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THE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK I didn’t trust the word “compelling”–not in the same sentence as “Central Committee” and “negotiations,” anyway–and I’d never heard of Brest-Litovsk. I was leery of the heroic imagery, too. I pictured a long, pious, deadly authentic recapitulation of debates remembered today only by Russian grammar school students, who probably get tested on them every year in civics class. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, it turns out that Brest-Litovsk is a city on the Bug River, at the border between the USSR and Poland, where the newly ensconced Bolshevik regime worked out what for them were the humiliating terms of a separate peace with Germany, ending Russian involvement in World War I....

“Come look,” said Jack Jaffe, a retired businessman and photography buff. Through the large windows of his lakefront home in Indiana, through the trees and past the dunes, a fiery orange sun could be seen sliding into Lake Michigan. “Do you see such things in Chicago?” he asked. Miller sprang up in the late 1800s as a settlement for railroad workers, many of whom were Norwegian. The community incorporated as a town in 1907, and a dozen years later it was annexed by Gary....

“If I can’t sing ’em, I don’t write ’em,” says Hugo Weisgall, composer and former singer, in answer to the charge that most modern operas are unsingable. “That doesn’t mean my operas are easy–they’re not. The problem with my operas is the intensity, but that’s a problem you have with Aida, and Tosca, and with Tristan und Isolde, too.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weisgall has been in town to advise the conductor, director, and cast for the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists production of Six Characters in Search of an Author....

I am haunted by a sentence in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Describing the single-mindedness that accompanied the creation of a book, she writes: “During that time, I let all the houseplants die.” Detail of course is added: “After the book was finished I noticed them; the plants hung completely black dead in their pots in the bay windows. For I had not only let them die, I had not moved them....

There’s nothing like finding yourself staring into the beady eye of a huge stuffed buffalo head just as you’re about to bite into a buffalo burger. It reminded me of Spy magazine’s recent “Bunny BurgerTM” prank, in which PR and marketing firms vied for the chance to market ground rabbit on buns in little boxes with pink Styrofoam bunny ears. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Foodwise, the place is a hunter’s paradise....

Fighting broke out on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border today, but Saudi troops quickly intervened to quell the hostilities. “No one who is not on the list will be able to go,” the Saudis said, checking us off one by one. An hour later we were at King Khaled Military City, an extraordinarily modern military base in the middle of the northern desert. We were met by a group of Saudi officers and piled into school buses painted desert brown....

INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL King Lear at the Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shakespeare understood folktales. Either that or he just absorbed them more completely than anybody this side of Ovid. Shakespeare’s plays not only indulge the folk taste for blood, they turn on the folk theme of disguise. In fact, they make disguise a starting point for some of the most disquieting explorations of identity in all our literature....

SWEENEY AGONISTES and THE BAD INFINITY As though The Bad Infinity weren’t punishing enough, Blind Parrot Productions has paired it with Sweeney Agonistes, by that old symbol meister T.S. Eliot. Subtitled “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama,” this play is every bit as impenetrable as Wellman’s. In her program notes Diana Spinrad, who directed The Bad Infinity, includes a fair and accurate “warning” about this double bill: “If you try to understand these plays as you watch them, your head will explode and you will be very unhappy!...

Already, baseball has reasserted its rhythm and tempo upon those of us who call ourselves baseball fans. Each year, it seems a little more amazing that we have survived for months without something that now seems so essential. The persistent and echoing cracks and pops of batting practice, the slow building of tension between pitcher and hitter when men are on base, the relaxed but involved hum of the grandstand between innings: baseball has returned as it has every spring this century, and it remains, as it has every year, for the most part unchanged in spite of the layoff....

You are my last resort. In the TV series The Flintstones, what was Barney Rubble’s job? We all know that Fred worked at the quarry, but Barney’s job was never directly referred to, except in a couple episodes where he worked as a TV repossessor or a short-order chef, after having been fired from his regular (unknown) job. Please help! –Nancy B., Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I love this job....

It has often fascinated me to consider that what I take to be connected, consecutive moments strung together to make up seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, epochs, and ages may not be the only valid system operating. There may be such a thing as a juncture where what I consider a moment intersects with the moment of a starfish, a housefly, a bacterium, or something that operates on an entirely different schedule....

As a sample of cutting-edge Moscow theater, Tverboul is rich. The songs by Alexey Paperny and Eugene Kadimsky are amalgams of Slavic pop, French accordion waltzes, and klesmer-style exuberance, while Eugene Arshanski’s staging illustrates the text–performed in Russian–with viscerally accessible stage pictures. At once sardonic and celebratory, Tverboul is a musical portrait of life along the Tverskoi Boulevard, one of Moscow’s busiest streets. Comparing the thoroughfare to a “broken contract,” Tverboul attempts to capture the sinister, often illusory feeling of boundless freedom presented by the beckoning boulevard....

Some cheap tricks for getting an audience’s attention: Have a phone ring onstage. The sound of a ringing telephone seems to stimulate the release of adrenaline, causing anxiety and tension. Depict sexual activity of any sort, or show a little nudity. This stimulates other hormones that contribute to full alertness. Place a psychopath in a locked room with a few defenseless people. The prospect of murder or mayhem awakens the survival instinct, which supersedes all others....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Enters the 20th Century Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ensemble InterContemporain Visits Northwestern University Smashing Pumpkins Go Nationwide For more than a decade New Zealand bands have been producing some of the finest rock ‘n’ roll in the world, one of the reasons being their obliviousness to the trends that afflict too much American alternative rock. For many years, alas, insufficient funding kept all but a very few of those bands from visiting the U....

A BIRD OUT OF WATER But maybe, in their hearts, everybody involved knew something was wrong, something that just couldn’t be fixed. It showed in the way the actors stood awkwardly onstage wondering what to do while another character talked. It was even more evident when they spoke, forcing emotions out of a script that asks for high drama but does nothing to support it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

What’s that strange image along the side of the road? Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s four large, neon dancing penises! They flash on and off, and they sport top hats, canes, and bow ties, Fred Astaire style. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are silk screen images inside the boxes at the rear, but they are visible only by day, up close: among them are a little girl skipping rope, a black man on his knees praying to a television screen, a space shuttle shooting a hole through a “Save the Seals” postage stamp....

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For nearly 50 years, pianist and torch singer Miss Eve provided the sound track to early evening rendezvous at the Green Mill. In February she dropped out of sight, a victim of heart surgery; now she’s back. A celebration tonight–dubbed the Comeback Player of the Year Party–will feature Miss Eve and a “battle of the saxes” between Green Mill regulars Von Freeman and Edward Petersen....

In a room you’re not allowed to go in, inside a machine you’re not allowed to look at, a 30-milliwatt laser beam that you’d barely be able to see anyway is burning infinitesimally small indentations into a spinning plate of glass. The indentations aren’t into the glass, exactly–as the laser switches on and off, the light is actually exposing tiny dots on an extremely thin layer of clear, light-sensitive coating. And they’re not dots, really, they’re more like flattened Good & Plentys of varying lengths....

Organist Charles Earland’s migration to Chicago, in early 1988, made perfect sense; for years, first in his native Philadelphia and later throughout the country, Earland had been playing the kind of soulful, bountiful, rollicking jazz that’s most at home in the clubs of Chicago’s south side. Earland possesses the expansiveness that seems to come with his instrument–a quality that helps make him dangerous, even untoppable in jam sessions–and combines the expected keyboard fireworks with a busy and insistent pulse from the organ’s foot-pedal bass register....

On a typical weekday afternoon in the waiting rooms of Dr. Manus C. Kraff, the din is like that at a hot River North eatery on Saturday night. There are as many as 75 people, mostly older patients with their younger friends and relatives accompanying them, talking and laughing and gossiping. Some have been waiting for hours. On another morning, Kraff struts back and forth outside two operating rooms between a huge stainless steel sink and a soap machine, washing and rinsing his hands at least ten times....