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After the disappointing Blaze, writer-director Ron Shelton is back on track with the same mixture of sports action, sexual sparring, and comic, slangy dialogue that sparked Bull Durham. Like that earlier comedy, this is enough of a structural mess to lose itself somewhere before the end, but the jazzy surface action is even more lively and seductive. Basically the movie is a string of episodes occasioned by the teaming up of two basketball hustlers (Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes) in Los Angeles, with racial differences serving both to help their hustles along and to define the limits of their friendship; Do the Right Thing’s feisty Rosie Perez plays Harrelson’s girlfriend, who longs to be a contestant on Jeopardy, while Tyra Ferrell is accorded the less interesting and less prominent part of Snipes’s wife....

TOSCA Krainik knew that the opera public would go nuts at this news (his last scheduled appearances here two years ago were also canceled at the last minute, as have been almost half of his Lyric commitments since 1981). Though known for her theater background and expertise, she suggested that Pavarotti could perform from a stationary chair. Understandably, Pavarotti declined. However ridiculous opera may sometimes be, the action of Tosca, which includes Cavaradossi’s torture and execution, would make little sense if he sat in a chair....

How do you compose a birthday tune for a beloved cultural institution in a midlife crisis? “Well, I myself am middle-aged. So I can sympathize with the sad situation at the station. I feel like an anachronism–just like the station.” Jan Bach is talking about WFMT, which earlier this year commissioned from him a string quartet to commemorate its 40th anniversary. “There was a time not too long ago when people didn’t use four-letter words, when civility was valued....

Anthony Newman’s once-controversial fast tempi are now commonplace among scholarly early-music performers. But Newman has always had unusual performing ideas; he was the first American to record the Brandenburg Concerti with one instrument per part, incorporating period instruments and conducting them from the harpsichord, now standard practice. He also released the first recordings of Beethoven piano concerti on fortepiano and period instruments that made use of Beethoven’s controversial metronome markings. Lest Newman sound like an early-music purist, there is also Newman the 20th-century composer and improviser, so thoroughly modern and avant-garde that no less a contemporary music figure than Lukas Foss commissioned a symphony from him, which Foss premiered last Easter in Milwaukee....

Friday 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When I first met her I thought she was sleazy; she needed to make a living, she was fucking on camera–I thought she was just another dumb porno slut. But I was wrong . . . ” And so begins another classic love story. Kamikaze Hearts, a 16-millimeter feature-length documentary by young filmmaker Juliet Bashore, follows the relationship of porn stars Tigr Menett and Sharon Mitchell in a real-life world of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll....

Ten years ago pianist Elizabeth Buccheri helped establish the chamber series at North Park College, which has considerably enriched musical life in the city’s northwest corner. Now, many happy and edifying concerts later, some of the series’s participants–including members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Vermeer Quartet–are back to celebrate its remarkable success. The music for the reunion is appropriately festive: the three hefty pieces are meant to convey esprit de corps as well as joie de vivre....

To the editors: What’s more, you have missed every important point this play was intended to make. Unless you are hard of hearing, you shouldn’t have said that Genevieve wanted to “inherit the house” and “sell it.” Nor should you have quoted a nonexisting sentence, to wit: “Things are different today,” nor should you have misquoted the word “safest” (in terms of birth-control) in Gene’s speech and replaced it with the word “easiest....

Two weeks ago, before the recent blast of warm air melted the snow, I made my first visit in almost a year to Somme Woods. The changes were amazing. The big oak grove at the southern end of the land has been totally opened up. It looks truly sacred. Buckthorn is as ruthlessly dominating visually as it is botanically. Walking through a buckthorn thicket, you have to devote almost all of your attention to avoiding a poke in the face with a sharp twig....

To the editors: Under Alternative II, which represents the CRC proposal somewhat, the city will gradually phase out existing capacity (at Northwest) with no consideration given to expanding incinerator capacity. Only under Alternative III is waste incineration proposed as a principal means of waste disposal or as “a major option for Chicago.” And should co-collection turn into no more than a failed experiment, it hardly follows that building new incinerators is the only alternative....

A couple of years ago, drag queen, novelist, scholar, performance artist, and avant-garde playwright and director Neil Bartlett reflected in an interview on his provocative place in the theatrical firmament: “At times I think, Why do I have this compulsion toward deliberate vuglarity, pushing things a little bit too far, which is going to guarantee that the work is indigestible to some people?” The British director, along with most of his collaborative production ensemble “Gloria,” came to town recently to push Chicago’s theatrical limits, inflicting their difficult and gaudy vision on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the Goodman Theatre....

LET’S DO BRUNCH Fortunately, you can take advantage of F. Romanoff’s special knowledge. Take this course and learn to identify your style and your special friend’s. Don’t risk losing everything over biscuits and lox. QWIK EXERCISE FOR SINGLES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The course that would have had to have been invented if it didn’t exist. No-sweat gymwork for singles, for those jam-packed days when you have a big date coming up but still need to go to the gym....

JAMES COTTON RECORDED LIVE AT ANTONE’S NIGHT CLUB Especially frustrating was the live recording that should have put Cotton over the top: an atrociously produced double LP on Buddah in 1976 that managed to drain most of the emotion from one of his most thrilling performances, a three-night stand at Connecticut’s Shaboo Inn. I was lucky enough to attend, and the performance bore no resemblance to the dull record that resulted....

CALL OF THE SPIRIT TWIN The sheer candidness of this opening gives it a simple beauty, the dark and somewhat threatening text counterpointed by the delicate dance of unframed canvases. The performers seem empowered by being onstage, like flag bearers in a parade. This opening scene, underscored by Willy Steele’s gentle but quietly urgent percussion, is evocative and open-ended, allowing text and image to complement one another and resonate with associations....

Labor Union Invades Law Firm “I was having dinner with a friend of mine shortly after getting a job at Mayer Brown & Platt,” explains Zarkadas, who started there as a proofreader 14 months ago. “I started at 15 thousand a year, which breaks down to $8.24 an hour. He mentioned to me that he’d met some people at a party who were proofreaders and made $17 an hour. My original thought was that they were working for some medical or very technical publishing firm....

LAPD INSPECTS CHICAGO LAPD, according to press material, is “the first performance group in the nation comprised mainly of homeless and formerly homeless people.” Under the direction of performance artist John Malpede, LAPD visited Chicago for a 45-day residency based at Cooper’s Place, a day shelter for homeless men. This show, performed both at Cooper’s Place and Randolph Street Gallery, is the result of workshops there. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

LONE STAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think one of the reasons I was so concerned about the floor was that McLure doesn’t give us much of anything else to be concerned about. Lone Star is another one of those jug-head comedies in which somebody says “Boy, are you dumb!” to somebody else every five minutes. The big dramatic question is how Little Brother Jughead Ray is going to break the news to Mean Drunk Jughead Roy (Ray and Roy–ain’t that cute?...

Lucinda Williams’s third record (called Lucinda Williams) is a charmer, released on Rough Trade, of all labels. She’s a country gal unapologetically, and if her record, production-wise, is a melange of messy 70s influences (particularly Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt), she overwhelms them with a wary integrity and an eye for the perfect lyric. “These boots are the same ones I was wearin’ then / And this beer I’m drinkin’ is the same old brand / But these blues are somethin’ new / They came around when I lost you....

Lead Story Thelma Weasenforth Lunaas of Houston filed a lawsuit against the United States in July for nearly $100 billion, as repayment of a $450,000 loan that her ancestor, Jacob De Haven, made in cash and supplies to General George Washington in 1777, when the Continental Congress issued a call for assistance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steven G. Rollins, already serving 32 years for killing a prison inmate in 1974 and charged with rape in July while on parole in Providence, Rhode Island, became dissatisfied with his lawyer’s defense tactics and began to beat him with his fists in the courtroom, causing a concussion before he was restrained....

HIGH AND LOW: MODERN ART AND POPULAR CULTURE “High and Low” looks at the interplay between popular culture and the fine arts. If that sounds like a major undertaking, its organizers–Kirk Varnedoe, director of MOMA’s department of painting and sculpture, and Adam Gopnik, a fiction editor and now the primary art critic for the New Yorker–seem to have been well aware of the challenge. So are their detractors. The attempt to define such concepts as “art” and “culture” and to make such distinctions as “fine” and “popular” raises Big Issues....

Surprising almost everyone, not least its organizers, last year’s Midwest Music Conference was a success by just about any standard. Its organizers–Dave Bernstein, Peter Katsis, and Jeff Kwatinetz, under the rubric of Kwatinetz’s Q Productions–saw their primary goal of putting Chicago back on the national record-industry map fairly well accomplished. And even by an outside standard, the conference seemed useful, interesting, and even, sometimes, fun–the panel members only rarely embarrassed themselves, relatively dependable information was more than occasionally dispensed, and the band showcases ranged from the OK (a disappointing Shoes reunion) to the terrific (Material Issue proving itself at the Cubby Bear, Soul Asylum closing down the conference at Cabaret Metro)....