The Risk of Being Cruel Sex not only sells, it guarantees an amazing rate of return when used to lure gay men into the theater. Over the past several years, the number of Chicago nudie shows gussied up as slice-of-life gay comedies has reached nearly epidemic proportions. It’s hard to think of a recent play about gay men produced locally that didn’t require abundant trouser dropping. Hell, it’s become Bailiwick’s bread and butter....

Lead Story Among the grants awarded this year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences–which administers the 1940 legacy left by Torsten Amund Amundsson to fund homosexuality studies–was about $6,300 to examine whether homosexual behavior in fruit flies is genetic in origin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In February scientists reported from Malaysia in the journal Nature that they’d found a male mammal, the Dayak fruit bat, that lactates....

NUMBERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New band, some old ideas, and a fresh approach: there’s definitely strength in Numbers. Bassist Ken Haebich’s quintet harks back to a time before “fusion” was a dirty word and recaptures some of the brittle, glittering energy that characterized the first electric-jazz bands. They accomplish this not so much with synths and electronics–though Numbers do feature doses of both–as with rhythm and dues (as in experience)....

“This is the story of a man,” says Jim Lasko as he brings a small hand puppet from behind his back. It’s Captain Ahab, the monomaniacal sea captain, with wild King Lear hair. “And a whale.” Enter a mean little sperm whale with pale white skin, a vicious stare, and a toothy jaw that opens and shuts with a satisfying chomp. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For five years Thomas has been working on and off to adapt Melville’s novel, staging several workshop productions along the way–on North Avenue beach, in Grant Park, at the Rhino Fest....

When Joanna Brown and Mark Freitas booked Toronto’s infamous queer punk band Fifth Column at the now-defunct Czar Bar in November of 1992, they had no idea they were embarking on a long-term project. As Brown concedes, “A big reason we started doing it was just to entertain ourselves. I just wanted to go somewhere where I could be with a bunch of queers and still listen to punk rock.”...

Alan Hirsch leans forward across his cluttered desk. “We had one woman from Florida call who said she had an increased ability to smell,” he says. “We said, ‘Yeah, right,’ but she said ‘No really, I can smell a fire miles away.’ So we told her to come here . . . and she was right! Her ability to smell was more than a hundred thousand times better than normal. Her ability to smell was about a hundred times better than your dog’s....

The custom Illinois plates on the white 1992 Toyota minivan read SURFUN 1, while the license plate holder proclaims STOKED. What a wannabe! How could a Prairie State vehicle even try to duplicate any semblance of coastal coolness? Where does the driver surf? Lake Michigan? I had heard rumors, echoes really, that there are people who surf Lake Michigan. Like some mythological tale passed down by tribal elders, this seemed a heroic yarn conjured up to bring hope to landlocked midwesterners like myself....

The eleventh annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, runs from Friday, March 24, through Monday, April 3. Film and video screenings will be at the Three Penny, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division; at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson; at the International Cinema Museum, 319 W....

Mary Zimmerman is gaining renown for her visually dazzling, beguilingly clever theater adaptations of literary classics, and she’s shown a knack for seamlessly incorporating musical elements. Like her mentor Frank Galati, she ought to be a natural for opera, and her first crack at it is her staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for the Chicago Opera Theater, which has a well-earned reputation as one of the country’s best presenters of Mozart in English....

Like Hemingway and Mailer, David Mamet loves to swagger in print, showing off his expertise in all the “manly” arts–gunplay, poker, swaggering in print. These testosterone-laden pronouncements, like the trendy poses he affects for book-jacket photographs, are always good for x number of inches of controversy in the press. But beneath the goatee, beret, and strategically placed earring–the look he sports on the back of his new novel–is an artist capable of creating rich and complex characters, even in a minor chamber work like The Woods....

Jack Pierson: Traveling Show “Everybody is a narcissist,” Jack Pierson told an interviewer. “That’s why people can respond to my work.” His photograph Palm Springs, one of 37 photos, drawings, and installations now on view at the Museum of Contemporary art, addresses this matter more directly than artists typically do: it’s a frontal nude shot of Pierson, with a flowering bougainvillea in the background. But he hasn’t taken any special efforts to make himself look good–or bad....

For his 1992 debut feature, Basque director Julio Medem has appropriated David Lynch’s larky visuals and eerie sound track to tell the saga of a multigenerational family feud. Spanning the six decades between two of modern Spain’s bloody civil wars–one in 1875 and the other in the 1930s–the narrative is a soap operatic procession of macho rivalries, lust, hatred, adultery, and incest. But Medem, who was trained as a surgeon and worked briefly as a film critic, isn’t all that interested in melodrama....

As WBEZ settles into its spanking new home on Navy Pier, with a press conference next week featuring Mayor Daley, WBEZ watchers are batting around two theories about the public radio station’s future: No one doubts that the news and jazz station needed to update its home. “WBEZ is one step above a homeless shelter as a radio facility,” says one station insider. Not surprising, considering its 47-year history as a creature of the Chicago Board of Education....

Like the ethnomusically minded central European composers he admires, Bright Sheng deftly remolds into western European frameworks folk elements from his native land. Many of the tunes he now uses as building materials were collected when he lived in the northwestern provinces of China during the Cultural Revolution. When Sheng finds an emotional context for his experiments, as he did with the orchestral tearjerker Lacerations, the effect is both striking and refreshing; even when he doesn’t, his work rises above tone-painting chinoiserie....

An avid champion of new works and younger composers, Chicago Pro Musica is always on the lookout for emerging local talents who can tailor pieces to the group’s flexible instrumentation. At this recital two such compositions receive their first performances: Gyula Fekete’s Morocco and Lawrence Rapchak’s Troika. Fekete, a Hungarian emigre who’s studying with William Karlias at Northwestern, has come up with a six-minute musical “game”–the title refers to an Eastern European version of pickup sticks–in which layers of sounds pile up on one another....

By a cruel twist of fate, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s major work, made in 1988, is finally receiving its Chicago theatrical premiere only a few days after his death at the age of 54. Ten separate films, each running 50-odd minutes and set mainly around two facing high-rises in Warsaw, are built around a contemporary reflection on the Ten Commandments–specifically, an inquiry into what breaking each of them in today’s world might mean....

DQE (for Dairy Queen Empire) started out as the after-school project of some misfit teenagers who wanted to vent spleen at a cruel world. They could barely play their instruments and used the crudest recording technology; what set them apart from the home-taping legions were singer-guitarist Grace Braun’s songs. Rock and roll has cultivated an illusion of reckless abandon since Elvis Presley first told his band to get “real, real gone,” and you can’t get any further out than Braun....

For a long time the official state tree of Illinois was “the native oak.” Purists have argued that there is no such tree, that we have many native oaks, and that if our state is going to honor one we ought to designate it properly by both genus and species. Realists have responded that getting the genus right is about as much as we can expect from the Illinois legislature....

The Golden Apple In Not Since Carrie, his chronicle of Broadway’s legendary flops, Ken Mandelbaum calls The Golden Apple “perhaps the most neglected masterwork of the American musical theatre.” He’s only half right. Jerome Moross and John Latouche’s musical comedy/folk opera, which humorously resets Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to 1900s America, is no masterpiece. But it is surely neglected. A critical success in its 1954 off-Broadway premiere, the show fared poorly when transferred to Broadway later that year....

Joe Morris Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s not enough for guitarist Joe Morris to have one of the most original approaches to the jazz trio in contemporary music. As his first solo album, the recently released No Vertigo (Leo), attests, he’s hell-bent on keeping each facet of his playing (trio, solo, quartet, etc) distinct. Though his playing on 1993’s terrific trio recording Symbolic Gesture used single-note lines to unfold a rich lyricism with a pulsing groove, his solo conception is altogether different....