and Don Johnson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can think of only one bit of Tin Cup that’s beautiful, imaginative, and different, and it lasts for only a few seconds: a speech delivered by Russo, before her character is transformed into the standard-issue cheerleader, is broken into fragments by jump cuts....

To watch Awadagin Pratt at the keyboard is to witness contradiction in motion. Built like a halfback, the 26-year-old pianist is capable of both tremendous volume and the tenderest of touches. He hunches over the piano with the oblivious abandon of Stevie Wonder, but he’s a classical performer to the core–a Naumburg prizewinner with diplomas in piano, violin, and conducting from the Peabody Conservatory. About the only reservation I have about this rising star–who grew up in Normal, where his father taught school–is his predilection for large-scale popular showpieces where he can dazzle rather than enlighten; there’s a danger he may end up another Van Cliburn, forever stuck in the groove of a flashy, limited repertoire....

Visiting the psych ward at Northwestern Hospital is like a dream. You step up to the big steel bank-vault door and ring the bell. You state your business and they let you in and the hatch thuds shut behind you. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jimmy’s in a back room talking to the shrink. I wait in the common area. Nice carpet and a couch in front of a color TV....