BRIAN LYNCH QUARTET with MELVIN RHYNE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scan the jazz mags and you’ll find ad after article espousing the flashy talents of the next young trumpet phenom. Though you probably won’t find much on Brian Lynch–a little older and a lot paler than the current fashion dictates–he can outplay the lot of them. Lynch plays a Monette trumpet (the same obliquely angled, matte-finished, Flash Gordon-styled horn used by Wynton Marsalis) to shape his poised, sinewy, and slightly sweetened tone....

Friday 18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The goal of the Blues University lecture series, organizers say, “is to expand the understanding of blues music as the foundation of American musical expression and further the appreciation of blues as an art form unique to the African American experience, putting it in context within a continuum of musical expression.” Blues U. 101, a four-week multimedia introduction to the genre, begins today at the Newberry Library, 60 W....

On October 1 a 13-year-old girl walking along a residential street in the far-west-side neighborhood of Austin was abducted at gunpoint, dragged into an abandoned building, and raped. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Using as their guide programs already established at Mount Sinai and Michael Reese hospitals, the activists would like local hospitals to maintain a cadre of trained volunteers who could offer rape victims emergency-room counseling....

A friend–I’ll call him Alex–called to warn me before I read it. At the time I didn’t understand the call to be a warning. The year was 1985, and Alex was phoning from Wisconsin to tell me that a mutual acquaintance had just published a second short story in the New Yorker. Before Alex hung up, he said casually, “You’re in it.” A failed writer and a repressed lesbian. I stared at the words, unable to read further....

Some people sit on the spiral park bench not realizing it’s an artwork about one of Chicago’s most remarkable heroines. They may not be aware of it, but the bench is talking to them, asking them questions. Other people passing through Wicker Park stop to read the words pressed into hundreds of ceramic tiles, in English, Polish, and Spanish; interested readers start at one end of the bench and follow the words to the middle of the spiral, then double back along the outer edge leading the other way....

Dear Sir: In his book Levitt alludes to just enough of his seamy past to deflect more serious inquiry. But since he was fired, Levitt has been in and out of court on multiple occasions for forgery, fraud, grand theft, failing to file income tax returns, stealing his own cars and has had 28 known judgments against him for nonpayment of debts which totaled well over $100,000. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

LAMBCHOP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Nashville-based group revels in the clash of disparate conventions. Countrypolitan, classic pop, and mopey folk rock mingle in baroque arrangements that layer pedal steel, horns, keyboards, guitar, and ambling percussion; 1995’s How I Quit Smoking even employed a string section arranged by Kathy Mattea collaborator John Mock. The delicate, pretty music stands in stark contrast to Kurt Wagner’s tenderly warped lyrics....

For three decades the Lincoln Park Rugby Club has toured the world, spreading the city’s name in a positive way to people in Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and the West Indies. But one evening last week a city cop, apparently acting on Park District orders, barred the team from the lighted section of the park where they’ve been practicing for years, on the grounds that they were a danger to the grass....

Lead Story The Deutsche Presse Agentur news agency reported in March that German cemetery operators are worried because embalmed bodies aren’t decaying fast enough. The country has a land shortage, so burial plots are often only rented out for 15 years, in the hope that by the end of that period the bodies will have decomposed and the families won’t object to their disposal. Cemetery owners are now avoiding burying bodies in soils that retard air and moisture circulation, because they restrict the growth of bacteria that eat the bodies....

Lead Stories Can’t Possibly Be True Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In February in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the first hearing was held in former attorney Reginald Frazier’s lawsuit against the state bar association for disbarring and imprisoning him. Frazier’s choice of an attorney to represent him was C.C. “Buddy” Malone of Durham, North Carolina, whose own license had been recently suspended for five years by the state bar....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bobby Johnson, an Indianapolis loading-dock worker, was arrested in May for criminal recklessness after he fired six bullets into his $900 Zenith television set because his 41-channel cable-TV service provided him “nothing to watch.” Johnson told the Indianapolis Star, “I don’t see why a man can’t shoot his own TV if he wants to.” An Aeroflot jet carrying 55 passengers landed safely in Arkhangel’sk, Russia, in May despite a loss of hydraulic fluid that prevented full use of its landing gear....

You know, despite the hardships, Kuumba was a big part of my life,” says Val Gray Ward, founder of one of Chicago’s first African-American independent theaters. “The growing pains were hell. I mean at one time we had to put cars and homes up on the block as collateral to keep it going.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evolving out of the black arts movement and known for its rousing gospel, jazz, and blues productions, Kuumba Theater was started in 1968 in Ward’s south-side home....

Dear Sirs, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I would call your attention to the careful use of quotation marks in the caption to my photograph, to remove my comments from their rightful context. I accused no one group of any wrongful acts or intentions. Those words in quotation, while accurately reported, were directed at those persons, whomever they may be, that are responsible for creating the air of fear that has surrounded ATC in the last year and a half or so....

An American radical based in Paris since the 70s, Robert Kramer is an important independent filmmaker who has been almost completely ignored in this country, though many French critics regard him as one of our major artists. His best known work includes such ambitious features as The Edge, Ice, Milestones, and Route One, as well as documentaries, including The People’s War, which he shot in Hanoi during the height of the Vietnam war....

A coworker and I are arguing about the following riddle. I hoped you could give me a hand. A magician must cross a bridge carrying three gold pieces. He weighs exactly 68 kilograms, and each piece of gold weighs one kilogram. The bridge can carry no more than 70 kilograms or it will break. How does he cross the bridge safely, without throwing or dragging the gold across? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Ever since its inception a decade ago, the female vocal quartet Anonymous 4 has excelled at the art of breathing life into medieval chant and polyphony. Its CDs on Harmonia Mundi USA and its excursion into movie music–Voices of Light, Richard Einhorn’s oratorio inspired by the silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc–have all been best-sellers. One key to their popular success–besides their pure, breathtaking voices and meticulous technique–is the care with which they prepare their historically informed, theme-oriented programs....

ArtsPlus: Not Dead, Just Buried Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hate to sound like a cheerleader for the paper, but check out the page’s music coverage: over a recent two-day period the Trib ran no less than eight music reviews by eight writers, encompassing rock old and new, punk, heavy metal, Christian music, Lost in the shuffle was Steve Nidetz’s thrice-a-week broadcasting column....

Babble Hushed Tom Loerch: “Hairs: Neatly trimmed/naired. Shoes: En pointe. Hobbies: Modelling and flogging.” Bruno would not comment on what may be a hollow victory. Having lost the case by default for failing to respond to Bruno’s suit, Babble owes Bruno $100,000. But “Malone,” Babble’s publisher, told me he and his magazine have only $4,000 in now-frozen assets, though a collection agency is hunting for more. Malone insists he could have prevailed in court–Bruno sent him the pictures, after all–but was done in by lawyers....

Former Chicagoan Frederick Heese Eaton virtually wrote his own press release by dying and then spending all his money to publish his own book, Scandalous Saints. Live vanity press authors are all too common, pestering busy book review editors. Dead ones with sizable estates, however, make great feature stories. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scandalous Saints gathers every racy Bible story and says, Hey!...

Entering his fourth season as head of the CSO, Daniel Barenboim is on the hot seat. Critics and subscribers are grousing about the inconsistencies in his interpretations; some of the players feel he’s either too tough or too soft; and to top it all off the Orchestral Association is embarking on an expensive renovation project and can ill afford bad publicity. But Barenboim does have some redeeming qualities: a well-honed musicianship that shines through, especially in his solo piano and chamber recitals; a willingness to experiment, which can result in different performances of the same piece in successive concerts; and a devotion to contemporary works....