In his capsule reviews of four new books dealing with how industry might be altered or persuaded to co-exist more benignly with the environment [“Small Leaps Forward,” February 9], Harold Henderson states: Even if…big plans for protecting the environment are just too 20th century, we still need to come up with modest plans–plans that, if they turn out to be mistakes, will at least be smaller mistakes. I appreciate the exposure he is giving the topic, but he’s doing Paul Hawkin, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins a disservice by characterizing their book Natural Capitalism as a smorgasbord of themes and then picking apart one of them, “biomimicry,” as ambiguous....

Many times when I’m driving home at night and I see a cop waiting to pull someone over, I think about this story. I was visiting my parents and we were riding in my mother’s new car. My mother is known to have a little bit of a lead foot, and my dad was warning her to slow down when all of a sudden we came over a hill and saw a state trooper....

The fifth annual Outer Ear Festival of Sound features live performances, sound installations, film screenings, and radio art broadcasts through November 24. For more information, see www.expsoundstudio.org/outerear/index.htm or call 773-784-0449. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 5 PM Opening reception for Richard Holland’s sound installation “Of Change,” Hyde Park Art Center, 5307 S. Hyde Park Blvd. F (Through December 15: Mon-Fri 9 AM-5 PM and Sat noon-5 PM)....

Catherine Schwalbe-Bouzide and her husband, Paul, were drawn to their Lakeview house by the leafy park across the street, called Gross Park by residents though it wasn’t really a city park in the traditional sense. The greenway on the 1700 block of West Henderson had been created in the late 19th century as part of a subdivision built by housing developer Samuel E. Gross. “It was a nice unique place,” says Schwalbe-Bouzide, a recreational therapist and artist....

Here’s a question for you: How much do commercial TV stations pay for the privilege of monopolizing the airwaves? The answer’s a grabber. Although television is a highly profitable business and the airwaves are public property in limited supply, a license to operate on them costs nothing. In fact, according to the media watch group Free Press, we’re giving away the use of an asset that’s been valued at $367 billion nationwide, and the major beneficiaries of our largesse are a handful of large station owners including companies like Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, and News Corp....

This is probably the least entertaining letter you’ll ever get, but I hope it’ll make a nice break between snot suckers and shit eaters. I am 18 now, going to college, and I think I may be in love. I know it might seem like I’m jumping in with both feet, but I don’t think I am. I met this girl on one of my first days in college–granted that my college has only been going on for four or five days–and I can barely get through the day without thinking about her....

MY MORNING JACKET 3/2, SCHUBAS While you’re waiting (and waiting) for the next Flaming Lips album, you could do worse than to turn to Louisville’s My Morning Jacket, whose lushly orchestrated psychedelic heights are grounded by gentle Americana flourishes on their second album, At Dawn (Darla). By the record’s climax it’s all starting to seem a bit much (shades of Spiritualized), but the overall artistry is undeniably satisfying. DEXTER ROMWEBER 3/2, ABBEY PUB As half of the Flat Duo Jets Dexter Romweber was an enfant terrible of Cramped-up rockabilly, but he plays it a little straighter on his second solo album, Chased by Martians (Manifesto)....

Three Tales, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s video documentary opera, had its genesis in the early 90s, after the longtime partners unveiled their multimedia milestone The Cave and went looking for another music-theater project that would mix performance with the latest audiovisual technology. But it took them almost a decade to complete this trilogy of sharp commentaries on the last century, each segment of which focuses on a pivotal event in technological history....

Rock, Pop, etc. PAUL ANKA Sat 10/27, 8 PM, Rosemont Theatre, 5400 N. River Rd., Rosemont. 847-671-5100 or 312-559-1212. CALIFONE with filmmakers Carolyn Faber and Jeff Economy in an improvised set of music and film loops; in the second set Califone accompanies Ladislav Starewicz’s The Mascot. Sat 11/3, 8 PM, auditorium, Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University, 1967 South Campus Dr., Evanston. 847-491-2305. DISTURBED, DROWNING POOL, STEREOMUD, ADEMA, SYSTEMATIC Wed 10/31, 5:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W....

Experts at belittling each other, George and Martha indulge in Olympic-level imbibing as they entertain and undermine a younger couple who lack the illusions–what Ibsen called the “life lies”–that sustain a marriage. In Edward Albee’s classic, George goes too far, and by the play’s end these two seasoned fighters must face their feelings. Rich with telling mood shifts but feeling longer than it should, Charles Newell’s staging underlines the fun behind the games before miring the characters in recrimination and betrayal....

At his first one-man show, at Phyllis Kind Gallery in 1990, artist Stephen Warde Anderson was the toast of Chicago. “They put me up in a fancy hotel,” he remembers. “Had the opening and a big dinner afterward with a dozen people. They said, ‘It did well. Here’s another check for $1,000.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 1980s were bull market years for folk and outsider art....

Friday 3/21 – Thursday 3/27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brent Ritzel started his exhaustive Evanston-based Zine Guide in late 1997 as an alternative to the now defunct Factsheet Five. Currently in its sixth edition, the guide provides reviews and listings of over 1,000 independent magazines, zines, and broadsheets, as well as an index cross-referencing the bands, people, and topics they cover. Tonight and tomorrow, March 22, Ritzel, who also publishes the zine Tail Spins, and associate editor Alicia Dorr will host two nights of free Zine Guide-sponsored readings at Quimby’s, 1854 W....

Friday 7/11 – Thursday 7/17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last spring there was such a severe drought in southern India that a 12th-century Krishna temple that had more or less lain underwater since the KRS dam was built across the Kaveri River in the 1920s appeared aboveground, and priests were conducting services there. Unfortunately, the temple was all that remained of the 36 villages that were flooded to make way for the project....

Demography is not destiny, even at the sushi bar. Kimiyo Naka writes in the Chicago Reporter (June) that of 139 sushi chefs in 36 Chicago sushi restaurants surveyed, 41 are of Japanese descent, 31 Korean, 25 Mexican, 22 Chinese, and 17 Ecuadorian. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Robert Taylor Homes resident leaders went on a trip in April to Springfield and Peoria where they saw beautiful new homes that were built by the same developers that will rebuild Robert Taylor,” writes Beauty Turner in the Residents’ Journal (June)....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a psychotherapist who also went to grade school and high school with Mr. Robin, I felt that Ted Kleine missed a valuable opportunity to educate the public on bipolar disorder (also known as manic-depressive illness). This disorder has increasingly been recognized by the mental health profession as a very serious mental illness. However, when accurately diagnosed, it can often be treated successfully with medication....

DWIGHT YOAKAM, GARY ALLAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After writing and directing a feature film (South of Heaven, West of Hell) and releasing collections of greatest hits, live material, unplugged performances, and covers, Dwight Yoakam finally wrote an album of new material last year. Tomorrow’s Sounds Today (Reprise) breaks no new ground, but it’s as good as anything he’s done, and his postmodern take on hardscrabble Bakersfield honky-tonk, abetted by fiddler Scott Joss and steel guitarist Gary Morse, is still a bracing antidote to Nashville orthodoxy....

Robert Mann, first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, once remarked to me how much he enjoyed playing at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall–an appreciative audience, he said, in an ideal environment. Appropriately the venerable hall, whose warm acoustics make it especially well suited to chamber music, will celebrate its 100th birthday this weekend with a concert by the Emerson String Quartet–the Juilliard’s successor as America’s greatest string quartet. Mandel Hall, named for department store magnate Leon Mandel and designed by the same firm that did the Art Institute, is one of the campus’s main assembly spaces, but its reputation as a lecture and music venue has spread internationally....

Nowhere to Hide By Steve Erickson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nowhere to Hide, a South Korean film opening this weekend at the Music Box, takes the strategy further than anything I’ve seen recently, mapping the intersections between action cinema and the avant-garde. Writer-director Lee Myung-Se draws on obvious sources like Dirty Harry and John Woo, while his postmodern imagery digests the vocabulary of silent cinema, animation, avant-garde film, and music video (most of the action is set to pounding techno and heavy metal)....

By the mid-1990s, Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg’s Instant Composers Pool Orchestra was one of the glories of European improvised music. Over the course of nearly two decades, it had slowly evolved into an elegant self-regulating mechanism, a gyroscope balancing composed material with ad hoc content, jazz with chamber-music accents, and its pocket-size sections (two brass, two reeds, and two strings–namely cellist Ernst Reijseger and bassist Ernst Glerum) with each other. But Mengelberg likes chaos, so in 1996 he threw a wrench in, enlisting second cellist Tristan Honsinger, who’d already put in a stint with ICP in the 70s....

A couple years ago Sue Boydston decided to tear down her garage. Traffic had decreased since her husband, Bob, died of cancer in December 1999. Bob Boyd, as he was professionally known, was the rhythm guitarist of the popular country-and-western trio the Sundowners, who between 1959 and 1989 played five nights a week at the various incarnations of the Bar R R Ranch in the Loop. When the Sundowners weren’t gigging, they could often be found in Bob’s garage....