Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Walter Benjamin: Marxist Moses, an evening of readings and discussion of literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, celebrates a man who is now considered one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers. An acclaimed journalist and critic, Benjamin was driven out of Germany by the Nazis; he turned to academics in France, but committed suicide while on the run from the gestapo in 1940....

The Chicago Chamber Musicians have established quite a formidable reputation and following for a group so young. It’s easy to see why. First off, there’s the Chicago Symphony Orchestra connection: five of the collective’s core players, including cofounder Larry Combs and horn player Gail Williams, are first or second chairs from the CSO, each with a fan club of his or her own. Second, since its founding six years ago the group has participated in a variety of wide-ranging educational and outreach activities, the most prominent of which is the free concert at the Chicago Cultural Center on the first Monday of every month....

Evanston-based young jazz violinist Diane Delin created quite an unexpected stir at last summer’s Grant Park Jazz Festival with her solid technique and crisp improvisations. Delin has avoided the more avant-garde and fusion-oriented jazz violin sound so popular in recent years for a return to a more lyrical style emphasizing beautiful tone, but with such style, originality, and good taste that it is quite a refreshing change. Delin is also a master of improvisation, but unlike many young players, she allows each musical idea to be fully developed and taken to a natural conclusion....

The Folger Consort and the Newberry Consort in concert on consecutive nights is a pleasure comparable to a joint recital by Pavarotti and Domingo. Both among the world’s top early-music ensembles, the D.C.-based Folger and our own Newberry have long mastered the art of breathing life into medieval and Renaissance music, and their performances tend to be both enlightening and entertaining. This weekend the ensembles both turn to medieval French romance....

FREE TO BE . . . YOU AND ME When it was first published in 1974, Free to Be . . . You and Me was lauded for its freshness and intelligence; it revolutionized juvenile literature. In the foreword to the original edition, Marlo Thomas wrote about how she was looking for books to read to her young niece: “I found shelf after shelf of books that told boys and girls who they ....

By 8:30 on Thursday morning the future homemakers had returned from their 6 AM, 5K “Fun Run” around Grant Park. A tall, thin girl with blond hair had a suggestion that she shared only with her fellow Illinoisans. “You know, there’s been so many ‘teen pregnancy’ and ‘safe sex’ workshops, right?” There was a little murmur of agreement. “I think they should be spread out a little more.” Everyone nodded, apparently making mental notes to have fewer in the future....

Suppose for a moment you live next door to a drug house. Cars queue up in your street. Drug abusers loiter in front of your house or apartment. Gunfire occasionally disturbs your sleep, and in the morning you might find derelicts sleeping it off in your front yard. Whether you’re a yuppie rehabber, downwardly mobile artist, aging home owner, white ethnic, Hispanic, Asian, or African American, you’re in danger the moment you step out your door and you know it....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Instead of repairing the damage, the Reader has further injured the children and perhaps the adults too in the Honey picture matter. Mr. Michael Miner, Senior Editor of the Reader, in his November 30 reply to letters from Mr. Crimmins and myself states, among other things: “But I decided that after 14 years in which her picture had appeared on museum walls, in catalogs, and as state’s evidence in a celebrated trial, there was no harm publishing it again (the emphasis is mine) could do to her, if in fact harm had been done her before....

Kenneth Jean, who’s 38, is facing a dilemma that other conductors of his age can only envy. He holds down the number-two artistic post at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, heads the Florida Symphony Orchestra in Orlando, and guest conducts all over the world. But now that he’s the recipient of an unexpected and generous prize, the Seaver Institute’s coveted biannual $75,000 grant for young American conductors, he has to make room in his already hectic schedule–the grant stipulates that he take time off for further development as a musician....

Lead Story James Fentress, 23, was arrested for taking an ambulance for a joyride in Oklahoma City in May. Fentress, who was dressed as an ambulance-company driver, was apprehended when he stopped in a parking lot to show some kids how the siren works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When sheriff’s deputies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, arrived to evict Rick “Reptile” Little, 30, from his home in June due to a rent dispute, they found 140 snakes (at least 40 of them venomous), along with owls, toads, rabbits, salamanders, moles, lizards, turtles, tarantulas, scorpions, dogs, cats, and fish....

PERISHED If you were ever beaten as a child by a person who was supposed to love you, Theater Wyrzuc’s Perished will recall a ton of pain. Laceratingly honest and close to the bone, Brian G. Kirst’s 90-minute play-poem graphically depicts child abuse from a child’s point of view; it also describes the terrible stratagems victims employ–guilt, denial, self-hatred, heavy drinking, suicide–to free themselves of the loved one’s hate. Just when the stories in Perished seem to hit rock bottom, it holds out some hard-earned hope....

It’s so crowded at the Gale grade school in Rogers Park that three classes have to meet in the cafeteria. At the Clinton grade school in West Rogers Park two classes are housed in a converted teachers’ lounge. Some students at the George Armstrong grade school in Rogers Park have to take their lessons in the hallways or under the stairs. And at the Hayt school in Edgewater, several classes must meet in the basement near the boiler....

SISTER CARRIE at the Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This play should be both historically relevant and timeless and universal. But somehow Touchstone’s production fails to illuminate either aspect of the novel. The problems seem to be evenly distributed between the adaptation (Creamer has done much more successful ones, most notably Goodman’s Christmas Carol) and the three leading actors. Creamer sticks close to the book’s essential action until the very end, when several important moments are omitted....

The Black Track: Minority Problems at the Tribune “My real failure,” Squires told us, “and what I’m concerned about, is that I’m not hiring them in enough numbers to increase the retention numbers. We’re hiring 30 percent minorities–we don’t even have to have an opening to hire minorities. And we’ve made no progress in the total numbers of people who have stayed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You would be right in supposing that few black go-getters, urban to the core, are eager to be posted in Hinsdale....

Give me your tired, your poor, your mathematicians… The University of Chicago Chronicle (February 25) reports that for the first time last year, more than half of the people receiving mathematics PhDs in this country were not U.S. citizens. “If not for the brain drain from overseas,” says U. of C. mathematics chairman J. Peter May, “it would not be possible to staff U.S. mathematics departments even at a skeletal level....

Last year at this time, culinary pundits were proclaiming that 1990 would be the year of the basics–the stews and casseroles we so fondly remember from our childhood. In fact, that much-heralded trend never got off the pot. Instead, our national obsession with cellulite and high-density lipids not only continued to hold sway, it increased in intensity, invading even the upper reaches of haute cuisine. When a restaurant like Seasons routinely serves margarine alongside the butter, you know the world is changing....

The standard offense of the Chicago Bulls is based on a series of rapidly forming triangles. The Bulls rely on outside shooting, and they typically deploy two players away from the basket with one under the basket on the strong side of the court, where they have the ball. Their strategy is to entice and exploit the double team, the standard defense of the National Basketball Association, where the zone defense is banned and where players are simply too skillful offensively to permit a stringent man-on-man....

Theater League Left in the Lurch Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as McCord well knows, many problems remain, chief among them boosting revenue at the Hot Tix outlets, still the League’s main income source. “It all boils down to how you get the tickets sold,” McCord said last week. “If we could crack that nut we would be ahead.” A Hot Tix expansion into Rose Records outlets hasn’t solved the problem; board president Mary Badger said sales have been fluctuating week to week....

Trip Shakespeare have nothing to do with any music produced since about 1973, their name is precious, and when singer Matt Wilson gets all fired up he’s liable to come out firmly in favor of snow. But after the dopey and overwrought Are You Shakespearienced?, the band’s new album and major-label debut Across the Universe is far better than it has any right to be: of the eleven songs, seven or eight have a ferocious melodic kick....

For eight years the battle over WSNS Channel 44 was waged in the relative privacy of federal hearing rooms and courtrooms in Washington, D.C. But now the bitter fray has broken into the open, with throngs of Hispanic activists and politicians passionately taking sides. Harris and his partners dropped the adult films and converted to a Spanish-language format five years ago. Nevertheless, the FCC awarded the license to Monroe, which had lodged a request to take over Video 44’s license back in 1982....