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Schoenberg and Steve Reich notwithstanding, the star of this new-music extravaganza is the Yamaha MIDI grand piano, making its Chicago debut. According to the event’s organizer, composer Howard Sandroff, this state-of-the-art instrument, when plugged into a network of microcomputers and digital synthesizers, allows for “the economic use of sound objects and the inventive enhancement of the piano sound.” To show off its potential, Sandroff has rearranged a 1984 work of his, now titled Adagio for the Piano, intending “through synthesis and simulation, to create an illusion of static aural objects–variations and the originals–juxtaposed over themselves....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rabbi Solomon Goldman, for whom the structure was named when it was owned by Anshe Emet, was a major figure in the Jewish Conservative movement beginning in the 1930s. He was a dynamic speaker and brilliant scholar, and under his leadership the synagogue grew to the point where the original synagogue and the adjacent community hall could no longer accommodate all those who wanted to worship there on the High Holidays....

“Why don’t you write that a person with a broken mind can be mended? And he can go on being useful like me. Broken minds can go on to being productive, like me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Would you swim in coffee if it wasn’t too hot?” he asks in a recent issue mainly devoted to coffee questions. “Yessss, I would,” responds Ed Poindexter, and asks, “You want to know my Social Security number?...

A fascinating time capsule-shot in 1968, released in 1970–this is a filmed performance by three angry, talented black poets. Gylan Kain, Felipe Luciano, and David Nelson recite their rhythmic, passionate work to Afro-Cuban percussion (with occasional flute and guitar) on a rooftop and other urban ghetto settings, working out a highly politicized poetics that anticipates rap while conveying much of the essence of black-power rhetoric of the late 60s. More than a simple objective rendering of an event, this film is interspersed with cutaways and found footage in a very effective fashion by director Herbert Danska, probably best known for his 1967 jazz feature with Dick Gregory, Sweet Love, Bitter....

Do not mistake Sara Paretsky for her creation. Where Warshawski is physically strong–a runner, capable of holding her own with violent miscreants–Paretsky has severe back problems. These prevent her from sitting up for more than an hour or so at a time (she spent part of our interview lying on a sofa) and have put her well behind schedule on her next book. BM: Were you a Presbyterian at the time?...

In 1986, two scholars from Philadelphia set out to conduct an exhaustive racial analysis of cities and suburbs across the land. Three years later, their computers have revealed some dismal information: Chicago’s metropolitan area is the most segregated region in the country. Put it this way: according to their study, the likelihood of an inner-city black youth encountering a white person in the course of a day is less than 20 percent....

To the editors: Bryan Miller’s cover story on Bill McCarter, Channel 11’s general manager (September 4), quotes me accurately for the most part. She’s on the button concerning my disdain for WTTW’s Board of Trustees (CETA). However, I was astonished by this quote attributed to me: “The more I think of Bill McCarter, the less I disrespect him. Like the kids say, ‘I don’t dis him anymore.’” My God, did I say that?...

Paula Wolff was born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., the second of three children (two girls and one boy) to Jesse and Elizabeth Wolff. Her father is a corporate lawyer for a Manhattan law firm; her mother stayed at home and raised the family. She grew up in Mamaroneck, a Westchester County suburb. She attended public schools until her sophomore year, when her parents “decided I needed to learn to punctuate and spell” and enrolled her at Rye Country Day, a private school for girls....

ALEXANDROV RED ARMY SONG AND DANCE ENSEMBLE The rest of the performance was equally reassuring about the possibility of peace and friendship between our nations. Thank goodness the chorus, founded by Alexander Alexandrov in 1928, does not celebrate the military in song. Military music is to music what Spam is to filet mignon, and the chorus knows the difference. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Curiously, the dancers’ finale, Dance of the Elbe Meeting, which depicts the historic meeting between American and Soviet troops during World War II, is the weakest dance....

Sometimes it’s easy to explain why a rock act is so good. Other times it’s almost impossible, as in the case of the Benders, who sound superficially like so much that has gone before, yet manage somehow to inject genuine, shiny warmth into the old moves. They’re all good players and they write clever, catchy rock-and-roll songs and I could bore you with a lot of cliches about how sincere and honest their music is, but what really matters is that they demonstrate what can be done by rock musicians of above-average intelligence who are mature enough to see through the bullshit of the rock-and-roll myth....

Friday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Using a bag of potato chips, a hammer, and a few assorted household items, performance artist Terry Galloway takes on topics such as Berlin, camps for crippled children, snakes, detectives in drag, sadomasochistic ventriloquism, and why feet are unhip in Out All Night and Lost My Shoes. Deaf since the age of 12, Galloway says her disability has left her “acutely aware of both the duplicity that language is capable of and the many expressions the body cannot hide....

To the editors: (1) I am one of those Roman Catholics who feel prompted by the Spirit in our insisting that the hour has arrived for the Vatican to permit married men to be received into Holy Orders. Our argument covers those who are to become diocesan priests. That is: we never include the vowed priest of the Jesuit, Dominican, Franciscan and all other male Orders or Congregations. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Growing up in Minneapolis, I thought of Chicago as the center of the world–the Great American City. But by 1984, when I came “home to the midwest” to work as an economist, things had begun to go wrong, badly wrong. Mainstays of the city’s economy were falling to the wrecking ball, and not enough people were worrying about what would take their place. On the coasts, where things were thriving, Chicago became synonymous with rusty, shuttered plants and a conflict-ridden industrial society that spanking-clean, high-tech enterprises wished to escape....

It’s been another bad year for the world, but a decidedly good one for Lester Russell Brown. In addition to State of the World, Brown and his young researchers have published some 80 authoritative studies–on topics ranging from global demographics to decommissioning nuclear power plants. The leitmotif that runs through all of these works is typically one of urgency and imminent crisis. Planet Earth is headed for big trouble. We’re living beyond our means....

A pair of turkey vultures nested in Black Partridge Woods near Lemont this summer, and a pair of red-breasted mergansers nested along the Sanitary and Ship Canal near Stickney. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you move north away from the equator and toward the poles, the amount of solar energy available to make updrafts declines, and this decline has a considerable effect on soaring birds....

The DuSable Museum of African American History gets its own version of the Grant Park Symphony this weekend when “Jammin’ in the Park” returns to Washington Park. Playing for the picnickers will be veteran pianist John Young, who is surely the romantic to end all romantics. He loves intricacy, so he tends to underline complex bop melodies with low bass rumbles, then suddenly turn the solo into the dirtiest of blues; or he’ll play grand, lush, swooning chords to climax a ballad, then subvert them with dying-butterfly triplets....

In modern blues, expanding one’s horizons usually means delving into the challenging improvisational realms of jazz, funk, or rock–carrying one’s music bravely into the future. Here, though, a legendary Chicago bluesman gets a rare chance to stretch out backward. Guitar and harmonica master Louis Myers was among the most important forces behind the 50s-era evolution of Chicago blues from a rowdy retooling of Delta traditions into a sophisticated, jazz-tinged urban pop music....

Within the inner sanctum of Area Four Violent Crimes, the City News reporter slouched at a battered desk. The office was experiencing the gloomy lull that is characteristic of the third watch, a lull that was disrupted only by muffled blows and stifled yells from within interrogation room F: the sound of an offender being put in shape to meet the assistant state’s attorney. The reporter cleared the line and put in a call to the watch commander of the Tenth District....

Our Flagging Film Fortunes Though the Tribune thinks that feature-film and television production are booming hereabouts (“Filming Booms as Movies Get Real,” September 29), “boom” most assuredly is not the word to describe what’s happening in 1989. We’ll be lucky if feature-film and TV production add $25 million in direct outlays to the state economy this year; in 1987 the figure was $39 million, and the year before that it was $52 million....

Perched on the bow of a freighter, 18-year-old Peter Hutton peered into the dark skies over the Gulf of Siam. Looking out for storms on night watch, the merchant seaman schooled his eye in the drama of light. Thirty years later the filmmaker says, “It was a huge influence to really pay attention to the weather. Thrust into nature like that, you become really very reverent. There’s an innate respect for the forces of nature, since you’re much more vulnerable to weather on a ship than you are on land....