It seems it must have been another era, many generations ago; but Florene Todd-Moore can remember a time when the list of nurses waiting to work at Cook County Hospital was long. County officials admit a shortage but try to downplay its urgency. “There is a national shortage of nurses, it’s not just at County,” says Wanda Robertson, the hospital’s director of public affairs. “I don’t think it’s affecting the quality of health care....

LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND The result of these rivalries is that works by a handful of established composers, commissions by major outfits, and particularly compelling works by up-and-comers might occasionally catch the attention of a wider circle, but most new compositions get only one hearing and are soon forgotten. In Chicago new pieces by Ralph Shapey, Shulamit Ran, and John Eaton may circulate widely, but those by their lesser-known colleagues at DePaul and Roosevelt universities are lucky to get a local premiere....

Recently metal has become infused with the spirit of punk. What had been a stagnant genre full of empty pomp and vapid posturing has become a valid form for populist statements of alienation. Young bands with something to say began to look to Black Sabbath instead of the Sex Pistols for musical inspiration, and gradually, despite protests from both camps, the two began to merge. Black Flag in its latter days began to sound suspiciously like a metal band, while the early albums of Metallica and Anthrax directly echoed the speed-driven angst of the Misfits and Killing Joke....

The first feature (1985) of Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (Family Viewing, Speaking Parts) is probably his least-known work. But thanks to its dynamic camera style and its bizarre premise, it is in many ways his most immediately engaging. In the course of undergoing family therapy with his parents, a young Canadian WASP (Patrick Tierney) comes across a video of an Armenian family (Berge Fazlian, Sirvart Fazlian, and Egoyan regular Arsinee Khanjian) who put their son up for adoption 20 years ago....

Last November I asked Dr. Virginia Barry, a psychoanalyst who teaches at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, if she’d consent to be interviewed for this article on dreams. In her work Dr. Barry takes careful note of the physiologists who try to find a biological basis for dreaming, but her primary concern is the interpretation of dreams. When the registrar showed me the courses I would need to take, I was bewildered....

THE EXERCISE The plot, such as it is, involves an unnamed actor and actress rehearsing a play, presumably for a Broadway production–the script indicates that they’re fairly well known. Clearly they were romantically involved in the past, and perhaps married (one line indicates this, but otherwise it isn’t mentioned). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two meet at the theater before the full rehearsal because the woman is having trouble with her part....

The Bulls have embarked on the 1991-92 season as the defending champions of the National Basketball Association, and it shows. That’s not necessarily a compliment, however. They began this season, as every season, looking ahead to their early west-coast road trip as a test of how good the team was. In the first couple of weeks, they allowed the remnants of their momentum from last spring to carry them along; they just sort of worked themselves into shape....

My grandmother used to amuse me by making five-pointed stars from a piece of paper. She’d fold it, make one cut, then hand it to me to unfold. The stars had five points, and the angles were all even. How did she do this? I’d ask Grandma but she died last year and won’t respond to the Ouija board. –Katharyn Bine, Reston, Virginia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Step 1....

“It’s the shortest commute I’ve ever experienced,” says Bruno Ast about his 100-year-old house in Old Town. For 21 years Ast and his wife, Gunduz Dagdelen, have run an architectural firm out of their house. For the last six months, the two architects have also been operating another business: since June, the 250-square-foot space in the front of their ground-floor office has housed an art gallery. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

COOL ONE’S HEELS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Standing in line is familiar enough to city people. One wouldn’t think there’d be much drama in an experience so everyday, so mundane–especially since nobody seems to know what the characters in Israel Horovitz’s Line, the main play in this collection of short pieces, are waiting for. Flemming, who has been camped in place all night, sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but Stephen, who joins him and thus starts the line, says they’re nowhere near a ball game of any kind....

STANDING IN THE WINGS The concert was dominated by Tim Buckley. Buckley is the genuine article: he dances, choreographs, sings, plays accordion, and composes music. Most important for this concert, he always seems to have a cluster of dancers around him and inspires them to create their own works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Buckley’s Husker Beat best shows this musical sense. The steps are remarkably simple–often one step per beat....

MR. COCONUT With Hui, Wong, Olivia Cheng, Ricky Hui, Maria Cordero, and Joi Wong. With Leung, John Sham, Yong Lin, Yia Ho, King Shin Chien, and Chan Koon Cheung. For me, this is both the advantage and the drawback of Hong Kong cinema; certainly that dynamism has a lot to do with the ways that it’s been celebrated by a handful of Anglo-American critics. The fact that it’s truly a popular cinema made for a regular-attendance audience–the kind of cinema we used to have in the United States before the old studio system fell apart and event-oriented attendance and video rentals took over–seems to make it, for many English and American enthusiasts, a return to childhood innocence and a certain antiintellectual simplicity....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to my letter [March 13] Jane Ellingwood [Letters, April 3] says that Christians are those who follow Christ and his teaching. True enough, but my letter dealt with the question of who are Catholics? In point of fact, they are those Christians in communion with Christ’s Vicar in Rome. Many people have trouble with this, but we live in a free country and if they don’t like what the Pope says they are free to protest and become Protestants....

Neighborhood News “De Tocqueville talks about the two strains in the American spirit, one Ben Franklin individualism and the other Jefferson-style democracy,” Hank De Zutter reflected, “and he warns that too much individualism is going to make the country ripe for despotism, a top-down “this is best for you.’ But that’s just a rule of thumb. It’s not how it has to be. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thank you for your recent piece on nursing at Cook County Hospital, Neighborhood News, October 26th. It points to a crucial and often overlooked issue that is fundamental to health care restructuring, that is the recognition and empowerment of health care providers who are the backbone of our health care system. Nurses don’t typically make the headlines, but they are indeed providing services that are most often associated with achieving and recovering good health....

Spiegel Slings Mud, Sun-Times Pitches In But in yet another Sun-Times postscript, a Spiegel vice president was allowed to make the city’s Lake Calumet offer sound like a joke. “If you go out there right now, where the building was to be situated,” general counsel Michael Moran told reporter Mary Ellen Podmolik, “I’d hope you were a very good swimmer because you’d be in 20 to 30 feet of water.”...

THE SPURT OF BLOOD Though the play was not produced until 1964–by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz–16 years after Artaud’s death, scholars have called the work a “landmark in Artaud’s development” and a major influence on the theater of the absurd. Still, it’s hard to imagine that this play would be very easy to sit through. I suspect that even those who take Artaud’s theories (as published in his seminal The Theatre and Its Double) as scripture would find themselves shifting in their seats during such deliberately nonsensical moments as the scene in which Artaud arbitrarily introduces a knight and the wet nurse into the story, only to have them argue over cheese....

THE SILENT TREATMENT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Everything you said about silent movies [April 12] was either wrong or semi-wrong. [The question was why the action moves so fast in silents; I said they were shot at 16 frames per second but today’s equipment can only project them at 24. –C.A.] Sixteen frames per second was not the standard speed for films of the silent era....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, she speaks as if service workers involved with helping teens and their families were uniformly opposed to parental notice laws. She should not take the official opinions of professional organizations on this matter to represent the views of every member. All the organizations she cited as submitting anti-notice briefs to the Supreme Court have their dissidents–not all of whom are necessarily opposed to legalized abortion....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, the Uptown Theatre is not and has never been an “abandoned” anything. Unless you consider the time Plitt Theaters, Inc., sold the building to a group of Spanish businessmen in the late 70s only to have them skip town and revert the ownership to Plitt again. Also, a theater or any building for that matter would never be allowed to be used in shooting a movie such as the film Backdraft last year without the city fathers (not to mention the cops) looking just a bit curious....