Henry Purcell was commonly acknowledged as England’s greatest composer when he died three centuries ago. But his reputation was slowly eclipsed by Handel’s, and it wasn’t until the early part of this century that it was rehabilitated. The period-instrument movement has zealously revived the bulk of his oeuvre, and Purcell’s genius is the cynosure of the first local appearance by renowned Dutch early-music ensemble the Locke Consort. Named after Matthew Locke–who preceded Purcell as head of the string orchestra of Charles II’s court–the four-member consort (Ubdhava Wilson Meyer and Mimi Mitchell on baroque violins, Susanne Braumann on viola da gamba, and Fred Jacobs on theorbo) is noted for its virtuosity....

THE CONNECTION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These “real junkies” forget their lines, deliver long, digressive harangues, or simply slump off their chairs at inopportune times. “I can’t tell the performance from the rehearsal,” one of them mumbles. Naturally these lapses drive the author to distraction, and more than once he interrupts the play with lines like “You are murdering the play. . ....

Two myths prevail about the Eagles. The first is that they typified southern California rock ‘n’ roll excess in the 1970s; the second, that their 1994 tour was an overpriced disaster. Both are half wrong. For the first, the Eagles’ decadence was greatly ameliorated by their stunning evocations of it, most notably on their ten-million-plus-selling Hotel California. Leaving aside the years they spent tooling a follow-up (their swan song, The Long Run), the group typified hardworking perfectionism, both in the studio (where leaders Glenn Frey and Don Henley rewrote their bandmates’ songs) and onstage....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Renaldo Migaldi’s article on the appearance of butoh artist Natsu Nakajima at Randolph Street Gallery [“In Performance: dance of the empty dancer,” July 9], he states that this marked the occasion of the first Japanese butoh performance in Chicago. This information was provided in Randolph Street Gallery’s press material (I received the same packet of information)....

Watching a dog’s excitement at taking a walk or seeing pigeons gather every day at the same time at a park bench where an old man tosses them bits of bread, we may wonder how animals perceive the world. What do they know? Do they think? Do they feel as we do? By the turn of the century men like John Burroughs, Ernest Thompson Seton, and William J. Long were making small fortunes writing best-sellers that proclaimed the virtues of nature and of wild animals....

During his New Jersey childhood James Sie identified strongly with the heroine of Scott O’Dell’s 1960 children’s classic Island of the Blue Dolphins. “I sympathized with her sense of loneliness and isolation, her learning to fend for herself,” he explains. “I suppose any kid growing up could relate to the way she adjusts to the world, dealing with adversity. But being a first-generation Chinese American, I also felt somewhat different physically and isolated on an unconscious level....

REVEREND HORTON HEAT BIG SANDY & HIS FLY-RITE BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clean it up or reduce it to kitsch–this sort of revisionist, antiseptic swabbing is rampant. In a television interview a while back, a middle-aged Dion DiMucci spoke bitterly about the current perception of doo-wop. The former golden-boy lead vocalist of Dion and the Belmonts in the late 50s and early 60s, DiMucci bristled over the fact that doo-wop–a genre that in many ways represents the height of vocal prowess by both black and white groups of the era–had been reduced in the public’s mind to that most loathsome embodiment of crass, commercial nostalgia, Sha-Na-Na....

American TV watchers, eat your hearts out! It isn’t always easy to trace the connections in these selections from “Ten to Eleven”–a series of short, experimental “essay” films made for German television by the remarkable German filmmaker Alexander Kluge–but they’re the liveliest and most imaginative European TV shows I’ve seen since those of Ruiz and Godard. Densely constructed out of a very diverse selection of archival materials, which are manipulated (electronically and otherwise) in a number of unexpected ways, these historical meditations often suggest Max Ernst collages using the cultural flotsam of the last 100 years....

I don’t know if it’s the night air, the happy, relaxed audiences, or a touch of midsummer lunacy, but something about outdoor performances of Shakespeare brings out the best in actors. Witness Shakespeare on the Green’s production of Twelfth Night, performed on the front lawn of Barat College. I’ve always considered this play one of the Bard’s weaker efforts, hobbled as it is by a loose, slow, rather aimless main plot, a frankly silly comic subplot, several unbelievable coincidences, and to top it off, a pair of sticks-in-the-mud at the center–the depressive Duke Orsino and the passive-aggressive Countess Olivia....

While I enjoyed a loyal reader’s letter (June 16, 1995), it is obvious that he/she did not get the point. Jae-Ha Kim never accused Bill Wyman of being racist or sexist. What she said was that he “must not realize that he comes across [emphasis added] not only as petty, but as sexist and racist [Letters, May 12].” Whether he is or isn’t isn’t even relevant in the context of Kim’s letter because she is right....

It happened while I was painting this “mural” that says “subway scholar” in huge 16-foot-by-as-high-as-I-can-reach letters. It spans an eighth-mile city block across the backs of four factory buildings, two and a half stories up, along one of the major veins of the el before it plunges into the subway downtown. So if you’re on the train, coming in from the south side, the piece is right there, butting up against the tracks....

Usually one must at least read the headline of Bob Greene’s column to experience that pang of horrified revulsion–the dreaded Bob Shock, simultaneously fresh and oh so familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There, in Bob’s column, which turned out to be “Famous last words: Closing thoughts worth repeating” (May 29), was a photograph–the little mid-column picture that typically shows a sobbing Child Once Known as Richard or a grim-faced, hang-’em-high Judge Heiple....

We met Roxanne Castillo, eight, fishtailing her way through the schools of schoolchildren in front of the Shedd Aquarium. Her breezy sundress and hyperactive running shoes shouted “Let’s play!,” seemingly straining the limits of the “appropriate dress required” commandment permafixed to Shedd’s marble facade. Was Roxanne’s carefree costume a fish out of water? Our fashion ichthyologists reeled it in to get a cold-blooded fix on the markings. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities was born almost 30 years ago, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s crusade for open housing and integration in Chicago. “We take the gag rule very seriously….The intent is to disable not-for-profit organizations and make us dysfunctional,” says Aurie Pennick, president of the Leadership Council. “It’s aimed at people who can least afford it.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The legislation was proposed by three Republicans (David McIntosh of Indiana and freshmen Ernest Istook of Oklahoma and Robert Ehrlich of Maryland)....

At certain moments in the history of an instrument, a single player comes along and opens a whole new can of worms. Such is the case with Harry Sparnaay, the Dutch virtuoso whose astounding facility on the bass clarinet has inspired such heavyweights as Iannis Xenakis, Isang Yun, Morton Feldman, and Brian Ferneyhough (along with some 400 other composers) to write works specifically for him. His performance of “Echange,” the chamber piece Xenakis wrote for him in 1989, on the Asko Ensemble’s Live 1 (Attacca) shows the extent of his talents, from remarkable lyricism, gentle translucence, and bracing energy to complete mastery of extended techniques....

Red With Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frederique Feder, and Jean-Pierre Lorit. Perhaps one reason why we can accept the strange congruences of Kieslowski’s world even when our rational responses reject them is that the city of Geneva itself and its customary channels of communication and connection help to bring them about. Streets, cars, windows, posters, newspapers, radios, TVs, and, most of all, telephones become the vehicles of casual conjunctions and gorgeous everyday miracles, suggesting that these channels could bring all of us together in ways that we never suspected, even if they usually don’t....

Up to now Chicago has never had a real brasserie–those brightly lit, lively, spacious restaurants Paris is full of, where hearty Alsatian dishes merge with high spirits and free-flowing wine and beer. (The word actually means “brewery.”) Brasseries are where you often come with a crowd, any time of night, to eat a full meal or just to slurp up a liter of beer and a snack. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, C: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Easton, a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor with a private practice in–where else?–San Francisco, has been into SM for almost 25 years. Before she “came out” about her desires she found herself in a similar situation to the one you describe. “I spent my idle youth hunting down rough trade in the streets of New York, and I finally wound up with a first-class batterer....

Ben Joravsky’s piece on the cineplex coming to Diversey and Clark tries hard to make some kind of case against Lou Wolf, the owner of the land, but doesn’t, and instead just makes the local protesters seem like assholes [Neighborhood News, July 5]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oooh, and it’s going to be seven stories tall! Wow! A skyscraper, in Chicago of all places!...

MILKMINE 9/2, LOUNGE AX If you’ve ever wondered what New York noise-rock kings Unsane would sound like submerged in a toilet bowl, go see this Cincinnati trio. EVE THING 9/2, METRO Waukegan pop quartet Eve Thing celebrate the release of their debut album, Tense (Yummysound), which presents them as muddled Anglophiles struggling to create a guitar sound a la the Smashing Pumpkins–or at least Catherine. They’ve got a ways to go....