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It was 40 years ago that Pierre Boulez wrote his revolutionary Livre pour quatuor, a string quartet so technically tortuous that it took nearly six years for a performance to happen, and even then only the first two movements were performed. The complete performance of the work took place no sooner than 1985, on the occasion of the composer’s 60th birthday. The quartet brought in to do it was the Arditti, quickly canonized by Boulez as “the best string quartet in the world....

The ninth edition of the annual festival of black independent film will be held Friday, August 3, through Sunday, August 12 at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Tickets are $5, $3 for Blacklight, Film Center, and Jazz Institute members. For more information call 509-2981 or 443- 3737. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DEF BY TEMPTATION Former child actor James Bond III wrote, directed, produced, and stars in this comedy-horror feature about a divinity student fighting to overcome sexual temptation who visits an actor friend in New York (Kadeem Hardison) and encounters further temptation....

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra rehashing the same old favorites under the pavilion’s big top is always the Ravinia Festival’s center-ring attraction. But for me it’s the chamber events in the intimate Murray Theatre that often make the long trek north worthwhile. The lineup this summer is especially strong: song recitals by Dawn Upshaw, Christa Ludwig, Cecilia Bartoli, and Jerry Hadley, plus the return of the Kronos and Cleveland quartets. The program for the Cleveland Quartet concert is commendable for the inclusion of a pair of rarely performed near masterworks....

MARGARET JENKINS DANCE COMPANY Shelf Life is a literary rather than a literal dance. It begins with six still dancers–Bryan Chalfant, Janice Dulak, Wayne Hazzard, Ellie Klopp, Anne Krauss, and Jesse Traschen–splayed across the stage in a long diagonal, illuminated by a rectangle of harsh white light. Sandra Woodall’s costumes are slashed and jagged layers of off-white–leggings, skirts, trousers, tunics–printed with streaks of color and bands of print reminiscent of newspapers, flour sacks, and grocery-store bar codes....

An immature bald eagle was sighted last week at Saganashkee Slough in the Palos forest preserves. Palos is the most likely place in Cook County to find a bald eagle. The forest preserves are big enough to provide them with secluded roosting trees, and the many shallow lakes and sloughs are prime hunting areas for them. The only bald eagles on my own Cook County list are an adult and an immature I saw in the Palos preserves at the Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center in 1982....

As many as 16 of Illinois’ 43 species of endangered and threatened birds may have nested in Cook County in 1993. I’d bet that no other county in the state could boast a total that high. And when he finally gets all their reports, he sits down and compiles them the old-fashioned way–with pencil and paper. He does not have a computer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I just got my copy of his report for 1993....

As is often the case with this sort of dispute, the first shot was fired away from the public view. “There’s a group of people that’s against guns, that’s all,” says Rufus Taylor, president of the gun club (whose official name is Lincoln Park Traps). “They would rather not see a gun club in the park. They’re against the shooting activity, and they’re just using the environment as an excuse.”...

EARTH AND SKY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Potentially heavy stuff for a whodunit. But Post, a Chicagoan who enjoyed commercial success with this play last year in New York, has a sense of balance and grace, and he knows how far to take his philosophical conceits before they start to seem, well, conceited. Earth and Sky is a very effective entertainment that cleverly melds its higher and lower aims: evoking the underworld journeys of Raymond Chandler’s novels on one hand and the endangered-but-plucky-heroine melodramas of Daphne du Maurier on the other, it offers suspense during the performance and a gently haunting emotional resonance afterward....

When the results came back from her group’s study of third-grade reading scores in Chicago’s public schools, Mary Lou Gonzalez called a press conference and directed her wrath at the Board of Education. School officials have a different explanation for the test-score results. “I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to blame the school system for those test results,” says Bob Saigh, the board’s director of information. “There are a number of different factors, not the least of which is a testing bias....

OH MY . . . NUTS! A MUSICAL TRIBUTE TO THE LATE GREAT MARK NUTTER Granted, Oh My . . . Nuts! is not as much a rerun as these other pieces. In the satirical hands of Mark Nutter (oops, sorry–the “late, great Mark Nutter,” as the ads and press releases refer to him), Oh My . . . Nuts! sends up all those musical-revue tributes to late, great songwriters–Cole, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and so on ad nauseam....

Father Frans Claerhout has spent most of his life in occupied countries. When he was studying for the priesthood in his native Belgium, the Nazis invaded. Not long afterward, in 1946, Claerhout moved to the Republic of South Africa where he still lives near Tweespruit in the Orange Free State–teaching, distributing food and clothing, and running interference between his poor, black parishioners and the white power structure. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Six days out of port their food and water ran out. Like thousands of others, they had fled their native Vietnam on makeshift barges only to have their exodus threatened by starvation. From the scene of an Argentinean family hanging on a wall life-size silhouettes inscribed with names of loved ones who disappeared during the 1976-78 regime of General Jorge Rafael Videla to the image of a young Vietnamese man building his own prosthetic leg from wood, leather, and an old tire, the exhibit’s more than two dozen wall-size photographs attempt to portray the experiences of refugees and those they left behind in human rather than political terms....

Nine months have passed since developer Alex Anagnostopoulos got a city permit to make some minor repairs to his Wilton Avenue home, and his neighbors in Lincoln Park are still trying to figure out what happened. The story begins in October 1990, when Anagnostopoulos bought the ramshackle two-flat on Wilton for $240,000. In November he applied for and received a permit from the Building Department to repair the rear stairwell, replace some windows, and fix the downspouts....

YOUNG GIRL BLUES Johnny Winter The mismatch between playing and singing occurs on several cuts. On “Queen Bee,” Foley’s version of Slim Harpo’s “King Bee” (minus the undulating bass line that characterizes most versions of the song) Foley crunches along in an admirable blues-rock vein, heavy on the metallic fire and light on the subtlety, though she does pull off a few attractive single-string echoes of Guitar Slim. But her voice, despite the obvious attempts to embellish it electronically, is weak, thin, and adolescent sounding, with little of the worldly knowingness essential to this kind of song....

This breezy 90-minute revue of classic black song, dance, and humor stands apart from bigger and brasher shows like Ain’t Misbehavin’ and One Mo’ Time by virtue of its quirky choice of material. The minimal story line of Rollin’ With Stevens and Stewart follows the travels of two 1920s vaudevillians on the T.O.B.A. circuit–officially the Theatre Owners Booking Association, but more popularly known as Tough On Black Asses. The two alternate between “onstage” renditions of vintage material (from such artists as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Bert Williams, Clarence Williams, Duke Ellington, Moms Mabley, and the writing team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles) with “backstage” vignettes whose anecdotal dialogue is drawn from stories and poems by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks....

Q. What’s the difference between Waste Management and most hospitals? A. Waste Management only dumps garbage. Dr. David Thomasma, of Loyola University Medical Center, reminds us that 38 million Americans don’t have adequate health insurance: “You know as well as I do that despite a federal law forbidding ‘patient dumping,’ it goes on all the time once a health care facility learns the patient’s insurance has run out.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE LION AND THE JEWEL Or I could choose to see the show as an allegory–a pure play of metaphors, where each character represents a larger principle and relationships unfold according to poetic rather than behavioral laws. Certainly, the title encourages that view: the jewel is Sidi, a beautiful young woman who becomes the toast of her podunk Nigerian village when she’s photographed for a magazine; the lion is Baroka–the strong, sly, frisky village patriarch who decides to make Sidi his youngest bride....

THE RAZOR’S EDGE Maugham paints Larry’s portrait against a flat backdrop of petty, materialistic characters, foils apparently based on individuals the novelist actually encountered in Chicago after World War I. Isabel Bradley is Larry’s spoiled, petulant fiancee, who sees happiness in terms of golf outings, horseback rides, and bellies full of children. Gray Maturin, Isabel’s millionaire suitor, has about as much personality as his unfortunate first name would indicate. Elliott Templeton, Isabel’s snobbish uncle, an American like Henry James obsessed with becoming European, disapproves of Larry....

THIS OLD MAN CAME ROLLING HOME at Chicago Dramatists Workshop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After a blithe “No contraceptive is 100 percent. We got lucky,” Dr. Louise proceeds to cheerfully anticipate having a baby. But the father, Benjamin, an inventor of adult social-interaction games, is not as enthusiastic. Since Louise has no intention of quitting her job, he points out, she will have to run off to deliver other women’s babies whenever her pager summons, even if it means neglecting her own child–a consideration his fiancee simply shrugs off, saying “We’ll manage....

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN With Stephen Lang, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young, Peter Dobson, Jerry Orbach, and Alexis Arquette. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in the 60s, I read only one of the six stories in Selby’s book–“Tralala,” which is about a teenaged hooker and which occasioned a celebrated obscenity trial when the Provincetown Review published it in 1961–and I was dissuaded from reading farther....