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Gee, if we can’t get the farmers to rotate their crops, maybe we can get them to rotate their chemicals. The Illinois Natural History Survey Reports (February 1991) notes that entomologists have long advised farmers that the best way to control corn rootworms is not to plant corn on the same land year after year, but instead to plant another crop such as soybeans) every other year or so. However, “several million acres of corn in Illinois are grown annually as continuous monocultures....

The Press Adored Her? Newspaper tradition has it that when slumming journalists assail each other in print the show of scorn jumps exponentially if the other party’s not named. As Dennis Byrne was saying, “Carol Moseley Braun’s Senate campaign was as content-starved and barren of issues as Bush’s, but you weren’t told about it because adoring reporters were too busy writing about her “charm’ while sharing the joys of her victory lap....

DANCE AFRICA/CHICAGO: HONORING THE SOURCE Seeing dance in such spectacular venues is wonderful, but it does create pressure on choreographers and dancers to fill the space, somehow match it. We’re used to seeing ballet in large houses, and I think the dancegoer’s eye seizes on and magnifies the often well-known steps, bestowing on them a dignity, even majesty that comes as much from our awareness of ballet’s tradition as from what we see onstage....

The bicentennial of Mozart’s death has inspired stunts of all kinds. But for the most comprehensive tributes in town, Chamber Music Chicago wins hands down. Earlier in the season it brought in Murray Perahia to play an extensive assortment of the composer’s piano concerti and sonatas. Now, on two consecutive evenings, Gidon Kremer and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie will perform all five of Mozart’s violin concerti. Kremer, a Latvian-born, Soviet-trained violinist and a frequent visitor here, is a first-rate technician noted for his brilliant intellectualism; the well-regarded Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, a Frankfurt-based conductorless chamber ensemble, is making its local debut....

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s because Brel had a knack, rare among nontheater songwriters, for creating very specific stories and characters while addressing universal issues. Like Bob Dylan at his best (in Blood on the Tracks), Brel wrote brief but intense musical dramas. His protagonists’ charisma, the result mainly of the potent melodies he gave them, often ran head-on into their frailties and failures....

Marguerite Horberg had spent years on the jazz scene–producing shows, supporting the music in a variety of ways–when she finally realized, last fall, that something was missing. She’d just finished hosting a 25th- anniversary tribute to Chicago’s AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) at Hothouse, her gallery. “Where,” she asked herself, “are the faces of women?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Women have played an important role in jazz virtually from the beginning....

As with any artist of the first or second rank, the work of John Campbell invites continued scrutiny and rewards the scrutinizer with new insights all the time. In the past I’ve focused on the three-dimensional nature of his piano sound, his balance of speed and strength. But while that quality–along with the remarkable melodic imagination it serves–remains irresistible, I’ve lately turned my attention to his left hand. Campbell voices his dense chords so as to let in the light: they blithely reveal their construction, making his improvisations all the more expansive....

AKASHA AND COMPANY Quartet: A Formal Offering, a premiere by Los Angeles-based choreographer Mary Jane Eisenberg, shows us the work of human existence, what the Bible calls the “labor of love.” The commissioned score by Bruce Fowler is anxious and modern percussion is provided at some points by what sounds like a knife hitting a tin can–but also dramatic and emotional, driving toward resolution. The costumes have a timeless simplicity: the women wear calf-length dresses with camisole tops; the man, pants and a loose shirt....

LAST LETTERS FROM STALINGRAD Last Letters From Stalingrad is a play created by director James Pelton from the letters written by such soldiers. Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union went awry when Moscow and Leningrad would not fall. Trying another tactic, he ordered an attack on Stalingrad. When this city too would not surrender, the 250,000 German soldiers who had been rerouted there found themselves trapped. Starving and desperate, their ranks were dwindling; finally, word was released that only one last German plane would make it out of the area....

In our private lives we are frequently required to work hard to make ourselves feel what we want to feel, or believe we are supposed to feel: we give ourselves pep talks when we are depressed; we talk ourselves out of falling in love; we decide to let go and grieve over a loss; we work at liking our in-laws; we choose to have fun at a party. And at ceremonial occasions we adjust our moods as necessary....

She works out of Texas these days, but the music of pianist Marcia Ball cooks with the flavor of her native southern Louisiana. Influenced by the gang of geniuses who forged modern-day New Orleans piano–Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, James Booker, and Dr. John, among others–she’s as effective on steamy blues testifying (“The Power of Love”) and boogie-woogie barnstormers, (“Mama’s Cookin’”) as she is on covers of half-forgotten R & B gems like Sugar Pie DeSanto’s “Soulful Dress....

Lead Story Salt Lake City police reported in September that a 19-year-old man, wearing only underwear and sexually aroused, was arrested in his home for pointing a BB gun at a young neighbor boy. When the boy’s mother discovered the man, he said he was angry at the kid because he was “bugging” him. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As of November, the cremated remains of retired postal worker Earl Miller, which were mailed from Fort Lauderdale in July, had not been received by his niece in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania....

Father Frans Claerhout has spent most of his life in occupied countries. When he was studying for the priesthood in his native Belgium, the Nazis invaded. Not long afterward, in 1946, Claerhout moved to the Republic of South Africa where he still lives near Tweespruit in the Orange Free State–teaching, distributing food and clothing, and running interference between his poor, black parishioners and the white power structure. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

All day long we squatted under the grapefruit tree, listening to the dull thunder of the artillery on the other side of the mountain, and wondered what the Sandinistas were shooting at. They might be firing at random–sometimes they did that, launching their expensive Soviet rockets out into the trackless jungle to pulverize monkeys and coconuts–but the shelling had been going on for hours now. It seemed more likely they were blasting away at the contra patrol that was supposed to meet our little group of journalists here but was now 36 hours late....

The late rock critic Lester Bangs was, like many of his colleagues, a frustrated musician. He even recorded a handful of records: the single “Let It Blurt” and hard-to-find LPs with his New York group Birdland and the Texas-based Delinquents. But his finest hour may have come when he played typewriter at Cobo Hall in Detroit with the J. Geils Band. Bangs’s work is another matter. Although he began his career like many of his peers, explicating the vinyl texts of the day for post-Altamont knuckleheads in the pages of Rolling Stone (his first review—a devastating, later recanted pan of the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams—appeared there on April 5, 1969), he took the form to bizarre new heights in his later work for Detroit’s Creem and England’s New Musical Express, as well as dozens of lesser and more obscure journals....

SALOME Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But censors halted the production during rehearsals because of its sexual outspokenness and blasphemous depiction of a Bible story. When the script was published, a reviewer from the Times of London called it “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.” Salome finally premiered in France in 1896, with Bernhardt in the title role (the recently imprisoned playwright never saw it)....

All the world’s a stage–even the world south of the city, where six professional, semiprofessional, and nonprofessional performing groups have banded together to request the attention of area audiences. This first-ever effort of its kind, conceived and coordinated by Michael Sean McCarthy, features 10 different productions in repertory through November 29, with shows Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7:30 PM (no performance on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26); each show consists of two or three one-acts....

An Israeli who leaves Israel is said to be “outside of the land”; an Israeli who moves from Israel to America is said to have “gone down.” According to Israelis, one is either inside or outside of the land. There are no in-betweens. When I called old friends, longing for the sound of a familiar voice, I heard a tape recording saying they were too busy to pick up the phone....

The Bad Luck Ballet Can Ballet Chicago survive its latest management upheaval? Last week, immediately following the struggling company’s truncated engagement at the Chicago Theatre, the board of trustees quietly sacked Oleg Lobanov, who lasted only nine months as executive director. “Will it take an act of God to make ballet work in this town?” wondered one observer close to the scene. Many in the city’s arts community knew long before the BC board did that Lobanov was a mistake....

REAGAN, BUSH & CO. It’s Jimmy Carter’s quote, but Reagan, Bush & Co. owe him a debt of gratitude for setting the right tone in his final years as predecessor proprietor. Thanks, Jimmy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of these costs will be paid through largely regressive taxes, some simply through reduced standards of living. Many future costs are hard to estimate: What is the cost of the government failing to support high technology, such as advanced computer chips, photovoltaics (solar power), or high-definition television, as government-supported foreign competitors seize major industries of the future?...