Hardly anyone would have predicted that the European Repertory Company, with its interesting but uneven track record of producing often obscure European texts, would have come up with one of the season’s best and most durable productions. But it did: ERC’s Agamemnon, which opened last September for a limited engagement, this week heads into a well-deserved open run. British playwright Steven Berkoff’s update of Aeschylus’ tragedy, about the Trojan War hero who’s murdered by his vengeful wife, boasts impressively tight ensemble work under the direction of ERC cofounder Dale Goulding, a British expatriate who studied under Berkoff in London....

All heads turned when city treasurer Miriam Santos walked into the auditorium at McAuliffe elementary, a largely Latino school near Humboldt Park. The reaction isn’t surprising; Santos has drawn starstruck attention almost everywhere since she won reelection in April with over 80 percent of the vote. She’s as close as one can come to being a political sensation in Chicago: a Hispanic lawyer with an MBA who’s backed by white ethnic firefighters and cops; a Democrat wooed by Republicans; an attractive, intriguing woman with barely concealed aspirations for higher office; the only local politician to take on Mayor Daley and win; and, for what it’s worth, the best treasurer the city’s had in a long time....

The early promise of a boldly innovative stylist is evident in this 1988 film, which marked Hong Kong auteur Won Kar-wai’s feature debut at age 30. Using a bare-bones story line–said to be inspired by Scorsese’s Mean Streets but really a hoary archetypal martial-arts plot–Wong manages to put forth layers of meaning through indelible images of central moments from the characters’ forlorn lives. Ah Wah (matinee idol Andy Lau in a surprisingly broody performance) and Fly (Jacky Cheung) are small-time extortionists plying their trade in a squalid tenement district....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Futrelle writes that the journal has “the kind of rhetorical excess only believable to those who haven’t ever had to struggle to pay the bills.” I work at a $6.31-an-hour job making copies so my financial situation isn’t as rosy as I would like. I know the value of hard, honest work and how money could be tight, but I resent having the government take so much in taxes out of my paycheck just for outdated, useless programs for other people except me....

A dazzling exponent of extended technique, Dutch improviser Luc Houtkamp provides an exhilarating exploration of sounds and how to make them. The Songlines, a definitive 1991 solo saxophone recording, highlights many of his favored tacks, including adventurous, often breathtaking overblowing and circular breathing. The album’s title piece dissects a lengthy upper-register squeal with sour decay, compact sound knots, and jags of powerful silence. Many solo sax improv performances stress spontaneity, but Houtkamp is more interested in pushing toward the margin....

It shouldn’t surprise anyone when a jazz pianist organizes a big band. If you picture the piano as a “miniature orchestra”–a common characterization that dates back to the instrument’s invention–you can easily appreciate the lure of translating a pianist’s impromptu arrangements to the larger medium. But at first blush, that wouldn’t seem to work far McCoy Tyner, with his highly percussive, densely textured, and often blunt approach. Tyner’s style falls outside traditionally “pianistic” models, which place flowing upper-register runs and internal sonorities against a wide variety of lower-register voicings –the very blueprint for most big-band writing as well....

Lead Story William James Silva, 44, was arrested in San Jose, California, in February after he allegedly robbed a police decoy who was posing as a street-corner drunk. It was the 550th time Silva had been arrested; his record covers 127 feet of computer paper. (According to police, before robbing the decoy Silva had argued with a friend about whether or not the man was a police officer, with Silva insisting he wasn’t....

Lead Story In April Scott Abrams, 27, filed a $2 million lawsuit against the owners and managers of an apartment building in Arlington, Virginia, for injuries he suffered in 1991 when he was struck by lightning while sitting on the roof of the building during an electrical storm. He said the defendants were negligent in maintaining the rooftop and should have provided, among other things, warning signs and brighter paint. When struck, Abrams was sitting on a ledge on the roof with his feet in a puddle....

Other festivals run one weekend, maybe two or three; this one, hosted by the Pilsen area’s Blue Rider Theatre, runs three months–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. Aiming to mix theater, performance art, dance, poetry, and music, the fest has scheduled 80 artists in 40 nights, by such groups and individuals as Theater Oobleck, Redmoon Theater, Donna Blue Lachman, Carmela Rago, Jeff Abell, MASS, Bob Eisen, the Chicago Moving Company, and many more....

For a long time it seemed that guitarist Roy Montgomery would be remembered, if at all, simply for playing on the first record ever released by New Zealand’s renowned Flying Nun label. Though he and his band Pin Group put out two more singles after that historic 1981 release, in 1983 Montgomery went into semiretirement and didn’t resurface until 1990, when he began writing and recording some truly stunning music, none of which has been readily available until just now....

The best of the so-called Generation X movies I’ve seen so far, this charming first feature by Rory Kelly about a circle of friends in their 30s, and the various complications that ensue when one of the bunch falls helplessly in love with a friend’s wife, owes much of its spark to collective effort, in the script as well as the performances. The film was written by Kelly and five of his own friends–Duane Dell’Amico, Roger Hedden (author of Bodies, Rest & Motion), Neal Jimenez (writer and codirector of The Waterdance), Joe Keenan, and Michael Steinberg (director of Bodies, Rest & Motion and codirector of The Waterdance)–with each of the six scripting a separate scene organized around a specific gathering....

Jo Carol Pierce was a high school classmate of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock in Lubbock, Texas nearly four decades ago. (She later married Gilmore, though they eventually divorced.) She’s now part of the Austin mafia that includes those three and a handful of other world-class talents, but she’s arrived at this point only after a diverse career that saw her writing a novel and several plays, acting, and doing social work, among other things....

GUFS 2/17,Double Door By my count a third of the songs on Collide (Red Submarine)–the second album from Milwaukee’s Gufs, a quintet whose music resides somewhere between Toad the Wet Sprocket and REO Speedwagon–contain the word “she” in their first two lines, and several others use it a bit further in. If the band’s dopey singer isn’t referring to some woman in the second person, he’s singing one cliche after another directly to her....

There’ll always be a drug problem. The Chicago Dental Society reminds us in a recent news release of a study that found 40 people during the 1980s who suffered from a hard-to-diagnose cause of mouth problems: cinnamon abuse. “Nearly all the cases were people who were trying to quit smoking and were chewing large amounts of cinnamon gum or sucking on hard candy that contained cinnamon.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The almighty car. How did members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America first hear about their current congregations? According to a survey published in the Chicago-based Lutheran (July), the top three ways were “invitation from a friend” (22 percent), “family or personal past association” (24 percent), and “driving by” (29 percent). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best six aldermen 1991-93, according to an IVI-IPO survey of 20 key City Council votes (including the Edison franchise, blue-bag recycling, and library funding): Jesse Evans (21st Ward, 95 percent correct), Larry Bloom (5th, 85 percent), Joe Moore (49th, 80 percent), Toni Preckwinkle (4th, 75 percent), John Steele (6th, 75 percent), and Helen Shiller (46th, 75 percent)....

Writer-director-actor Robert Townsend hits paydirt with the first black superhero. An equivalent of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne (Townsend), the hero is a mousy inner-city schoolteacher and part-time musician in Washington, D.C., who assumes extraordinary powers after being hit by an emerald green meteor and proceeds to do battle against a big-time drug syndicate that’s menacing the ghetto. The results are very funny, delightfully stylized, and euphorically energetic–also a bit slapdash in the manner of Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, though I didn’t mind at all....

While rereading Moby-Dick recently I came across a reference to something called the Pythagorean maxim. We were all forced to learn the Pythagorean theorem in grade school, but this was something new. In my Norton Critical Edition the footnote says, “The Pythagorean injunction is to avoid eating beans, which cause flatulence.” Inasmuch as you are the world’s top expert on all matters scatological, I figured I should turn to you for help....

I’m sure you’ve never been asked this before, but is it OK to eat clay? I’m a student at the Art Institute, and I’ve been eating clay for four years. You are probably not familiar with the process of clay, so I will briefly explain. When the clay is completely dry but has not been fired it’s called greenware. That’s when I eat it. But I once ate a whole teacup after it had been fired (bisqueware)....

By Ben Joravsky The Hyde Park Cooperative Society, a cooperatively owned grocery store at 55th and Lake Park, has announced its intention to spend roughly $2.4 million opening a second store at 47th Street. Mingay thinks it’s an imprudent and wasteful decision devised by a tyrannical board that’s violating its democratic tenets. “We have a great tradition of bringing democracy to Eastern Europe,” says Mingay. “If it’s good enough for Poland, it should be good enough for the co-op....

Bernard Williams counts billboards, Spiderman, baroque Italian portraits, and “those paintings you see at the end of Good Times” among the influences that have shaped his ten-year career as a painter. Then last year he saw a video on Wassily Kandinsky at the Terra Museum. The way the music on the sound track connected with Kandinsky’s abstract shapes and colors revealed a whole new perspective to the realist painter. “That show was sort of the pin that broke the bubble,” says Williams....