The Bears and Mayor Daley got their way, and the new Soldier Field’s been built. But the criticism won’t die. The stadium’s design and location may be moot, but its price tag still rankles. “Soldier Field’s a symbol as much as it’s a football stadium,” says Jesse Sharkey, a history teacher at Senn high school. “As long as it’s there on the lakefront it’s a reminder of all the other things we might have done with the hundreds of millions of dollars–or whatever it was–we wasted on Soldier Field....

I like the idea of a band mirroring the listening habits of most people–a little of this, a little of that, all jumbled together. But from Naked City’s dizzying genre-hopping to the Kronos Quartet’s effete multiculturalism, dial-spinning aesthetics usually sound better on paper. The first few albums by San Francisco’s Tin Hat Trio each have moments of beautiful acoustic lyricism and include some well-executed downhome tangos, but until lately the main objective of the band has seemed to be defying categorization....

Red Herring Political satire and romantic comedy don’t mix easily. Satire is sharp, skeptical, and at times downright caustic (think of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal”: eating Irish babies to reduce the island’s surplus population). The goal of a good romantic comedy, on the other hand, is not to expose moral failings but to bring lovers together. Satire is a rant, romantic comedy a love song with punch lines. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Retired mechanic Paul Szymanowski, who owns the gold 1974 Cadillac with purple tinted windows parked catercorner from the Target at Elston and Logan, says the car has a new engine with only seven miles on it. (The car itself has only 6,700.) He also recently put in a new windshield, alarm, stereo system, and air shocks. Yet it’s been wearing those for sale signs for two years now. The problem may be that it appears to be a hearse....

Piano duos just don’t get the sort of respect and celebrity accorded solo players: few composers have thought enough of the format to write great music expressly for it, and four-handed synchrony is often seen as a stunt. (As children, Mozart and his sister performed as a duo for royalty, who delighted in their freakishness.) But in the 19th century four-handed transcriptions of orchestral works were a popular middle-class home entertainment....

Bluegrass Ambassador Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Covington, 48, is best known locally for having owned Biddy Mulligan’s, the now defunct north-side club he bought not once, but twice. He first acquired the bar in 1978, and the hard-core Chicago blues acts he booked drew a steady clientele of Northwestern students, tourists, and aficionados from all over the city. “I would buy ads in the Defender,” he says, “and you can’t do that if you’re going to bring in ‘Hey Bartender’ bands from Schaumburg....

Please allow me to clarify several points made in your “Clinical Depression” article of August 24. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, you reported that the Chicago Department of Public Health’s move away from public medicine and toward public health represents a “new vision” that sprang up when Dr. John Wilhelm was appointed health commissioner in December. Actually, the department has been following that pattern fairly consistently since about 1991 (which nearly coincides with the Cook County Bureau of Health Services’ major expansion of public-medicine clinics in the city)....

Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood have a reputation as pop lightweights, and it’s not entirely undeserved; they can’t resist the temptation of the easy chorus, the pumped-up guitar, the routine dynamic shift. But their words, which couch pathos in humor, have rarely been as glib as the music. On the band’s third album, Welcome Interstate Managers (S-Curve), they depict a middle-class north Jersey suburbia that’s every bit as soul numbing as the drudgery Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar heroes struggle to escape....

Stanley Gehrt Harold Henderson (HH): In your article in the March issue of Chicago Wilderness Journal you called bats “perhaps the most efficient predatory mammals.” What does that mean? How many fewer bugs do we have because bats ate them? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HH: Don’t bats fly differently from birds anyhow? SG: Yes, birds are stronger and more linear flyers. Bats rarely fly in a straight line, they tend to flutter and change direction constantly, and they have very quick wing beats....

One Friday morning in late November, Sister Jean Kenny sat in the attendance office at Von Steuben high school, phoning in her weekly segment on WLIT. “The Lions could pose a formidable challenge,” she said. “They have a lot of losses, but those were close losses. If the Bears win, it could be a tight game.” Her eyes flashed like emeralds beneath a pile of white curls, and a cross from her order, the Sisters of Providence, dangled from her neck over a Chicago Bears sweater....

I’m a 21-year-old college guy. I used to be chubby and then, about a year ago, I hit the gym. Then I started having my sister dress me because I have no fashion sense. When the weight came off and muscles came on, women really started to notice me. Suddenly women couldn’t keep their hands off me. Now I’m one of those guys I always wanted to be, i.e., good-looking and confident....

The fusion of jazz and Indian classical music–both genres that emphasize improvisation–has a short but noble history. In the 50s John Coltrane developed a lasting interest in the subcontinent (reflected first in his composition “India”), and in the 70s John McLaughlin, a Coltrane devotee, abandoned his electric guitar to perform ragalike acoustic pieces with Indian musicians, including the brilliant young percussionist Zakir Hussain. But the best reference point for George Brooks’s new combo, Summit, is a lesser-known mid-70s project led by altoist John Handy and the venerable Indian sarod player Ali Akbar Khan (and also featuring Hussain): it too matched Indian instruments with saxophone, combining jazz tonalities with the timbres of north Indian music for an archetypal meeting of East and West, most notably on an out-of-print album called Karuna Supreme....

It’s career day at Lawndale’s William Penn elementary school, and reporter John W. Fountain arrives without a notebook. Instead he carries a bag filled with copies of his recently published memoir, True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity, and a black case containing laminated newspaper clippings. “Why?” some students ask. “We were so poor that my sister and I thought a ketchup sandwich was a treat....

Charlie Miller likes to think he’s reducing urban ugliness by caring for trees, which he fervently believes improve the quality of life. “Trees are really irreplaceable in our lifetimes,” he says, pointing to a huge honey locust at the corner of Clark and Schiller. If it were taken out–for which the company he works for, the Care of Trees, would charge $3,000–a six-to-eight-foot tree replacement might take 40 years to grow to the same size....

As I was leaving Incurable Theater’s adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s grotesque 1816 fairy tale–about impressionable student Nathaniel, driven mad by recurring visitations from the eyeball-stealing Sandman–a staff member approached me and lamented, “You came on the worst night ever!” I couldn’t disagree. Plagued by logistical logjams and technical mishaps, this 90-minute production featuring a puppet protagonist and masked cast barely limped to the finish line. But given Meredith Miller’s sketchy, shapeless adaptation and her actors’ curiously dispassionate performances (considering the source’s heightened emotions), the show might have stumbled under ideal circumstances....

This potent Belgian feature (2002) by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is every bit as good as their La promesse and Rosetta. Unlike them it can’t be described in detail without telegraphing the plot’s carefully structured exposition, but it involves a carpenter and teacher at a vocational workshop (Olivier Gourmet) who takes on a 16-year-old boy as an apprentice, with cataclysmic consequences. Gourmet, who played the hero’s father in La promesse and the heroine’s employer in Rosetta, gives a strong and nuanced performance that deservedly won him the best actor prize at Cannes....

Assistant state’s attorney Marie Taraska: Anthony, I talked to you earlier, and you told me about the death of Semaj Rice. . . . In the last week or two, on several occasions you struck Semaj Rice while disciplining him. A few days ago you saw Semaj sticking his hand in his diaper and you felt he needed to be disciplined, so you struck him several times in his legs and back....

Rock, Pop, etc. BELLE & SEBASTIAN Sat 5/11, 8 PM, Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee. 312-559-1212. DOLLY VARDEN, CHRIS MILLS Fri 5/10, 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000. HIP NOZ Free in-store performance. Fri 5/3, 8 PM, Borders Books & Music, 7100 Forest Preserve Dr., Norridge. 708-457-2111. SUZANNA MALLOW Mon 5/6, 7 PM, the House, 263 E. Lincoln Hwy., De Kalb. 815-748-2880. PETER MURPHY, MICHAEL J....

In the 80s, when the neoclassicists commandeered jazz, many young musicians began to emulate their 60s predecessors. Wallace Roney internalized the style of Miles Davis so fully that at Davis’s last recorded performance–the disastrous 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival concert, when he could barely play more than a few minutes at a time–Roney was called upon to fill in the blanks left by his idol. Roney has since proved even more mercurial than Davis....

The last time this company was here, in 1998, it performed Pangols, a compendium of Senegalese music and dance designed to show the spiritual nature of all beings and things. The new work on its current U.S. tour, Kuuyamba, details initiation into adulthood through a sojourn in a magical forest. The evening-length piece is divided into three traditional parts: the sama, in which the initiates dance to sacred songs and ask permission to undergo the ceremony; the djigui, in which the village chief gains the approval of the gods; and the silimbo, the ritual celebration itself, which includes eight different sections of music and dance....