THE WILD SWANS The fairy Morgana appears to Elise in a dream and tells her how to break the curse: she must prove her love by plucking nettles from the rocks and sewing shirts from them; flung over the swans, they will restore their humanity. Until then she must speak to no one, though that injunction almost costs her the love of a handsome king who befriends her. Nearly burned alive as a sorceress–her silence means she can’t explain her obsession with nettles–Elise is saved by her flying brothers, whom she in turn redeems from the curse....

Thomas Mapfumo first came to prominence singing protest songs for the Zimbabwean independence movement during the 1970s and followed up with music of celebration and reconstruction after the 1980 overthrow of the Rhodesian colonial regime (an artistically crucial period well documented on his delicious Shumba: Vital Hits of Zimbabwe). Since then his music has continued to grow in richness and depth, with neither his rhythmic drive nor the restrained yodeling urgency of his singing losing any of their force....

*** OLEANNA David Mamet’s four features to date, none of them realistic, are all concerned to a greater or lesser extent with con games. Ultimately what one thinks of any of them has a lot to do with which side of the con one winds up on–which proves to be a matter of how one relates to the style as well as the content. Language is the major instrument of both seduction and deception in these films, and Mamet’s stylized use of it, playing on its ellipses and ambiguities as well as its more abstract and musical qualities, often deceives and seduces the audience....

Angel Dust Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1994 thriller from Sogo Ishii–a young Japanese director best known for his fascination with the behavior of fringe groups–focuses on the vulnerability of a police investigator brought in to help find a serial killer whose victims are young women on crowded subway trains. Possessing near-telepathic powers and specializing in criminal psychopathology, the investigator, Setsuko, poses as a potential victim and begins to suspect her ex-lover and former research partner, a therapist who now runs a secretive deprogramming clinic for religious fanatics....

Don’t let the nickname fool you: Bill Smith doesn’t bark the blues, he croons them in a mellow baritone reminiscent of Billy Eckstine, Johnny Hartman, and other great jazz balladeers. Bill traces his career back to early gigs with the late guitarist Tampa Red; like Tampa, he combines the musical instincts of a jazz musician with the lyric and emotional sensibility of a bluesman. He brings a rugged edge to the classic ballad themes with his street talk and his tales of “back-talkin’, fat-mouthin”‘ women, but his delivery is so smooth–and his good-natured grin so infectious–that it’s almost impossible to be offended....

Dwayne Killian has given lots of tickets in his seven years as a police officer in Joliet. Last year, though, people began to react differently when he wrote them up. “Like one guy,” he recalls. “He says, ‘Do whatever you gotta do–just don’t tell nobody you gave me a ticket while you were on a bicycle.’” Joliet may be more open to changes like this thanks to a program the city instituted more than two years ago: community policing....

Declaring that we need to avoid the “train wrecks” that have resulted from previous battles between economic interests and the Endangered Species Act, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt has announced his intention to change the focus of enforcement of the ESA from individual species to entire ecosystems. It occurred to me that if I was on the same side of this issue as a bunch of California real estate developers and the Tribune it be time to reexamine my position....

JOHN HART-CHRIS POTTER QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One plus one equals three. You can spend your time lauding the talents of both guitarist John Hart and saxophonist Chris Potter, but it’s the partnership between the two that has my ears tingling in anticipation of this weekend’s sets. Start with the two instrumentalists’ carefully honed sounds, which blend without either losing its individual edge; then continue to the way in which one picks up the shifting tides of the other’s musical drift–as in Potter’s solo on the song “Ozone” (from Hart’s newly released Ozone on the newly exciting Concord label), with the guitarist egging him on in his accompaniment....

This string band’s musical theater piece In the Deep Heart’s Core: A Mystic Cabaret, a setting of Yeats poems that was one of last season’s surprise hits, displayed composer-guitarist Joseph Daniel Sobol’s gift for blending Irish folk idioms with art-song nuances and unusual literary influences. It also showcased some dynamic soloists, including fiddler Andrew Bird and singers Kathy Cowan and Tom Orf. Now the group is back with a charming Classic Digital CD, A Kiltartan Road Christmas: Joy in the Morning, that shares the Yeats show’s strengths while highlighting the tight, confident teamwork of the whole ensemble....

LYRIC OPERA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don Carlo is one of my favorite Verdi operas not only for its gorgeous, dramatically compelling music but also for the life it breathes into historical personages whose actions shaped the politics of their day. Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, this five-act opera based on Schiller’s celebrated play traces the downward spiral of an ill-starred love against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition....

Lead Story From a recent scientific paper noting that not everyone regards Beano, a food additive that inhibits gas, favorably: For some people, “the production of high volumes of resonant, pungent intestinal gas is a source of personal pride and fulfillment.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Defense lawyer Paul Fernandez, explaining in a Paterson, New Jersey, court in March why his client, a 14-year-old boy, might have sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl: They were “two kids who had nothing better to do....

Rodney Graham Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Canadian conceptual artist with a long history of manipulating texts, Rodney Graham showed his Lenz at the Art Institute’s “About Place: Recent Art of the Americas” exhibit last spring. He inserted the first five pages of a German Romantic novella into a mechanical “reading machine” devised to create an endless loop of text. The resulting narrative, which was to be read on a carousel of pages, violated the conventions of storytelling because it had no beginning and no end....

Flaubert once said he preferred tinsel to silver, because tinsel has all the same qualities as silver–plus pathos. I think this is why, when it comes to cult sci-fi TV shows, I’ve grown so fond of VR.5 and Babylon 5. They have everything that great cult shows need: a freaky look, an enigmatic premise, a sinister mood–even that arbitrary number in the title to make them seem like some kind of cool sci-fi upgrade of regular TV product....

In three short seasons the musician-managed Symphony of the Shores has made crossover eclecticism its endearing trademark. Not at all concerned with the decorum of classical programming, this youthful ensemble has, among other unconventional feats, performed works by jingle writers and collaborated with a performance troupe, juxtaposing light entertainment with serious art. This season finale is at once typical and extravagant. The classical part of the program features a gifted young soloist, Evanston native (and New Trier alum) Eunice Lee, in a pair of Russian curiosities: Tchaikovsky’s swooning Serenade melancolique and the 1948 Violin Concerto of Dmitry Kabalevsky, the Soviet composer overshadowed by Prokofiev and Shostakovich for much of his career....

The Politics of Trust Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vedder speaks almost mystically about two things: the primacy of the music and the connection between performer and audience, a relationship he takes seriously indeed. The chat was prompted by a recent Hitsville column about a crowd-safety watchdog, Paul Wertheimer, who was pulled from the crowd and later arrested at Pearl Jam’s Soldier Field show last month....

Once there was a fishing hole in the upper midwest that fell on very hard times. Too many fishermen had taken too many fish out over the years, and then a newly installed culvert let some aggressive fish from other ponds in and they started taking over. Before long practically nothing was swimming in the old fishing hole but ugly foreign fish, some big and some little, and hardly anybody wanted to fish there....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I spent a considerable amount of time speaking with Jeff Huebner for his November 1 cover story “The In Crowd” on Lynne Warren and the curation of “Art in Chicago, 1945-1995” at the MCA, only to find myself edited out of the piece. The gist of my concerns was that the show, with but a literal handful of exceptions, is actually a history of Art in Chicago 1945-’90, with any artists of note who emerged on the scene after 1990 basically passing under the radar of Lynne Warren undetected....

Though best known to Americans from such movies as The Omen (she played the nasty nanny), The Krays, and Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Billie Whitelaw is one of England’s most highly regarded stage actresses; distinguished for her classical and modern roles at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, she’s the authoritative interpreter of the stripped-down style of her longtime colleague Samuel Beckett. In this solo appearance she’ll perform selections from the astringent absurdist’s works, including Happy Days (in which he directed her) and Rockaby (which he wrote for her)–“a couple of pieces which made him laugh,” she says....

WHAT’S SO FUNNY? January 14-17, 20-24, and 27-31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Such a substantive, self-critical approach is not only unusual given the smug, escapist mockery that dominates stand-up comedy–it’s unwelcome. That’s probably why Tingle is trying to move into the more receptive arena of theatrical performance with this work in progress (directed by Larry Arrick, a Broadway and TV veteran with roots in Second City’s predecessor, the Compass Players)....

Choral Capo Canned Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Garrin–who was also associate conductor of the CSO Chorus for more than a decade until 1992–was out of town earlier this week and did not respond to messages left on his answering machine. But several of those who worked with him over the years say he was a demanding, at times difficult leader. Observes Scott Director, WCGC’s former executive director: “Richard was artistically gifted; his standard of musical interpretation was the highest....