THE SEA Terrapin Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Willy’s search for an explanation introduces us to the citizens of the sleepy town on the North Sea coast of East Anglia where such things are permitted to happen. They include the straitlaced Mrs. Louise Rafi, the quintessence of Victorian propriety, who rules the affairs of the town with an iron hand, and her niece Rose, the fiancee of the dead man who now chafes under the boredom from which she hoped marriage would deliver her–Willy is quite prepared to oblige her in his late friend’s stead....

Anyone who doubts that sport reflects the society at large hasn’t examined the Bears of late. The Bears embody almost everything that’s good–and that’s disappointing–about the 90s so far, especially compared with the 80s. There’s an air of political correctness about the Bears this season, with Dave Wannstedt as head coach. The Bears played the Minnesota Vikings a week ago last Monday and the Green Bay Packers last Sunday–two long-term black-and-blue division rivals–but in both cases the hype and the competition were sporting and gentlemanly....

The attached document, which is floating around the Web, details a number of deadly side effects of aspartame (NutraSweet). One side effect stems from the release of methanol when aspartame is heated to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The paper goes on to suggest this may be the cause of “gulf war syndrome,” since the troops all drank diet drinks that had sat in the desert sun for several days. Other claimed dangers of aspartame may not be so farfetched, but it’s hard to tell....

Speaking of the next decade, how did the people who lived in Theodore Roosevelt’s America refer to the decade they were going through? I suspect they called it “the 1900s” or “the hundreds”–a natural sequel to “the 1890s” or “the nineties”–but I wasn’t around then. They must have called it something, and it seems odd that no record of this has emerged as we approach another double-0 decade. You know everything, Cecil, even about the past....

A big noise was made about James Kudelka’s Cruel World when American Ballet Theatre premiered the dance in the spring of 1994. This Canadian choreographer is notable in part for the gloomy issues he tackles: he’s been described as a “kinetic poet of loneliness, isolation, misunderstanding and repression,” and Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times called him the Harold Pinter of dance. Only 39 years old, he’s the son of a Hungarian immigrant and grew up in a small farming community, entering the National Ballet School of Canada at the age of ten, where a fellow student recalls that Kudelka wore thick glasses and carried a briefcase (one of his dances, performed in kilts, is said to reflect the “oppressive atmosphere of a ballet school”)....

Readers: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It amazes me how Frank Conklin, the moonlighting Evanston cop who arrested me, after expelling me from Barnes & Noble, on Fri 29 Apr 94, for trespassing (on Sherman Ave.?) can get his lies printed after the fact. What the Reader printed from Conklin: that I was passing out leaflets in the store, was not even on the charge sheet read by a bailiff at the Skokie bond hearing (where 2 bonds, separate and contradictory, were placed on me for one and the same charge)....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Not one foot of track has been laid since the inception and demise of the [central area circulator] project, yet an astounding $59 million of tax dollars have been spent,” writes Dennis Constant in ITEF Comment (January 4). “According to published reports, $33 million was paid to project designers DeLeuw Cather & Co. and McDonough Associates....

Bailiwick Repertory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his 1970 book, William Hinton revealed the village of Long Bow, 400 miles southwest of Beijing, as a microcosm of a rapidly changing China. David Hare’s stage adaptation transformed that historical record into a Brechtian parable, its subject the community who fanshen (“turn over”) centuries of tradition in three pivotal years, 1946 to 1949. A small-scale epic, Hare’s play offers object lessons in peasants inheriting privileges denied them for centuries....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wouldn’t waste space with any brief treatise on the language of painting, art history, and where great artists like Claude Mount and Gustave Caillebotte fit in. Nor will I join in on any futile condemnation of particular financial trends in the global art market and the “sitcom Ellens” of society. Instead, I’d like to impart a little advice to Mr....

Dear Tom Frank, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I want to thank you for your insightful expose on those insidious and evil corporations which had the audacity to inflict fun, enjoyment and pleasure on people’s lives by renovating Navy Pier [October 13]. Can you believe those assholes? It’s really a sad day in America when close to a million people in a summer have to endure the pain of music, shops, restaurants, carnival rides and a view of the beautiful skyline of Chicago....

GO GIRLS! So what’s forbidden to lesbians? According to Victoria Baker and Neon Weiss, two San Francisco lesbian performers, it’s men. Of course, not straight men. There’s nothing revolutionary about women–regardless of sexual orientation–screwing straight men; in fact, it’s kind of retrograde. But how about gay men? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the notion of lesbians and gay men having sex with each other strikes you as odd–as perhaps just heterosexuality with a twist, as just bisexuality disguised as radical chic, as just another plot to deny women their unique sexual identity–Baker, for one, has a neat explanation: “It’s like a screen door,” she says....

Most successful as a songwriter–his tunes have been recorded by George Strait and Vince Gill as well as rockers like Dave Edmunds and John Mayall–Jim Lauderdale proves on his new album, Pretty Close to the Truth, that he’s a top-notch performer as well. His 1991 debut, Planet of Love, produced by Rodney Crowell and John Leventhal, aimed straight at mainstream Nashville. A solid effort with strong melodies and effortless singing, it nevertheless smothered the noncountry aspects of Lauderdale’s vibrant personality and–like many Nashville records–flopped....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this year Michael Eugene Price was granted retrials in two armed robbery cases after an Oklahoma appeals court ruled that trial judges had erred in telling juries that defendants are “presumed not guilty” instead of “presumed innocent.” Price had been serving 32 and 35 years, respectively. He was retried, found guilty in both cases, and sentenced to 60 years for the first and 65 for the second....

Perhaps the most remarkable film-history revaluation currently in progress (highlighted at the Film Center this month) concerns Russian films made during the teens, fascinating today for their highly modern handling of space and decor, their resourceful mise en scene, their unambiguous feminism, and their embrace of tragic endings, among other things. If you assume, like most people, that world cinema has been steadily improving over the past 70-odd years, there’s plenty here to challenge that premise; this work, like the equally neglected work of Louis Feuillade from this period, is arguably in advance in some respects of not only D....

RED HOLLOWAY & EDDIE HIGGINS TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the days when he played prominently with Chicago bluesmen–Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Roosevelt Sykes–and then with B.B. King and Chuck Berry, Red Holloway established himself as a silk-and-grit saxophone voice. When he began to work regularly with Sonny Stitt, in the late 1970s, his fluid command of hard-bop improvising forced the jazz world to reevaluate his place in modern music....

Wag, wag, goes the dog. From painter Aaron Karp’s description of his work at Eva Cohon Gallery on West Superior: “I used to be able to finish a painting after the fifth or sixth layer [of paint], but as a result of being on this grant the duration has become ridiculously prolonged. I often wonder after about the sixteenth layer…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I have attended too many community meetings where everybody seems to know everything but nothing conclusive is ever derived from discussions,” laments Andrew Eperi in Afrique (October)....

Manoel de Oliveira’s The Convent (1995) has little conventional dramatic tension and a strange, almost surreal ending, but this meditation on good and evil is allusive, poetic, and deeply affecting. Michael (John Malkovich) is a professor who arrives with his wife Helene (Catherine Deneuve) at a Spanish monastery to research his theory that Shakespeare was originally a Spanish Jew named Jacques Perez, which he thinks could have been anglicized to “Shakespeare....

On the day of the Million Man March in Washington, President Clinton was in Texas. But he still delivered a rousing speech on racism, imploring blacks and whites to stop the hatred that “is tearing the heart of America.” He urged them to “roll back the divide” and talk to one another honestly about race. “I am convinced, based on a rich lifetime of friendships and common endeavors with people of different races,” said Clinton, “that the American people will find out they have a lot more common ground than they think they do....

This lineup beautifully captures the inherent multiculturalism of Austin roots music. Country, Tex-Mex, blues, R & B, rock, conjuntos: Austin artists mix ‘n’ match ’em without a second thought. Don Walser’s new album Rolling Stone From Texas (Watermelon) covers both halves of country and western by offering rich cowboy tunes such as “Cowpoke” to counter more typical fare like honky-tonk boogies. Walser possesses an innate knowledge of old country styles, vibrantly drifting from a Jimmie Rodgers yodel to classics by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Willie Nelson, and Marty Robbins....

Vedder Talks, part 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In retrospect, this may have been a strategic error of some proportion. Most seriously, absent Vedder’s glamour, the press passed on the story. While Chuck Philips at the Los Angeles Times and Eric Boehlert at Billboard aggressively exposed Ticketmaster’s schemes, no one else did. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today barely noticed the story....