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Here’s a Chicago trio that’s eaten up and digested all manner of African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern sounds, and whose spare-but-lyrical synthesis flows out naturally, without arch hipness or any sense of dilettantish flitting around. Led by the unassuming Nick Horcher, the unassuming Kilometers turn the music of hot countries into something all their own, something strangely laconic, strangely precise and loose at the same time, even strangely midwestern. The drums, bass, and guitar interlock with such intelligent economy, and ring changes on non-Western idioms with such evocative understatement, that while they play you can dose your eyes and summon up the vast loneliness of a Kenya savanna, the graceful beauty of kill-craving cheetahs racing through the grass, and a sunlight that burns away all illusions....

THE RUSSIA HOUSE With Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, J.T. Walsh, Ken Russell, David Threlfall, and Klaus Maria Brandauer. With Robert Redford, Lena Olin, Alan Arkin, Tomas Milian, Raul Julia, Richard Farnsworth, Mark Rydell, Daniel Davis, and Tony Plana. Ironically, though Havana is set on the eve of the Cuban revolution (Christmas 1958) and The Russia House is set in present-day Russia, Havana comes closer to reflecting contemporary American attitudes....

“Honey, promise me you’ll never do what I done.” Cassie hugged me against her hard belly and sobbed, “I’ll never forgive myself for what I done. When you’re a teenager like me, don’t you never forget this promise.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I came home one day when I was 15 to find Susanna crying over a small framed photo of a very little boy in bib overalls, holding a small rake, standing in a freshly plowed field....

MUD Fornes’s 1983 script Mud is so tense it’s nearly unbearable–especially in Big Nose Theater’s claustrophobic space on North Avenue. In this play Fornes makes the usual demands on her audience, then asks for a certain courage and patience, too. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story involves Mae, a young backwoods woman who is urgently trying to overcome her circumstances. As the play opens, she is ironing men’s pants and telling Lloyd, the dumb, puppylike man who shares her home, about school....

Singers call them “church jobs,” the regular weekend work that saves the world’s most promising vocalists from starvation and full-time office careers. Of course some church jobs are better than others. For 50 years one of the better ones was not in a church but at K.A.M. Temple (now K.A.M. Isaiah Israel Congregation) in Hyde Park, where Max Janowski, a world-renowned voice teacher and composer of Jewish liturgical music, was the musical director....

Lead Story In March Christina and Cliff Fields summoned police to their home in San Carlos, California, to help them with their burgeoning pet-rat problem. It had started when they were given one as a gift. Then they purchased two at a pet store. Because rats can have up to five litters per year of up to 11 rats each and begin breeding at two months of age, the Fieldses ended up with over 300 pet rats in their apartment....

Paper Assets: Eager Buyers in Gary Will it continue to? We don’t know. The Post-Tribune is for sale. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Knight-Ridder is a Miami-based corporation that reported $2 billion in revenues and $155 million in profits for the ’87 fiscal year. The Post-Tribune, circulation 76,000, is a lot more important to northwest Indiana than it has ever been to its owners....

To any old-line Chicago Irish alert to the symbolism, that March day must have seemed a nightmare on legs. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and there was Harold Washington, nemesis of the Irish political machine, marching arm in arm with Jim Thompson, scion of the ancient foe of the Irish, the Anglo-Protestant establishment. It was enough to make a man move to Oak Lawn. The new Irish-Americans were especially suited to operating within an urban political system that at its worst was so corrupt that ordinary embezzlers and swindlers avoided politics as unbecoming....

The Great Chicago Rock ‘n’ Roll Booking War of 1990 began earlier this year, when Cubby Bear manager and booker Brad Altman decided he wanted his club to become a”big-time player” on the city’s music scene. At this point it looks like the war’s cruising right into 1991. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet Altman has also alienated most of his competitors, thoroughly infuriating people like Nick Miller, Jam’s club booker; Joe Shanahan, booker and co-owner of Cabaret Metro; and Sue Miller, now an owner as well as the booker at Lounge Ax....

SOUL SURVIVOR The final installment of Bailiwick Repertory’s Gay & Lesbian Series (the earlier offerings were Robert Chesley’s Jerker and Holly Hughes’s The Well of Horniness), Soul Survivor was picked–hastily–as a replacement for Harvey Fierstein’s Forget Him because Bailiwick could not afford the rights to it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Bailiwick can afford even less to dumb down their stage and audiences to the level of Bruno’s bargain-basement theater....

LA BELLE NOISEUSE With Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Beart, Jane Birkin, David Bursztein, Gilles Arbona, Marianne Denicourt, and the hand of Bernard Dufour. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now in his mid-60s, Rivette seems to have mellowed since the wilder forays of his earlier work as a founding member of the French New Wave, much of which teetered on the edge of madness. The four-hour L’amour fou (1968) alternates between scenes of a theater company rehearsing Racine’s Andromache and glimpses at the tragic relationship between the play’s director and his alienated wife (Ogier), who drops out of the production in the first sequence and begins a gradual descent into madness as she festers in isolation....

Last fall the Muntu Dance Theatre was going through that phase known in the not-for-profit world as downtime. It had been promised a grant for productions, but the check was “in the mail.” The south-side dance troupe was facing a dilemma: work for free or suspend its current production. For their efforts they recently won the praise of Mayor Daley and were rewarded with $500,000 in contributions from a consortium of eight downtown banks....

FACTS ABOUT CATS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You seem to be stumped as to the origin of the old wives’ tale about cats sucking the breath out of humans [August 17]. Perhaps I can help. Cats are often accused of being indifferent to their owners, but they simply have different ways of showing their affection. One of these is sniffing the breath of their owners....

Rock ‘n’ roll has always accommodated weirdos who took the received sounds of the day, processed them through their own mechanisms, and produced something new. And some became successful far beyond their wildest dreams–think of Elvis, John Lennon, Joey Ramone, or Bob Bogle and Don Wilson. What they have in common is a–Bob Bogle? Don Wilson? They founded the Ventures, a collection of eccentric autodidacts who grabbed an obscure Chet Atkins tune, turned it into the hit ‘Walk Don’t Run’ and invented a uniquely obsessive brand of guitar rock in the process....

The onetime Chicago-based filmmaker will be here for a screening of seven of her films made during the 80s, presented in conjunction with Women in the Director’s Chair. Some of the half dozen of these films that I’ve seen are lyrical studies in motion whose subjects are usually either tourist attractions or tourists: Pools, Pond and Waterfall, Tourist, and Parisian Blinds–all made between 1980 and 1983. Others are more complex meditations: Optic Nerve (1985), on how and what Hammer’s grandmother, who’s in a nursing home, sees; and Endangered (1988), on the precarious situation of the independent, artisanal filmmaker....

To the acquisitive, the passing of a treasured retail establishment is a momentous occasion. When certain shops close their doors, faithful patrons may find themselves feeling lost and bereft, as if they had been abandoned by an old friend. Many local acquisitors experienced just this sensation when Goodies abruptly went out of business last year after almost a decade on North Halsted. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goodies occupied a distinctive place in the pantheon of Chicago retailing....

Buchanan, Michigan, is only 90 miles from Chicago but far off the southwest-Michigan tourist path. It’s a small working-class town of 4,000 people who speak with that relaxed American country drawl that doesn’t seem to know North from South. Buchanan’s stores have none of the understated boutique look that you find in trendier New Buffalo or Lakeside, 15 miles east. Intead it seems thrown together and lived in, with too many bikes and toys littering the front yards, a battalion of pickup trucks under repair in backyards and driveways, and a hodgepodge of vacant storefronts along the main drag....

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS Pointe Theatre Company at Big Game Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Mamet is not by any stretch of the imagination just the American Pinter. He is, like all good writers, the sum of his influences–and then some. Nor is he just the Arthur Miller of the 80s, or just the American Chekhov, or just the Hemingway of the theater....

Evanston has a new haven of Italian haute cuisine, named after one of Verdi’s most moving arias, “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” (“Go, my thought, on golden wings”) from Nabucco. The opera recounts how the Hebrews, prisoners in Babylon, helped restore Nebuchadnezzar to the throne and then returned to their homeland. A chorus of captives on the banks of the Euphrates sings “Va, pensiero . . .” a haunting lament by those deeply homesick for their native soil....

CHICKEN, GRAVY & BISCUITS As it turned out, though, the future hasn’t quite fulfilled the promise. Fits and starts characterize Lil’ Ed’s career. When he’s on, he’s one of the most spectacular showmen in blues, culminating his performances by doing crotch-splitting deep knee bends and leaping atop his sidemen, all the while firing out searing treble screams with his slide. He’s one of the few artists whose live performances and records sustain the same level of high-energy exuberance....