It’s noontime on Michigan Avenue, and the lean young man in the Nike basketball shoes is fighting his way through the current of moving bodies. His pace slows; the kid, who is about 20, scowls as he bounces left and then right, trying to avoid a collision. “God loves you,” says John Kesler, an open-faced man in double-knit pants and sports shirt. “Here’s a free gift,” says Roger Britton to one skeptical woman....

Who’ll Tell the Story of School Reform? No disrespect whatsoever intended, to the Sun-Times or to the Tribune, but school reform in Chicago has advanced to a point that’s way beyond the dailies’ ability to do it justice. “It’s two publications in one,” says Lenz. “It’ll come out monthly for nine months during the school year. Six issues will take a newsletter format, like the Chicago Reporter”–which CRS has been publishing to general acclaim since 1972....

Back in January, when her colleagues on the staff of departing governor Jim Thompson were getting new business cards printed up, Paula Wolff told an Associated Press reporter that she had put her own job search “on hold.” For 14 years Wolff had whispered into the ear of power in Springfield as the head of Thompson’s program policy staff, but for the moment she was doing temp work as co-director of the transition team assembled by new governor Jim Edgar–waiting, she explained, “for lightning to strike....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In her lengthy article, Levinsohn never once compares Hartigan’s positions to those of his principal opponent, Republican Jim Edgar. Instead, she judges him against an abstract standard of political correctness, as measured by complaints by named and unnamed sources from the left/liberal side of the spectrum. In every single case, Levinsohn decides that the source is wrong and Hartigan is right, leading to the conclusion that he is left enough to deserve support from left/liberals....

ANDREW YOUNG Living in Siena, Italy, in 1983, Young saw pictures that would shape the direction of his artwork for years. The Italian masters helped their patrons worship God (and, not incidentally, helped them impress their neighbors) by adorning linen-covered panels with depictions of holy persons. Using a mixture of egg yolk and pigment, these artists made precisely balanced pictures in glowing colors that, at their best, seduced their viewers with the illusion that they were looking at something divine....

ADVERTISING AND SOCIAL ISSUES: UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON The images are not labeled in any way (according to museum staff the necessary information did not accompany the prints), so it’s impossible to tell for sure when they were made and by whom. However, a helpful piece of wall text by museum staffer Karen Burstein helps us a bit with the chronology by sketching the history of the campaign. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s sometimes startling to realize how many people remain unaware of the NRG Ensemble. Those who’ve heard this group over the years (or better, seen the group: they incorporate visual stimuli, sometimes even film clips, into their performances) carry around impressions so vivid, we tend to assume that everyone else has them too–as if the group were some black-sheep chapter of the collective unconscious. In other words, once I you’ve seen ’em, you won’t forget about it....

The 80s go down as a decade of jazz reconstructionism: “the neoclassic years.” But while the Marsalises and their musical progeny have plugged into an overall jazz aesthetic–the hard-bop style of the 50s and 60s–they also have found quite specific inspiration in individual trailblazers from years past. In the case of the Harper Brothers (this weekend making their Chicago debut), this model lies in the Jazz Messengers of 30 years ago....

Together again–sort of: Roach and Rollins are appearing on the same stage, just not on the same night. But the decision to book these two old friends and jazz soul mates on the same weekend involves a neat conceit spun from one of the music’s great encounters. By the early 50s, Max Roach was already just shy of jazz legendry, having emerged as the preeminent bebop drummer when that idiom was still under construction; when he joined forces with Clifford Brown, a gifted and prodigal trumpeter (sort of the Wynton Marsalis of his day), their quintet quickly became the sine qua non of the hard-bop era; and when an intense, agile, and diamond-tough improviser named Sonny Rollins signed on in 1954, the Brown-Roach Quintet catapulted to another level altogether....

Basically Bach’s founder and music director Daniel V. Robinson quit teaching music at a small college in Ohio and came home to Chicago in 1983. While deciding what to do with the rest of his life, he “joined a couple of music groups and kept musically active.” He and Christie Enman, later Basically Bach’s executive director, sang with several early-music groups in the city, and his wife Kate played violin. Then, he says, “We just decided that we thought we could do better on our own–and I was really eager to get back into conducting....

The kiddie corps that currently rules the jazz roost seeks to prove the strength of bebop by reprising it, by reiterating its lessons. But you hear much greater proof of the idiom’s resiliency listening to Roy Haynes. Haynes was around for bebop’s infancy, but he’s traveled a wide variety of other musical paths: how many other drummers could have played with Thelonious Monk in the 50s, John Coltrane in the 60s, and Gary Burton after that?...

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY And certainly not from a play with any degree of smarts. Other People’s Money isn’t a stupid or mean-spirited piece of work. Conceptually, at least, it’s got a lot in common with The Cherry Orchard. Like Chekhov’s masterpiece, it describes a minor yet resonant moment in the annals of capitalist predation: the dissolution of a gracious but untenable old world, and its replacement by a rough, tough new one ruled by upstarts and money changers....

MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE With three premieres on a program of four works, Mordine is obviously going through a particularly productive phase. Program credits for the new works reflect an interest in collaboration: Thin Ice and Woman Question have been choreographed “with the dancers,” and In One Year and Out the Other is a performance art piece made and performed with James Grigsby. Letting others in on the creative process can be invigorating, but it can also backfire....

This work from composer Philip Glass premiered in Vienna in July and is now making its U.S. debut in performances across the country, performed live by the Philip Glass Ensemble. 1000 Airplanes on the Roof concerns the story of “M,” who is walking home from a date when a spaceship suddenly picks him up and begins performing a variety of experiments on him. Although M is programmed to forget the experience, his subconscious is left disturbed, and the piece deals with his anxiety and fear over whether or not he should tell anyone about it, and the transformation that follows....

All Good News We just picked up a newspaper that is a model of what a newspaper ought to be. It comes out only when there is news, and the news is always good. It’s a nifty paper–snappily designed with lots of color, and chock-full of the elements that mark today’s successful journalism. There’s an advice column (“Dear Lotta: I won $1,000 on an instant ticket, but my agent won’t give me cash for it....

Betty Smith started working at the Blue Note in 1950, when she was 19. She remained there in the all-purpose capacity of waitress, press liaison, girl Friday, and gofer for nine years, nearly but not quite up to the night the club shut its doors for good. She still gets a bit misty about those last few months. “It was probably the most fabulous jazz club that ever was, the Taj Mahal of jazzdom,” she says, “but the writing was on the wall....

TAP One of the more poignant effects of contemporary Hollywood has been the virtual extinction of at least two of the major genres that served as industry staples during the 30s, 40s, and 50s: the western and the musical. When attempts are made to resurrect these old standbys, a certain self-consciousness often makes itself felt. Such “last westerns” as Once Upon a Time in the West and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and such “last musicals” as All That Jazz and Pennies From Heaven tend to wear their obsolescence on their sleeves, representing themselves as last-ditch attempts to revivify forms that are no longer part of the present tense, but only nostalgic emblems of an earlier era....

Helen Leister says it was the railroad job that spurred Volney into popping the question and set her to thinking about wedding gowns, back in the spring of 1938. The country was still dragging itself out of the Depression then; caution was the order of the day, even when it came to marriage. But when Leister started spending her nights hurtling across the land at 100 miles an hour in a futuristic, silver-sided dream machine, Volney suddenly realized he couldn’t live without her....

It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon. You could be browsing through your New York Times, standing in line for Batman Returns, or doing a little shopping. The carpeted display case overflows with a wild profusion of lacy violet garter belts and teddies, with color-coordinated packages of condoms sprinkled like confetti. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We used to get a lot of harassment here,” confides a salesperson....

This is an intriguing mix of materials drawn from Video Data Bank’s What Does She Want series, which centers on art by women. Julie Dash’s Illusions, the only full-size film (as opposed to video) in the bunch, is an effective narrative about racism in 1942 Hollywood. The videos include Cecilia Condit’s nightmarish fairy tale fantasy Possibly in Michigan, Max Almy’s SF fever dream with fancy graphics Leaving the 20th Century, and Martha Rosler’s rather humorless Semiotics of the Kitchen....