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Chicago Book Week–City of Big Readers Teachers and storytellers read from favorite children’s books in the museum’s galleries. 9 AM to 5 PM: Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. Lake Shore Dr. $8, $4 for seniors, students, and children. 312-407-0006, ext. 122. Bob Greene Panel discussion with Other Voices magazine managing editor Gina Frangello, Northwestern University Press editor in chief Susan Harris, poetry publisher Devin Johnston, writer and Third World Press publisher Haki Madhubuti, and writer Cris Mazza....

Hello, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you out of a job. “Stopping industrial development in the name of ‘environmental justice’ will do nothing to alleviate poor environmental conditions or public health problems in low-income and minority communities,” writes Jonathan Adler in “Intellectual Ammunition” (June/July), published by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. “However, by erecting the greatest barriers to economic development in those communities with disproportionate minority populations, ‘environmental justice’ has a disparate impact on the people it purports to help....

FRANCISCO LOPEZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although most of the sounds Francisco Lopez uses in his work are original field recordings, made in far-flung locales from Costa Rica to China, his music is determinedly abstract. Lopez insists that there’s no deeper meaning in the sounds, and to prove it lately he’s been releasing CDs in clear jewel cases without any contextual information–no titles, no credits, no artwork....

By Michael Miner “Nobody was hurt,” White says with satisfaction. “Nobody was killed. And it’s because of the fire department, the police department, and the people themselves–people helping people. We see the explosion and people screaming–that’s the instant people see. But I see the wholeness of the situation, what is and what could have been. I see what could have been one of the worst stories of the year in Chicago....

Heat Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Asingle voice telling a single story might not sound like a pleasant hour’s entertainment, even if the story is an account of a grisly child murder on an oppressively hot day. But this story is authored by Joyce Carol Oates, who rejects lurid speculation on the facts of the case to describe, in meticulous detail, the many ancillary personalities affected by the event....

When bassist Fred Hopkins moved to New York back in 1975, an early emigrant in the mass exodus of Chicago’s vibrant free-jazz community, he was propelled by an ambitious hunger that he hadn’t always possessed. He didn’t pick up his instrument until high school, after watching Pablo Casals on TV inspired him to play cello. The only stringed instrument DuSable High School offered was bass, so he studied that instead, under Walter Dyett, the man famous for instructing Chicago musicians, from Nat “King” Cole to Johnny Griffin....

Sarajane Avidon says she never read a mystery until after her daughter was born in 1972. “The neighbor asked me over for peach ice cream and I couldn’t go. I started crying because I was stuck in the house,” she recalls. “She gave me a Dorothy Sayers mystery to distract me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both made their homes in Chicago. Avidon pursued her stage career, finding work in commercials, movies, and the theater....

Lonely Ghosts and Lukewarm Espresso Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last spring, when Jacobs and Schmidt decided to present the play, they thought it would appeal to a broad cross section of theatergoers. A story about the ghost of a woman who caused the death of a child, The Woman in Black had a nine-year track record in London, where it premiered and continues to run....

Arthur Lipsett, a Canadian filmmaker most active during the 60s, is almost unknown in the U.S., but his films rank among the most powerful experimental work I’ve ever seen, documents of industrial dehumanization colored by a deepening sense of personal despair. In Free Fall rapidly edited footage of sun through trees is more fragmented than lyrical, nature filtered through some infernal machine. Faces on city streets, stripped of context and frighteningly disconnected from each other, become haunting fragments, and by matching and mismatching sound and image Lipsett creates hallucinatory voices, disembodied sentences offering weird commentary on what we’re seeing....

Buju Banton It’s not too tough these days for a fallen star to clamber back into the public’s good graces. Marv Albert hit the talk show circuit before the ink was dry on his plea bargain; a newly penitent Mike Tyson landed a gig with the World Wrestling Federation; Latrell Sprewell got an arbitration hearing. Seems anything short of murder–sorry O.J.–is forgivable if you’re famous. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

HATEWAVE 6/19, METRO This local “ultraspeed deathmusik” trio’s first official LP, a limited-edition vinyl pressing on Up Jumps the Devil Records, has scared off the band’s European distributor–gee, I wonder if it was the mangled corpse faces on the back cover or song titles like “Slit the Catholic Throat” and “Hate Crime Spree” that broke the camel’s back. Guardians of the public morals are so thin-skinned. But the inured, the desensitized, and the jaded will appreciate the sheer bloody-hamburger power of Marc Rucker and Sasha Tai’s guitars, Tai’s garbage-disposal gargling, and Weasel Walter’s rabid-Energizer-bunny drumming....

Stage Fight Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At this point the Auditorium Theatre’s longest-running melodrama isn’t Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, or Phantom of the Opera–it’s the three-and-a-half-year battle between Roosevelt University and its renegade Auditorium Theatre Council. Roosevelt bought the Louis Sullivan-designed Auditorium Building in 1946 and created the council as a fund-raising and administrative body; now the ATC, incorporated as a nonprofit, argues that it has a public responsibility to control the revenues and operation of the historic theater....

The Life and Times of Sophie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thirty-three years ago a kid named Larry Graham, just out of high school, came to Chicago from Columbus, Ohio, and stayed at the YMCA. His company had sent him to be a secretary in their new office opening in the Loop. He had already won national fame for being the North American Typing Champion....

If James Cameron (Titanic) is entitled to risk making a fool of himself, why not Sally Potter? The writer-director of the wonderful if much-reviled The Gold Diggers (her first black-and-white musical) and the mediocre if much-praised Orlando plays herself in this second black-and-white musical, a wistful pipe dream set in Paris, London, and Buenos Aires, about her learning the tango from a master (Pablo Veron, also playing himself). She’s always dreamed of being a dancer, he’s always dreamed of being in a film, and the main problem between them in this joint enterprise is who gets to lead–a metaphorical premise that’s milked for everything it’s worth, and then some....

Fatty Just this morning I heard another high-minded editorial bemoaning President Clinton’s alleged sex with and lies about Monica Lewinsky (no videotape). And I’m sure I’ll hear another Clinton joke or three today, as the scandal’s oily slick of speculation continues to spread over the airwaves and the newspapers, smothering more important news. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The headline wasn’t entirely accurate, however: according to John Fournier, comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the first fatty to fall into a national scandal....

Anything but Pop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those unwanted influences include just about every note of music recorded in the last 50 years: for now, at least, Bird has dedicated his brain to the music of the early 20th century. And as heard on Bowl of Fire’s new Thrills, the first album in a five-record deal inked early this year with Rykodisc, Bird isn’t merely revisiting the stuff; he’s reinventing it....

maloney.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have about had it with some of the Reader’s brand of journalism. Peter Margasak’s December 5 article in Post No Bills is annoyingly peculiar. Its intro is dedicated to commending local artists for their resilience, as they release albums on their own indie labels. That would have been a great premise to stand by. However, Mr. Margasak then proceeds to review eight recent local indie releases that fail to discuss “first-class production values” that were so endearingly introduced, and positive words are few and far between....

Friday 10/8 – Thursday 10/14 Authors Ana Castillo and Dorothy Allison team up tonight to kick off this weekend’s Women Writers Conference, called “A Place in Mind: Women Redefining Voice and Vision.” But the real draw may be tomorrow at 3, when “participants will learn how to wield their menstrual cycle as an implement of creative self-empowerment” at Sharon Powell’s workshop “Women’s Bodies Politic: Periods, Poetry, and Power.” The reading with Castillo and Allison is at 7 at Curtiss Hall in the Fine Arts Building, 410 S....

By Michael Miner She took the job. Eleven years later she’s still at the Tribune, one of its four reporters. “I didn’t think I was going to be here this long, believe me, but it kind of grew on me.” “When we went daily I think seven daily papers were delivered in Chesterton,” Canright told me. “We were the eighth.” The Tribune, Sun-Times, and Daily News came in from Chicago, the Tribune from South Bend, the News-Dispatch from Michigan City, and the Vidette Messenger from Valparaiso....

DADADAH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Composer and vocalist Kitty Brazelton has chosen a cute but misleading name for the impressive genre-crunching “rockestra” she formed in 1990: unlike the dadaist art of the teens and twenties, Dadadah is neither nihilistic nor incomprehensible. In fact, Brazelton’s synthesis of fine rock songwriting, personalized folk imagery, psychedelic guitar, soul-band horns, free-improv sensibilities, and classical instrumentation (the nine-piece ensemble features French horn, cello, and harp) proves her a master builder–vigorously postmodern, but never merely eclectic....