PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taylor’s jaunty, neatly crafted Arden Court, six men showing off for three admiring ladies, was the curtain raiser. Occasionally the women join their cavaliers, cradled affectionately but not passionately in their arms. Since its 1981 premiere, Arden Court, performed to portions of William Boyce’s symphonies, has delighted audiences with its gentle humor; though not formally balletic in style, it has nevertheless become part of the Joffrey Ballet’s repertory....

By Michael Miner In his recent book, News Values, Fuller writes, “It is always tempting to look at young people’s behavior and project it out in a straight line through their advancing age. Using that methodology you would have said that the Baby Boomers would still be playing with drugs and radical politics.” The Tribune’s publisher was contemplating the slow, steady decline of newspaper readership and a generation of kids with “attention spans that it would be charity to describe as flickering....

A Screaming Catholic Transvestite and life’s reactions to me what blood rituals they may participate in So I put the mask back on this time “It’s hard to remember all the feminine things, to keep everything straight and drive, too,” Maryann says. Sometimes she’ll check into a hotel for the weekend, in order to have the freedom to go shopping as a woman, go to a movie, have a nice dinner–as a woman....

A little more than a month ago, the much ballyhooed improvisational theater troupe Ed opened their late-night run at the Famous Door Theatre with one of the most dreary and depressing fully improvised shows–about a theater having trouble attracting an audience–I’d ever seen. So imagine my surprise when, last Friday night, I saw the same six-member cast (four actors and two musicians), now appearing at Facets Multimedia, create a rich, resonant, very funny hour-long improvisation complete with interesting, three-dimensional characters and an almost linear storyline....

“If you flip the map of Chicago, Grand Boulevard would be where Lincoln Park is,” Harold Lucas says with a smile. He’s worked for nearly two decades as a community organizer in and around the mid-south side, which includes Grand Boulevard, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Over the years he’s been a sort of community development chameleon, focused on the rehabilitation of the neighborhood but constantly reinventing his approach....

Spragga Benz Lucky Star, March 18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Technically, anything played at dance halls can be called dance-hall music, but it’s popularly defined as sampled beats from R & B, reggae, pop, and East Indian tunes over a bass-heavy reggae rhythm with DJs toasting in Jamaican patois. This patois, a blend of English, Spanish, and west African languages, can be hard to understand....

Over the past several years Mississippi Heat has evolved from an earnest but enjoyable revival outfit into a full-fledged contemporary Chicago blues aggregation. Their Delta-to-Chicago sound combines elements of tradition with up-to-date aggression, and they’re savvy enough to feature soloists whose love of that tradition never hinders their enthusiasm for house-rocking boogie. Guitarist James Wheeler honed both his melodic sense and his instincts for soul baring during his stint with Otis Rush; both he and fellow fretman Billy Flynn combine taste with intensity in a way that’s all too rare these days....

Lead Story Russian officials reported that U.S. economist Michael Dasaro, 35, died of a routine heart attack in Moscow in November. However, they acknowledged that robbers had ransacked Dasaro’s apartment either shortly before or shortly after his death. When the body arrived at the home of a family member in Peabody, Massachusetts, later that month, Dasaro’s heart was missing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November the Grand Canyon claimed its seventh death-by-falling victim of 1993....

Quilt–A Musical Celebration Like the quilt, the show has a familiar, homespun feel. It’s an utterly straightforward, almost makeshift evening of theater, with a stream of characters filing past us one or two at a time, primarily to recount memories of a charismatic uncle, a misunderstood son, a longed-for lover. Some seethe with anger–at the person who died too soon, at governmental institutions that betrayed the public trust, at a society all too willing to dismiss people with AIDS....

FACE TO FACE 7/21, METRO Hopped-up melodic punk twaddle from California–done strictly for the kids. Face to Faceless is more like it. GOV’T MULE 7/21, BUDDY GUY’S Castoffs from latter-day lineups of the Dickey Betts Band and the Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule signal a hirsute return to bellowing blues rock. Crammed with extendo guitar jams and howled, overwrought vocals, their eponymous debut goes straight for the jugular of folks still waiting for the next Cream record–or at least some new material from Mountain....

The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, now in its 12th year, runs from Friday, October 6, through Sunday, October 15, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton (except for the opening-night screening at the Chicago Cultural Center). Individual admissions are $4 for children and adults; but various discounts are available to those who purchase four or more tickets, and an unlimited pass for a family of four can be purchased for $100....

Don’t let your laptop fall in there. According to a Chicago firm offering a document shredder, “Unlike desktop shredders, the Kwik Shred machines can destroy staples, paper clips, rubber bands–even computer disks and tapes, off-specification packaging materials and confidential product prototypes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aside from the occasional carnivorous shrub. How to control crime in parks? In a recent press release the International Society of Arboriculture, based in downstate Savoy, quotes one of seven suggestions from a recent study: “Remember, the wholesale removal of vegetation is unnecessary....

Traffic jam just ahead on the superhighway. “Chemical Abstracts took 31 years (1907 to 1937) to publish its first 1 million abstracts,” writes Eli Noam in Science (October 13). “The second million took 18 years; the most recent million took only 1.75 years. Thus, more articles on chemistry have been published in the past 2 years than throughout history before 1900.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Today’s lopsided debate over national policy stems in part from a shortage of liberal and left thinkers who can work full time to develop and sell ideas,” writes David Callahan in the Nation (November 13)....

Young Playwrights Festival And so it is with the Young Playwrights Festival, an exciting academic exercise for students. When I taught a six-week playwriting workshop at Von Steuben High School a few years ago, helping the senior English class develop their submissions for the competition, it was all I could do to keep the kids in their seats when they saw their words acted out in class. I watched young writers truly come to life–especially those who’d suffered years of discouragement from friends and even teachers....

Mayor Daley’s 1993 Chicago city budget struck a major blow against public information in Chicago. The budget called for the closing of the Municipal Reference Library to the public, and the transfer of more than 50,000 documents to the Harold Washington Library. The MRL, located on the tenth floor of City Hall, had for decades been a key mediating institution between community activists, journalists, academics, students, and city government. The library primarily existed for city employees, but at least half its 20,000 yearly visitors came from the outside....

THE UNDERTONES (RYKODISC) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Northern Ireland’s Undertones are a swell case in point, and their recent reissues on Rykodisc make them a convenient subject of study. Formed in 1979, two years after the explosion of punk rock, the Derry quintet exploited punk’s raucous energy and applied it to an unfettered pop sensibility. Their initial record was an independently released four-song EP called Teenage Kicks, and influential BBC deejay John Peel flipped over the title track, making it a staple of his widely heard show....

The short, highly concentrated films of Peter Kubelka have given me some of the most ecstatic experiences I’ve had watching movies. No other filmmaker has realized the idea of cinema as light, shadow, and sound organized in time with more purity and precision. The images in Adebar (1957)–commissioned as an ad for a Vienna cafe–are of couples dancing, seen in stark silhouette. Kubelka creates the film’s strict rhythmic structure by limiting his shot lengths and using only a few fixed multiples of 13 frames; by also cutting between positive and negative images and moving and still shots, he creates in less than two minutes a film as precise as classical music and approaching the solidity of architecture....

The jazz world has chosen to look forward to the next century by recapping significant portions of the current one. That’s OK–as fin de siecle behaviors go, it’s right in line–but most of jazz’s next generation have kept their retrospection far too narrow. Enter Zane Massey. If you had to design a sax player for the 90s, you couldn’t do much better. The son of songwriter/trumpeter Cal Massey, he had plenty of exposure in his formative years to the music of family friends John Coltrane and Lee Morgan; in the 80s, he explored Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theories in the explosive band led by ex-Coleman drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson; and on his new album, Soul of Grand Central (Bart Records), he goes urban-underground, grafting on hip hop beats, raps, and multiple keyboards with a fair amount of success....

3 MAD RITUALS at the Wrigleyside Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Played back-to-back and without intermission in what becomes a very grueling and focused comedy marathon, the three “rituals” are Deconstruction, the Movie, and the reliable Harold, which build slowly to a full head of steam. The first improv method sets up a scene with variations, based on the line of poetry, that can be looted later for laughs....

On Senegalese pop star Baaba Maal’s new album, Firin’ in Fouta (Mango), a slick, voraciously genre-blending effort, the vocalist–second only to Youssou N’Dour in popularity for an artist from his country–travels the world investigating all sorts of divergent styles. The production is unapologetically big, recorded in several studios around the world with lots of guest musicians. Yet for all of the larger-than-life grandeur, the core of the music remains the spiritualism of Maal’s longtime backing band Dande Lenol (Voice of the People) and the leader’s gorgeous soul-searching vocals....