Friday 20 Today and tomorrow are the two annual days in the sun (with any luck) for plane and boat nuts: the 35th annual Chicago Park District Air and Water Show takes place between Fullerton and Oak along the lakefront from noon to 4:30 both days. Here’s what you might see: the Air Force Thunderbirds precision flying team, in which six planes fly 18 inches apart; U.S. Navy Seals dropping out of a helicopter to stage an “assault” on North Avenue Beach; and lots of Air Force equipment, including a Stealth fighter and a B-1 bomber....

Louis XIV lavished money and honors on his favorite artists, and leading the pack of musicians at Versailles was Jean-Baptiste Lully, a prodigious composer who established the graceful, dignified tone that would dominate French music for years. In this “Music From Versailles” sampler the Chicago Baroque Ensemble–well-respected for its scholarship, fluid playing, and sensible period-instrument approach–offers glimpses into the dance-rhythm-dominated style that began with Lully and was chief rival of the more flamboyant Italian style (in keeping with Louis’ desire to dominate Europe’s political stage)....

CHICAGO OPERA THEATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An opera ahead of its time, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos sports a postmodern theatrical attitude even though its music, written just before the outbreak of World War I, is decidedly modernist. Intended first as an appendage to a one-act adaptation of Moliere’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme by longtime Strauss collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the opera was lengthened with a prologue when Strauss wanted to fill an entire evening bill....

Driving Ambition “For example, the article in the June issue on sales certification classes held by the National Automobile Dealers Association. Those have gotten very little coverage in the press generally and in the automotive press.” He goes on, “The purpose of my publication, and other publications that aim directly at the consumers, is to provide more information for them to use so they can gain a more equal footing with the dealer....

Reta Do Fim Do Fim (“The Endless Edge”), performed by three women, is filled with circles: pools of light within the darkness; the arcs described by dancers swinging on ropes; the twists and turns of a body rooted to a single spot, moving around its core. All these circles make me think of the individual’s isolation, circumscribed by the body and by the little space the body can carve out for itself....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra The equation is further complicated by the unwritten requirement that an example of what’s loosely known as “music of our time” (which can be more than a half century old if it’s sufficiently hideous) be included in almost every concert. Such programming, ostensibly there to “educate the public,” always comes before the big number the audience is really there to hear. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Bozenna Biskupska: Time Beyond Time In a catalog available at the museum Peter Lachmann, a German theater director who has worked with Biskupska, compares her sculptures to the monuments of ancient Egypt, which “claim to be models of eternity.” But Biskupska seems to be doing something a bit different: monumentalizing a particular moment, making it seem eternal. Catching the Air, also mounted on two square logs, contrasts a sense of permanence with the suggestion of two moments in time....

Paula Killen has been to hell and back. “OK, it ain’t your HBO special,” says Killen. “But it says to other people that follow the national theater scene that hey–I’m here.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is no news to her largely underground audiences–who have literally descended to her shows at the subterranean Smart Bar, Lower Links, the old N.A.M.E. They’ve followed Killen in her various guises: endearing chanteuse in Music Kills a Memory, dead yet curiously logorrheic bimbo in A Cocktail of Flowers, goddess at the Big Goddess Pow Wow, and exorcist of personal demons in Loose Cannon: Bitching to Cure the Planet....

At this cushy Ravinia gig with Little Richard the odds are good that Jerry Lee Lewis, about to turn 60, will heed the lines of his 1969 country hit “Once More With Feeling”: “We’re just going through the motions of the parts we learned to play.” On the other hand, few participants in the history of rock ‘n’ roll have reinvented themselves as often as the Killer, so you just never know what to expect with Jerry Lee....

Perhaps best known for her striking performances with guitarist Davey Williams and for coediting the obsessive improvised-music journal The Improvisor, LaDonna Smith has the rare ability to make free improvisation and extended technique corporeal as well as cerebral. Smith’s solo performances–primarily on the viola, with occasional forays on the violin–are wild and woolly excursions into heretofore unmapped territories of sound. Her textures range from lithe snags of gentle lyricism and caustic ragalike drones to screechy stops, violent swooshes, and percussive thwacks....

Until the best-selling CD of his Third Symphony turned him into classical music’s flavor of the month, Henryk Gorecki toiled in relative anonymity in his native Poland. And his fellow countrymen Witold Lutoslawski, Andrzej Panufnik, and, Krzysztof Penderecki still command deeper respect for their probing avant-gardism and fierce political commitment. Gorecki’s less unsettling, more mystical style incorporates folk and Gregorian elements, and in looking to the distant past-appropriating medieval church hymns, for instance–he’s no different from Estonian Arvo Part or Englishman John Tavener....

FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE With Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dieyi’s delusion is made more plausible by the way Chen films him as a child. After the color prologue, the film shifts to black and white: it’s 1924, and Douzi and his mother wander into a street festival. They see a group of boys–from the opera school, as it turns out–performing acrobatics, and with Douzi’s first sight of theater a hint of color appears, in some flags the performers are holding....

A century ago three young men trekked from Chicago to Waukegan to show off a new gizmo. In a darkened room, in front of a crowd of friends and business associates, they placed the elongated apparatus on beer kegs, hooked it up to an electrical extension from a street lamp, then aimed it at the wall. Illuminated images started to flicker and move across the wall. Was this the debut of the first motion-picture projector?...

One of the funnier remarks in Variety late last year came from a Universal Pictures executive who noted that because of the special nature of Schindler’s List his company wasn’t really promoting the picture, but simply informing people it was out. I’d wager that if the other movies on my ten-best list had been given the same amount of “nonpromotion”–one of those modest multimillion-dollar campaigns–you would have heard nearly as much about them....

Second City Didn’t Want Us, or Is There a Spot in the Touring Company for My Girlfriend? Factory Theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second City has been ripe for satire ever since it became obvious in the mid-80s that the actors who hacked and hotdogged their way through those increasingly miserable shows were just doing time until they got their own sitcoms. But until now no one dared ruffle the feathers of Mother Second City, even though there are literally hundreds of bitter Second City wannabes running around town with ugly, funny stories to tell....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, once he flags examples of this quality and then applies it as the premise of critique for Dolores Wilber’s Two Men Are Dead Continued, it is clear that it’s not grounds for determination. Do bare-breasted women, a man donning a wedding dress and performers covered with ladybugs constitute the shocking (extraordinary) acts that Brennan believes they do?...

Dear editors: The way Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his piece on Leni Riefenstahl [“Can Film Be Fascist?,” June 24], relies on empty cliches like “puff piece” is typical of the sloppy thinking that permeates his review. In my Riefenstahl profile, I do praise her artistry and I do assert that she was not a Nazi, but I also write that, in her dealings with Hitler, “she had made a pact with the Devil”; I write that she cannot claim to be innocent and that certain arguments she makes on her own behalf are pure sophistry; most important, I insist that, contrary to her protestations, Triumph of the Will was indeed propaganda, and of the most powerful sort....

“The computer is a tool–just like a lens, light source, or film emulsion–that you select for its effect on the final image,” says John DeSalvo in Loupe (Spring), published by ASMP Chicago/Midwest. “I use image manipulation very cautiously….It’s important that digital image manipulation is not considered an electronic gimmick, a passing fad, or a Band-aid for bad ideas”–all things that photography itself was once considered to be. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The late Sergei Paradjanov’s greatest film, a mystical and historical mosaic about the life, work, and inner world of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, has previously been available only in the ethnically “dry-cleaned” Russian version–recut and somewhat reorganized by Sergei Yutkevich, with chapter headings added to clarify the content for Russian viewers. This superior version of the film, recently found in an Armenian studio, shouldn’t be regarded as definitive (some of the material from the Yutkevich cut is missing), but it’s certainly the finest we have and may ever have: some shots and sequences are new, some are positioned differently, and, of particular advantage to Western viewers, much more of the poetry is subtitled....

The Roots A Tale of 3 Cities Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hip hop, though, turns the beat around, submitting the drummer to the discipline of strict time. As reggae singer Winston Shand once sang: “Time is the master, but time can be disaster if you don’t care.” For hip hop the appeal of sampling and looping comes directly out of the funk aesthetic, which makes punctuality its prime virtue; the rhythm team averts disaster by carefully obeying Master Time....