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Lead Story A gang of grease thieves burglarized restaurants in Dallas in January, making off with more than seven tons of scrapings from griddles and deep-fat fryers. According to police, the “stinky, rotten” grease has a resale value of about 13 cents a pound; it’s used in cosmetics and cow feed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October a newspaper in Toulouse, France, turned down an advertisement from a 42-year-old woman offering one of her kidneys to any employer who would give her a job....

When Eugene Richards visited a Chicago slum in 1986 to photograph a poor black family, he became more involved with them than he’d expected. The family hadn’t been able to pay their rent, so the landlord had turned off the electricity. Richards helped run an extension cord over from another apartment. When the landlord found out about that, he turned off the electricity to the entire building. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

OWNERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crudely seen (the only way to approach this socialist melodrama), the characters divide into owners and chumps. Chief among the former is Marion, a former mental patient, now a predatory real estate broker whose credo is to grab and hold onto whatever and whomever she craves even if it kills them (at one point she unhesitantly blurts out, “We men of destiny get what we’re after”)....

Psyops isn’t for the faint of heart; then again, restless devotees of new music and free improvisation already know it don’t come easy. But in the realm of acoust-electric, freely associative, you’ll-know-when-you-get-there sonic exploration, it doesn’t get much better, or at least wilder, than this. In his latest project, the trombonist/conceptualizer Jim Staley has gathered three like-minded artists: that is to say, they’re equally ready to leap into the void and test the currents....

NUCLEODANZA So begins Tilt, the first work on a program at the Dance Center by Nucleodanza, an Argentinean troupe formed in 1974 by Margarita Bali and Susana Tambutti. Tilt is Bali’s work, a solo performed by Ines Sanguinetti, and it is as stylish, as sexy, as elegantly performed, and as deeply angry and despairing as anything I’ve seen in a long, long time. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nucleodanza has no such compunction, and the result is art that’s both sexy and deeply political....

In 1968, Peter Maas’s The Valachi Papers was published, offering the first inside account of life in the Mafia as related by the first actual member of the Mafia to break the code of omerta and turn government informant. As such, the book was a literary landmark–it created a new genre. In the years that followed, other gangsters who became federally protected witnesses would pick up extra bucks by plying the literary trade: among the books, My Life in the Mafia by Vincent Teresa; The Last Mafioso, the story of James “the Weasel” Fratianno as related by Ovid Demaris; and the best work of the genre, Wiseguy, the story of Lucchese family associate Henry Hill as told by Nicholas Pileggi....

THE BAD SEED When George Bernard Shaw said, “It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid,” he could have been defining the word “camp.” Camp flourishes wherever works that once felt transparently sincere now seem transparently stupid. Quickly and cruelly, the camp sensibility transforms one era’s heartbreak into another’s laugh riot. (Just look at Erich Segal’s Love Story, a now-hokey embarrassment that only a generation ago seemed the last word on love....

As befits a record that begins with its star getting soaped up in the tub by his “bitch” and continues with the graphic sounds of his taking a leak, Doggystyle, the debut from Snoop Doggy Dogg, wears the arrogance of its making on every track. Unlike in the haute regions of rock ‘n’ roll, rap artists don’t argue about commercial appeal: a hot jam has no existence if it’s not pounding on the streets or flying out of record stores....

Amy Lee Segami had been a fluid-mechanics engineer for various corporations for several years when she began looking for a way to express her creativity and looked toward traditional Japanese arts. She mastered ikebana (flower arranging), cha-no-yu (tea ceremony), and sumi-e (brush painting). Her background in the precise science of fluid mechanics eventually drew her to suminagashi. “I discovered that art and science are connected. When you see formulas, you see pictures too....

DECEMBER Friday 25 Candyman, a filmed-in-Chicago supernatural thriller, is on its last legs at second-run theaters, so it’s worth catching before it heads to video. The film’s eerie exposition follows a white Circle graduate student in folklore as she investigates an urban legend at Cabrini Green and tumbles into a bloody netherworld. The plot is twisted (in both senses of the word), the production values are only serviceable, and at times you wonder if indeed there is a unifying intelligence behind the film....

Friday 10 The Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC), a nongovernmental organization of the United Nations, supports all the UN resolutions on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. PHRC backers include individuals and academic, religious, Jewish, civil rights, and Arab-American organizations. The PHRC will hold an all-day conference, The Palestinian Uprising: American Policy and Palestinian Statehood, beginning at 9 this morning at the Kent School of Law, 77 S. Wacker. Admission is $3....

A remarkable and beautiful 160-minute family saga by the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Dust in the Wind) that begins at the end of Japan’s 51-year colonial rule in Taiwan and ends in 1949, when mainland China becomes communist and Chiang Kai-shek’s government retreats to Taipei. Perceiving these historical upheavals through the varied lives of a single family, Hou again proves himself a master of long takes and complex framing, with a great talent for passionate (though elliptical and distanced) story telling....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But equating sex crimes with the rights of fathers and equating fathers with rapists is noise everyone can live without. What planet do such thinkers live on? Men and women have one thing in common–each sex has its share of walking, talking pieces of shit. Some humans thrive by visiting pain upon others. The best we can do is educate, rehabilitate or eliminate them as much as possible....

To the editors: I’d like to elaborate a bit: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moral Superiority. The “peace” movement is permeated with it. A common complaint in the movement press during the Iraqi debacle was, “Why aren’t these ignorant, self-centered Americans concerned about Iraqi lives and welfare?” Well, in the most perfect of all worlds, your average Joe and Jane would be overflowing with compassion for all humanity, but we don’t live in that world....

The 50-odd performing groups in the eight-week “festival of Chicago’s international arts” include a dozen theater companies; those performing October 24 through 31 are described below. These listings refer to theater and performance art offerings only; on nights when only one theater company is listed here, be assured at least one other program of music, dance, or poetry is also planned, with discount prices available to viewers buying a ticket to all performances on a single night....

One day last year African American performance artist Danny Tisdale set up a table on the sidewalk outside his studio in Harlem and started hawking skin-lightening products. Tisdale called himself Mr. Tracey E. Goodman, president of Transitions Inc.–“We turn minorities into majorities.” It was a trial run for a performance piece he took around New York City last May and is bringing to Randolph Street Gallery Monday night. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Pianist Pinetop Perkins, Muddy Waters’s last great keyboard man, is a living repository of over half a century of blues. He laces barrelhouse standards and up-tempo rockers alike with a deep blues sensibility and solid craftsmanship fused with an impish good humor that makes every performance an unabashed celebration of life. In recent years he’s had the annoying habit of surrounding himself with loud young musicians who tend to overwhelm the subtle majesty of his style, but you cant squelch a spirit like Perkins’s for long; his left hand lays down a sure, deep-chording foundation for his nimble-fingered treble work, and his rousing performances bring back echoes of the fabled juke joints of the Delta, where this magnificent music was born....

POWER PIPES Reviewing a work in progress is a lot like evaluating a restaurant by walking around the kitchen and smelling the food as it’s being prepared. The fact is, you never really know how it’s going to turn out. It could be great, but then again, it might not. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I left wondering: Is it me? Admittedly my exposure to American Indians and their cultures has been limited....

John McNaughton’s first Hollywood horror story–the ordeal he had to go through to get his low-budget first feature out of limbo and into distribution despite a prohibitive X rating–is well-known among local film people. When Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer finally made it into theaters, it had already been an underground hit for years, its reputation made on the circulation of bootleg tapes. Chicagoan McNaughton was able to get work on the basis of that unreleased film–was even considered a hot prospect–but if he thought his movie-business problems were behind him, he soon learned otherwise....

Roeper Revisited “He kind of writes like he’s 12,” a reporter told us. Someone else said, “His columns are all, totally, ‘I – I – I.’ Sort of like a teenage Bob Greene.” “I don’t see where he’s got any substance” was a third opinion. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So Royko merely stated the conventional wisdom about Richard Roeper. What’s significant is that this wisdom was becoming dated as he spoke....