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In the Shawnee National Forest the red-eyed vireos are getting scarcer, the cerulean warblers are nearly extirpated, and the remaining wood thrushes are raising cowbirds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And what the data reveal is a picture of the lack of reproductive success of many species of neotropical migrant forest-interior birds. These birds are hurting in part because of the loss of winter habitat caused by the destruction of tropical forests, but their problems on their summer range seem to stem from the fragmentation of the local landscape, which exposes these birds to the hazards of life on the forest edge, particularly to high rates of predation–by raccoons, opossums, and other animals–and brood parasitism by the brown-headed cowbird....

He must be at least 75. Our eyes meet when I push past him with my overflowing laundry basket, and I cough and look away. If laundromats are such good places to meet people, where are the ones my age? I plop my load down a few machines away and begin sorting colors and counting change. “Cotton–is it ‘wool’ or ‘permanent press’? My blanket is cotton.” The man is puzzling over the settings on his washer, and I look at mine....

For most of the 80s Carmela Rago lived a double life. By day she worked as the director of communications for a large insurance association, while at night (and on weekends) she performed her witty, quirky solo pieces around the country, at such places as N.A.M.E. Gallery, P.S. 122, and the Washington Project for the Arts. Eventually the long hours, the rampant corporate sexism, and having zero personal life became too much for her, and she dropped out–for three years, she gave up performing entirely....

ONLY YOU It doesn’t get any deeper than that. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A waiter who’s also waiting for love and/or marriage, Leo is a nervous nebbish whose idea of courtship is to blurt out, “If I were a multiple amputee, would you love me?” When this self-conscious twit is not sticking a foot down his alimentary canal, he’s listening to the voice of God–Who, according to Mason, serves as a kind of Playboy adviser to the sexually stupid....

The heart of rock and roll is not the beat, but the iconoclasm. Those early, rude sounds in the 1950s shattered a lot more than white middle-class illusions of security; despite the music’s obvious debt to traditional black blues and R and B, some of its harshest criticism came from the jazz community. Suddenly adherents of artists as revolutionary as Charlie Parker found themselves in the unfamiliar role of conservators of tradition and culture, decrying what they saw as a defilement of the sophisticated pop-jazz rhythm and blues of Louis Jordan, Bullmoose Jackson, and others....

Jeff Bridges gives one of his best performances to date in an absorbing romantic comedy-drama written and directed by Alan J. Pakula about the emotional confusions and adjustments that take place when a divorced psychiatrist (Bridges) and a widow/photographer (Alice Krige), both of whom have two children from their previous spouses, decide to get married. The New York setting and the economic bracket and well-educated veneer of the characters (as well as the effective use of familiar songs) suggest the world of Woody Allen, but this is incomparably better in its insights and density than any of Allen’s efforts; the characters steadily grow in interest and complexity as the plot unfolds, and although the two-hour movie may be slightly longer than it has to be, it does a surprisingly deft job of acquainting us with about a dozen major characters, not one of whom is a stock figure....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don Graham’s No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy, excellently reviewed by Mike McGrath in the October 20 Reader, certainly seems like a fascinating study in the evolving mores of post-World War II America. However, I feel it necessary to point out a glaring mistake in Graham’s choice of documentation that was noticeable merely by reading the review....

Ideas that may take some getting used to, from the Animals’ Agenda (June 1989): “If we could set aside species stereotypes and see chickens as they really are, we’d discover a sensitive and courageous bird.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rrrm! Rrrrrmm! Appendectomies, anyone? “Providing all your electricity with only nuclear power and coal is like doing all surgeries with only chain saws,” writes Dave Kraft of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service....

Purity: the impossible dream. Environmentalist Tom Kinder describes his family’s “awakening” to the ubiquity of plastics, in Greenkeeping (September/ October): “We looked around our house and saw the very chemicals that we had fought in hazardous waste dumps or chemical factories….We had to do something. So we piled all our plastics–okay, not quite all, we kept the records, phone, car, computer, etc.–we piled all the plastics we could stand getting rid of into the car and drove them off to a consignment store....

“So many activists who want social justice can’t tolerate a little sin and scandal in their ‘churches,’” Chicago labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan tells Bill Droel in Salt (January). “So they walk away in a huff. As a practicing Catholic you can’t do that. You don’t give up on your church even if–as in the Middle Ages–a Jackie Presser or Jimmy Hoffa becomes the pope.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Wil Wheaton, in Stand by Me, posed a very interesting question. Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog . . . what the hell was Goofy? Enclosed is a bribe–the largest I could afford. –Britt R., Seattle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Educated people–leastways, educated people who’ve just chatted with the Disney archivists–know Goofy first appeared anonymously in “Mickey’s Revue” (1932), looking essentially as he does today except older....

Clint Eastwood directs his first and most accomplished western in years from a rather elaborate script by David Webb Peoples (who cowrote Blade Runner). Like Bird, this movie seems at times to equate dark cinematography with artistry (albeit with stunning use of locations in Canada and California and beautifully composed results), and as with White Hunter, Black Heart, its view of reality depends almost entirely on countercliches, and their implied critique of the machismo of earlier Eastwood movies....

Crime Is His Specialty “No. But if it’s a biography of Lyndon Johnson–didn’t he get into his election rigging early on, and didn’t he get into Bobby Baker? Truman and his scandal–his friend Tom Clark arranged for about five Chicago hoodlums to be released all at the same time. Willie Bioff testified they were shaking down the Hollywood movie industry through the projection-booth union. [Bioff, the union president, later was assassinated....

It’s quite simple really. Just combine a fondness for classic jazz composers (e.g., Monk, Roland Kirk, and Sonny Rollins) with a sensibility that allows for elasticized solo sections, the occasional synthesizer foray, and a goofily clever humor; include evocative newer pieces by the likes of Ornette Coleman and even Robert Fripp; fashion a vibrant sound that falls somewhere between the moonstruck ensemble work of the Microscopic Septet and the polished modernism of the Mel Lewis Orchestra; convince each of the band’s dozen or so members that he’s actually playing in a combo; and abracadabra, it’s the Either/Orchestra....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jim Rosenthal’s comments (p. 36) display both fallacious reasoning and inaccuracies. Every introductory logic course teaches categorical syllogistic reasoning and speaks of the “fallacy of the illicit minor,” which means that no term may have a greater distribution or extension in the conclusion than it had in the premise. Hence, it is fallacious to jump from the example of one particular parish (presented very accurately by their clergy and Mr....

NIGHT ON EARTH As the most popular American independent filmmaker around, Jim Jarmusch carries a special burden: his reputation makes his work particularly hard to evaluate. Other American independents who haven’t enjoyed his commercial success–he’s the only independent who comes to mind who works mainly in 35-millimeter and owns all his own pictures–envy and even resent him, questioning whether he offers a serious alternative to the commercial mainstream. Indeed, Jarmusch has come to be so identified with artistic freedom that it’s difficult to see how any of his movies can live up to his reputation....

GOD NOSE Our hero finds himself at odds with his society when, on the morning before he is to be married, his false nose mysteriously rises off his face as he sleeps and levitates into the flies. (A minor miracle that is never really explained.) Moments later Lug awakens from uneasy dreams to discover to his horror that his nose has disappeared. After a quick search of his apartment, Lug realizes he has become a social outcast....

New band, new album, but the same old John Scofield–thank goodness. With his rawboned sound, a rhythmic drive born of the rhythm and blues that gave rise to rock, and a solo style that combines complex enterprise with straightforward communication, Scofield remains among the most listenable–in fact, most compelling–contemporary improvisers. Few guitarists have had as strong a hand in shaping the way their contemporaries will sound. What’s more, Scofield and his music have matured to the point where he can share the spotlight with an improviser fully his equal....

Louisiana-born guitarist Kenny Neal is one of the most exciting of the bold new generation of musicians who’ve been redefining the boundaries of blues expression in the 80s and 90s. Son of Baton Rouge harp legend Raful Neal, Kenny has incorporated his father’s deep blues feeling and clarity of expression and fired it up with a young man’s restless desire to explore. The results are as satisfying a mix of the traditional and the new as you’re likely to find....

We went to my cousin’s wedding the other day, and as we might have predicted, Paul was there. Paul is always there. He turns up at every social event I go to, or if not him, someone who knows him. This is not in itself a great feat, because Paul knows everybody. They went to college with him, or they live in his building, or they’ve sailed on his boat. Walk 50 feet down the street with him in downtown Chicago and some long-lost friend is sure to hail him and come over to talk....