Daley’s $100 Million Joke Late last week a motley crew of reporters, business magnates, and cultural executives were herded into a briefing room at City Hall to hear Mayor Richard Daley announce that more than 25 corporations and philanthropic foundations had coughed up approximately $100 million for expansion and renovation of Orchestra Hall and the Civic Opera House. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But a year later their grand plan was a shambles, primarily because CSO trustees turned out to be less enthused about it than executive director Henry Fogel was....

DAVE DOUGLAS STRING GROUP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Versatility is a necessity for a young jazzer trying to make it in New York, all the more so if he takes his music outside the mainstream. Not only can trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas navigate many stylistic waters, but he relishes the opportunity. Perhaps best known as the Don Cherry to John Zorn’s Ornette Coleman in the Yiddish-tinged quartet Masada, Douglas leads several terrific groups of his own, including the eastern-European-flavored Tiny Bell Trio and a more boppish sextet that paid tribute to Booker Little on last year’s In Our Lifetime (New World)....

FSK’s music ambivalently critiques the Americanization of their native Germany. Like Wim Wenders’s 70s films, they celebrate American pop culture’s growing worldwide hegemony even as they criticize and undermine it: on their album In Dixieland the last line of “Yankee Go Home” pleads, “And take me with you.” FSK is short for Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, which is German for free-willed self-control. The band connects the dots between central European folk forms and North American roots music, illustrating the evolution from Bavarian yodels to Jimmie Rodgers’s yodeling country-and-western laments to contemporary rock and roll....

Billboards has been a big hit for the Joffrey, but I was disappointed, maybe because I like Prince’s music so much: three of the four sections in this evening-length dance, choreographed by four different people, don’t even come close to the subversion in Prince’s lyrics and androgynous style. Most of Billboards is business as usual, the American business of selling beautiful young people in conventional sexual posturing. Now it seems the Joffrey may have had a similar neutralizing effect on Randy Duncan, former artistic director of Chicago’s Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre....

Lead Story The U.S. Treasury Department’s Historical Association announced it is raising money this year by offering for sale Internal Revenue Service gift ornaments that commemorate the 80th anniversary of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the income tax. The $11 ornaments are “24-carat, gold-finished, three-dimensional” models of a 1913 income tax form. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First Things First Two Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital doctors, reporting in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, described the case of a 44-year-old man who attempted suicide through an overdose of nicotine....

THE TOWN-HO’S STORY The Chicago Tribune was of two minds about the sculpture. On September 12, reporter Michael A. Lev characterized it as a typically incomprehensible example of postmodern art, agreeing with a crane operator who described it as “a lot of molten scrap.” Three days later Alan G. Artner, the paper’s regular art critic, attempted a more sensitive interpretation, calling it “a mushroom cloud of dense visual activity” and describing some of the stages of production it underwent in its birthplace, the Tallix foundry in Beacon, New York....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Could it possibly be that I am just expecting too much from today’s artists and their agents? Should I perhaps lower my standards and expectations and be content with retreads, copycats, and manufactured artists? The general public has fallen for this trend years ago, maybe the Reader is right and I too should acquiesce and joyfully go along for the mindless ride....

You wouldn’t know it from the dry talk coming out of Springfield lately, but electric utility deregulation is a hot topic these days, a strong contender to become one of the fashionable subjects of enlightened commentary in the early part of 1998. Even before Jim Edgar put it back in the news recently–expressing some surprise reservations about the bill just passed in the state legislature before signing it as expected–the Golden Promise of Deregulation was well on its way to becoming prime-time pundit fodder all across the nation....

Public Enemy’s new album, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, has ignited a gritty range war among New York hip hop critics; the spat was fueled by a review by the black writer known as Toure, who penned a ferocious put-down in Rolling Stone’s lead review slot and got pegged an Uncle Tom by the Amsterdam News in return. I don’t like epithets like that, but it is true that Rolling Stone hasn’t run a severely negative review of a major artist in about 15 years; if Toure’s piece ushers in a long-awaited new age of intellectual honesty in the magazine’s handling of white artists as well as black I’ll stop suspecting there’s a racial double standard at work here....

The first definition of gourmand, according to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, is “glutton.” Then comes “judge or devotee of good eating.” I plead guilty on both counts, which is also why I am so fond of buffet dining–especially some of the buffets around town where even a nongluttonous gourmet (“connoisseur of eating or drinking”) can walk away satisfied that quality was equal to quantity. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

ANI DI FRANCO 6/3, OLD TOWN SCHOOL While musically Ani DiFranco is most certainly in the same league as postfolkies like Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, and the Indigo Girls, the effectively uncut vinegar and acid of her lyrics sets her apart. “Just the thought of our bed / Makes me crumble like the plaster / Where you punched the wall / Beside my head,” goes the title track of her new album Out of Range (Righteous Babe)....

In 1954, Carlisle Floyd finished his first major opera, Susannah, when he was 27. The works eventually became the most produced of American operas. By updating and transplanting the apocryphal tale of Susannah and the Elders to the Tennessee hills, Floyd fashioned a beguiling musical parable, a wry indictment of small=town pettiness and hyprocrisy. Susannah Polk, an innocent waif, is the object of the suppressed desire of the town’s church elders, and her nubile beauty provokes the jealous rage of their wives....

THE LITTLE SISTER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago-born, British-bred author of such detective novels as Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep was an advocate of gritty realism who sought to shake the mystery genre free of the calculated gentility it had acquired at the hands of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. But with the passage of time his books have come to seem as old-fashioned and mannered as those he was rebelling against–especially to people who’ve never read them, but know them only from the film adaptations....

Twenty-five years ago four young Japanese musicians formed the Tokyo String Quartet at the urging of their mentor, Robert Mann of the Julliard String Quartet. It was an auspicious debut, signaling the arrival of a new generation of quartets capable of inheriting the mantle of their distinguised elders. At first the Tokyo emulated the Juilliard’s incandescent sound and intellectual approach, proffering roughly the same mix of classical and contemporary fare. In the early 80s the British-trained Canadian Peter Oundjian took over the first violinist’s chair–joining violinist Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura, and cellist Sadao Harada–and the Tokyo’s sound mellowed and became more obviously expressive....

Dear editor: Your story “Pay Phone” by Michael Glab [January 7] was repulsive in its obvious anti-Asian, antiminority racism. I’m offended that your holier-than-thou, PC publication would even print it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t understand why Glab had to unleash his white man’s venom (and that of his neighbors) on this unsuspecting Korean merchant. Not only did he basically call her cheap and filthy, he implied those traits were because of her ethnic background....

IT’S SHIFTING, HANK Goat Island’s most recent work, It’s Shifting, Hank, begins with the horrifying image of a man taking a deep breath and holding it until an attendant squeezes his chest, forcing the air out. Then the man sucks in another breath with a gasp and holds it till his face turns red. Such images multiply in this nonlinear piece, which weaves together text and movement, suggesting that breathing and not breathing are beyond our control: the four performers repeat the phrase “Tom bring the boat nearer” over and over like a machine-gun mantra until their breath runs out and they can’t say it anymore....

When Ivan Watkins was growing up in New Orleans, he was surrounded by the brilliant pomp of the Indians at Mardi Gras. The colorful plumes and the dancing fascinated him and made him wonder about the connection between African-Americans and Native Americans. “I grew up around it but I wasn’t a part of it,” he says. “The elders in my family would speak of our Indian ancestors. When I thought of Native Americans, I felt the same rush of energy that I felt for my African ancestors....

“This is bullshit! This is bullshit!” The concert, scheduled for December 3, had fans excited: Springsteen’s first concert in town in three years, an acoustic solo performance in the relatively intimate confines of the brand-new 4,200-seat Rosemont Theatre. Tickets went on sale Saturday morning at eight by phone and at only two locations in Chicago, both of them Tower Records outlets. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By seven on a nippy morning more than 100 people had gathered, most of them prime representatives of the species Yuppicanus northsideicus....

Friday 11/29 – Thursday 12/5 Marshall Field’s ZooLights Festival at Lincoln Park Zoo features juggling elves, more than 100,000 lights, a laser-light show, appearances by Nutcracker characters, carolers, the world’s largest cup of hot chocolate (335 gallons), ice sculptures, and enough activities to make you wonder what the long-term effect will be on the inhabitants’ nervous systems. It kicks off tonight from 6 to 10 at the zoo, 2200 N. Cannon, and runs through December 31....

Friday 14 Saturday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Train buffs–train buffs are a dime a dozen. But high-speed-train buffs, they’re different. If you’re one of them, the Illinois High Speed Rail Association has a luncheon for you. High Speed Rail: Building a Midwest Coalition features the manager of the transportation division of the Illinois Commerce Commission talking about the train’s prospects and starts at noon at the Holiday Inn in Evanston, at 1501 Sherman....