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I’m called by somebody from the local of the Newspaper Guild–one of the unions on strike against New York’s Daily News–about a demonstration in front of the Tribune Tower the next morning. The Tribune Company owns seven newspapers, including the 71-year-old Daily News, and the company’s board of directors is to meet Tuesday morning to hear a report from embattled Daily News publisher James Hoge. Some strikers from New York are coming to try to confront Charles Brumback, the Tribune Company’s president, and they’ve called for a rally and picket....

The last straw came early last winter, when a small fire swept through the basement of a large courtyard building in Rogers Park. “I’m the guy who comes in just when things are coming apart,” says Larry Schwartz, a receiver for several north-side buildings. “I preserve and restore housing under the jurisdiction of a local court. That’s all I can do. A lot of times it’s frustrating, because people expect so much more....

ROOSTERS Latino Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » OK, the symbolism isn’t painstakingly subtle, and the cockfighting Morales family is somewhat less emotionally complex than the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. However rough cut, though, Roosters is still a strange and amusing play. The best thing about Roosters is that it’s written by a woman. What I mean is, you get to see macho explored from a feminine point of view....

To the editors: But this experiment in democratic decision making is already threatened in three major ways: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the most important early results of the work of the local school councils is the change in student attitudes. At one of the rallies, Steven Moody gives an indication of how students in many schools are beginning to feel, “I love my high school....

LIFE STINKS With Mel Brooks, Lesley Ann Warren, Jeffrey Tambor, Stuart Pankin, Howard Morris, and Rudy De Luca. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In fact, what seems especially precious about Life Stinks–a comedy about the homeless, and not one of Brooks’s best–is how beautifully and movingly out of date it is. I know we’re all supposed to be concerned constantly and exclusively with “now,” especially when it comes to Hollywood movies; the marketplace decrees that, and we’re expected to follow its dictate without complaint, like trendy, up-to-date sheep....

Landon “Sonny” Cox is the greatest high school basketball coach in the state of Illinois. But his office at Martin Luther King Jr. High School is so cramped and crowded it feels like a broom closet. There are no trophies, plaques, or bronzed basketballs on the walls–there’s no room for them; just some crudely clipped, yellowing newspaper articles. The brown carpet is threadbare. Still, Cox does have the horses, and if coaching college ball is what he wants, their successes should have earned him a job coaching college ball by now....

MORPHINE, 11/19, METRO In his promising new band, singer and two-stringed slide-bass player Mark Sandman (former leader of Boston’s bluesy roots rockers Treat Her Right) has replaced the ever-present lead guitar with the saxophone of Dana Colley. Unfortunately, on its second album, Cure for Pain, the band comes across as mannered and uninspired–mostly due to the self-conscious cool of Sandman’s vocals (he’s bluesy in a detached, Mose Allison sort of way) and Colley’s lack of gusto....

Stung Ray On November 1 Hanania was called in by Dennis Britton, editor of the Sun-Times, and Steve Huntley, the metro editor. They questioned his relationship with city treasurer Miriam Santos, a relationship once torrid and even now disconcertingly chummy. Hanania was a political reporter, assigned to the county beat; Santos was in pitched battle against Mayor Daley over control of city pension funds. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

BROADWAY BOUND As a result, the laughs that Simon coaxes out of his characters are richer and more varied. There are the usual pithy, Jewish-inflected one-liners: “A heart attack God gives you. Nerves you get from people who worry about you”; “Jewish guys are never good at sports played between November and April.” But they are more deeply woven into the fabric of everyday human life that Simon so convincingly and affectingly presents....

You’re sitting down, about to enjoy a meal. Or maybe you’ve just put your feet up after a hard day. Or perhaps you’ve gone to sleep and have your passport ready for a trip to REM-land. The phone rings. Like the Pavlovian dog that most of us are, you answer it. On the other end is someone offering you aluminum siding, a newspaper subscription, or a chance to help some orphans....

Derek Jarman’s kaleidoscopic experimental film–a dark, poetic meditation on Thatcher England–is visionary cinema at its best. A work that manages to combine more than a half century of home movies of Jarman’s family, a documentary record of industrial and ecological ruin, and sustained looks at Jarman regulars Tilda Swinton and Spencer Leigh, the film was shot in Super-8, transferred to video for additional touches and processing, and then transferred to 35-millimeter....

THE LAST WORDS OF DUTCH SCHULTZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The development of character and the spoken language–these, I think, are areas where theater can not only compete but surpass both novels and films. Theater is the person and the voice. So you’d think that a play entitled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (adapted from the novel by William Burroughs) might capitalize on these strengths....

Almost everyone I’ve talked with has been disappointed in this year’s Winter Olympics, from 24-hour-a-day sports fanatics to weekend-only sports dabblers to once-every-four-years Olympics devotees. I’ve found the games themselves as entrancing as ever, but I’m also as disappointed as everyone else. The competition, it appears, has been great. Yet I add the “it appears” because the presentation, on CBS, has been atrocious, a postmodern mishmash of athletes and events that has allowed only the suggestion of the Olympics’ essential drama....

Last Monday afternoon–his day off–Rush Pearson pulled a wad of dirty dollar bills from his pocket and offered to buy his friend a beer. “It was a good weekend,” he said. “I made out all right.” The bartender hesitated a moment before he picked up the bills. On one, George Washington’s face was smeared with a gob of dirt. This sort of thing happens to Pearson a lot; he earns his money eating mud....

TINTYPES Like the old-fashioned camera used to start and end the show, Tintypes takes its own tender snapshots as it celebrates the energy of a shameless, profligate America. You get the feeling the era put all it felt into song, whether popular Tin Pan Alley sheet music like “Smiles,” Joplin’s ragtime classics, or the light-opera luxuriance of Herbert’s “Kiss Me Again.” Tintypes reflects an amazing range; there’s a tribute to electricity, a medley of songs of arrival, vaudeville sketches, and the patriotic crowd-pleasers Cohan could write in his sleep (right now this last category seems a tad too comforting and smug)....

“. . . OR YOUR FACE WILL FREEZE LIKE THAT!” Gonged by Mr. T. Now how many Chicago actors can say that? The White Boys With Rhythm are mighty proud of their national television appearance and the infamous judge who gonged them off the air. To show us what a schmuck Mr. T really is, Robert McKersie and Michael Westerholt perform their entire Ninja Twins routine in “. . . Or Your Face Will Freeze Like That,” pretending to be inept Asian acrobats with large objects stuffed in their tights....

A lot of boiling and scraping has been required to bring Oliver Sacks’s 1973 case studies of postencephalitic patients–victims of the “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the 20s–to the screen, and many of the standard Hollywood blunt instruments are used to perform this task: changing Sacks himself into an American with a different name (Robin Williams), concentrating almost exclusively on a single patient (Robert De Niro), and scenes and emotional reactions that seem designed at times to duplicate the successes of Rain Man and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (among other films)....

BOBBY GOULD IN HELL at the Preston Bradley Community Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mamet still has one of the most acute senses of rhythm and dialogue in 20th-century drama, but he has also become one of the sloppiest writers around. He is always clever and entertaining, but his plots are frequently contrived and require great leaps of faith. From the slip of the tongue that gives away Lindsay Crouse’s intentions in House of Games to the car key fortuitously discovered on the dashboard of a stolen car in Things Change to the many puzzling offstage decisions in Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s plots bend and scrunch their characters....

It is sobering to realize that James Levine is opening his 16th season as Ravinia’s music director this week, for it seems like only yesterday that this unknown, bushy-haired wunderkind from Cleveland was jumping in at a few days notice for an indisposed Istvan Kertesz. The rest, as they say, is history, and we have since learned to share Levine with New York’s Metropolitan Opera (where he has been music director since 1976) and the major podiums and opera houses of the world....

First you notice his eyes. They are piercing, steel blue. They bore in on you as he talks. It’s as though he’s searching you for signs. For a glimmer of understanding. Or an opening. The show, Motorsports Unlimited, is seen in some 110 communities in Illinois and Wisconsin. Mark Schaefer of WBBM TV called it the most watched cable show in Chicago a few months back. Untold thousands of people in the area have clicked past the show....