By definition, a first-time collaboration is a unique and unpredictable event; so no one can tell you exactly what to anticipate at this intersection of instrumental and vocal musics and dance. Vocal artist Theo Bleckmann provides a powerful incentive not only to attend but also to leave expectations at the door. A collaborator of Meredith Monk who has also lent his talents to the music of Anthony Braxton and Philip Glass, Bleckmann can match just about anybody’s range of intriguing mouth noises and scattered vocal flights....

Sun-Times Won’t Judge Rosty “We feel sadness over the prospect that a 42-year career of public service could end that way,” the Sun-Times commented. “We don’t judge the merits of the charges, and we acknowledge Rostenkowski’s gusty [sic] vow to fight it out. But after two years of rumors, the reality is here that a Chicago institution faces a shameful end. These are not happy times.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When Randall Duk Kim left American Players Theatre with his cofounders Charles Bright and Anne Occhiogrosso at the end of the 1991 season (to work in Honolulu), some wondered whether the company could survive the loss. Two years later APT continues to deliver the intelligent, unpretentious, accessible productions of Shakespeare’s work that make it worth the four-hour drive from Chicago to Spring Green, Wisconsin. In fact, their work seems more confident, their acting more surefooted, and their forays into comedy less desperate for laughs than in the last, divisive years of Kim’s administration....

Hello, Bob Aardvark Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Twenty years after his stint in off-Loop theater, a new generation of artists is mining Patrick’s canon. Though his writing isn’t going to overturn the reputations of guys like Albee and Horovitz and Shepard and Mamet, his quirky, little-known pieces are a refreshing change of pace from these much-produced lions. By sheer coincidence (or fate, if you prefer), two youthful theater groups are presenting Patrick plays this month–an unintended rotating repertory that constitutes a mini revival....

Dear Reader: As a Bucktown resident and frequenter of the Gallery Cabaret, 2020 N. Oakley, I was quite startled by Ms. Lehoczky’s review (Our Town, April 29, 1994) of what I consider one of the most interesting and enjoyable taverns in the city. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Inasmuch as Ms. Lehoczky admits that her idea of a good time is sitting around her own kitchen with a six-pack, I would like to take the opportunity to give another portrayal of the Gallery for those of us who do enjoy the art of conversation with a stranger, listening to a new musical group, watching improvisers create a scene or viewing a different artist’s work every other week....

Dear Sirs: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read with great irritation Larry Kramer’s recent diatribe [January 14] regarding the movie Philadelphia. Kramer’s principal objection to the film appears to be that it was made by persons who seem to know too little about the subject matter to treat it honestly. Not being homosexual and having not yet seen the movie, I cannot dispute his characterization of it....

This enterprising group has put together a triple bill of early 20th-century operatic one-acts that unveils three disparate faces of love: the essential loneliness of the human soul, ardor cooled by deception and jealousy, and ironic bemusement. Yet all three derive their narrative drive from the discovery of a secret. In Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), loosely based an the fairy tale celebrated for its macabre denouement, the redemptive power of a woman is shattered by fatal curiosity....

Southern California roots rocker Chris Gaffney has been bumming around country music and its fringes for decades, backing up people like Ferlin Huskey and Webb Pierce and pursuing his own ragtag solo career. But on his last few records, especially the superb new Loser’s Paradise (Hightone), he’s truly come into his own. The perfect candidate for the recently created Americana radio format, which includes all those roots-based artists that don’t fit into niches like country, blues, zydeco, or rockabilly, accordionist/pianist Gaffney glides through honky-tonk, Cajun, Tex-Mex conjuntos, and rock ‘n’ roll, and even makes a daring, successful stab at Philly soul, covering the Intruders hit “Cowboys to Girls” with Lucinda Williams....

No man indifferent to sports can keep this quirk hidden for long. Men are expected to share a certain obsessive interest, even expertise, on the subject. Invariably someone–often a complete stranger–asks the nonfan what he thinks about an upcoming game, how he assesses the local team’s performance, whether he thinks such-and-such a team was right in trading so-and-so. But my lack of enthusiasm was nonetheless seen as a failure of masculinity; worse, many boys took it as a challenge....

Re: Our Town, January 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first paragraph, we met Amoke (no last name until the fourth paragraph), who came to “our writer’s group . . . and we helped her with it [her book].” If this “writers’ group” is the Feminist Writers Guild, and I suspect it is, then I, who was only a name on a mailing list for the same time period Omoleye was an active and highly visible participant, seemed to have been considered a “member” while Omoleye remained an outsider, forever a visitor to “our” writers’ group....

Brooks and Dunn Now on their third album, Brooks and Dunn are at the forefront of that most critically disdained segment of contemporary country, the line-dance movement. Their debut album, 1991’s Brand New Man, sold four million copies, unleashed five hit singles, and gave the movement its biggest anthem, “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” The liner notes couch the history of the duo’s formation in the guise of a western tale: two drifters meet up on the sun-scorched plains and decide to hook up....

Serge Pierre Louis found that being Haitian wasn’t easy when he arrived in the U.S. to study medicine in the early 80s. His homeland meant AIDS to most Americans. “It was very painful,” he says. “It took a whole decade for people to understand that this epidemic was also taking place in other parts of the world.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pierre Louis is president of the Chicago chapter of the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad, a 22-year-old group providing health care to Haitians worldwide....

Film music can be a narrative tool, heightening the drama on-screen. Free improviser Ken Vandermark plans to turn the traditional role of film music on its head with his upcoming mixed-media series Chicago Eye and Ear Control. Joined by some of Chicago’s finest improvising musicians from the rock, experimental, and jazz scenes, he’ll create instant sound tracks to a variety of films. “Some purists might not be happy with what we’re doing because there isn’t going to be any sound from the original films,” says Vandermark....

This archive document contains both parts of this story, which ran on September 29, 1995 and October 6, 1995. Could such a thing be possible at the University of Chicago? Had Robert Maynard Hutchins’s glorious experiment in liberal education, the home of the Manhattan Project, somehow become involved in the smut business? Now Mabley turned coy. “I’m not naming the magazine because I don’t want to be responsible for its selling out....

This multidisciplinary performing arts festival, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs through December 17, with shows most Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 7 PM, as well as children’s matinees on selected Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM. Most evenings feature two or more artists, with intermissions between each act. Blue Rider Theatre, 1822 S. Halsted, 733-4668. Tickets: $10 a night except where noted in the listings below; $60 for a festival pass (good for all performances); some student and senior discounts available....

I’ve long believed that advertisements–our “fables of abundance,” as historian Jackson Lears recently described them–are central to the way we Americans understand the world. Astonished at advertising’s pervasiveness and convinced of its malevolence, I once read a series of deeply pessimistic books about the advertising industry and its effects on American life. Everyone agreed, it seemed, that advertising was doing terrible things to Americans: it was making us a boring, homogeneous people; it was transforming a nation of proud individuals into a land of gray-flannel conformists....

SCREAMIN’ CHEETAH WHEELIES 7/22, WORLD Rate them against their competition on this year’s H.O.R.D.E. tour and these Nashville yobbos begin to sound relatively OK. Mining the same decimated southern-fried-rock territory as the Black Crowes, Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies’ hard-rocking twin-guitar boogie-down excess earns points if only for its honesty. While other acts on this neohippie package tour–e.g. the insufferable Blues Traveler–parade their musical rehashing under the guise of social consciousness, this quintet harbors no such illusions, delivering its mindless, partying tracks without any contrived “messages....

The New Chicago Blues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The blues aren’t in good shape these days. Besides being musically moribund–or perhaps because of that–the genre’s been almost completely discredited in the realm of rock music; since that realm is populated primarily by slumming upper-class white folk, that discredit isn’t surprising. To the extent that the blues exist there at all, they appear in two different but warped forms....

Bob Eisen and Sheldon B. Smith Eisen has a physical presence onstage, a sheer emotional intensity that pushes you into the back of your seat. But it doesn’t lead to an emotional connection with the audience. Onstage Eisen simply does what he does, like a force of nature or the physical manifestation of his own extraordinary will. His dances and his presence remind us again and again that he’s alone....

Patrolling the Comiskey Park outfield during batting practice, Mike Pazik didn’t quite seem at home–not yet, anyway. After three and a half years serving as White Sox general manager Ron Schueler’s special assistant, Pazik returned to uniform last week as the team’s pitching coach–the third person to hold the hot-seat position this long, troubled season. He has a hunched-shoulders appearance, and last Saturday night–his second day on the job–he could still be seen introducing himself and shaking hands with pitchers shagging flies during BP....