Susan Peterson Twentieth-century city dwellers have stopped trying to answer a question that was a major preoccupation of 19th-century thinkers: How should humanity’s relationship to the natural world be conceived? Ralph Waldo Emerson and his cohorts argued that man’s intelligence is primary and that natural history proceeds from that, while the proponents of natural philosophy suggested the opposite–that nature was the foundation and source through which intelligence could be examined. But both ideas depend on an unbreakable connection between man and the natural world in which neither is subsumed or contained by the other....

Progenitors of England’s rap scene as part of the Wild Bunch back in the mid-80s and more recently movers in the trip-hop movement, Massive Attack are a musical collective bursting with ideas. More than just another batch of tunes, their second album, Protection (Virgin), masterfully dissects pop music. The group’s core members–3-D, Mushroom, and Daddy G–are conceptualists who spend more time evolving particular approaches than they do behind instruments. A dizzying, remarkably smooth melange, Massive Attack’s music draws liberally from reggae, hip-hop, soul, ambient, and other obscure dance musics; a wide variety of vocalists and instrumentalists cater to the needs of any given song....

This recital, which opens the fifth season of Oak Park’s well-received Concerts Under the Dome chamber series, felicitously pairs a seasoned veteran with a quartet of emerging talents noted for their interpretive acumen and enthusiastic playing. Menahem Pressler, the distinguished pianist whose career stretches back to the late 40s and who’s achieved wide renown as a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, performs Schumann and Brahms with panache and bold dashes of romantic yearning....

Navy Pier’s Private Practice Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pier authority then decided that the best way to deal with the parking problem was to make it somebody else’s headache. Right away parking companies started lining up to take advantage of the lucrative nuisance, and Devonna says the field of candidates was narrowed to four firms after open bidding. Standard Parking eventually won the contract, and one of its first moves was to sharply increase parking fees....

Mr. Wyman, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wish you would enlighten us, your readers, with more information on the Harsh, Contrary, and Macho Chicago Underground Music Scene that you always talk about in your column. Who are these bands? They sound neato, except for their naughty propensity for always bitching about those artists more talented and popular than they are! I hear that the Harsh, Contrary, and Macho Chicago Underground Music Scene has weekly meetings where they burn copies of Spin magazine, prank call their enemies’ record labels, and wring their hands while attempting to create new gossip about that cute little Liz girl....

Whatever you may think about flying saucers, they seem quite real in the paintings of Ken Grimes. White lines against a black background form words or cute extraterrestrials. In the large What Doesn’t the Gov’t. Want Us to Know . . . , white block letters at the top cite a “UFO survey presented to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in July 1960.” Below are 63 little flying saucers, drawn, Grimes says, from a sheet the committee published summarizing various photos of UFOs....

“I don’t know if America is ready for a blind girl who isn’t a goody-two-shoes,” warns Diane Starin in an early scene from this hour-and-a-half docu-bio. Out of Sight (1993) belongs to the new wave of PBS-supported documentaries that matter-of-factly chronicle the everyday life of the handicapped, warts and all. Starin, who lost her eyesight to cancer as an infant, is a thirtysomething horsewoman living in northern California. Fiercely independent and outspoken, she candidly confides to a girlfriend (and the camera) her sexual yearnings, financial worries, and domestic squabbles....

Escape From Paradise Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Escape From Paradise, written and performed by a woman best known as an actor in the television series I’ll Fly Away, is an ironic, ambitious new play–in general an evening of skillfully performed poetic theater. Though the narrative describes a ritual journey, it’s rarely abstract or literary, driven as it is by Taylor’s athletic energy. Squatting, clutching her belly, crawling, leaping, crouching under a table, Taylor moves around the stage as if memory has made time into a physical space that can be crossed as decisively and absolutely as an ocean....

Space rock, once reviled, is newly ascendant: witness the popularity of Stereolab’s Moog-dominated pop, the rise of ambient house music, and the grudging critical respect recently accorded seminal space rockers Hawkwind. The Hyde Park combo Sabalon Glitz puts Chicago back on the galactic musical map. (Sun Ra’s Arkestra, based here in the 50s, was an early exponent of the genre.) Ufonic, Sabalon Glitz’s fine debut CD, evokes an orbital ambience with its bubbling Moog synthesizers and droning guitars, but in concert their music takes on a harder edge; singer Carla Bruce’s hoarse incantations have a bracing earthiness that helps the band keep one foot on the ground even when their improvisational jams achieve meltdown intensity....

Larger Than Life With Bill Murray, Janeane Garofalo, Matthew McConaughey, Keith David, Pat Hingle, Jeremy Piven, Lois Smith, Anita Gillette, and Linda Fiorentino. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Are you still suffering from postelection malaise? I’ve just gotten back from a couple of weeks in Australia, where voting is compulsory, and for all the complaints I heard about the downsizing of government services and ugly efforts to renege on aboriginal land rights and change immigration policies, the political atmosphere seemed decidedly less alienated and despairing than it does here....

BRISE-GLACE TORTOISE If you’re following closely, you’ll find repeated references to dub reggae in reviews of both When in Vanitas . . . and Tortoise. Surface characteristics do give the two records a dub veneer: unorthodox mixing, curious sounds, phase shifting, deep-in-the-pocket grooves, denaturalized echo, sudden ruptures in pulse/background relationships, and an overall sense of studio artifice. When Tortoise performed live at HotHouse in August, they played dub during the break, confirming the Jamaican influence....

Columbia College’s Department of Film and Video presents its first annual African Film Festival, “Visions of Africa Through African Eyes,” on Friday and Saturday, April 21 and 22. Screenings will be at the college’s Hokin Center, 623 S. Wabash, and Ferguson Theater, 600 S. Michigan; admission is free. For further information call 663-1600, ext. 287, or 663-1124. Ta Dona Souleymane Cisse’s extraordinarily beautiful and mesmerizing fantasy (also known as Yeelen) is set in the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) long before it was invaded by Morocco in the 16th century....

Dear Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wicker Park, as a neighborhood, is not a fixed entity. Rather, it is, like all neighborhoods, a spatial entity produced by the ongoing activities of a number of different people over a number of years. Furthermore, it means different things to different people: to readers of Rolling Stone magazine who live in far-off cities and suburbs it is a music “scene”; to artists and middle-class newcomers it is a cheap place to live and make a home; for longtime residents it is home and an affordable place to live; and for real estate brokers, appraisers, assessors, and investors it is a market....

Caps, Needles Theatre Company, at Stage Left Theatre. Now that Bleacher Bums has taught even non-sports aficionados how to behave at ballparks, it’s no surprise that the audience on one side of the Stage Left space was heckling the other side before Caps even started. But you won’t encounter that kind of rude behavior in this series of monologues on the subject of America’s Favorite Pastime written and performed by Dan Nelson, with direction, technical effects, and live a cappella music by Jacki Rutter....

It’s like all the other junk that comes in the mail, but a bit less . . . self-evident. I can’t just throw it away without opening it, the way I can the credit card offers (I already have three Visa cards, I don’t know why), the cable-TV pitches, the “emergency appeals” from charities and political groups. It might be a packet covered in black cellophane with only my name and address showing....

DOGTOWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their gift for creating dozens of vivid characters in the span of two hours, the Dogs deserve better than Stephen Serpas’s collection of overwritten, unsurprising, unreal urban fantasies. Collected under the title Dogtown, his ten tales (and prologue) leave no city-life cliche unevoked. We meet the heartless drug dealer, the nerdy bag boy, the bullying store manager, the sexually ravenous housewife, the lovable, goofy bartender, and various colorful, goofy blue-collar types in the seedy but homey neighborhood drinking establishment with a quaint name, Rich’s First One Today....

All’s Well That Ends Well Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one would argue that All’s Well That Ends Well is major-league Shakespeare when it comes to richness of language; its quirky surges of poignance and hilarity are to be found more between the lines than in them. Happily, that’s where the focus of this Goodman production lies. Though in the past I’ve found director Mary Zimmerman inclined to substitute attitude for feeling, here she’s assembled a group of actors whose emotional expressiveness and idiosyncratic approaches to their roles amply make up for occasional technical weaknesses....

When I was a kid the reading that most absorbed me was the “Drama in Real Life” article that appeared every month in Reader’s Digest. Campers attacked by grizzly bears, cars plunging off bridges, grotesque tractor accidents–every month a new heart-pounding adventure, a few minutes’ worth of you-are-there adrenaline jolts. When the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, few doubted that its intent was noble. Human activities were imperiling the continued existence of many animal and plant species, and a law to protect them seemed a good idea....

Spring has begun to push winter aside, although the signs are still very obscure. Two weeks ago, when the windchill hit 40 below, a few northern harriers passed through on their early migration, and an early canvasback duck was sighted at the Chicago Botanic Garden. A week ago a large flock of common mergansers was seen on Lake Calumet. We see three species of these big fish-eating ducks around Chicago, and common mergansers are our usual winter birds....

Dear Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jae-Ha Kim plays the racism and sexism trump cards when she derides Bill Wyman’s attacks on her writing [Letters, May 12]. These disingenuous and too easily invoked broadsides weaken an otherwise compelling letter. Say what you will about Bill, but his commitment to covering artists of all genders and races outstrips that of any local critic except Jonathan Rosenbaum....