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A cause for celebration: Curlew, a wiggy but impressively grounded quintet, makes its Chicago debut. Perhaps the most lionized of the bands that inhabit the energetic jazz scene in lower Manhattan, Curlew is steeped in the blues, but you’ll hear that influence only obliquely; it informs pieces that also boast the soulful funk of southern rock, or manage to combine avant-garde guitar noise with an irresistable beat, or motor along on rhythms previously found in Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society....

SPIKE I wish that I could push a button Texturally and thematically, King of America was a one-shot for Costello; true to form, he appeared again just eight months later with a noisy, high-tech song cycle, Blood and Chocolate, produced by old crony Nick Lowe. It sounded like a forgotten Kinks or Hollies record, or maybe just the Great Lost Costello Album. Costello was back writing pop songs with his old vicious charm, and it was probably this unshakable quality that denied him a hit single yet again....

Expect to see William Bolcom in the news come November when his Lyric Opera-commissioned McTeague premieres. In the meantime, however, the talented composer and pianist is still better known for the act he and his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, have performed for years. When it comes to singing popular American tunesfrom Foster to Bernstein–the Morris-Bolcom partnership really brings on the nostalgia. (Only Marilyn Home can be more stirring.) Morris’s singing can be ardent and sweet and Bolcom’s accompaniment is always assured and elegant in performances that serve up both wicked insouciance and down-home appeal....

Parents and teachers at Wilson Occupational High School had begged central office officials for almost two years to buy them a new building–their current quarters were the third floor of a northwest-side grade school. “In one day, they blotted out all the hard work of two years, and they didn’t have the decency to tell us–we still don’t know what our future is,” says Marlene Curylo, president of Wilson’s local school council....

MINNIE’S BOYS These questions seem especially puzzling when one considers the Marx Brothers. They are among the best-known comedians in the world. Everyone seems to respond to the insults, puns, and wacky situations in their movies. Yet many of the Marx Brothers’ jokes are real groaners, and their shtick tends to be silly and cruel. Why do we laugh? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You might call it a form of ghetto psychology gone amuck,” says Patinkin, commenting on the perennial appeal of Marx Brothers movies....

Lead Story Seven Tokyo schoolteachers were reprimanded in July for punishing two boys, ages 13 and 14, for bullying their classmates by burying them up to their necks in sand and leaving them on the beach for 20 minutes while waves swept over them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas J. Schooley, 20, was arrested in Evansville, Indiana, in May for robbing two men who were coming out of an alley late at night....

It’s the end of summer as I write this, and it feels like it. The baseball season’s winding down, and though last year’s heroes may have escaped the cellar, and this year’s version of Cinderella has kept things interesting, it’s pretty clear nobody’s going to win anything. Vacations are over, school has begun, and everyone I know seems to be getting sick again–with late-summer colds, or fall colds, or the flu, or their jobs, husbands, wives, kids, lovers, or their lack of them....

This third installment of the Jazz Showcase’s month-long tribute to Charlie Parker packs the greatest potential wallop, both academically and emotionally. Charles McPherson is often considered the last true disciple of the bebop avatar, capable of so convincing an imitation that he was used to mimic Parker on the sound track of the film Bird. On the other side of the stage is Richie Cole, who has patterned his own style on that of Phil Woods–one of the earliest Parker devotees....

Cairo, 720 N. Wells: “Oh, B. Kamp, you look more glamorous tonight than evermore,” Plain Patty said, hopping up and down. “Let me be near you as you and your ecstatic boyfriends Keith Ann and Aqua Netta search for the night at Cairo’s weekly Steamy Sunday. It gets so exciting when Byron Dorsey, the club’s gay events promoter, who looks Egyptian when he wears his golden hoop earrings, conducts Midnight Madness and throws lollipops and condoms into the air....

CLEPSYDRAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A clepsydra is a water clock: a device for measuring time by marking the gradual flow of liquids through a small opening. And Clepsydras–an installation by Jo Hormuth at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery–is an economical yet stimulating piece that marks the passage of time with objects that speak of the body. Forty phallic-shaped gourds painted gray are mounted approximately five feet from the floor in a horizontal line that stretches across three walls of a gallery room....

There was no real reason for any of us to be at Wrigley Field last Sunday. Sure, the Cubs had won two in a row, seven out of the last ten, and ten of the previous fourteen games, and were going for their second straight sweep of a three-game weekend series, and it’s true they were a season-high two games above .500, only seven and a half games out of first....

If all goes well, the planners say, in a year, maybe two, the bulldozers will come and level the old neighborhood. That’s tough talk, but it’s backed up by the coalition the residents have formed, the demands they’ve made (they want a percentage of any profits the White Sox make from the leasing of sky boxes), and the downtown lawyer they’ve hired to press their case. “Our community is what’s left over from when they built the Dan Ryan,” says Gus Zimmerman, who is 80....

Bridge Writer In Scandinavia, where the most important lesson anyone can learn is how to make it through a night six months long, bridge is part of the curriculum. It’s not actually a separate subject, syndicated bridge columnist Tannah Hirsch was telling us, but Nordic schools jimmy it into the classroom as a tool for helping kids develop their logical, mathematical, and communications skills. Which is not to say bridge hands are never published twice....

Friday 1 It may have escaped your notice that today is the tenth anniversary of the last time Elvis Presley performed in the Chicago area, but more observant people have planned an Elvis fan reunion: it will include a convention from 10 to 7 and an Elvis show from 7:30 to 9:30 at the Berwyn Sokol Hall, 6445 W. 27th Place in Berwyn. $3 for the convention, $5 for the show, $7 for both; 484-7428....

As a 16-year-old touring Baptist minister, Steven Milford was in hot demand in the churches of the Bible Belt. Four years later he was bounced out of a Baptist college in Birmingham after rumors of his nascent homosexuality soaked the campus. Today, 26 and living in Chicago, his religion shed, Milford is co-owner and artistic director of the Rudely Elegant Theater and Gallery in Wicker Park. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Government Lawyers Drink Illegal Brew In May 1985, President Ronald Reagan declared Nicaragua to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and established a trade embargo. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reagan renewed the embargo on April 25, despite the Central American peace accords. Amnesia Strikes U.S. Treasury Department: Even Transformed Beans May Be Illegal...

October 27, 1989: It may be cold and gray outside, but Leon Beltran is making sandals. He’s got them on lasts, the plastic forms over which shoes are fitted, and one by one he’s gluing the straps to the sole. As he works, Beltran hunches over, his head practically touching the table on the other side of the shoe. He presses a strap into place, pulls it up, presses and pulls again until he’s satisfied....

In the last month or so, two James Moody albums have been released. Honey, on Novus, was recorded last fall, while the other–a Blue Note reissue-is made up of tunes played by James Moody’s Modernists in the fall of 1948, when he was still in Dizzy Gillespie’s employ. Taken together, these discs offer a telescoped view of virtually his entire career; but then so does a typical Moody set, which might include bebop chestnuts, distinctive and atmospheric compositions from the last 30 years’ repertoire, bouncy contemporary material–and of course the obligatory rendition of “Moody’s Mood for Love,” his famous 1949 tenor solo that was later given lyrics by Eddie Jefferson and became a hit recording for such vocalists as King Pleasure in the 50s and George Benson a quarter century later....

In her poem “The Color Red,” Maxine Chernoff mentions a family legend: that her great-grandmother “was the first Jewish woman in Bialystok, Russia, to wear lipstick. A shame on her family, she also smoked cigarettes.” But that’s not why she left Russia. She left because her son with yam-colored hair was caught stealing apples. So off he sailed to become a “real estate baron in Los Angeles.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

PETER SERKIN at Orchestra Hall The one restriction was that the piece each composer wrote (at $5,000 a commission) was to be a brief statement, about six minutes in length. The problem with this otherwise inspired idea is that instead of two or three really meaty pieces that had something important to say, we heard 12 homages to Serkin, all far too much conceived with his sound and technique in mind to find a place in the standard repertoire....