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Three years ago a few workers at the Uptown Center Hull House started a project that evolved into the Fourth World Artisans Cooperative, a storefront at 3453 N. Southport full of handcrafted items that is run on the principle of fair wages for the artisans and a minimal markup to cover the costs of operating the store. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The store is now a full-time project of Hull House, part of their ongoing effort to, as their publicity puts it, “help low- and moderate-income people help themselves....

Call it roadhouse music, honky-tonk, rockabilly, or what you please–I’d just as soon call it traditional rock ‘n’ roll, and I’m convinced that right now Sleepy LaBeef is its foremost purveyor. Maybe you haven’t heard of him (and frankly I’m at a loss to explain why he’s not a hundred times more well known), but you should, because LaBeef, a native Arkansan well into his fourth decade of the rock ‘n’ roll road life, possesses an impossibly deep, rich bass voice and a repertoire of several hundred songs, which he delivers in concert with a curiously serene Zen effortlessness, one after another, building inexorably to a peak of excitement that turns a bar into a party....

In the mid-80s Odis Richardson wanted out of teaching. He was a special-education instructor and debate coach at south-side DuSable High School, which draws most of its students from the Robert Taylor housing project. And he’d been teaching in the Chicago Public Schools since 1965. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The profession does seem to be in decline, at least according to a statistical portrait painted by the Golden Apple Foundation....

THE APOLLO OF BELLAC Essentially plotless, this famous one-act “antiplay” parodies the pointless lives of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, two respectable middle-class London suburbanites with a definite fondness for wayward logic: “A conscientious doctor must die with his patient.” On the night of the play, the Smiths entertain their friends, the Martins (who have either dropped in unannounced or are four hours late to dinner). The Martins have a few quirks of their own, the most unusual being their habit of behaving as if they hardly know each other....

The tenth Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival continues from Friday, November 16, through Sunday, November 18, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, and Rodde Center, 4753 N. Broadway. Tickets ($4 for most matinees, including 5 pm shows; $5 for most evening shows) go on sale a half hour before the first show; advance tickets can be purchased before the day of the show at Chicago Filmmakers. Festival passes are $25, good for six screenings only....

Thoughts to live by, from local actor and bookstore manager Bob Parker, quoted in the new twentysomething magazine Pure (Fall), on his eventual move out of Chicago: “If I couldn’t pack everything I own, I would throw it out.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dept. of underwhelming modesty, from a North Pier press release in which Kris Kringle announces his relocation from the North Pole: “I looked everywhere, including New York’s 5th Avenue, Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive, and Paris’ Champs Elysees, and no place has it all like Chicago’s North Pier....

From the outside, the building at 2306 N. Lincoln looks innocent and ordinary, a storefront and some apartments in need of nothing more than a few coats of paint. Of all the residents there when she was, Franken–a graduate student in literature at the University of Illinois–and her husband, Steve Munro, were hardest hit by the electric company. When they moved there in September 1986, their landlord estimated that the gas-heated, one-bedroom unit would generate about $450 a year in utility bills....

Part of the brilliance of Raul Ruiz rests in his capacity to take on routine documentary assignments for French television and turn them into mind-bending fictions. That’s what happened with this provocative hour-long 1984 film about an actor at the 1983 Avignon Theater Festival; it ingeniously balances reporting on an actual event with Ruizian yarn spinning. Even more impressive is the accompanying 20-minute 1980 short Le jeu de l’oie (Snakes and Ladders)–which was commissioned to promote a map exhibition at Paris’s Pompidou Center–an awesome and hilarious metaphysical fantasy with the tattiest special effects this side of Edward D....

It doesn’t do justice to the intense passions involved between the Bulls and the Detroit Pistons to call their series of battles over the past few years a rivalry. The Bulls and the Pistons–and their fans, across the country–have developed such hatred for one another, such conflicting styles, strategies, and criteria, that theirs is the sort of enmity found only in the high-pitched emotional traumas of classical tragedy. If the Bulls’ second annual five-game victory over the Philadelphia 76ers in the second round of the playoffs was simply putting a younger brother–a younger, more emotional, but less experienced and, in the end, a mite lazy sibling–back in his place, then moving on to the third annual conference title series against the Pistons was, at least in the minds of the Bulls and their fans, like fighting for the conscience and direction of the family....

I am currently reading a book entitled The Lost Books of the Bible. Being interested in Bible history, I thought it might be an interesting diversion, but I was not prepared for what I found. It claims that when Jesus was young, he killed a couple of boys and a schoolmaster because they displeased him. Jesus comes off as an arrogant bad seed in these supposedly ancient texts. My question is: Were these books truly a part of the original Bible, and if they were suppressed for obvious reasons, does the Catholic church, or any church for that matter, acknowledge their existence?...

To the editors: I’ve finally been frustrated enough by your biased and inept reporting to express my own myopic views. Did you read Royko’s article on Kozubowski, city clerk, I believe, who has served dutifully and efficiently in his office? Did you comprehend why Washington wants to replace him with one of his own supporters? Is it because Washington is really no reformer at all, but maybe a new political chieftain of a different stripe?...

Tribune’s Vision for Arts Coverage: Internal Restructuring! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not surprisingly, Twohey has emerged as head honcho in the new scheme. No one will have the title of entertainment editor, which until last September belonged to Richard Christiansen, who now goes by the title senior writer and chief critic. Instead, a group of editors will report to Twohey, whose principal expertise is newspaper and magazine design, not the arts....

DIE FLEDERMAUS This debate is similar to the current debate about whether opera companies should produce Broadway musicals; in fact, musical and operetta are virtual synonyms in that both are sung dramas dependent on much spoken dialogue to move the action along. Much of the debate boils down to one issue: does one hire actors who can sing, or singers who can act? Or more probably, actors who can do some singing, or singers who can do some acting?...

BLUE WINDOW Bailiwick Repertory Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This doesn’t make the characters any easier to take. Libby, whose dinner party for a group of friends is the focus of the play’s action, is a dithering neurotic whose insecurities, funny at first, make her incredibly annoying by the end of the evening, when Lucas unveils his shocker of an ending. And the guests at her party–less profoundly afflicted than their hostess but full of woes nonetheless–aren’t a whole lot easier to take....

Friday 28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Randolph Street Gallery’s Festival Cinema Borealis offers a rare opportunity to see wide-screen features as their creators intended–on an 70-foot screen. The three-day fest will be held in Lincoln Park on the lawn between Stockton Drive and North Pond, just north of Fullerton. Tonight’s free featured film is Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, tomorrow’s is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Sunday’s is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven....

BROADWAY BILL *** (A must-see) Directed by Frank Capra Written by Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman With Warner Baxter, Myrna Loy, Helen Vinson, Clarence Muse, Raymond Walburn, Walter Connolly, Margaret Hamilton, and Frankie Darro. I’ve never been one of Capra’s champions, though I admire the exquisite textures and feelings of his highly uncharacteristic and still neglected The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Like McBride, I agree with critic Elliott Stein that Capra’s most durable work comes in the 20s and 30s, before rather than after Mr....

Her last clients have left, including the woman whose boy got a little carried away drawing the Terminator and scribbled red crayon on her wall. Pamela Poynter doesn’t bother cleaning it off–it makes the office look a little homier. And she’s trying to create an atmosphere that isn’t at all threatening. Yet Poynter doesn’t want this woman to believe the order of protection will actually protect her. “It’s just a piece of paper,” she says....

Often noted as the best local example of a new breed–the conductorless chamber ensemble–Concertante di Chicago is also remarkably imaginative in its programming. In this salute to two titans of American music, the group has picked a couple of relatively early obscurities from the composers’ oeuvres. Aaron Copland’s Quiet City is a modest charmer long overshadowed by the rambunctious ballet Billy the Kid. It shares the Copland half of the bill with Appalachian Spring, written in 1944 for Martha Graham and her dancers....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am writing in response to Francisco Ruiz’s letter of March 23 about Natural Ethics. Quoted below is the key paragraph of the article. “Natural Ethics is independent of any religious creed; it depends on the common characteristics of people’s understanding of right and wrong. For instance, most agree that killing is wrong; anyone who disagrees with this is considered a pathological case....

Robin Lakes Rough Dance It always happens when you least expect it. Dissonance, an evening-length work by Robin Lakes Rough Dance, was described in a press release as raising “the haunting images of Holocaust.” Heavy material to dance to. I figured it would be like watching another TV or film documentary, focusing on the issues of racism and the ugly possibilities of man’s inhumanity to man. The medium is never the message here, only a conduit for the content....