At age 62 Alfred Brendel is arguably the most respected and beloved pianist in the generation of performers whose careers took off in the 60s. He gained this distinction, however, partly by default. There were more brilliant technicians and more soulful interpreters than he at the starting gate, but some of them, like Leonard Shure, faded fast, and others, like Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher, are afflicted with a nervous disorder that prevents the use of both hands....

At a time when dogma, denial, and dishonesty make open discussion of racial and ethnic conflicts nearly impossible, Anna Deavere Smith looks America straight in the eye and shows these long-festering problems in all their horrifying complexity. Emulating the techniques of Emile Zola (who took notes on everything he saw, heard, and tasted) and Studs Terkel (who did Zola one better by using a tape recorder), Smith interviews people to create compelling one-woman shows with multiple characters....

SMOG Funny Farm Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there are those artists who, while loath to exploit the lowly catchphrase, would nonetheless like to be noticed and remembered. Some of them have contrived a way to circumvent the problem. Even while they maintain the posture of disinterest and apathy, apparently eschewing the dirty little device, these groups manage to produce simple, catchy songs....

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Richard Crowe has been a professional ghost researcher, storyteller, folklorist, tour guide, and self-styled ghostbuster for more than 20 years. Tonight he’s leading a Chicago Historical Society-sponsored ghost tour by boat. The Chicago Supernatural Cruise leaves the southwest corner of the Michigan Avenue bridge at 9:30 PM and goes to midnight; the route allows Crowe to expatiate on spirits both asea (the site of the Eastland ferry disaster) and on land (ghosts of the city skyline)....

John Williams has scored some of Hollywood’s biggest sellers–from the Star Wars trilogy to E.T. to Jurassic Park. He’s no master of subtle orchestration; rather, he’s a specialist in blockbuster sound, a facile author of the bombastic. A onetime conductor of the U.S. Air Force Band, Williams began his show-biz career as an arranger for Kraft Television Theater, and in the 70s he worked on a string of disaster movies; then, of course, he hooked up with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, furnishing the brass-heavy fanfares for their escapist epics....

Bassist Edgar Meyer, who’s long been fascinated with his instrument’s ability to imitate the human voice, has drawn renewed attention to the least appreciated member in the traditonal orchestral string hierarchy. It helps too that the 34-year-old multifaceted soloist and composer–who teaches at Vanderbilt and was recently named a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center–doesn’t limit himself to classical idioms and can just as readily jam with jazz and bluegrass musicians....

THE GRAFFITI SHOW Getting the unwieldy cans of color to conform to such elaborate visual agendas requires both variously gauged nozzle caps and disciplined maneuvers of wrist and hand, but the resulting complex gradations of hue and line work well in the service of the aggressive, larger-than-life images. The singing color and granular texture make for an improbably beautiful cross between watercolor painting and TV. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“I do things honestly,” the scalper was saying. “Not like this.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I do it fairly,” contended the scalper, who calls himself Mike. To him “fairly” means hiring helpers but depending on their sheer numbers and the luck of the draw to score some tickets. “I just bring a lot of people. I ask my friends too–anyone I can get,” Mike said....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although the statements which are quoted in the article under my name are generally accurate–I was disappointed that hardly any of the statements which I made in support of inclusion during our long interview appeared in the article. The one-sided picture which was drawn from my statements is thus providing an erroneous impression that I, personally, and the organization I represent, the Family Resource Center on Disabilities (FRCD), are opposed to inclusion and the placement of children with disabilities with their nondisabled peers in regular classes....

In the early 1960s alto saxist Jackie McLean put together a group that he felt would catch the spirit of change and the drive for freedom and independence that the political winds were then buffeting around the nation. You can gauge his success from the group’s two Blue Note recordings (One Step Beyond and Destination Out, both on CD): the music bristles with a hard-edged optimism that remains refreshing three decades later, even as it summons up a world of A-line dresses and dashikis....

NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of a new coterie of giddy indie popsters that also includes the Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel transfers Brian Wilson’s obsessive sonic tinkering to the four-track. Ostensibly a one-man band, NMH’s Jeff Mangum treats loopy but catchy melodies redolent of Ray Davies with truly oddball production flourishes on the debut album On Avery Island (Merge)....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the middle of Sotheby’s April auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s estate, Milwaukee lawyer Robert Steuer announced he was searching for an auction house to handle the Jeffrey Dahmer estate (to benefit the families of Dahmer’s 17 victims). Included were such treasures as Dahmer’s refrigerator and freezer, a 57-gallon drum, an 80-quart kettle, four saw blades, a sledgehammer, and chemical-resistant gloves....

Lead Story Delaware prison officials decided in July to allow condemned murderer Nelson Shelton to have a kidney removed at public expense so he can donate the organ to his mother. The state initially refused to pay but relented when Shelton threatened to appeal his sentence, which would cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mollie Brusstar, 48, was convicted in July embezzling the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, where she’d been employed in administration....

In the 70s, when photo-realism first wowed gallery hoppers in New York’s newly vibrant SoHo, the works of Idelle Weber, like those of Richard Estes and Chuck Close, invited such close inspection that people walked up to them with magnifying glasses just to see how something so real could spring from an artist’s palette. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weber, who grew up in Chicago, painted New York scenes then....

Do you like men in skirts? Imagine performance artists and dancers Ames Hall and Ken Thompson of Atlas/Axis as a pair of Catholic schoolgirls run astray who run, jump, leap, and perform hip-hop and Javanese dance wearing skirts, work-shirts, hiking boots, crew socks, shaved heads, and manic expressions. The result is a visual non-sequiter–intriguing, exciting, and mysterious, reminiscent of Pina Bausch and Goat Island as well as those dangerous little girls on their way home from school who hiked up their skirts, lit up cigarettes, and applied an overdose of eye makeup....

Rats never bothered me much. A neighbor where I used to live kept one as a pet–I’d see them out for a walk sometimes on my way to work, the rat snuffling along the sidewalk pulling his smiling master by the leash. Happy together, they even looked alike. A small community of rats used to gather in the garbage bags at the restaurant where I tended bar. I was supposed to put the garbage out at the end of the night, and sometimes I’d do it, other times I’d get a customer to do the job for me....

To the editors: “Jackson also claimed that some children are deliberately labeled inaccurately to justify their transfer from segregated settings into neighborhood schools,” McClory wrote. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, I reported on the individual case of one child whose records were altered for reasons that were “unexplained,” and said school officials were investigating the case. David Jackson Jackson reported that 3,500 disabled pupils had been transferred to neighborhood schools in 1992, with another 1,500 to 2,000 more expected to be relocated this year....

“Happily untainted by the reactionary crowd-control school of urbanism promoted by that pompous con-man, Daniel Burnham, Maxwell Street is virtually the opposite of a ‘mall.’” rejoices the Evanston-based Surrealist Group. “Maxwell Street is more marvelous than the ‘Magnificent Mile’; more educational than the Museum of Science and Industry; more fun than any of the official multi-million-dollar extravaganzas at Grant Park or Soldier Field. The destruction of such a haven, for any reason, would be a tragedy....

“The likelihood is that we’re going to get an information railroad and not an information highway,” Abdul Alkalimat told his audience at the Harold Washington Library last March (Video, May/June). The government, he pointed out, gave railroads public land for free, then let them charge riders and freight shippers. “At a latter stage, based on automobile technology, the government built and continues to maintain the highways we are all free to enter....

Queen Victoria once remarked, with British understatement, “We are not amused.” What was she not amused by? –Mark Terry, Kailua, Hawaii Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Victoria’s comment is said to have been inspired by the Honorable Alexander Grantham (Alick) Yorke, one of her grooms-in-waiting. (A relative described him as an “elderly pansy.” Flower lover, I guess.) The job of a groom-in-waiting, or anyway Alick’s job, was to hang around the castle and be funny....