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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If there is any area where Henry Fogel deserves the hearty support of CSO listeners and players it is in his support for new music and American music being added to the CSO repertoire. Aside from the bizarre concept of a union leader opposing a programming move that adds work for more musicians, Vosburgh’s apparent position ignores the extraordinary importance of the CSO’s bringing a powerful and accessible piece of American music to Europe next year....

You don’t have to read anything. You don’t even have to listen to anything to know that Commonwealth Edison clobbered the city in negotiating its proposed new 29-year franchise agreement. Just push the mute button, roll the tape of the October 22 press conference at which the tentative agreement was announced, and watch the mayor of the nation’s third-largest city stare down at the podium and hang his head like a whipped dog....

THE CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER PLAYERS at Grace Place Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shapey, according to the program, was a friend of Varese, who is finally getting the recognition he deserves as one of 20th-century music’s true giants of innovation. Although Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartok are still generally considered to be the century’s most important composers, the true avant-garde pioneers were Charles Ives in America and Varese in Europe (though he also did important work here)....

A luncheon at Ditka’s put on by the Chicago chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences finished with jumbled scenes from Gone With the Wind playing on five overhead TV sets. Pretend battles and a resplendent Vivien Leigh had been cannibalized to decorate this music video. As the sound was turned down, Essee Kupcinet took the floor to introduce TV news anchorman Bill Kurtis, who was moderating a panel on covering a war almost as distant as the Civil War....

“My father was a hard-working farmer and sawyer,” Dan Wagoner explains in Connie Kreemer’s book on dance Further Steps. “He chewed tobacco, spat a lot, and could curse with great fluency. A friend once described him this way: ‘He was the most natural “cusser” I ever knew. He could make a “goddamn” sound almost theological, and “son of a bitch” a compliment. I never heard him cuss in anger or malice....

DEGENERATE ART And yet when the Reich’s culture police come to Nolde’s studio during the play to take away still more of his work, and he cries out “Arresting art!” the equation’s simply there. We naturally flash on any number of more recent art arrests. On the Harold Washington portrait bust at the School of the Art Institute. The Robert Mapplethorpe photo bust in Cincinnati. The ongoing NEA artists bust in Washington, D....

The gospel of caviar in four easy lessons: (1) it comes exclusively from Caspian Sea sturgeon; (2) it is always served plain on a lightly buttered toast triangle, perhaps with a lemon wedge; (3) it is eaten only as an appetizer or with cocktails; and (4) it is very expensive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the use of domestic roe isn’t the only thing that’s different about some of these caviars....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This letter is in response to the article written by Anne Moore which appeared on July 3 containing an interview with Terry Donahue from the All American Girls Professional Baseball League [Our Town]. More specifically, this letter is to address the remark printed in this piece that “There’s a women’s baseball league in Glenview now, but Donahue and her league friends have gone out to see the women play only once....

A fascinating 1988 film essay about photography by Harun Farocki. One of Germany’s most interesting independent filmmakers, he combines the freewheeling imagination of a Chris Marker with the rigor of an Alexander Kluge, and has a materialist approach to editing sound and image that suggests both Fritz Lang and Robert Bresson. Central to the argument of this film are some aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by American bombers looking for factories and power plants and missing the lines of people in front of the gas chambers–which are contrasted with Nazi photographs and images drawn by an Auschwitz prisoner, Alfred Kantor....

DAVID PUSZH DANCE COMPANY AND HEARSAY Surrounded by domestic violence, a child discovers old movies and escapes to a fantasy world “forever at the mercy of [her] remote control.” As a teenager she creates an alter ego, also called Etta Blue, a B-movie composite with a host of imaginary lovers–the gangster Louie, tough Scab, and a Fred Astaire look-alike. As an adult, she finds all three lovers in Stan, a man who dances with her in the Dominick’s produce department: fantasy and reality blur....

Marty Ehrlich and Anthony Cox each make wonderful music–consistently, unstintingly, and with the simple gusto of artistic conviction. That they’ve chosen to do this in the same room at the same time is a bonus. I’ve long admired Ehrlich, not just for his expertise on saxes, clarinets, and flute, but also for the company he keeps (he’s played with innovative ensembles led by Muhal Richard Abrams, John Carter, Julius Hemphill, and Bobby Previte, to name a few)....

Krystin Grenon smiles out from behind the cluttered counter of her antique/curiosity/resale/junk shop on Newberry near 15th Street, at the southern tip of the Maxwell Street Market, and offers a visitor a cup of coffee. The sign out front says she’s got the “best coffee at the market–free with your purchase or 50 cents,” but this morning the coffee is cold; the machine is on the blink. Once Grenon had proved her mettle (“There’s not very many white women selling down there–there were bets on the street whether I would last!...

Michael Pensack, executive director of the Illinois Tenants Union, has played a key role in bringing together two of Chicago’s most antagonistic interest groups. For the first time in years, the Chicago Board of Realtors and other groups representing landlords and property owners are engaged in productive negotiations with a number of the city’s tenant organizations, including the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, the Rogers Park Tenants Committee, the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, and the Legal Assistance Foundation....

A newborn baby’s cry is often inaudible to the unattuned ear. An infant can wake up and start to bawl, and a stranger in the household won’t hear a thing. “Come here, you,” Novak murmurs as she scoops the baby up and changes her diaper in a quick succession of movements that betray a lifetime of nurturing children–right hand, left hand, wet diaper off, fresh diaper on. Back in the kitchen, she gives Tiffany a bottle that she has warmed on the stove....

Lead Story Red Cross officials in Oakland, California issued a public warning in April about the fund-raising activities of George Cox, who planned to induce Red Cross givers to pay a $158 fee by promising to award the top giver $17.5 million. Cox told the Oakland Tribune that his plan was not a pyramid scheme: “In pyramids, a lot of people are making money. Here, only one person will make money....

SPANIC BOYS, 12/17, SCHUBAS This Milwaukee group got its 15, er, more like 10, minutes of fame a few years ago as a last-minute replacement for musical guest Sinead O’Connor, who refused to appear on Saturday Night Live with guest host Andrew Dice Clay. Father and son rockers Tom and Ian Spanic had no such qualms, but their big mass media break was only a flash in the pan. After a listen to their new record, Dream Your Life Away, it’s not hard to see why; the most striking feature of their music is the pair’s pleasantly ragged, Everly Brothers-like harmony, but their 60s-tinged rootsiness (a la Rockpile), “updated” by the occasional stinging guitar explosion, begins to ramble with mid-tempo sameyness, and the scant melodic variation does little to dispel encroaching boredom....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hearty applause is due the four courageous clients of Attorney Hope Keefe, and gratitude to Keefe as well. (“The Law of Incest,” 7/19). These survivors of incest are boldly choosing one newly available and promising avenue of recourse by suing their parents as the perpetrators of the incest in an attempt to hold them accountable legally, as well as emotionally and financially....

Do fish sweat? –Bill Bow, San Francisco Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Freshwater fish have the opposite problem. They’re saltier than the water around them and thus have a tendency to absorb water. They combat this by absorbing what salt they can through special cells and getting rid of extra water by excreting large amounts of, well, pee. This can be a real problem if you are traveling with a freshwater fish on a long car trip....

Submitted for your edification and amusement; a darkened theater on the near south side where some four score and an odd baker’s dozen of idle curiosity seekers, liberal intellectuals, telecom students, and the kind of lonely characters you find talking urgently into dead pay phones at cheap arcades are all huddled in a communion of nostalgia and the bizarre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is a Saturday afternoon in March....

Six years before Spike Lee’s X, the Yale-trained composer Anthony Davis came up with an opera version of the life of the radical black leader. Though it didn’t attract much attention back then, his opera is just as ambitious as Lee’s bio-epic. X covers the entire span of its subject’s life–from his Depression childhood in Lansing, Michigan, to his assassination in Harlem in 1965. The libretto by poet Thulani Davis (the composer’s cousin) focuses on the pivotal events that shaped the making of Malcolm X, the man and the myth....