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About a year ago the central office announced its plan to close the Wilson Occupational High School. The idea was to merge the school for mentally handicapped students with Taft, one of the city’s largest high schools. Just who supports the merger is not clear, since school officials would not respond for comment. But leaders at Wilson and Taft say it threatens ambitious reorganization efforts at both schools. “No one asked us about this consolidation plan,” says Bill Watts, Taft’s principal....

Composer and saxophonist, self-styled cultural revolutionary, former construction worker, Chinese American who joined the Black Muslims at 16, Harvard sociology major who now researches Asian folk songs as well as historical oppression–Fred Ho doesn’t fit any stereotype you can conjure. His friend and champion Amiri Baraka writes that Ho’s music “is part of the new tongue of anti-oppression,” but you don’t need even that description to appreciate the phrase “Bamboo That Snaps Back....

Kenneth Branagh’s superb version of the Shakespeare play, which he directed and adapted as well as stars in, presents a distinctly different view of this work from Laurence Olivier’s 1945 movie. While the earlier film, made during the war, was intended to whip up patriotic sentiment, Branagh’s version has a much darker view of England’s defeat of France, more relevant in certain respects to World War I. (The climactic battle is muddy, gory, and marked by the looting of corpses, and after it’s over, Henry’s face is streaked with blood and grime like a Jackson Pollock painting....

The nature of American society is such that Howard Johnson will always be best known as “that guy who plays the big saxophone on Saturday Night Live”–despite the fact that his virtuosity on the baritone sax has been employed by Taj Mahal and Paul Butterfield, Gil Evans and Dizzy Gillespie, Jack DeJohnette and Abdullah Ibrahim and three dozen other leaders who decide they want the top gun for the bottom sounds....

Setting tempos, coloring the ensemble sound, influencing and at times controlling the rhythmic design of everyone else’s solos: in jazz, the drummer plays the most important role (after the leader) on stage. Certainly Jeff Stitely gets enough of all that in the several bands he regularly anchors. But with this quartet–in which he shapes the music with such authority that it sounds newly minted–Stitely makes you understand why the drummer might go one step further and actually be the leader....

With his debut album just hitting the racks and two decades of jazz dues all paid up, vibist Jim Cooper is on the verge of establishing himself among Chicago’s jazz perennials. His unquestioned control of the mainstream idiom has made him a valued sideman in a variety of contexts; when he leads his own groups, the more flamboyant leaps and harmonic boundary-bashing that characterize Bobby Hutcherson’s music come to the fore....

The 50-odd groups appearing in the eight-week “festival of Chicago’s international arts” include a dozen theater companies and performance artists; those performing November 7 through 14 are described below. These listings refer to theater and performance art offerings only; on nights when only one performance is listed here, be assured at least one other program of music, dance, or poetry is also planned, with discount prices available to viewers buying a ticket to all performances on a single night....

KAREN MCMAHON AND BOB EISEN McMahon’s crawl forward on her hands and knees evolves to a loping animal walk on hands and feet. She seems feral, a wild child. She crawls to a pile of rocks and perches on them, making her torso into a muscular hollowed-out form. Only then does McMahon pull her hair away and show us her face, and in that moment she becomes human, though still wild....

REFLECTIONS For seven months I thought I lived in Uptown. Then one evening about a month ago, I arrived home to find men in a utility truck affixing maroon banners to the streetlights. The banners announced that I was now living in “Buena Park: An Historic District.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kings don’t make it a habit to grace trash heaps, but that hardly matters to Mathilda, and soon the bum awakens and engages the young couple in clever banter about the meaning of their lives....

“I think you have it,” Beck is saying. “I really remember that we talked about it and you said that you wanted to take it so it would be safe.” There’s only one problem–well, there are actually several problems, but the biggie is Caporino’s choice of subject matter, which is a little, um, adolescent, as may be discerned from several song titles. In plain point of fact, Caporino wanders among the fields of sexual juvenilia and schoolyard scatology with an expert’s eye; human genitalia and bodily functions are to him what haystacks were to Monet....

SON OF THE BITCH . . . SKID MARK AFTER DARK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Far from the misbegotten child it purports to be, this latest effort from Mary-Arrchie Theatre is a perfectly logical development from its predecessor. A show like Bitch With Rich, which deliberately encouraged its audience-participants to fling shit about indiscriminately, sooner or later accumulates an awful lot of shit....

This building suitable for recycling. A new interdisciplinary operation at the University of Illinois is called the Degradable Plastics Laboratory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The press and the pollsters take for granted that there is a public and that it has opinions,” writes Jay Rosen in the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1989). Not true. For instance, ever since 1967 NATO has said that it might use nuclear weapons to stop a conventional Soviet invasion of western Europe....

Rubbing it in. The Wisconsin Electric Power Company recently held a media-briefing session to explain why it just had its seventh rate decrease in five years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m consistently impressed by how dangerous people are who want to serve others,” writes Northwestern University’s John McKnight in The Other Side (January/February 1989). “The service ideology and its systems don’t work….they constantly steal money from people who are poor....

The 26th Chicago International Film Festival includes, at the latest count, 110 features and ten additional programs, spaced out over 15 days in two locations –a somewhat more modest menu than last year’s. Apart from this streamlining, it would be a pleasure to report some major improvements in the overall selection, but I’m afraid wanting isn’t having, and from the looks of things, this year’s lineup is not very inspiring....

THE SEA HORSE Moore, who in 1974 won the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Playwright for this play, based it on the old comic courtship scenario, in which two equally imperfect models of humanity find love and happiness together. (Shakespeare explored this same theme in The Taming of the Shrew, and Chekhov in several short farces.) One of the unlikely lovers is Gertrude Blum, who became proprietress of the Sea Horse, a waterfront tavern, after her abusive husband deserted her....

What’s the poop on this Dianetics stuff? Is it a religion, a life-view, or another P.T. Barnum scam? L. Ron Hubbard’s ads make it sound like the best thing for humanity since cable TV. However, all these years of reading your column have made us skeptical. Is it worth wasting our time and money on this stuff, or is it just more garbage from money-grubbing con artists? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The set for Arts/Lanes’ production of Romeo and Juliet at the Halsted Theatre Centre has a lean and hungry look. This isn’t the sumptuous Renaissance of Franco Zeffirelli’s movie, or the sleek 20th-century vision of last season’s Goodman Theatre production. The only thing onstage for most of this version is a bare, slightly inclined wood platform, which serves as a street corner, a table, a bed, and finally a funeral bier....

It’s such a truism that it’s passed into cliche: there are all too few singers who can even survive the average opera by Wagner or Strauss, let alone sing those works with undiminished strength and beauty of tone. Yet Swedish soprano Siv Wennberg, who tosses off fiendishly difficult roles like Salome the way other singers approach Mimi, is virtually unheard of in this country. Despite the worldwide shortage of dramatic sopranos, she has never been invited to sing at the Met, the Lyric, or the other international opera houses of North America....

Willie “Big Eyes” Smith is best known as the drummer whose smoothly propulsive shuffles and rugged stop-time lopes drove Muddy Waters’s bands for 18 years. But Smith’s roots go back much farther than that: although he’d played drums since childhood he began his professional career as a harp player, working in the 50s with such Chicago stalwarts as drummer Clifton James and guitarist Arthur “Big Boy” Spires. In 1958 Smith turned to the drums, playing with Muddy Waters’s understudy Mojo Buford, and within a year Muddy himself had recruited Smith to record....

LOS ENCUENTROS The formal and conceptual terrain represented in “Los Encuentros” is as vast as the geographical area from which the artists are drawn. The show includes painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and mixed-media work; crisply representational imagery and spare abstraction; religious symbolism, romantic landscape, and terse political commentary. Nevertheless there are common strains. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the work in “Los Encuentros” investigates how we understand ourselves as physical creatures....