So it has come to this: The Bears play in prime time on Sunday, and I’m sorry to be missing even the increasingly cartoonish X-Files. In fact, I’m sorry that the Fox network isn’t playing one of its world’s-most-gruesome-police-chases specials, because it would truly be a dilemma whether to watch that or the Bears, whose season has been one long accident, a train derailing on a bridge and slithering into the water....

In the best of all migratory traditions, the DUKWs have returned to River North for the summer. They’re nesting at the “quack shack” alongside the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I stepped onto my first duck about seven years ago in the Dells. It was heaven. The guides were goofy, the gasoline fragrant, the splashes cooling. Now you can get a 90-minute duck trip that mixes humor, history, and architecture in downtown Chicago....

TEDDY EDWARDS & FRANK WESS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the signal instrument in jazz from the mid-50s through the early 70s, the tenor saxophone attracted thousands of young players–so obviously not all of them could go on to cut a top-selling record or earn a page of their own in the history books. That, more than anything else, explains why you might find a chair when tenor men Teddy Edwards and Frank Wess hook up at the Jazz Showcase this week: though they’ve spent their professional lives playing one sparkling and spectacular solo after another, leaving indelible marks on the music, neither man’s name is a household word....

The Meaning of Life Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It does not begin at conception. Life (characterized by metabolism, growth, and motion) is present in developing sperm and ova. This was shown by a London widow being permitted to use her husband’s frozen sperm and Chicago’s Dr. Craig Niedermeier extracting sperm from a dead man’s body at the request of his widow who “may have wanted to conceive the dead man’s child....

WOLFGANG FUCHS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hearing German reedist Wolfgang Fuchs improvise is a little like watching a cat contemplate a toy, rolling it around and surveying it from every angle. As with many other European free improvisers, the timbre, color, and attack of Fuchs’s sopranino saxophone and bass and contrabass clarinets are at least as important as melody or structure, if not more so....

By Michael Miner In the name of truth and history, Lundberg decided to wade in. A former pathologist, he persuaded two of the physicians who’d performed Kennedy’s autopsy that it was time to break their silence. In April 1992 Lundberg and one of his top reporters, Dennis Breo, spent two days interviewing James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell in a Florida hotel. “I am tired,” Humes told Breo, “of being beaten upon by people who are supremely ignorant of the scientific facts of the president’s death....

Bring ‘Em Back Alive Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leonard says a new task force will attack the issue, but the LCT will have to present a united front, pulling back into the fold a number of organizations that place ads on their own or through other channels. Independent off-Loop productions, such as the long-running The Irish…and How They Got That Way at the Mercury Theater, can often negotiate better deals on their own, because they don’t have to pay the LCT’s service charge....

By Neal Pollack Mejorado took a breath. “I’ve been in that building 22 years. They’re saying people in that building are drug dealers, and when they say that they’re referring to me! I work 44 hours a week. I have three kids. Where are my kids going to go? We’re being relocated. My neighbors are being relocated. I have neighbors who I don’t consider drug dealers. They’re decent people trying to make a living…....

By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Back then it was expected that if you graduated from the Goodman you left town. There was nothing here,” says Paul, a Wilmette resident and Goodman School of Drama alumnus. In his early 20s, he’d snagged a job as a prop runner at the Ivanhoe, carrying props up and down the aisle during scene changes. Sometimes he found himself running up and down Wellington Avenue as well, working shows at both the Ivanhoe and the Chicago City Players, an experimental troupe down the block that specialized in plays by Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, and Jean-Claude van Itallie....

Up in Michigan the men go hunting every fall, and my father is one of them. Some of his buddies are particularly enthusiastic about deer hunting, but my father prefers to hunt birds. And for that you really need a dog. It’s possible to hunt birds without a dog, but few hunters would consider that much fun. The dog is important because not only can it find the birds but its companionship and enthusiasm are a large part of what makes the hunt meaningful for the hunter....

Spalding Gray’s greatest contribution to the world of solo performance may not be his own work–his tiresome new Morning, Noon and Night is merely an opportunity to brag about his kids–but the workshops he holds from time to time on storytelling and techniques for unleashing creativity. Fred Rochlin, a retired architect, attended one in Los Angeles and began turning his old war stories–he was a flight navigator during World War II–into monologue material....

Children of the Revolution By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One day Fraser gets a visit from David Hoyle (Sam Neill), apparently an Australian spy who’s intercepted one of her letters to Stalin, and he gives her a friendly warning. She visits the Soviet Union in 1953–after Stalin (F. Murray Abraham) happens on a file of her letters and invites her to come–a complex journey traced by a succession of red stars on a map....

Brakhage Rating ** Worth seeing But there remains something troubling about a relatively conventional documentary that aims to cover Brakhage’s life and almost 50-year career, during which he produced several hundred usually silent explorations of objects, light, abstract patterns, and people and places in his life. For one thing, Brakhage’s biography is in his films. For another, his life is messy and multifaceted. But perhaps most important, Brakhage’s great subject is the transformative possibilities of actual and imagined imagery, visionary experiences that cannot be analyzed or described in words: he negotiates the difficult territory between what Barnett Newman called “the chaos of ecstasy” and the formal coherence necessary to art....

Before we get into this week’s Savage Love, I’d like to say this for the record: While the letter printed below was written on Garfield County Sheriff’s Department letterhead, so far as I’ve been able to ascertain this letter is a complete fabrication. It was not sent to me by Thomas P. Dalessandri, Sheriff of Garfield County, Colorado, or by any other law enforcement officer, living or dead, to the best of my knowledge, so help me God....

Recently, one of my friends was giving a girl a friendly back rub when she took off her top and bra and let him continue. Then she informed him that she didn’t want to have sex with him. He told her he was going to go hang out with the guys. When he told us this story we were all in agreement that something is definitely wrong with that chick. I have found myself in similar situations with other women, as had some of the other guys, and what we want to say to women out there is this: “Why the hell would you let us fondle your bodies if you don’t want to have sex?...

Hollow Man With Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Joey Slotnick, Mary Randle, and William Devane. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In retrospect, I turned against Verhoeven mainly because of the way he combined misanthropy and potent eroticism–which I mistook for misogyny, a common error. I still think his misanthropy is problematic, and I don’t think his clear liking for and identification with his powerful women characters–a constant in his recent work, Showgirls included–necessarily excuses including a couple of rape fantasies in Hollow Man, even if both sequences are ambiguous and never get very far beyond voyeuristic preliminaries....

It was a steamy afternoon and the clouds seemed to grow out of the sickly white sky, as in the paintings of Dutch masters. Mickey Morandini, shorn for summer, took swings in the batting cage. Manager Jim Riggleman, off to the side, discussed in a weary, matter-of-fact voice how difficult it is to get even major-league ballplayers to hustle on every play. Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, in a funky straw hat, played catch with Mark Grace as if they were killing time at a church picnic....

THE CAPTAIN’S BOY, Bailiwick Repertory. Not to be confused with Bailiwick’s family-friendly holiday musical, The Christmas Schooner, is The Captain’s Boy, a different kind of nautical romp–a gay pirate musical by Clint Jeffries and Chris Jackson. But it’s not The Pirates of Penzance minus Major General Stanley’s daughters. A cross between Jeffrey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this travesty has too many levels to keep matters clear, let alone fun....

Back in the Shadows Again: The Lighter Side of “Dark Shadows” Chicago Viewpoints Ensemble By Jack Helbig Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think the growing interest in Halloween is a good thing. In a culture that increasingly demands that human beings think and act like robots and computers–squelching feelings while they get the job done at a faster and faster rate–Halloween gives us a chance to exercise our imaginations and an excuse to dress up, role-play, and indulge our dark, repressed fantasies....

For years I’ve been reading about German choreographer Pina Bausch. Now, finally, I’ve had the chance to see some of her work on video–and the woman is a certified genius, producing images so right and so terrifying they seem to have been plucked from our dreams. Far from erasing or blurring sex roles, Bausch heightens them: in 1980 (a dance featured in the documentary A Primer for Pina), a woman crouches between the legs of a man seated in a chair, almost hiding beneath its seat; her hand creeps up his torso and caresses his face, which he tolerates for a few seconds before shoving her head down violently....