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When Warner Brothers released the seven-minute cartoon Canary Row in 1950, it’s a good bet no one realized they’d created an important tool in the study of human communication and cognition. By examining these videotapes closely–at key points, frame by frame–McNeill has found that the gestures we spontaneously make in conversation are full of meaning. They are not “body language,” unconnected with speech. They are not ethnic hangovers. They are not emotional outlets for overexcited storytellers....

OVERRULED Which is only to say that Shaw was too great a playwright to let ideas get in the way of persuasive characters. As often as not–though this flies in the face of the popular conception of a cold-blooded, system-mongering Shaw–it’s the characters who lead the ideas along in his plays. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Touchstone Theatre dark-night production, Sandra Grand’s staging reinforces the script by adding as an introduction excerpts from Shaw’s preface to the play....

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; Yea, they have all one breath . . . –Ecclesiastes 3:19 At the north end of the Ravenswood line, the el comes down to earth. You walk right out of the train onto streets where well-trimmed lawns front solid brick homes. You may meet an occasional solid citizen walking a besweatered dog or taking a child to the corner park....

BLOODY POETRY Byron–in literature and in the popular mythology of his day the “doer” to Shelley’s “seer,” charming rogue and heroic revolutionary–comes off as a cynical, burnt-out libertine, diseased by alcoholism, syphilis, and sexist arrogance. The women we meet are Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Shelley’s lover, and her half-sister Claire Clairemont, mother of Byron’s child (though she’s also sleeping with Shelley, and though the bisexual Byron seems to have his eye on both Mary and Shelley himself)....

Staying home in the Twin Cities and playing with tape loops instead of synthesizers; wringing new sounds from a variety of fretted instruments instead of relying on the latest sample; sticking mostly to eight tracks while the tech men are dissecting everything into 32–that’s how guitarist Steve Tibbetts has painstakingly constructed his densely woven instrumental tapestries over the last 15 years, and he’s built a small battalion of loyalists in the process....

It’s not as though the Chicago Park District needs more problems, what with trees dying in Lincoln Park and so many inner-city parks a shambles. Yet once again it’s the target of accusations by outraged activists who feel the bureaucracy is trying to take control of policies and practices beyond its domain. “We don’t need the Park District with its mandatory guidelines coming in to tell us how to run our business, thank you,” says Cecilia Butler, chairperson of the Washington Park advisory council and a member of the consortium....

So why do we have to sleep, anyway? I hate spending almost a third of my life in a coma. –Bill Toman, Madison, Wisconsin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (2) Sleep conserves energy. It takes a lot of energy to keep us warm-blooded critters warm. Since energy consumption drops during sleep, maybe we doze so we don’t have to eat all day long (not that that stops a few people I could name)....

After doing my monthly bills I happened to notice all the envelopes provided by my creditors had two sets of bar codes printed on them. The ones at the top were all the same except for a “business reply” envelope, which was slightly different. The ones at the bottom were all different–maybe zip codes. But if we are picking up the postage, what do the companies get out of it? If it’s to ease mail sorting and keep the price of postage down, I guess it hasn’t worked....

Lewie really wanted to buy a pig. He was out of work and lonely. He was overeating. Like a time some years ago when he’d smoked so much reefer that he’d smoked himself straight, he was eating himself hungry. Bored with watching reruns of reruns, he found himself turning on the Home Shopping Club. That’s how bad things were getting. He couldn’t find a job. He couldn’t afford to go out....

The last time the Chicago City Council challenged a mayor on his budget was in 1985, at the height of Council Wars. Led by the aldermanic Eddies–Vrdolyak and Burke–the majority bloc of opposition aldermen threatened to bring city services to a halt unless Mayor Harold Washington made some last-minute changes to the budget. Simpson has written, with four graduate students, “The City Council’s Role in Chicago Budget Making,” a 31-page analysis of council voting patterns on the budget over the last three years....

Friday 16 Saturday 17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year marks the 125th anniversary of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery in this country. Mary Frances Berry, of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, will speak about the critical years after the amendment’s passage in The Struggle for Freedom: African Americans and the Constitution, 1868-1868. It’s part of the Public Library Cultural Center’s celebration of African American History Month....

Chronologically, the history of vocal jazz squeezes Carmen McRae between Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter; stylistic comparisons prove a good deal more difficult. There’s no doubt that her scat singing was first influenced by Vaughan’s, but McRae improvises with the swagger of a Texas tenor saxist; similarly, she had clearly heard and loved Billie Holiday, but brought a new, modernist edge to Lady Day’s deflowered sensibility of long-lost innocence. McRae is tough: in person and in music, she suffers fools not at all, and sentimentality is spat on....

On a 13-acre plot of land at 87th Street, just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway, lies the future of economic development in inner-city Chicago. The local alderman is almost as upbeat. “Are there some drawbacks? Yes. Is it perfect? No. But the positives outweigh the negatives,” says 21st Ward Alderman Jesse Evans. “This shopping mall is economic development, and that means expanding your tax base and putting people to work....

EXHIBIT A The premise of Exhibit A is simple. A police officer (Charles R. Bowen Jr.) and a young man (William C. Moore) burst into the room, as if the cop has chased the man in off the street. There’s a brief explosive scuffle, during which the police officer is apparently stabbed in the leg. Once the young man is subdued, the two agree to allow the audience to decide the guilt or innocence of the alleged criminal....

Almost anything can happen in the world of Jose Rivera’s plays. Maidens have prophetic dreams; flowers bloom as long-separated lovers kiss; a man “waters” his garden with his own blood; a handsome young poet is murdered by the magic dance of a chicken. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was invited by the Sundance Institute to take part in a workshop with Marquez,” says Rivera....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recall Juffer’s thesis. What is happening at the Harold Ickes Homes, to the Richmond family in particular, and to the poor residents of public housing across the city, “not only raises a question about the civil liberties of innocent people caught in the cross fire of the war on drugs but also leads to a related question about the nature of Operation Clean Sweep: When does such an operation become less of an effort to make public housing safe for its tenants and more of a convenient way to control a whole community of people, people with every reason to be angry at the system and people for whom eviction could easily mean homelessness?...

“It’s better to make them wince than just have people snapping their fingers. The stuff we do is so pop and sing-alongy that we need the lyrics to sort of counter that.” That’s Juliana Hatfield, talking about some of the more blistering moments on the Blake Babies’ new album, the plangent Sunburn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Blake Babies are a rock ‘n’ roll trio who, as Hatfield implies, create confectionary melodies, jangly songs, and roaring banks of choruses, then just as efficiently undermine them with some pretty painful analyses on the subject of interpersonal relations....

SWAY In the right hands, say Harold Pinter’s or David Mamet’s, this rhetorical device can be quite effective. Anyone who has seen Pinter’s The Birthday Party knows how much unstated but still felt tragedy lies beneath the “comic” dialogue. However, in less certain hands this switching from a comic to a more serious tone seems less a conscious choice than a halfhearted attempt to obscure the inconsistencies of the work. Such is the case, I suspect, with Andy Roski’s Sway, which changes tone every time the scene changes....

Kill, maim, destroy with Bill and Linda. A survey of the four major local TV stations’ late newscasts from December 1989 to May 1990 (conducted by Northwestern University’s Robert Entman) reveals that Channel Nine spent the least time on crime (1,955 seconds) and Channel Two spent by far the most (4,660 seconds) (Chicago Reporter, January 1991). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey, let’s go out to that new Dutch restaurant!...

The Secret Life of John Schmid The pseudonymous author stands on shaky ground indeed in the straight-arrow fellowship of journalistic scriveners. The Reader’s own policy on pseudonyms is clear and unnegotiable: only when appropriate. Tracy Baim thought the whole thing was pretty funny. “He started out as a straight woman,” she said, speaking of Schmid and the formidable Mrs. Walls. “It was done very tongue in cheek, obviously a pseudonym for somebody....