lsudc.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The administration has proposed solutions and taken measures that could reduce these standards. A powerful aspect of the Loyola curriculum is its in-depth and multifacted core. With the onslaught of class section cuts, the core curriculum has suffered. Many class sizes have increased as faculty teach more introductory classes, leaving less time for research and one-on-one interaction with students....

Lewis Hine’s Crusade Against Child Labor Nikki S. Lee Photography, like cinema, has long had two polar tendencies: documentation and abstraction. Though such categories inevitably oversimplify, the documentary photographer–represented in several current exhibits–seems to subordinate his vision to his subject matter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Children as young as five are shown performing agricultural or factory labor or doing piecework at home. In an untitled image from about 1912, four young cotton pickers carry heavy sacks; children are consistently seen dwarfed by their loads or by a mound of oyster shells or by the machines around them....

Gabert Farrar describes his 11 untitled paintings at Monique Meloche as “removed from their actual subject matter” and “self-referential,” yet they convey an idealized essence of urban clutter. All set thick lines against solid-color backgrounds. In one piece two orange lines on a gray field depict a street receding into the distance, though a vertical skein of lines at the right edge of a tree trunk eclipses the vanishing point, replacing the suggestion of infinite space with a hard-to-untangle jumble....

By Ben Joravsky As the drivers see it, they have the worst of two worlds. They’re convenient targets–scapegoats, really–for politicians looking to score easy points with the public, particularly the black community. And they’re a good source of revenue. “We’re a cash cow,” says Johnny Holmes, who lives on the south side. “Want to raise some money? Slap a fee or a fine on the driver. No one knows, no one cares....

Junoon At the time of the first gulf war under the first Bush, I was a student at a tiny midwestern college where lefty politics was the wind beneath our collective wings. I remember somebody had a tiny black-and-white portable TV and some 40 of us had crammed into a dorm room to watch the bombs fall. We were perversely excited: now was the time for action! But even we were savvy enough to realize that a protest on our insular campus would be an exercise in group masturbation, so we hied ourselves to the nearest air force base....

LOVERS AND FRIENDS (CHAUTAUQUA VARIATIONS) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though between them they have over four decades of stage experience, much of it in Chicago, operatic baritone Robert Orth and cabaret singer and actress Hollis Resnik have never appeared in a show together. But that will change this weekend, when they costar in the premiere of Lovers and Friends (Chautauqua Variations) by Michael John LaChiusa, composer in residence at the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists....

Angelina Gualdoni: Demo Realizing that hubris lies at the root of civilization’s “achievements,” many recent artists eschew modernist claims to artistic truth in favor of more modest and contingent statements. Angelina Gualdoni’s six carefully crafted paintings at Vedanta all depict the 2000 demolition of the Horizons Pavilion at Disney’s Epcot Center while John Wanzel’s 13 pieces at Dogmatic explore our interstate highway system. Both 27-year-old artists critique the notion that technology makes life better....

PERSPECTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Detroit duo Perspects tends to make grandiose but empty statements about what it wants its music to accomplish–for example, producing “the effects of maximum convenience on the present-day human mind.” But the music–aggressive pop played on cold synthesizers, occasionally sidestepping repetition and juxtaposing unrelated rhythms–more than makes up for all the hot air. Musician, producer, and multimedia artist Ian Clark founded the band in 1999, after he and Adam Lee Miller (now of Adult....

The 15th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, runs Saturday, November 1, through Sunday, November 16. Unless otherwise noted, films are screened from 35-millimeter prints and tickets are $9 at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence. Films are projected from video and tickets are $7 at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. A $40 pass admits you to any five screenings, except for the opening-night program; for more information call 773-486-9612....

On the morning of April 28 Ceylon Mooney sat in the Starbucks near Madison and State drinking a cup of coffee. On the floor next to him lay a banner that read “Boeing Weapons Crucify the Least Among Us” and a backpack containing 200 buttons with the names of Iraqi children who’d been befriended by activists from Voices in the Wilderness during a visit to Iraq last year. Next door in the Renaissance Chicago Hotel three other activists, two of them Voices in the Wilderness members, were in room 914, getting ready to disrupt Boeing’s annual shareholders’ meeting, which was to start at 10 AM in a third-floor conference room....

ROY HAYNES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s obvious why the Jazz Showcase has booked Roy Haynes to open its annual Charlie Parker Month: one of a mere handful of surviving Parker sidemen, Haynes drummed for the legendary saxist in the early 50s, helping to solidify the bop percussion style pioneered by his predecessors Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. But it goes even deeper than that: In the late 40s Haynes played in a band led by Lester Young, the swing-era saxophonist whose liberated phrasing and iconoclastic harmonies had inspired Parker in his teens....

You’re a dick. I’ve been enjoying your column for years, but your reply last week to “Confused in Ohio,” who was worried about her boy-porn-perusing boyfriend, is typical bi-phobia. I thought you had laid your bi-phobia to rest when you finally relented and acknowledged that yes, there are lots of bisexuals. But now you are back to your same old agenda, the agenda shared by so many other people who desperately want to make themselves “right” by projecting everyone else to be the same as they are....

Watching Chicago’s Erwin Helfer charm a packed room at JazzFest Berlin last year, I saw him in a new light: as a successor to Art Hodes, another white conservator of pre-bop African-American piano styles that would be lost if someone hadn’t made a point of fixing them in mind and under the fingers. Helfer long ago turned his blues and boogie influences–gleaned from Jimmy Yancey, Clarence Lofton, Sunnyland Slim, and others–into a lively, durable, personalized sound....

For two decades experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt has explored the dark side of human behavior through a compelling series of miniatures consisting almost entirely of found footage. The five shorts on this program cover most of Rosenblatt’s work from 1990 to the present, and while each is a self-contained unit, viewing them together allows his larger themes to emerge with considerable cumulative power. The Smell of Burning Ants (1994, 21 min....

“Anybody waited on you yet, baby?” asks a friendly waitress as a newcomer decides between chicken and dumplings or ham hocks. The question of sides is brought up, as if that will affect the main course selection. The answer is a rapid-fire listing of the comfort classics: “We got candied sweets, we got collards, we got corn…” A few tables away someone asks about peach cobbler. “Miss Boo,” the waitress shouts, craning her head in the general direction of the kitchen....

The Other Side of the Notepad He goes on, “The same process can still apply. If a person calls up and says, ‘Here’s a row of buildings that are going to be torn down, and I think they’re historic,’ I’ll do the same thing I did at the Sun-Times. I’ll look into it. I’ll see what’s there and if there’s a case for saving them.” “No matter how much one thinks one knows, you truly don’t know until you’re inside,” he says....

What’s the rant with offshore banking? It’s a big thing in every John Grisham novel, but what’s the real story? Forget ethics and morals. If I put in my paltry hundred bucks a week, will it make more than at my local bank? Will they even talk to me about starting an account with a hundred bucks? Most important, if I don’t pay taxes on it here, do I have to pay taxes in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas, etc?...

John and Frank Navin, the brothers at the core of the Aluminum Group, are about to scoop poop in about $6,000 worth of Prada. Neither the band nor their day jobs (schoolteacher and waiter respectively) paid for it: the sibs met Aluminum Group superfan Fabio Zambernardi, right-hand man to Miuccia herself, 18 years ago through designer Lawrence Steele, a friend of Frank’s from his days at the School of the Art Institute....

Someone oughta start a self-help program to steer performers away from parodies of self-help programs. Though tantalizing comic territory, it’s undeniably limited, partly because the turf’s been worked over and partly because it’s hard to heighten the ridiculousness of the real-life personal trainer, motivational speaker, etc. In the hands of truly gifted comedians, however, anything’s possible, and Al Samuels and Kevin Fleming fare better than they probably have any right to....

BAABA MAAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few African musicians have mixed native traditions with contemporary trends more creatively or authoritatively than Senegalese pop star Baaba Maal. Throughout the 90s he released a series of albums that stretched further and further to pull in listeners around the globe; his hybridizing approach, always grounded by deep West African grooves, reached its apex on 1994’s Firin’ in Fouta (Mango), but by 1998, when he released Nomad Soul (Palm Pictures), his music was beginning to collapse under its own weight....