Since it went on the air in the 1970s, Loyola University’s 100-watt WLUW (88.7 FM) has been a Top 40 music station, the type where student DJs train to become professional broadcasters. Then three years ago Loyola’s communications department voted to devote mornings to community radio. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Lakeshore Community Media Workshop puts students in touch with community groups and sends them out to dig up stories in the neighborhoods of Uptown, Andersonville, Rogers Park, Edgewater, and Devon Avenue....

For nearly an hour Apollo, all 67 pounds of him, has been running on a specially made dog treadmill in a blood-stained garage on the south side. His owner, a man I’ll call Michael, says I can’t pet him, and I assure him I have no intention of doing so. Apollo’s been observing my every movement and growling at me for some time. “Don’t take it personally,” Michael says. “If you were a girl he’d be licking you all over....

There’s something sad about the increasingly bitter relationship between Rogers Park and Jewel Food Stores. Jewel needs customers and Rogers Park’s got them. Rogers Park needs groceries and Jewel’s got them. But in August Jewel closed the neighborhood’s last remaining full-service grocery store, a 19,000-square-foot Jewel at 1425 W. Morse. And ever since, residents, activists, and politicians have been pleading with Jewel to bring one back. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Money Trouble at Wisdom Bridge Payroll checks for some of the actors employed in Wisdom Bridge Theatre’s most recent production, Kabuki Medea, bounced in the weeks before the show closed on December 12. Tad Currie, regional director of the Actors’ Equity, indicated that when the problem first arose, the cast member designated as union representative quickly contacted Equity officials. When the union subsequently contacted producing director Jeffrey Ortmann about the problem, Ortmann reportedly said the checks bounced because Wisdom Bridge didn’t receive funds it had expected from a television taping of Kabuki Medea that ultimately fell through....

Lead Stories Crime California-style: In August in Toronto two jewelry-store robbers made a successful getaway after they stole a car in front of the store and drove it to their getaway car–parked a half block away. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In March the police department in Nagasaki, Japan, began an investigation of several officers who allegedly helped a suspect get a gun while in custody....

The season opener for North Park College’s chamber music series is a thoughtful tribute to Schubert, featuring some of the composer’s miniature gems and a memorial by John Harbison. The sublime, forlorn scena The Shepherd on the Rock–performed by soprano Sunny Joy Langton, clarinetist Dileep Gangolli, and pianist Elizabeth Buccheri–is a chestnut, but how often do we get to hear the Allegro in A Minor for Piano Duet, op. 144? Or the Introduction and Variations for Flute and Piano on “Ihr Blumlein Alle,” op....

Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg H.L. Mencken thought Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg was Western civilization’s single greatest work of art. English critic Ernest Newman described it as “the greatest of all comedies in music.” And Georg Solti in his introductory note to last weekend’s concert performances said that he thought it “the most complete and most brilliantly conceived opera.” With all this against it, how does this tale of the foibles and virtues of 16th-century bourgeois Nuremberg by a dead white European male continue to speak more truly to the heart of the modern operagoer than The Death of Klinghoffer or Satyagraha?...

Rewarding Ethival Journalism–Whatever That Is If a newspaper risks a trash tort for the sake of a good story that there’s no other way to get–could that be the highest form of ethics? I asked Bukro. I was thinking of CBS’s recent decision to scrub a 60 Minutes interview with a whistleblowing tobacco industry insider who’d signed a confidentiality agreement with Brown & Williamson. Although the network’s decision may have been prudent, no one was praising CBS for exercising principle above and beyond....

The following two-act play might read like a recently (and unfortunately) unearthed work by Samuel Beckett, but it is actually a direct transcript (allowing for the vagaries of microcassette recording) of White Sox manager Terry Bevington’s pre- and post-game media conferences a week ago last Saturday. Allow us to play the Russell Baker role and set the stage. The interviews took place after a win the previous night and after a loss that night, both against the Baltimore Orioles, the team closest behind the Sox in the race for the wild-card spot in the American League playoffs....

TOTAL CHAOS, BATTALION OF SAINTS A.D. 5/26, HEMENSWAY CHURCH A flashback to hardcore circa 1984 and proof that not all kids these days are gobbling ecstasy at illegal raves. Total Chaos is an Ontario, California, combo whose members sport electric Mohawks that would’ve made the Exploited blush. With their relentless buzz-saw throttle and cliched anarchist exhortations they dredge up memories of better-forgotten bands like GBH. San Diego’s Battalion of Saints were actually playing plenty of hardcore matinees back in 1984, and their old output has been recently collected on a CD called Death R Us (Taang)....

On State Street, that great street, they whitewash things they’re not afraid to say on Broadway… From River North News (December 22): “The pedway level [of Marshall Field’s] includes… the Hinky Dink Lounge and Bar. Michael ‘Hinky Dink’ Kenna was the 1st Ward boss and committeeman who had a big impact on the daily life of the area around the turn of the century.” Translation: For a fee, he protected the whorehouses from the cops....

THE ICE FISHING PLAY Organic Theater Company Thankfully the rest of us are allowed to live in a more or less blissful state of ignorance. Which may be one reason so many plays–from Oedipus Rex to King Lear to Krapp’s Last Tape–revolve around people being forced to admit some nasty truth about themselves. There’s something fascinating about watching others do onstage what we do so reluctantly in our own private lives....

By Ted Cox Switching the narration from first-person is not as significant as it first may seem. In writing about himself, Whitman sought a universal connection with his readers–an inherent, unspoken “we”–and Jackson simply makes that overt in a way that, for instance, we might. Yet any reader would have to admit that the line takes on a subtly different meaning when applied to a team embarking on the playoffs after a record-breaking regular season....

Why can’t you rent CDs in the U.S.? I’ve heard it’s illegal and that a case challenging this is winding its way through the courts. In Japan it is legal, there are something like 6,000 rental outlets, and per capita blank tape sales run twice the U.S. total, with original CD sales much lower than in the U.S. What nefarious group allows videos to be rented, but not CDs? Where is the logic in law in all this?...

By Michael Miner “I don’t do interviews,” he said. And what a year it was. First Bloomington and then Normal was split by a proposed gay-rights ordinance. The Pantagraph–which despite its motto “Independent in everything, neutral in nothing” knows when not to stick its head out (in 1994 it withheld as “religiously offensive for a family newspaper” a Doonesbury encounter between gay Mark Slackmeyer and a Christian fundamentalist)–was by Frazier and McCulley’s partisan measure honorably covering the passionate debate....

JULY Friday 29 According to the folks who’ve organized the First Annual Underground Film Festival, an underground film is one made by “the truly independent filmmaker–the kind who lives off beans and rice and hides from his landlord for months in order to see his vision on film or video.” (They probably meant to say his or her vision.) When pressed for specifics, they’ll note that to qualify for the fest, which runs through Sunday at the Bismarck Hotel, 171 W....

Dear Bill Wyman: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suggest you reevaluate, at the very least, Infidels, Oh Mercy and disc three of The Bootleg Series. 1983 was as prolific a year for Dylan as any since 1967, and his work in many ways more compelling. Far from having to turn to external sources to bemoan a “world gone wrong,” the tracks on Infidels and the seven or so that eventually turned up on The Bootleg Series are the work of a man with a profound (albeit disturbing) vision....

We would like to thank the Reader and Tori Marlan for the portrait of one woman’s struggles to put her life together following prison [“Sins of the Mother,” November 8]. Denise is typical of women in prison in that she has been physically and sexually abused and has a history of drug abuse. She was fortunate to have gotten a place in Gateway: 80 percent of female inmates in Illinois have substance-abuse histories, but only 7 percent can be served by addiction-treatment programs in prison, where drugs are readily available....

HYSTERICS Du Rand is undeniably a first-rate writer. Her concise, eloquent story begins with her childhood as an Afrikaner in rural South Africa, then proceeds through her marriage to an American businessman and eventual career as an actress and drama therapist. Though her sparse prose makes a few sections a bit sketchy, especially the story of her introduction to American culture, its simplicity makes some moments stand out in high relief....

Music From China Music From China, a group of five Chinese musicians from Beijing, Guangdong province, and Shanghai who met and began performing in New York City, features men and women playing both folk and classical pieces, solo and in various ensembles. Their instruments are as wonderfully strange as they are similar to some Western instruments: two-string fiddles of different ranges (erhu, gaohu, and zhongu), raspy double-reeded pipes (houguan), zithers more wobbly and tinkly in their voicing than the wildest Teutonic equivalent (the 21-string zheng and bridgeless seven-string qin), and the closest thing to a Western instrument, a four-stringed lute (pipa)....