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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Salim Muwakkil’s “Pop: I’m Bad, Therefore I Am” [January 22] reveals a confused and contradictory attitude towards jazz. On the one hand, in describing the musical tastes of the “black bourgeoisie,” he notes that “jazz has become an exclusively aural art form; dancing is not allowed. (Jazz began as dance music. But to satisfy Western canons of art–canons that exclude dance music, except waltzes, from the category of serious music–jazzmen seeking respect ignored the feet....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This movie was filmed on a vacant lot in a burned-out area of Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Eighth Street between Avenues C and D). In order to achieve the scene in which the building burns down, Spielberg built as a set a complete fake tenement on this lot in which the movie was filmed, and which was then burned down....

JULIE SALK AND THE ZEPHYR DANCE ENSEMBLE The concert was literally incredible: it was hard to believe that such complex and evocative images could be produced with such minimal means. De Kalb’s Emergence Dance Theatre is just upstairs from the Duck Soup Co-op. From the outside the building looked a bit dumpy, but inside was one of the most beautiful and intelligently designed dance spaces I’ve yet encountered. Merely a large studio with black curtains hung to mask the wings and an enormous white cyclorama hung upstage, the room’s proportions somehow created the illusion of a great expanse, which was perfect for the first piece, Westward Woman....

Ricky Michelon–the basketball-playing pride and joy of Highland Park High School–catches the ball, and works it to his right. Out of the corner of his eye he spies two opponents rushing him, so he fakes a pass and leaves his feet to let loose a long, soft jumper. “We’ve got people coming from all over the world,” says Mark Klaber, head of the Chicago delegation. “The games will run for one week [August 18 to 25]....

THE HERO’S JOURNEY: THE POETRY OF RAYMOND CARVER The title of the show is well chosen, for in these poems Carver is a hero, someone who faces death–as well as his own sordid past–with quiet courage. The Hero’s Journey shows that by the time Carver died in 1988 he had achieved Freud’s equation for happiness–the ability to work and to love. In the final 11 years of his life, after he’d conquered his near-fatal addiction to alcohol, Carver wrote constantly, establishing himself as a master of the short story....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film made no claim to be a docudrama on the Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney murders. It should not be judged as one. It is, however, a powerful film. If one judged Mississippi Burning only by Rosenbaum’s review, one wouldn’t know that it depicts civil rights marches or the beginnings of armed Black self-defense against the Klan. Most of the funeral scene that Rosenbaum maligns consists of a march through town, to the voice-over of a speech cribbed from activist Dave Dennis’ impassioned eulogy at James Chaney’s funeral: “I am sick and tired of going to the funerals of Black men who have been murdered by white men ....

NOT ABOUT HEROES Even to this day World War I is called the “Big War,” and rightfully so. Not only was it the first actual world war, drawing forces from virtually every country in the Northern Hemisphere, but unlike other wars, which were made up of maneuvers, confrontations, and movement, World War I was a battle of endurance, armies facing each other in a line of trenches extending from the Swiss border to the English Channel, with the victory going to the side that wore the other out....

OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE Long before the Berlin Wall came down, the fourth wall–the one “separating” the performer from his audience, constructed on the principle of “aesthetic distance”–was being stormed. Alan Kaprow created the first happening 31 years ago, though the roots of these revolutionaries go much further back. Their motto: the words of Antonin Artaud, “Between Life and Theatre, there will be no distinct division, but instead a continuity.” Their purpose: breaking down individual isolation and complacency and replacing them with the perception that we are all involved with one another....

Fred Johnson likes to tell stories, and one of his best is about a building he used to work in. Back in 1941, Johnson’s employer, O. Henry Tent and Awning, moved from the corner of Wilson and Clark to bigger headquarters a few blocks away. For Johnson, who painted circus-sideshow banners, this was good news: his canvases were huge, and now he’d have more space to work on them. The only problem was that his new studio had once been a hayloft....

ORGASMO ADULTO ESCAPES FROM THE ZOO Despite the energy and ingenuity Peditto has brought to the staging, Orgasmo still seems hopelessly out-of-date. Men are accused of being selfish beasts insensitive to the needs of women, and the women are portrayed as hapless victims of this oppression. Sex is violence, marriage is slavery, love is a four-letter word. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary-Beth Kelleher anchors the show as “A Woman Alone,” the longest and most complex monologue....

It has not been a good year to be a peacenik. Consider the story I heard from Connecticut state representative Jessie Stratton, who was active in SANE and the FREEZE before becoming the first Democrat ever to represent her district. During the gulf crisis, a friend of hers who’s a small-town volunteer fireman and ambulance worker “happened to be in the ambulance with a 55-year-old blue-collar guy whose son had recently joined the Army....

John Eaton is generally considered one of the most original composers writing opera today. Now he’s taken another bold step–setting up a small music-theater outfit that counters the pretensions and snob appeal of grand opera. With his traveling band of troubadors, the Pocket Opera Company, this University of Chicago prof hopes to reach out to new, younger audiences. For the company’s debut Eaton has composed an intimately scaled opera that will serve as a prototype for the group’s future presentations....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » News Flash . . . The cat lives! It does not limp and it does not just maintain. It proudly–but humbly–moves forward with a dedicated and talented staff that leaps far and reaches higher than ever. In the past 12 months alone there were world-premiere performances on WFMT of Shulamit Ran’s and Jan Bach’s 40th-anniversary commissions and a celebration in City Council by proclamation....

QUERENCIA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Columbus bashing has been fashionable for so long that this year, the 500th anniversary of his having stumbled upon the Caribbean, it’s become almost passe. But in Querencia (meaning “longing” in Spanish, but pronounced by the Bottom of Your Shoe troupe more like carencia, meaning “lack”), ingenuity and creativity make the Columbus story a blast to watch. Surreal, magical, surprisingly well researched, and actually funny, Querencia gives a little history lesson about the origins of the Americas as we’ve come to know them and explores some questions about moral responsibility....

In many ways it was appropriate that the second annual Hoops for a Better America basketball tournament came down to one last shot. The two teams in last month’s final, the Peace Posse and the Fellas, consisted of outstanding players in their early to mid 20s who have been playing with and against one another for more than 12 years. With a few seconds left, the Fellas led by three, but Posse star Jonathan Speller, a former Continental Basketball Association player, was charging up court with the ball and a chance to tie the score....

Jazz and blues–the two genuine American contributions to music–have sparked the imagination of many of this century’s classical composers; yet a great majority of their works offer only pale imitation. Not so Street Music by Chicagoan William Russo. The half-hour piece (in four high-voltage movements)–written in 1976 especially for Corky Siegel, the San Francisco Symphony, and its maestro Seiji Ozawa–achieves freewheeling fusion. The orchestra is used as a more versatile, riotous band: it heightens the funk and feistiness of the best blues....

THE FAIRY GARDEN Talisman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Fairy Garden starts out as conventional drama. Roman and Mimi, two men who are longtime lovers, are drinking cassis and seltzer in the lush garden behind the luxurious home of their friend Dagny. At first they all seem relaxed and contented, but soon we learn that Dagny is distressed. She can’t decide if she should stay with her wealthy husband Boris or move in with her lover, an auto mechanic....

THE SONGS OF WAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The narrator, Calvin Saks (nee Sakowitz), is a seasoned, successful performer of stage and screen both big and little–much as Schisgal is a seasoned and successful writer for these venues. On this evening Calvin/Schisgal proposes to determine once and for all which of his parents was responsible for his unhappy childhood and his emotionally crippled adulthood (evidenced by two broken marriages and one recently broken engagement)....

Is it true the black doctor who invented blood plasma bled to death in front of a hospital because the white doctors refused to admit him? –Anonymous, Kansas City, Missouri Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charles R. Drew was a black surgeon who pioneered techniques for preserving blood plasma that saved countless lives during World War II. Later he became medical director of Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D....

Since people living close to the poles are moving much more slowly than people living at the equator, isn’t it true that a person near the pole will age faster than someone at the equator due to the effects of the theory of relativity? –Jim Uschold, Washington, D.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jim, you sound like a guy with a lot of spare time on his hands....