Denise Zaccardi is sitting in the controlled chaos of her Bucktown offices looking uncharacteristically glum. She’s just gotten back from a trip to suburban Lincolnshire, where she met with officials of a large corporation and asked them for a contribution. This is the part of her job she most dislikes, and it’s the part that consumes most of her schedule these days. But try explaining this to funders. The corporate people in Lincolnshire listened attentively but made no commitment....

Sitcom Ellen is at an art gallery. For a reason known only to the show’s writers she’s brought her philistine pals with her, and they’re now capering doltishly around, making embarrassing remarks without any respect for the art on display. Ellen makes one last, exasperated attempt to bring them back into line. This is a multimillion-dollar painting! she exclaims. The flower of civilization! Behave yourselves with decorum, as you would in any comparably important financial institution....

UNFINISHED PORTRAIT OF AKHMATOVA You were bitterness, lies, a bill of goods. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), one of a handful of great Russian poets of the 20th century, led a life of great hardship and high drama against the backdrop of postrevolutionary Russia. She was in favor, out of favor, and in favor again–renounced and denounced by her own government, then dusted off and saluted....

ALONE OF YOUR SEX But informality is a time-honored tradition in performance art, and Abelson is young. I saw Karen Finley perform here in 1982, and the work was interesting but sloppy, wholly lacking the polish it has now that she performs at Lincoln Center. Was Finley’s work bad art? No, it was merely not as developed as it is now. One must start somewhere. And so it is with Abelson: she might not always be on target, but she is always interesting–there’s that seed of something worth watching and cultivating....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If political correctness of this sort were really such a huge problem in American movies, they probably wouldn’t be quite so filled with portraits of women as prostitutes and maniacs (e.g., Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Pretty Woman, Honeymoon in Vegas, and Indecent Proposal). Similarly, the problem with movie portrayals of black people is hardly that they’re excessively evenhanded....

These days the chamber trio isn’t as popular as the duo or the quartet. But the trio sonata–two strings plus a keyboard continuo–did enjoy a long vogue in the Baroque era. Later Haydn shifted the balance of power in his trio sonatas, expanding the piano part at the expense of the cello. This change encouraged indifference to the form among prima donna cellists, and since then far fewer noteworthy trios have been written than quality quartets....

In early September the woods are quiet. The birds, through nesting, no longer sing, but the leaves are still on the trees, damping the sounds of traffic from the roads. There’s an atmosphere of waiting. DeCourcey operates the banding station one or two days a week, May through October. In a typical year he bands up to 1,000 birds. On this Saturday he was joined by about ten volunteers–far more than necessary, but then he’s an enthusiastic raconteur and teacher who likes to share what he knows....

Captured at newsgroup talk.bizarre Pastrami and peppers. Lotsa peppers. You? OK, make it two. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You really want this job? Yeah? OK, here’s, lemme see, four quarters. Take ’em. You ever played Tetris? Good. What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna play that Tetris game inna corner over there. You get to round, lessee, I got, what, a dime, a nickel, and four pennies left, to round 19 and you got the job....

Music Notes: rock of Asians Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Park, the leader of the critically acclaimed Chicago band Seam, says he wanted to put out the record “because when I was growing up I could never picture a legitimate Asian American songwriter. . . . There weren’t any.” Park and Shin met last year in Seoul. Park was visiting relatives after breaking up with onetime Seam bassist Lexi Mitchell, and Shin was under parental pressure to get his shit together and benefit financially from the proliferation of multinational corporations in South Korea....

Jon Ginoli’s first band with the Outnumbered, a Champaign-based power pop quartet that favored the crisp guitar lines, keening, melodic vocals, and unflappable backbeat beloved of such aggregations across the country. The band never really got know outside the midwest, but left one fairly winning LP, Why Are All the Good People Going Crazy, on Homestead, in its wake. Ginoli went west, where he now works for a record distributor in San Francisco and fronts a marvelously good-humored and assertively gay band called Pansy Division....

Most people think of the eight-track tape as a dinosaur, assuming that it perished alongside other oddities of the 1970s, like leisure suits and pet rocks. But those bulky plastic cartridges containing loops of oft-interrupted–kerchunk!–audiotape continue to inspire Russ Forster, editor of 8-Track Mind, a zine devoted to keeping analog alive in our digital world. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forster says his distrust of CD–or “seedy”–technology is a reaction against the “lemminglike consumer culture of the past decade....

Maurice Weddington heard classical music for the first time in the late 50s, when he was attending Dunbar Vocational High School. “A very weird schoolmate introduced me to Stravinsky by playing a recording of Le sacre du printemps. It did impress me deeply. In fact, it changed my life. It showed me how serious music could be put together. So I signed up for a theory course.” He already knew how to play the trumpet, flute, and bassoon, and jazz was a passion....

The charm, humor, and healthy eroticism of Australian writer-director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting) are back in force in this pleasantly recounted tale, set in the 30s, about a newlywed Anglican clergyman and his wife, freshly played by Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald, who stop off at the remote home of a controversial (i.e., erotic) painter (Sam Neill). The clergyman has been asked by his bishop to try to persuade the painter to remove one of his sexy paintings from an upcoming exhibit, and when the couple unexpectedly have to extend their stay, the sensual lures of both the scenic setting and the bohemian household–which largely consists of the painter’s female models–have a subtle but indelible effect on them, the wife in particular....

CHISEL, POEM ROCKET 1/26, EMPTY BOTTLE Chisel’s new album, 8 A.M. All Day (Gern Blandsten), finds the spunky Washington, D.C., trio delivering hopped-up pop that looks to the early Jam for inspiration but actually suggests a low-rent, impatient, indie-rock Oasis. Hooks abound, but the annoying earnestness of guitarist Ted Leo’s vocals and the group’s overly spirited bashing–done, I suppose, to convey some sort of urgency–sell the tunes short. Based on their recent debut album, Felix Culpa (PCP), a collection of seemingly every sound the young band’s released, it’s tough to know what New York’s Poem Rocket are all about....

ROGER BROWN When pop first surfaced, art-world denizens–including many of the great abstract expressionist painters–thought both its subject matter and style abominations. Three decades later, many still deny that Warhol was a serious artist. Argued with any subtlety, the case against “low” art is usually that subjects or forms taken from popular culture lack the complexity and resonance of true works of art, from van Eyck to Vermeer to Cezanne. “Low” art is said to give the viewer the same limited and debased experience as mass-culture objects....

The producers of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s epic comedy-drama about politics and religion in the age of AIDS, have decided that the second part, Perestroika, is technically too wobbly to open until October 9. So I’ll wait for both wings to unfold before exploring the work in a full review. But I have no qualms about giving the first half, Millennium Approaches, my highest recommendation–or about stating my hope that director Michael Mayer will carry through in Perestroika the same spare simplicity that makes his Millennium Approaches light-years better than the Broadway version....

Friday 19 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hey, kids! It’s National UFO Information Week! Operation Right to Know and the Mutual UFO Network, organizations dedicated to taking such things seriously, have a pair of lectures planned for this evening. UFO researcher Robert Dean will give a talk called The Greatest Story Never Told, based, so the organizations say, on “cosmic top secret information” gleaned by Dean in his years at NATO....

Captured at newsgroup alt.bitterness There was a kids’ swim meet and that brought in a load of people who had never been in the club before to watch their little kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews and what not compete in the meet. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the meet was in progress someone’s grandpa came out in the lobby to get a cup of coffee....

When I go to hear saxophone wizard Eddie Harris, I love to watch him from the middle of the room on back. You don’t have to sit too far away–25 or 30 feet works fine–before his fingers seem to stop still on even the fastest passages, as if they had become the appendages of a fantastically musical statue. Harris looks as if he’s hardly playing because, like the best-trained classical saxophonists, he enjoys such economy of motion in his technique; and you won’t find much wasted energy in the rest of his often overlooked musical ethos either....

Farrakhan Furor Same page, different article: “But on this 40-foot-long, gray and lavender bus, little but praise was heard whenever Mr. Farrakhan’s name was raised, and it was raised often. “The survey of 1,047 participants in the Million Man March also found that it was the message and not Farrakhan that brought these black men and a handful of women and whites to the nation’s capital.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....