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THE POETIC THEATRE PROJECT The Poetic Theatre Project, not unlike last fall’s “Poetry Under the Lights” by City Lit, features words and performances by six local poets, including readings of work by Cyn. Zarco, Anna L. Barbould, and Nikki Giovanni. There’s also a reading of literary criticism by T.S. Eliot. The local poets include Marc Smith, who founded the Uptown Poetry Slam and gave performance poetry a weekly forum at the Green Mill, and Cindy Salach, who often performs with the Loofah Method, a group that bases its work on Salach’s writing but whose shows usually fall more into the mold of performance art than performance poetry....

The perception that some number combinations appear more frequently than others in the various state lotteries leads me to wonder: do all number combinations have equal probability, or is there some mathematical quirk that would allow certain number combinations to appear more often than others? –Douglas J. Stark, Houston Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In some games of chance, of course, systems do work....

TOM FRIEDMAN Another piece demanding careful scrutiny is a length of mill-cut wood lying casually on the floor near a couple of windows. Called Two by Four, this work looks so unmediated that we tend to glance at it and walk by. It seems just another pretentious, boring piece of conceptual art, or maybe it’s a carpenter’s remnant. Only after looking at the rest of the show did I return to this work for another look....

The last three days of a five-day festival, now in its eighth year, that highlights film and video shorts and features by women, including documentary, animated, narrative, and experimental works. It continues Friday, March 10, through Sunday, March 12, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont. Films and videos are grouped under such program headings as “Live in a Glass House,” “Play With Fire,” and “Take One’s Life in One’s Hands.” Festival tickets are $5 per program for the general public, $4 for members of Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago Filmmakers, and the Center for New Television, students, and senior citizens....

As soon as my mother told me the news, I caught the first bus home. I hoped I wasn’t too late. Our old friend suddenly had a week to go, two weeks max. “Archer Big Store is going out of business,” she’d said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Archer Big Store helped me show my wife, when words failed me, why I can’t bring myself to wear an earring....

The trustees of Winnetka probably did not realize it, but with little fanfare or celebration they unleashed a revolution last October. “There’s precedent for this,” says Randy Neufeld, executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, a not-for-profit advocacy group. “Evanston closed Sheridan Road to cyclists in ’58. We’re opposed to all bike bans, but, in their defense, Evanston at least takes cycling seriously. They’ve created well-maintained alternative routes. It’s not a situation like this, where they simply ban bikes and hope they go away....

Bulls Win! Joyous City Goes Shopping! Rampage on Michigan Avenue! Before this saga jumped to page four, the Sun-Times did allow that “high spirits turned to trouble in the hours after the win as looters struck businesses and fires broke out.” Vandalism chronicled on the inside pages more than justified the paper’s observation that “the enthusiasm got out of control in some areas.” And a page of pictures was titled “Win Brings Joy, Destruction....

Friday 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Vito Acconci’s Pryings, Acconci literally tries to get a woman to open her eyes to the world around her. That image will be juxtaposed with Race and Reason–an episode from a real neo-Nazi public-access program–in The Powers That Wanna Be, a program of ten videos on repression and censorship sponsored by the Randolph Street Gallery and the Center for New Television....

As tanks maneuver through drill practices and bulldozers scoop up the desert floor preparing for ground war in the Middle East, McGuire Gibson cringes at the sight; where others see troops digging foxholes Gibson sees the pulverization of thousands of years of human society. Working in the late 1970s in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, Gibson uncovered fragments of pottery that originated hundreds of miles away in the ancient city of Ur....

On hangers, the dresses Mark Heister designs don’t look the way they’re supposed to. The spiraled seams, the twists of fabric, the flared hems, and the draped bodices hang loose and slouchy on the racks. To get the full effect, you have to see them on a woman’s body. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But recently the museum’s curators have decided to step up coverage of local contemporary work....

All of Mary’s special possessions are now at the city dump, where they would have been years ago had she not saved them from the trash cans and alleys of Uptown and taken them to her sleeping room in the Norman Hotel. The 80-year-old Mary (which isn’t her real name) doesn’t talk much about herself, though she once said she’d been a bookkeeper 20 years ago. For years she hauled debris up to her room at the Norman....

How far should the state of Illinois go to attract investment within its borders? How much should it spend to create a single job? What guidelines should it impose for grants and loans? Should it be in the job-creation business at all? Subsidies were awarded non-competitively without targeting specific industries. In some cases, subsidies were given to firms that did not need them. Audit manager C. Edward Gilpatric of the auditor general’s office called it “the most consuming and demanding audit I’ve ever worked on....

Set in Portland, Oregon, in 1971, this amiable, no-nonsense account of the exploits of a quartet of junkies who live together (Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, and Heather Graham) fully lives up to the promise of Mala Noche, director Gus Van Sant’s previous feature. Based on an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle that Van Sant adapted with Daniel Yost, the movie has the kind of stylistic conviction that immediately wins one over, conveying something of a junkie’s inner life (in the film’s editing rhythms, unorthodox use of sudden close-ups, and Dillon’s offscreen narration, as well as in a few hallucinatory passages) and the outer necessities of the life-style (which, in this case, include many drugstore robberies and changes of address)....

A round bald man spent the morning in a crouch, repeatedly inflating a bicycle tire that kept going flat before its rider could pedal 50 feet. The man was from the Schwinn History Center, the bicycle from 1894; both were part of a Chicago Historical Society effort to reinvent the past. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first part of the new exhibit offers six slices of Chicago life....

The screaming is coming from the monkey cage. The zoo visitors who have been gazing at neighboring animals–the sleepy North American black bears, the hairy and ponderous North American bisons, the leggy and brilliant flamingos–rush now to the monkey cage, like children drawn to a school-yard fight. Cashew has just bitten Cindy. Now he is chasing her up the stone steps. He corners her and glares, openmouthed. Cindy, shivering, bares her teeth and screams back....

Thank God they’re not being billed as a “girl group” anymore–these three women are assertive, sophisticated vocalists who left girlhood behind long ago in favor of a knowing and refreshingly contemporary approach to blues. Strehli’s onstage demeanor–she’s regal, aloof, almost icy in her self-assurance–stands in marked contrast to the passion she brings to her music; especially notable is her ability to segue from up-tempo exuberance to stark balladry and still maintain her control and her emotional commitment....

Like other aging rockers who hunger for approval from the musical establishment, Paul McCartney attempted to move into the classical realm. However, his foray was only a qualified success. A prodigious tunesmith with an ear for hummable melodies, the ex-Beatle knows how to captivate. But in collaboration with movie-score composer Carl Davis, he fashioned a quasi opera rather pretentiously tided Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio that, in musical sophistication, falls somewhere between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Kurt Weill....

RED CROSS and The characters of Red Cross and Chicago, two early Sam Shepard efforts, are just so many escape artists, imagining their ways out of confining circumstances. Though Shepard’s early plays teem with overblown speeches that threaten to take his characters over the top, they’re catnip for actors. The players at Kamijo clearly relish these roles, and their rawness confers on Shepard’s sophomoric excesses of the 60s a crude conviction all their own....

Perhaps in the age of microchips and instant everything, we need a new frisson with every meal. Or maybe in the narcissistic 80s, the age of anxiety, we yearn for the good old days when we sat in high chairs and Mommy beguiled us into opening our mouths for the choo-choo. Something has to account for the latest trend in restaurants. In the past few years, we’ve gone through a spate of dinner theaters in which someone is “murdered” during the first course and the murderer unmasked by the time dessert rolls around....

It’s readily apparent by now that Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is something of a Rorschach test as well as an ideological litmus test, and not only for the critics. It’s hard to think of another movie from the past several years that has elicited as much heated debate about what it says and what it means, and it’s heartening as well as significant that the picture stirring up all this talk is not a standard Hollywood feature....