MARILYN HORNE The art of opera and the art of the song recital are as different as the art of the muralist and of the miniaturist. The opera singer–well, the star anyway–has the entire evening to create a character, aided by costumes, makeup, wigs, sets, and props. She has the conductor and colleagues for support, and the size of the hall, the orchestra, and the demands of the role to cover or excuse any deficiencies of tone....

On the third weekend of April, Art Jones went to Washington. It’s not easy being a bigot in the United States today. The Holocaust Museum opened to acclaim. Steven Spielberg won prestige and a sizable box office with Schindler’s List. On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, the triumph of American good over Nazi evil was retold in every medium. Jones’s goal is political power by constitutional means. “The white race has got to do something, and fast,” he says, “because unfortunately we’re facing extinction if we sit back and do nothing....

Friday 27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WFMT’s Ray Nordstrand, a friend and mentor to many of Chicago’s folk performers, gets honored at a dinner tonight at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bonnie Koloc and Corky Siegel will perform; Rich Warren (Nordstrand’s successor as host of the Midnight Special on WFMT) and Old Town School executive director Jim Hirsch emcee. Tickets are $75....

Covering the Home Team So Warren asked reporter Glen Elsasser, who’d written the bulldog story Friday night with William Neikirk, to come back to the bureau Saturday and make some more calls. For the final edition the article became “Intellect, quiet manner characterize Breyer,” a graceful examination of the nominee’s personal and judicial history, and the politics behind the appointment dropped to the bottom of it. When we talked to Warren this week and asked him what’s changed in the five months he’s been running the Washington bureau, the Breyer article was one of the things he pointed to....

For the last seven years the stage at Lane Tech High School has been lit by innovative productions of classic comedies and tragedies staged by an English teacher named Randall Bates. For their part, Bates and his students suspect he was fired as punishment for having exposed serious safety hazards in the school’s auditorium. But whatever the reason, Bates’s sacking has been a disaster for the school at Addison and Western, a classic example of a top-down ultimatum delivered without explanation or consultation or regard for anyone even remotely involved....

Stop kicking yourself. So you couldn’t cough up the 30 bucks–including a five-dollar Ticketmaster service charge–to sit in the nosebleed section of the mezzanine and watch Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here, the latest controversial New York must-see to sweep through town. Don’t worry, Jones didn’t need you there–or any of us for that matter. The piece was commissioned by a dozen A-list cultural institutions, and Jones thinks we’re all idiots anyway....

There’s a 1,000-pound gorilla in the Bogucki family’s basement. Hunkered down on all fours, massive, hulking, his broad brow and nostrils barely emerging from the blank stare of abstraction, the gorilla holds everyone’s “This sort of work gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘family.’ A married artist dovetails marriage into the art. We have a house, but basically it’s a studio we live in.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Nontraditional cabaret theater” is how radical Renaissance man Warren Leming describes Out of Context, a two-day benefit for the quarterly publication Context: A Journal of Arts, Politics, and Community. Or in his other words, “The creme de la creme of the un-hyperfunded Chicago fringe.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Founded as the Near Northwest Arts Council Newsletter in 1985, the journal took the name Context in January of last year, expanding to include broader community arts coverage, local theater and art criticism, book reviews, and left-edged cultural commentary....

By now it’s traditional for politicians to knock around the press like Mike Tyson’s sparring partners. Yet even Nixon waited to be kicked around before he complained about it. As a mayoral candidate, Roland Burris may have begun a new trend when he started attacking his media coverage before it was possible for him to have any media coverage–namely, at his very first press conference. He didn’t suffer from antagonistic reporting, either....

To Bill Wyman and all involved in Section Three, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First off, I would like to say that the only reason I pick up Section Three is to read the Metro listing. On occasion, however, I have perused your Hitsville and Spot Check. I have a request for you: End all commentary, both positive and negative, of anything you consider “punk....

On the hundredth anniversary of William J. Bryan’s great silver crusade, it is fitting that pseudopopulism should become something like a permanent style of American politics. Virtually no one’s a Keynesian anymore, but everyone’s a populist. Everyone’s furious about the inside-the-beltway crowd; everyone’s a person of the people; everyone’s our ally in the perpetual war against the cultural, economic, and political elite. We all know that Washington stinks, that shadowy interests run everything, that boodle is king: this is the monotonous verdict of novel, film, and even corporate press release....

BOOGIE SHOES 9/8, DOUBLE DOOR With their debut album, Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 (NoVo), the release of which this gig celebrates, Boogie Shoes demonstrate that they lack both humor (cf the CD’s lame title) and depth. A five-piece band frequently appended by a blustery horn section, these locals combine tediously familiar funk grooves, specks of wan soul, and functionless traces of hip-hop (hackneyed scratching and piss-poor rapping). Their admirably tight playing suffers from a complete dearth of original ideas, but hey, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it....

MEM SHANNON 7/5, FITZGERALD’S While the life of this New Orleans bluesman makes for a great story, the music on his debut album, A Cab Driver’s Blues (Hannibal), fails to match its inspiration. Before recently taking on music full-time, Mem Shannon drove a taxi while playing the blues on the side. Judging from the album’s scattered snippets of taped dialogue between Shannon and his various fares–many complete assholes–he’s got plenty of reason to have the blues....

Jim Lauderdale Jim Lauderdale’s conundrum is a timeless one. Though he’s no stranger to the country music charts, the fans know him only by proxy–his songs have been recorded by George Strait, Patty Loveless, Doug Supernaw, Vince Gill, Mark Chesnutt, Mandy Barnett, and Kelly Willis, among others. The closest Lauderdale has come to making himself famous was in 1989, when “Stay Out of My Arms,” a single from his aborted first album for Epic (and later a big hit for Strait), reached 86th....

Groucho Marx once said that he would never join a club that would have him as a member; in fact, the comedian was in a class by himself as a master of the one-line quip and the neatly spun line of illogic. But LA actor Frank Ferrante’s impersonation of Groucho puts him at least on the shortlist for club admission; as the star of Groucho: A Life in Revue–a play cowritten and directed by Groucho’s son Arthur in the mid-1980s–Ferrante won accolades from audiences and critics in New York and London as well as an Olivier Award nomination and a Theatre World Award for promising newcomer....

After its dismal production of Hansel and Gretel two seasons ago, Ballet Chicago seemed on its last legs. But the company bounced back beautifully last year with a technically impressive, highly entertaining production of Coppelia. Artistic director Dan Duell’s trick to keeping his impoverished classical company alive then: hire strong dancers and borrow sets and costumes. The trick worked so well he’s using it again this year for A Midsummer Night’s Dream....

LE SHAUN In the case of the recent single “Wide Open” by female rapper LeShaun, the subject matter could make our favorite Hoosier clamp down his sphincter so tight he might never shit again. At first this catchy light rap single seems perfect for any urban crossover format. The song opens with LeShaun and a friend checking out a hot young stud on the corner, and her youthful, flirtatious vocal is matched by an equally enticing R & B arrangement–there’s a cute fluttering sax, a catchy girl chorus, a smooth beat syncopated to a background organ, and a clean little guitar figure breezy enough for a Curtis Mayfield or King Sunny Ade record....

Some plays suffer when presented on a small stage; Samuel Beckett’s work actually seems more at home in cramped quarters. Of course Beckett spent his life paring down his plays–simplifying the premises, reducing the number of characters, eliminating all but the most essential details, until his later work was effectively too small, too quiet, and too brief (some of it is as short as a quarter hour) to work effectively in larger, more traditional theaters....

Crush Stories On December 3, 1979, Paul Wertheimer had just been promoted to public affairs officer for the city of Cincinnati. Sick, he had taken the day off and was lying in bed watching television when news bulletins began reporting an unfolding disaster at a local Who concert. As the enormity of the tragedy became clear–11 kids killed and more injured trying to get into an 18,000-plus-capacity venue with only a few reserved seats–Wertheimer began thinking like the PR man he was....

El Vez’s third appearance in Chicago–on the anniversary of his namesake’s death–is his first under proper conditions; at both of his previous dates he played with pickup musicians or taped accompaniment. This time Chicagoans will experience El Vez the way he’s meant to be, with his band, the Memphis Mariachis, his backup singers, the Elvettes, and his preferred opening act, a jokey combo from Richmond, Virginia, called the Useless Playboys, who do a sort of twisted 40s swing....