From the pioneering psychedelic postpunk of the Soft Boys to a remarkably varied and productive solo career, Robyn Hitchcock has remained an unflagging exponent of left-side-of-the-dial pop tunesmithing. Heavily inspired by Pink Floyd founder/acid casualty Syd Barrett, Hitchcock has always loaded his songs with tripped-out whimsy, bizarre humor, and wildly imaginative and strange narratives. But labeling him the quintessential cult artist, as the press has long been wont to do, undermines his musical depth....

Randy Mehrberg had to work late at the office New Year’s Eve. “It wasn’t my wife’s idea,” he says. As general counsel and lakefront director of the Chicago Park District, he was putting what he hoped were the finishing touches on an intricate three-way transaction among the Park District, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences. If the deal goes through, each institution will get something it wants–and the south end of Lincoln Park will get even more people and more traffic....

I have been told by someone who claims to know that you can preserve the carbonation in a half-consumed bottle of champagne by hanging a silver spoon upside down in the neck, with the handle suspended in the contents. As a none-too-convincing explanation for this miracle my source mumbled something about electrolysis. Any truth to this? –Joe Ryan, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I asked the Champagne News and Information Bureau in New York and Paterno Imports, a champagne importer in Chicago, about the silver-spoon idea....

Trib Arts Cuts: the Masses Respond “It would be one thing if all the theaters got together and said, we don’t like you changing the page,” Sertich told us after the letters had been delivered. “But if thousands of readers take the time to send letters saying, we don’t like the changes either–we know for a fact we sent 15,000 letters over, and we hear several thousand letters are over there already....

Combining a variety of Amerindie traits–hushed melodicism, controlled guitar noise, severe dynamic shifts–with a fanatically disciplined minimalism, Berlin-based 18th Dye seem to take the British approach to appropriating Yankee culture. The difference is that they aren’t capriciously chasing the latest fashions; as their new album Tribute to a Bus (Matador) proves, 18th Dye wear their sonic uniform like a second skin. Yo La Tengo, the trio responsible for bringing 18th Dye to American shores, provides the closest stylistic point of reference....

To her shock and dismay, Lynne Lohr entered the CTA’s el station and bus terminal at Higgins and Harlem one day in February and saw two uniformed bus drivers smoking cigarettes beneath a no smoking sign. Lohr’s antipathy to cigarettes stems from illnesses she has suffered and seen. She has sinusitis, which is aggravated by cigarette smoke, and she’s been a chaplain at several local hospitals, where she’s watched smokers die of cancer and heart disease....

In 1991 Morry asked me and my wife if he could park his car in our yard. It wintered there among the snow and a variety of stunted brush and weeds. When spring came, the weeds surrounded the car and reached into the engine, choking it. Morry came for his car in May, but it didn’t want to cooperate. He called a tow truck, and had a new transmission put in....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was delighted to read the cover story about Rick Garcia by Jeffrey Felshman [August 30]. The article single-handedly injected loads of honesty into the debate about how to get things accomplished in the lesbigay-transpolitical world. Politics is a messy, power-laden, aggressive game. Elizabeth Birch (of the Human Rights Campaign) says she would rather meet with Ralph Reed (of the Christian Coalition) than with Rick Garcia because Reed is more polite than Garcia....

KLEZMATICS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With three albums to their credit, the Klezmatics have made themselves probably the best-known band in the new wave of klezmer music (sometimes referred to as “Jewish jazz”). Klezmer grew out of traditional Yiddish melodies but, like American jazz, came to reflect influences from classical dance pieces, military band music, and native (in this case European) folk songs, gradually swirling into a distinct mirror of its place and time....

THE MUSIC OF CHANCE With Mandy Patinkin, James Spader, M. Emmet Walsh, Charles Durning, Joel Grey, Samantha Mathis, and Christopher Penn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Auster were taken literally, the best medium for adapting his fiction would be the Disney cartoon feature. But in fact the differences between seeing Beauty and the Beast and hearing the story read aloud are profound–as profound as the differences between reading Auster’s beautifully crystalline prose and seeing Philip Haas’s intelligent but fairly literal screen adaptation of The Music of Chance....

Following the excitement generated by the blues documentary Deep Blues, the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum Records has spent the last three years releasing albums by the obscure but phenomenal bluesmen who fuel the raucous energy of the low-down juke joints in north Mississippi hill country. Regardless of style, most contemporary blues loses its urgency in the process of commodification–increasingly high-gloss rock-steeped production, reliance on compositional cliches, and a dying repertoire have contributed to the current sad state of the genre....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a study of the psychological well-being of 91 Canadian customs officers earlier this year, researchers at the Kingston Sexual Behavior Clinic in Ontario concluded that those officers whose work consists of looking at pornography all day showed no ill effects. (Canada generally has stricter laws against pornography than most U.S. states because authorities more readily accept that viewing pornography is dangerous....

Lead Story Phoenix police arrested Michael William Wetton, a Christian school headmaster, in March and charged him with child abuse. Police say when a woman and her 15-year-old daughter met with Wetton to discuss enrolling the girl, he forced the girl to strip and submit to a paddling while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Denver police arrested Milton Edward Anderson, 63, in March and said he was their principal suspect in a wave of about 200 recent brassiere slashings at stores....

Say what you will about the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, but give him this: he reads books. In his speeches and press conferences he routinely recommends books to his colleagues and to reporters, complete with bits of bibliographic information and constant reminders that he was once a professor. No sooner did the professor become Speaker than he issued his own crash course in American democracy for the Republican House freshmen....

The Bears couldn’t be more different this year from last, yet their fortunes remain almost exactly the same. A year ago the Bears were a cautious team that wasn’t going to beat itself; this year the Bears are gamblers willing to risk it all on a big play. A year ago the Bears had a quarterback who wasn’t going to win many games on his own but wasn’t going to be responsible for many losses either; this year the Bears have a quarterback who loses a game and then wins a game–on the same afternoon....

WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY But not of all the members. The two youngest Romanovs–Alexei and Anastasia–were not identified. Anastasia was long rumored to have escaped, her “second life” the subject of romantic speculation. In a 1956 film Ingrid Bergman played her as an amnesiac young woman recruited in 1928 by exiled Russians to impersonate herself. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Silent Treatment, the first of two one-acts by One Day Short Theatre that make up the 90-minute “When the Swallows Homeward Fly,” director-playwright Cynthia Wasseen supplies another sequel....

Now that I’ve finally caught up with this live-action sleeper about a piglet that behaves like a sheepdog, I find it every bit as impressive as its reputation suggests, though I do find it creepy to be so entertained by a movie in which I can’t tell from one moment to the next whether I’m watching a real animal or a fake. The coproducer and cowriter here, George Miller, is the Australian wonder responsible for both the antihumanistic brilliance of the Mad Max movies and the humanistic brilliance of Lorenzo’s Oil, and anyone who wants to reconcile those disparate achievements will find the same paradoxicality swimming through this movie....

The Eveready rabbit has nothing on Elvin Jones: creator of a swirling, hyperkinetic percussion style as demanding mentally as it is physically, he’s still going as if his 65th birthday were a far-off report instead of a recent echo (last September, actually). One way to trace the history of jazz drumming involves tracking the beat, which moved from the bass drum (in the swing era) to the ride cymbal (in bebop) to–in Elvin’s music–everywhere....

Jason Mojica was fighting insomnia one night a few years ago when he turned on the television and caught the biography Hugh Hefner, Once Upon a Time. Instead of putting him to sleep, the film made him realize that, contrary to what he’d previously thought, Playboy was more than just the sum of its body parts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the time, Mojica, now 22, was putting out the fanzine No Shirt No Shoes No Service as well as mini-comics, including the minimalist Hamster Man....

With the Chicago Jazz Festival celebrating its 15th anniversary this weekend, it’s worth noting that the Chicago premieres of major acts like the World Saxophone Quartet, the Henry Threadgill Sextet, and David Murray occurred not in Grant Park but in the ever-changing locations that have housed percussionist/composer Kahil El’Zabar’s ancillary event, Underground Fest. This year, after a three-year absence, the Underground Fest is back. Best of Chicago voting is live now....