One night in 1979 a couple of 14-year-olds were fishing for suckers in the CB radio waves and hooked a truck driver who didn’t have the brains to shut off or dial away. They called him names like “Jughole” and “Dogpiss” and asked disrespectful questions about “cousins’ clubs,” right up to the moment they heard a loud rumble through the bungalow walls, looked out the bedroom window, and saw an 18-wheeler stopped on the narrow suburban street, idling with its lights on....

Long and languid–and determinedly so–detailed, devoted, and only occasionally dramatic, Ken Burns’s new documentary, Baseball, mimics the very pace and temperament of its chosen subject. It is, at times, somewhat arch in the way its structure apes that of a baseball game: the documentary airs in nine “innings” over the course of two weeks, beginning Sunday night on Channel 11. While each of those innings lasts precisely two hours (with a 30-minute epilogue, the total running time is 18 1/2 hours), and thus violates one of baseball’s most treasured traditions as one of the few sports without a clock, the documentary as a whole and each of its innings revel in that unhurried, deliberate feel unique to the game....

Ball Four is a landmark baseball book, at least in part because it is set in 1969, the year the players’ union first flexed its muscles. The first paragraph of Jim Bouton’s diary has an ominous ring to it now: “Reported to spring camp in Tempe, Arizona, today, six days late. I was on strike. I’m not sure anybody knew it, but I was.” The union threatened a work stoppage during spring training, and the owners–perhaps feeling guilt after having things their way for almost 100 years–threw the players a bone, granting them a few concessions on a pension plan....

I am sending you a copy of this letter I wrote to [San Francisco Chronicle columnist] Herb Caen at the urging of my husband. He says only a man of your intellect and discrimination can truly appreciate all its nuances. –Lisa Wells, Oakland, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a classic all right. You spend three pages kvetching to Herb about a grammatical error in his newspaper and in the process make about ten million mistakes yourself....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t tell me I don’t understand tags because I didn’t have good art appreciation classes. I have. (Unlike the idiot who remarked to coming across a Picasso in the 16th- or 17th-century “stuff.” Any form of intelligent life would know that Picasso was never around those centuries.) And I will admit to seeing graffiti that displays talent....

Vocalist Buddy Ace hails from Texas, and he’s got the suave sophistication one might expect from a Lone Star State bluesman who cites Bobby “Blue” Bland as one of his primary influences. But he’s capable of steamy funk as well as mellow balladeering, and his Old Testament prophet appearance–white suit, flowing mane, regal beard–adds to the genial sense of patriarchal authority his lyrics convey. Ace is known among aficionados for his hard-to-find early recordings on Don Robey’s Houston-based Duke label, but he’s had his glimmers of recognition on the national charts as well: “Nothing in This World Can Hurt Me” (1966), “Hold On (To This Old Fool)” (1967)....

A product of the Hollywood studio system, Andre Previn was a movie arranger long before he joined the classical world as chief batonwielder of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1968. His career since then–from London to Jouston to Pittsburgh–can best be characterized as uneven and enigmatic. As a conductor, he’s apt to give elegant if stolid performances, and the same reticent good taste imbues many of his compositions, which more often than not reveal that he’s still a deft, graceful arranger with a fondness for jazz....

This may be the best of writer-director Atom Egoyan’s slick, Canadian carriage-trade productions (the other two are Speaking Parts and The Adjuster), though it’s also a regression, both formally and thematically, compared to his previous film, Calendar. The central location–a triumph of lush, imaginative set design–is a sort of strip club where young female dancers sit at male customers’ tables and verbally cater to their psychic needs; at the center of this faux-tropical establishment is an odd little house where the club’s pregnant owner hangs out with the jaundiced announcer (Egoyan regulars Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas), voyeuristically overseeing the voyeuristic clientele....

FIBER 94: NEW CRITICAL ATTITUDES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How, you may ask, does a video end up in a fiber-art show? If nothing else it’s a sign that the boundaries between visual-arts media continue to blur. Many of the works in “Fiber 94”–juried by Anne Wilson, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago–could as easily fit into a show of sculpture or installation art....

You may not care for Julio Bocca’s duets with Eleonora Cassano if you’re a ballet puritan–in fact, any kind of puritan at all. Their bastard blend of ballet and tango marries glittering precision with sexual innuendo not customarily found in the ethereal world of ballet: in Dos mundos, the man and woman challenge each other by placing a leg inside the other’s thighs, the woman on pointe. His chest is bare, her legs are....

In last spring’s Interplay production of Lillian, a one-woman show based on Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical writings, playwright William Luce and performer Caitlin Hart not only did justice to Hellman, they captured something essential about her story telling. At the start of the play Lillian admonishes us, “The tales of former children are not to be trusted.” And so we agree to listen to colorful stories about herself, her relatives, and her lover Dashiell Hammett, accepting them not necessarily as truth but as the way Lillian likes to remember things....

Lovers Fragments By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Exile and eroticism go together like New Year’s and hangovers. Away from numbing familiarities the senses reawaken, discovering sublimity in circumstances most people wouldn’t tolerate for five minutes back home. The mold-infested $11-a-night pension with tissue-thin walls and a bed that lists hard to port has an unmistakable Old World charm. The tasteless sponge that passes for bread in every Parisian sidewalk cafe becomes a gustatory sacrament....

I don’t know much about this LA combo, but its recently released eponymous debut is one of the year’s best straight-up rock albums. Bearing a vague resemblance to their labelmates and neighbors Acetone–whose striking debut, Cindy, remains one of 1993’s best-kept secrets–they craft immaculate, often gentle melodies, setting the hushed, dreamy vocals of Ed Ruscha amid swinging rhythms and artful, psychedelic guitar counterpoint and creating an ambience that can jump from calm to manic in seconds....

Lead Story The Toronto Transit Commission voted in February to reinstate a 33-year-old man who’d been fired because he took time off from a rail-repairing job in the middle of the day to have sex with a prostitute in a nearby alley. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Los Angeles Daily News reported in April that the city’s department of building and safety had ordered an adult nightclub to remove its stage, a large shower where nude dancers would cavort for the customers’ enjoyment....

There’s Always Room for Cello Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like many musicians in the postmodern age, Lonberg-Holm dabbles in a cross section of styles–contemporary, classical, jazz, rock, improv. He regards an ad hoc improv session at the Myopic bookstore with as much seriousness as his regular gig in Broken Wire, a quartet with Michael Zerang, Daniel Scanlan, and Jim Baker. Though he never really let himself be restrained by New York’s largely factionalized music scene, Lonberg-Holm praises Chicago’s openness....

Dance Fusion Debra R. Levasseur and Robynne M. Gravenhorst Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Flamenco and belly dance are mirrors to each other–mirrors in which both West and East can see themselves. The music is the clearest tip-off. Tomas de Utrera of Soul & Duende explained at the Bop Shop show that both flamenco and Middle Eastern music are based on rhythmic cycles, such as a cycle of 26 broken down into shorter patterns like 4-3-4-3-4-3-2-3....

The Jam Paul Weller was 15 when he formed the Jam, and for some time to come the outsize emotions of youth would supply both the fuel and the subject matter for his feverish rave-ups. “Life is a drink and you get drunk / When you’re young,” he declared on one of the band’s later anthems. By the time the British power trio landed a contract with Polydor in 1977, Weller was obsessed by the 60s ideal of youth culture as a social and political force, and the Jam’s initial clumsy embrace of the Who’s mod mythology–power chords, two-tone shoes, Union Jacks draped over their amps–sprang from Weller’s sincere ambition to unite his own g-g-generation against England’s fossilized class system....

Debbie Fleming Caffery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Caffery’s first images, done in the early 70s, were in-focus portraits of subjects in rural settings that emphasized character through poses and expressions. The earliest photo in this show of 31 images, now on view at Catherine Edelman Gallery, Praying, 1976, shows a subject Caffery photographed often: Polly, an elderly African American woman. Here she stands in a field facing us, looking a bit downward and to the side, her hands raised beside her head....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bus took us to Neenah Avenue, where it met with the Irving Park trolley line at the entrance to the old Dunning state hospital. (Many a parent of that era cautioned their children never to talk to the people who reached through the iron bar fencing.) Via the Irving streetcar (sometimes with transfers to a north- or southbound car or the “L”) we could reach the remotest areas of town....

“Why was I born with a song in my heart?” asks Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s 1931 tune “Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing.” “On most every occasion / With a little persuasion / I find that a ballad’s about to start.” Andrea Marcovicci certainly has a thing for ballads–and why not? They fit her warm, vibrant alto to a T. On her Elba Records release Just Kern, she proves she’s especially well suited to the songs the master melodist wrote with a variety of lyricists, including Oscar Hammerstein, Ira Gershwin, P....