SHOSTAKOVICH FESTIVAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 12-concert Shostakovich festival, led by cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, may look like just another marketing gimmick. But in fact Shostakovich himself sketched out the program in the early 60s, when his friend Rostropovich told him he’d like to organize such an event. Rostropovich misplaced the list and eventually forgot about it; since finding it a few years ago in a cache of old letters, he’s mounted the festival in Saint Petersburg and Tokyo....

Thirty years ago next month, baseball belatedly entered the modern age with the publication of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues. Like many milestones, Ball Four didn’t cause change so much as it signaled it–in society and in sports. Rereading the book this spring to see if it endured as a classic, I was less surprised at how well it stood up than I was at how almost quaint and innocent this once infamously outrageous work–a tell-all diary of the 1969 season, edited by sportswriter Leonard Shecter–now seemed....

LANTERNA 11/13, Gunther murphy’s Guitarist Henry Frayne, a veteran of Area, was obviously the kind of kid who daydreamed a lot in class–“never his mind on what he was doing,” as Yoda would say. His current trance-rock project, Lanterna, soars high into the ether but is never quite as firmly rooted in a concrete sense of place as, say, Calexico. As a result, he and drummer Brendan Gamble (of the Poster Children, and one of Frayne’s cohorts in the Moon Seven Times) wander off in imaginary landscapes that don’t quite connect to any recognizable place on earth, despite a few token attempts at grounding with train and seagull noises....

I was at a lecture on existential philosophy, and it was mentioned in passing that Nietzsche proposed to someone early in his life. She turned him down and he got bitter. Later, in the same lecture, I was told that another famous philosopher met this same woman at an artists’ colony and had an affair with her. What was this woman’s name, and who was the other philosopher? I can’t remember, the professor is dead, and I’m not finding anything on the Web....

Adapted from the celebrated play by Clare Boothe, this glossy 1939 comedy about a pampered set of Manhattan plutocrat wives hasn’t lost its satirical edge or bitchy sense of fun. Boothe, a sharp-tongued magazine editor and social climber who married Time publisher Henry Luce, knew well the psychology of women who measure their self-worth by their husbands’ wealth and power, and though men are absent from the world of The Women they’re still a strong presence....

It’s Halloween, a balmy, magical night for children. My husband took our daughter out trick-or-treating. And I’m alone at home–a nice two-story stucco house in an old tree-lined suburb, right on the edge of the west side. “I don’t mean any disrespect, ma’am,” he says. He holds a mask in one hand, as some kind of credential. He stretches the other hand toward me, palm up, a soft brown bowl. “I heard you were giving out quarters....

CECIL PAYNE & ERIC ALEXANDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Veteran baritone saxist Cecil Payne and young tenor man Eric Alexander first paired up in 1993 to record a Delmark album called Cerupa, released under Payne’s name. That led to a 1994 gig at the old Bop Shop, then to two more Delmark discs–and though the 77-year-old Payne needs a cane to walk, those records prove he only needs a reed to run....

CRAIG HARRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trombonist Craig Harris makes it way too easy for us to forget he’s out there: he records infrequently under his own name, and his travels haven’t brought him to Chicago in half a decade. That’s a shame, because he stands among the most exciting modern trombonists. Along with Frank Lacy (known these days for his work with the Mingus Big Band), Harris extends a Chicago lineage–specifically, the playing of Julian Priester, who joined Sun Ra’s Arkestra in the 50s and Herbie Hancock’s fusion band in the 70s, and in the interim developed an improvising persona that credibly blended mainstream and avant-garde concerns and technique....

By Ted Kleine Last year, the Chicago Department of Revenue booted 27,915 vehicles, an all-time high. This year, the revenuers’ busy boot crews matched that mark on August 1. A yellow boot now adorns a car on almost every city block, especially in the crowded north and west side neighborhoods where the booters do most of their work. The city’s been nabbing a lot more scofflaws since 1998, when it debuted the Chicago Adjudication and Ticketing System, which allows booters to troll the streets with a handheld console called an Auto-Cite, typing in license plate numbers....

Dreaming the Divine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve always thought that dance is peculiarly suited to exploring spirituality. Maybe it’s the trancelike state dancing sometimes induces. Maybe it’s dancers’ understanding that physical being is nothing without human will and intention. Maybe it’s their knowledge of the body’s fragility, which they’re always seeking to overcome. Whatever the reason, dance can sometimes–not often–open a door on another realm....

GRANT PARK SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto (1987), his earliest orchestral work, shows both the appeal and the limitations of minimalism. Its sonorities can mesmerize, evoking the meditative ecstasy that marks much Tibetan Buddhist music, and the soloist leaps and glides in marvelous arabesques. But Glass merely nods to the three-movement convention, differentiating the segments with sudden changes in tempo that don’t always adhere to a deeper logic....

“It’s almost impossible to tell a story through instrumental music,” says composer Patricia Morehead. Such attempts usually “come across as trite coloristic effects.” Yet she’s named her latest piece, a composition for two pianos, after Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, a feminist allegory in which women are forced to become breeders for those rendered sterile by the toxic environment. When she read the book ten years ago, Morehead says, she felt “helpless outrage” at the prospect of chemical and nuclear contamination in the near future....

JAZZ MANDOLIN PROJECT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their name seems to promise mandolins as far as the ear can hear–and if that were what they actually delivered, it’d be reason enough to ignore them entirely. But the JMP features only a single mandolinist, Jamie Masefield, and he doubles on banjo in what’s really a variation on the tried-and-true power trio. More important, in both his own playing and his group concept, Masefield shakes off the stereotypes that cling to the mandolin, from the bluegrass-inspired “dawg music” of David Grisman’s bands to the Sicilian sobriety of the theme from The Godfather....

JEAN-PIERRE RAMPAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 75, flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal could deservedly rest on his laurels. Over the course of his lengthy and prolific career (which stretches back to the waning days of World War II, when he forsook medicine for a higher calling) the Marseilles-born Rampal has made the flute an instrument to reckon with, vastly expanding its repertoire and paving the way for other superstar pipers like James Galway....

Lead Stories The New York Post reported in June that the state of New York has provided about 25 free organ-transplant operations, costing taxpayers about $1 million, to illegal aliens in the 18 months since Governor Pataki promised to end the practice. State officials told the Post they knew of “dozens” of cases over the years in which foreigners flew into the city, applied for Medicaid, received expensive surgery (which can include sex changes), and then flew home....

Lead Stories Among those charged recently with possession of child pornography and now awaiting trial: Gerald Ackerman, former mayor of Port Huron, Michigan, in April; Warren Ernest Campbell, a chief of the fire department of Cannington, Ontario, in August; Jeremy Lacey, president of the University of Vermont’s only alcohol-free fraternity, in August; George Edward Davis, former high school principal in Lonoke, Arkansas, in August; and pediatrician Jonathan I. Weinstein, of Herndon, Virginia, in May....

Not long ago, Sam Sanfillippo, a longtime member of the Lions Club, saw an article in the club magazine about albino squirrels in Maryville, Missouri. He wrote to the head of the Maryville club. “I said, ‘If you don’t mind, if one of your albino squirrels gets a heart attack and dies or gets hit by a car, would you mail me one?’ Six months later UPS drives up with a box....

Erin Sax brings a completely fresh perspective to the filming of cadavers–seen here being prepared for burial–in this 19-minute film from 1994, which implicitly argues with 1970s films by Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton that deal with autopsies. The earlier filmmakers poeticized the bodies and body parts they photographed, using rhythmic editing to place their images of the dead in a silence that evoked the monumental and eternal. Sax rejects those kinds of poetics in favor of a more direct, factual kind of looking....

No one figures to escape unscathed from the Cubs’ ongoing Sammy Sosa fiasco, in which, by making it clear they don’t want to give him a nine-figure contract extension, they’ve placed themselves in the ticklish position of being all but forced to trade him before the end of next season, when he becomes a free agent. Already most key figures on the Cubs have seen their reputations damaged, including Sosa himself....

I’m one very disgruntled and estranged member of the Catholic church–so disgruntled, in fact, that I really don’t want to be counted as a member. How can I get excommunicated? I assume it’s not as simple as writing a letter (though this probably only means the church is more bureaucratic than most mail-order CD clubs). How can I make my intentions known to the right offices? Best of Chicago voting is live now....